Colilli, Paul - The Angels Corpse

The Angel’s Corpse
Paul Colilli
Semaphores and Signs
General Editors: Roberta Kevelson and Marcel Danesi
SENSING SEMIOSIS
Toward the Possibility of Complementary Cultural “Logics”
Floyd Merrell
THE SENSE OF FORM IN

LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
Michael Shapiro
ARCHITECTONICS OF SEMIOSIS
Edwina Taborsky
OF CIGARETTES, HIGH HEELS,

AND OTHER INTERESTING THINGS
The Semiotics of Everyday Life
Marcel Danesi
ART, CULTURE, AND THE SEMIOTICS OF MEANING

Culture’s Changing Signs of Life in
Poetry, Drama, Painting, and Sculpture
Jackson Barry
ELEMENTS OF SEMIOTICS
David Lidov
THE ANGEL’S CORPSE

Paul Colilli
Paul Colilli
THE ANGEL’S CORPSE
Copyright © Paul Colilli, 1999. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States
of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s
Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Colilli, Paul, 1952-
The angel’s corpse/Paul Colilli.
p. cm.—(Semaphores and signs)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-22150-9
1. Poetry. 2. Semiotics and literature. 3. Semantics
(Philosophy) 4. Meaning (Philosophy) 5. Logic in literature.
6. Angels. I. Title. II. Series.
PN1031.C568 1999
808.1’01—dc21 99–23106
CIP
Design by Letra Libre, Inc.
First edition: October 1999

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Probings into an Irreparable Order of Signification
(Which Signs Itself as a Reawakening)
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS
Preface ix
A Idea of the Work 1
B First the Mortal Remains 2
C Poetology in a Time of Destitution 11
D Lyric Philosophy 13
E Apparitions 21
F Transcendence Falls from the Sky 30
G Fragments of a Recumbent Figure 41
H Lyric Fragments of a Reawakening 43
I Encrypted Signs 52
J The Earth Has No Way Out Other Than
to Become Invisible 57
K Idea of the Name 64
L Decayed Logic of the Eternal Return 65
M Human Terror 74
N Angelus (I) 76
O Angelus (II) 82
P Madonna with Child 89
Q De Amore Fragili 95
R The Angel of Death Is All Covered with Eyes 101
S The Fixed Gaze of Melancholy 106
T The First and Last Sign of Human Life 110
U The Unrepresentable Community 120
V Anti-Annunciation 124
W The Angel Signs Its Name 126
X Kabbalistic Theses 141
Y An Occult Kind of Ascesis 143
Z Annunciation 162
Notes 163
Bibliography 179
Index of Names 187
PREFACE
T
hrough the cognitive and epistemological lens of poetic logic (alias
lyric philosophy and poetology), this study offers a new world of
meaning rooted in the critical dynamics of a movement that links
the form of the visible with the formlessness of the invisible. The princi-
ple figure in this movement is the Angel. The claim this book puts forth is
that the figure of the Angel and the mode of thinking called poetic logic
share the same fate. Both were at one time important modes of commu-
nication and thought; however, with the advent of Cartesian rationalism
and of empiricism their epistemological properties were confiscated. As a
result, they have both been transmitted to us today as ruins deprived of
any functional value. But is it appropriate to speak about the restitution of
the confiscated properties to the Angel and to poetic logic? By critically re-
thinking the signifying nature of the Angel and by probing into critico-
philosophical attributes of poetic logic, this book attempts to offer an
answer to this question.
In its most important respects, this study continues my probing into
the complex nature of poetic logic begun in Signs of the Hermetic Imagi-
nation (1993) and The Idea of A Living Spirit: Poetic Logic As A Contem-
porary Theory (1997). Revised pieces and fragments of this book have
appeared as “Theses on the Corpse of Poetry,” Yale Italian Poetry, vol.
II.1 (Spring 1998), 113–129; “What is Poetic Logic? (or, The Remains
of A Forgotten Italian Human Science,”) in Italian Politics and Society
no. 51 (Spring 1999), 32–37 and “Scholia on Angelological Cognition,”
in Essays in Honor of Albert N. Mancini, ed. P. Giordano and A. Tamburri
(Lafayette: Bordighere Inc. 1999). Earlier versions of units S and T were
read at the Wake Forest and Chicago meetings of the American Associa-
tion for Italian Studies and the Philadelphia meeting of the American
Association for Teachers of Italian.
This book was conceived and written in two different geographical lo-
cations. The research and writing began in the fall of 1996 at Laurentian
x THE ANGEL’S CORPSE
University, while the structure was “discovered” during the summer of

1997 when I was a visiting professor at the Scuola Italiana, Middlebury
College. My students at both universities provided me with the intellec-
tual energy for this book. I extend my warmest thanks to Michael Flamini
and Mara Nelson of St. Martin’s Press; to Semaphores and Signs series di-
rectors the late Roberta Kevelson and Marcel Danesi; to Enid Stubin,
Meg Weaver, and Rick Delaney for their sharp editorial eyes. My wife,
Diana, my daughter, Olivia, and my sons, Andrea and Giuliano, provided
me with the unconditional emotional support that gives meaning to any
intellectual enterprise.
Sudbury, Ontario
June 1999
A
IDEA OF THE WORK
Man is dead and the angel is risen or, rather, the fallen angel is dead
and a man is born.1
T
here is a painting by Marino Marini called The Fallen Angel (1963)
where the Angel is characterized by the look of that moment that
immediately precedes death. The Angel is announcing its own
demise and prefiguring its corpse. However, this is not the Angel of his-
tory; but rather the messenger/interpreter who is purported to have existed
somewhere between the sensorial domain of historical experience and the
cold abstraction of the ratio-logical mind set. But this moribund Angel has
its own perspective and it contains traces of human cognition, in the way
that the pale memory of angelic vision is entombed in the human psyche.
How the Angel sees the world is most effectively, but not exclusively, rep-
resented in the lyric form, as in the case of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s An
Angel Comes to Babylon (1953). In this poem we are witness to a radical
contamination of matter with hyperreality. “I see moulded in the plants,
the animals,” the Angel in Dürrenmatt’s poem states, “that which lives in
the formless stars / enraptured and burning with visions / I elevate and
lower myself in the light.” But in the end there is a ceaseless search for a
place other than the present. An unending investigation (at once poetic,
philosophical, theological and aesthetic) into the nature of an “otherness”
that is within grasp yet seemingly ungraspable. This inquiry into the light
that the “otherness” offers by means of meditation and interpretation is a
constant objective, and like the figure in Oscar Milosz’s Psalm of the King
of Beauty we desire to fall asleep on “this throne of time,” and “fall from
the bottom toward the top into the divine abyss.”
B
FIRST THE MORTAL REMAINS
T
his book explores the possibility of attributing a “new name” to the
idea of the comprehension and production of signs. The path we
take to realize such an objective entails coming to terms with the
“name” of the Angel. Regardless of the cultural angelic fads today, there is
one issue that is, to say the least, very problematic: that of verifying and
documenting human contact with “real” Angels. The fact is that today an
angelophany is judged in the same way as a purported sighting of aliens
and UFOs; as neural convulsions whose end product is the experience of
psychosis. This is how the ratio-logical mind set distances itself from the
nightmare of a bizarre past. But the problem is that all contemporary in-
tellectual practices in the West belong to the same genealogy that the al-
chemic-hermetic thinking mind, for whom the Angel constituted
something much more than merely a sign of contact with the invisible, es-
tablished centuries ago. For example, Michael H. Keefer has convincingly
argued that Renaissance hermeticism is at the base of Descartes’s search for
a new way of understanding the world; the meditations that the French
philosopher experienced during November 1619 are informed by the
spirit of hermetic philosophy. Descartes’s intention in the meditations was
to sever his mind from his body with the goal of achieving “disembodied
knowledge.” The fact is that the first and thirteenth dialogues of the her-
metic Pimander find their hub in a dualist ascesis in which the final aim is
that of being witness to a visual epiphany.1
Moreover, in 1936 the economist John Maynard Keynes examined
manuscripts belonging to Isaac Newton that were to be auctioned off at
Sotheby’s and discovered that the scientist was greatly imbibed with and
influenced by alchemical philosophy. But the reference here is not limited
FIRST THE MORTAL REMAINS 3
solely to the domain of philosophical and scientific thought. In the “The-

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

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

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

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

rate pre- and early modern magical realism or enchantment into the strat-
egy of modernization. As we will see, hermetic semiosis, the signifying
pivot of pre-modern enchantment, constitutes the Angel’s semiotic signa-
ture and is at the root of the idea of reawakening).
The dialectic of mortification is echoed in Paul Virilio’s thesis that still life
was the most realized form of art in the sense that the immobile world it
houses allows us to “ . . . dream of the repose in which the deceased becomes
an exposed object that one can contemplate at leisure, taking one’s time,
since they are now still.” In other terms, our imagination, whether a ratio-
logical paradigm is superimposed on it or not, instills in us the sense that the
mortal remains, “the person who has stopped being alive exists more fully
than when actually alive.”14 Just as in James Whales’s Invisible Man, in which
the protagonist of the film is invisible in vita, but visible in morte, the Angel’s
corpse shocks into life the things that are closest to it. In this way, the mor-
tification of the Angel leads to a reawakening, along the lines of what is
found in a poem by Nelly Sachs: “The petrifacted Angel / still dripping with
the memory / of a previous universe / without time / erring amongst the
infirm / locked in an amber-coloured light / visited by a primigenial voice /
prior to the advent of sin / singing about truth / in the dawn.”
The Angel’s corpse is a figure for ratio-logical thinking, but it also rep-
resents the signpost beyond which there exists an uncharted and unimag-
ined territory of human signifying practices—hence, the new name of
signification. The language of the space beyond the signpost is lyric-philo-
sophic and it speaks the nature of the Angel’s corpse. But in order to think
what is beyond the Angel’s remains we need to imagine critically the na-
ture of the Angel whose secret is hidden in its remains—that is, in ratio-
nal abstraction. Although we attempt to recall what has been said
concerning the living Angel, the aim of this book is not to recompose the
living Angel, a task that is essentially impossible; as Rilke reminds us, the
living Angel would be unbearable for us, like a violent flood, I would add,
of blinding light. (This is the sort of language Thomas Aquinas employs
when illustrating the difficulty of the cognition of the transcendent Being
for humans: “God is not unknown on account of obscurity but on account
of the abundance of brightness.”)15
Rather than a reconstruction of the Angel, this book offers, among
other things, an autopsy of its mortal remains. In a general sense, an au-
topsy seeks to determine, among other particulars, the cause and time of
death, as well as describing the state and condition of the deceased body.
Ultimately, the aim is to present the corpse as it actually is at a specific mo-
ment in time. The angelological autopsy that the present study undertakes
probes into the corpse of the Angel from the point of view of the history
ideas to which it belongs. Through the mediation of the critical autopsy,
we are offered a radically different view of the world. We are allowed to en-
vision the world through the Angel’s eyes. For Rilke this possibility exists
in the form of a pure questioning: “The Angel’s view: perhaps the tips of
trees / are roots that drink the skies; / and in the earth the beech’s deepest
/ roots look like silent summits. / For them, is not the earth transparent /
against a sky full as a corpse?”16 All of this offers the possibility of a new
philosophy of culture and interpretation that is free from metaphysical
idolatry but that pivots its cognito-epistemological premises on the idea of
reawakening.
The image of the dead Angel, which paradoxically signifies both the
unrepeatable instant of meaning and the decayed properties of ratio-logi-
cal thinking, is a strong figure for the intellectual and cultural climate and
ecology we currently live in. A time in history, in other words, that feeds
at once on the ratio-logical and the poetico-eidetic (that is, the fascination
with images, advertising, the video screen, and so on). But what is the
meaning of the seductive scent emanating from the angelological cadaver?
The perfumed corpse of the Angel is also the cadaver of reason, and it
traces a path that moves in the direction of new interpretative constructs
that help us understand the world we live in. The constructs are categories
of poetic logic, while the perfume that adorns the corpse is the joy that the
ratio-logical could never be able to provide.
Along with the image of the “autopsy,” there is also that of archaeology:
an archaeology of the unrepresentable and of what is not real. The task en-
tails searching for elements, shards, fragments that appear unintelligible to
the person who discovers them. This unearthing of what is dead, both in
material form as well as in nonmaterial form, requires an interpretative
strategy that is at once critical and poetic, as in the case of the study of an-
cient Rome described by Michel Serres:
The history of religions frequently furnishes us with full and dense constel-
lations. Here it lets us see knowledge and its strategies, its incorporated epis-
temology. We seem fickle, we moderns, in abiding by partial, splintered
reason. As if history had been for us a slow unfolding of these involved for-
mations. But if we were to go back in time, our sporadic flashes of reason

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

form of thinking that we cannot avoid if the entirety of things is what we
seek to achieve, namely, archaeology. Not just the literal unearthing of
things, but an onto-archaeology, a type of thought that moves toward a
knowing of the ontic nature implied in the act of unearthing. If we focus
on the pure materiality of the unearthing, the archaeological becomes
nothing more than a pale metaphor, a substitute for thinking. Onto-ar-
chaeology allows us to see unearthing as the act of being and of knowing.
But there is a sense of terror that could result from the act of disinterring,
as is implied in Serres’s quote: the horror of seeing your opposite that has
for centuries been hiding beneath the surface of the earth. This is analo-
gous to the Neoplatonic correspondence between the idea in the hyperu-
ranian world and the form in the terrestrial realm. But the
correspondences among what is above the earth’s surface and what is below
follow a different trajectory of thought and practice.Everything was origi-
nally entombed in Rome, so to speak, and brought forth from the tomb
by the power of the archaeological.
As a consequence of the fact that, as Ludwig Wittgenstein affirms, “It
is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,”18 hu-
mans have had to deal with the overwhelming weight of the idea of tran-
scendence, or a transcendent Being. We read about figures such as
Friedrich Nietzsche who sense the eerie presence of signs that do not be-
long to this world: “I look up ahigh, / there seas of light resound: / oh
night, oh silence, oh deafening sound mute as death! / I see a sign / from
the most remote distances.”19 Moreover, as Henri Meschonnic informs us,

“The model of the sign is the model of the sacred: a relation to the Absent,
to the Other,”20 that is, the understanding of the process of semiosis has
its origins in attempting to divine the relationship between what is con-
cretely visible and what is invisible. Ultimately, the attempt to probe the
Angel’s mortal remains is at the same time a critical meditation of how it
is possible to move back and forth between visibility and invisibility. In the
end, we come up against the risk Montale eloquently articulates: “O black
Angel reveal yourself! / but do not kill me with your brilliance, / do not
dissipate the halo of fog, / imprint yourself in my thought (“Black Angel”
from Satura). In other words, knowing the Angel is closely linked to an
unknowing; cognition exists alongside its opposite of cognitive impossi-
bility (the brilliance that kills). The closest we can come, then, to knowl-
edge of the Angel is in its imprinting of itself in human thought. That is,
an idea of the Angel has a corresponding “realness” for which we are cog-
nitively empty. It is exactly this emptiness that constitutes a main theme of
the present study. It is a realm of void that is housed in the poetic sign and
that is at the heart of lyric philosophy.
C
POETOLOGY IN A TIME
OF DESTITUTION
H
eidegger opens his reflection entitled “What Are Poets For?”
with the following quote from Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine”:
“ . . . and what are poets for in a destitute time?” This question,
in Heidegger’s mind, is unintelligible to us today. In an attempt to an-
swer the question Heidegger claims that the “destitute time” refers to the
“default of God,” which “means that no god any longer gathers men and
things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering
disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it . . . the divine radi-
ance has become extinguished in the world’s history.”1 As the result of
such a default, the world is bereft of a “ground that grounds it,” and the
epoch that remains groundless wallows in the abyss. “In the age of the
world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured.
But for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss.”2
However, it is one mortal above the others, namely the poet, who is able
to touch the abyss and correctly read the signs found there as the “traces
of the fugitive gods.” Heidegger formulates a concise definition of the
office of the poet when he remarks that poets “are the mortals who . . .
sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the god’s tracks, and so trace
for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning.”3 The ultimate
role of the poet “in a destitute time” is to collect in poetry “the nature of
poetry.” When that occurs, Heidegger tells us, it is appropriate to sur-
mise that there exist poets “who are on the way to the destiny of the
world’s age. We others must learn to listen to what these poets say—as-
suming that, in regard to the time that conceals Being because it shelters
it, we do not deceive ourselves through reckoning time merely in terms

of that which is by dissecting that which is.”4 What Heidegger affirms
here about the nature of poetry is not all that different from Aristotle’s
idea that poetry is a theoretical activity that meditates and acts upon all
that may or could happen. (It is pointless to state that the Greek and the
German philosophers are separated by the toxic abyss of metaphysics.
This ignores the fact that the two actually believe that poetic utterance
and thought plays a critical role in anticipating and inventing the fu-
ture.) But is it possible today to prove in a convincing manner that the
poetological is endowed with cognitive and epistemological traits that
are relevant to all spheres of human activity? And what are the sources,
documents, materials and ideas for such proof? Are we moving against
the current of time, convention or fashion in attempting to do as much?
Giacomo Leopardi’s poetico-philosophical reflections are apropos in this
case, especially the words found in “Dialogue of Fashion and Death”:
Fashion: Madame Death, Madame Death.

Death: Wait until the time arrives, and I will come without you having
to call me.
Fashion: Madame Death.
Death: Go to hell. I will come when you do not want me to come.
Fashion: As if I were not immortal.
Death: Immortal?5
Thinking the poetological, and, for that matter, the angelological, means
understanding the fact that certain ideas transcend the inescapable cadav-
erization of conventions and practices.
D
LYRIC PHILOSOPHY
W
ith the great merit of Aristotle’s Poetics, the scientific study of
poetic utterance and thinking progressively assumed an un-
questioned status of privilege, especially in periods such as the
European Renaissance. Aristotle, in polemic with Plato, viewed the poet-
ological as being endowed with an important cognito-epistemological di-
mension. The poet differed from the historian, for example, since while
the latter was concerned with relating past events, the former’s vocation
rested on excogitating what could happen (Poetics 9, 1). Aristotle con-
cluded that poetry is both more philosophical and elevated an activity than
history in that its work is more general and it is concerned with the prob-
able and with necessity. Of equal importance is the fact that poetry’s sig-
nificance is not a result of being linked to the mythological tradition or its
making use of the verse form (Poetics 9, 2ff ). We are reminded by Franco
Rella (who has dedicated a lifetime contemplating the qualities of poetic
logic) that with Aristotle the poetic becomes a “theoretical activity which
has a philosophical nature” and it is “‘more philosophical’ than the pure
representation of existence.”1 In our own time, however, while Aristotle’s
elevated position in the history of Western Ideas has resisted the savage as-
sault of change and mutation, the scientific respectability of a poetic logic
has been greatly demoted on the ontological scale.
What does it mean when we say that the poetological serves a ‘higher’
function than the description and analysis of events that occur in human
time? We are not just speaking about the genre of poetry, if anything, we
are dealing with all expression that originates from metaphor, figura-
tions, sounds, movements, pathemas and so on. But for the specific pur-
poses of this book we investigate a poetic logic, that is, a mode of
critico-philosophical utterance that is grounded in the experience of the

lyric. A major objective of this book is to perform the experience of a po-
etology that, in its most important respects, fits into Aristotle’s general
definition. We attempt such a task, however, not by rehearsing his views
presented in the Poetics and in other works; instead, we think the poeto-
logical through the figure of the Angel’s corpse. The Angel’s corpse is a
semaphore beyond which there exists an uncharted terrain of human sig-
nification. This terrain is expressed in terms of lyric philosophy, and its
universal trait is a reawakening symbiotically linked to the dissolution to
the repetitive logic of history.
The fact is, the disappearance of the Angel roughly coincides with the
demise of a variety of thinking that conjugates the lyric with the rational.
The domain in which the angels were purported to have lived, the mundus
imaginalis (which has remained vacant for centuries), is the same as the
supra-empirical world of poetic invention. Dante is an important example
of this world. Many of his critics struggle with the relationship between
myth and history in the Divine Comedy. What has instead been forgotten
is the suprasensory world, which is neither myth nor history, but which
constitutes the concrete nonempirical reality that houses his divine poem.
Dante research that quibbles over history and myth while forgetting the
mundus imaginalis will always risk forgetting Dante.
Among other things, this book navigates the trajectory linking a poet-
ology of the morning to a philosophy of the late afternoon characterized
by the eternal return of the same, or of a flat rationalism. The navigation
is undertaken through conceptual, epistemological, and textual ruins, and
what is offered is not only a commentary on the epistemo-verbal relics but
a critical wandering within their constellation: similar to the individual
who roams through the ruins of an ancient city with the intention of not
so much offering an archaeological explanation of the artifacts as critically
imagining the ruins, much as Petrarch did as he wandered through the
urban corpse of Rome during the fourteenth century, as the expression of
unrepresentable life. The movement in this book is toward a lyric philos-
ophy that transforms the logic of the eternal return into a ruin.
The Angel’s corpse is offered as a figure for the present time, which is
suffering from the withdrawal symptoms caused by the death of the poet-
ological imagination. Knowing the Angel’s perfumed corpse means com-
ing into contact with the future of what is currently silent, namely poetic
reason. This is not a form of uncommunicable mysticism, nor is it an en-
LYRIC PHILOSOPHY 15
couragement to abandon the metalanguage of sanctioned critical dis-

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

sage from his autobiography, Albert Einstein presents us with a descrip-
tion of the thinking process that pivots on the ability to visualize:
What, precisely, is “thinking”? When, on the reception of sense impressions,

memory pictures emerge, this is not yet “thinking.” And when such pictures
form sequences, each member of which calls forth another, this too is not
yet “thinking.” When, however, a certain picture turns up in many such se-
quences, then—precisely by such return—it becomes an organizing ele-
ment for such sequences, in that it connects sequences in themselves
unrelated to each other. It is by no means necessary that a concept be tied
to a sensorily cognizable and reproducible sign; but when this is the case,
then thinking becomes thereby capable of being communicated.2
Scientific thinking as here described by Einstein begins in the ability to

manipulate images that we are able to collect from the gallery of our psy-
che. What results in ratio-logical thinking is at the outset poetic knowing.
One of the aims of this book is to illustrate the great extent to which po-
etic logic or lyric philosophy is a mode of signification that engulfs our
daily experience. The intent is not to argue in favor of poetic logic against
the ratio-logical. If anything the two are intertwined, and often the one
makes no sense without the other. Nor is poetic reason exclusively linked
to poetry (in fact, many of the works I discuss are not poetic writings). Po-
etic logic functions from the perspective of an interdisciplinary mind-set
that is particularly sensitive to the properties and potential of metaphori-
cal utterance.
But in a very general sense, is the demise of the metaphysical tradition
at once the death of poetry? Are poets and teachers of the poetic tradition
essentially the invigilators of a monumental corpse we call poetry? The aim
of this book is to provide answers for these and other questions with the
intention of illustrating how the poetic sign provides access to a human
cognitive domain that has been painted over, so to speak, with the violent
brush of techno-scientific thinking. In many ways this cognitive domain
has been replaced with the prosthesis of audio-visual technology that gives
a material, scientific context for imagining.
Gianni Vattimo offers one of the most original interpretations of the
role of the poetic in our everyday existence. To be sure, Vattimo goes to the
point of claiming that one of the characteristics of the postmodern is that
LYRIC PHILOSOPHY 17
our everyday existence has been totally aestheticized. What is interesting in

all of this is that nihilism is the element that has made this aestheticization
possible. “The process of making the world ever less real,” Vattimo claims,
“may not only take us towards the rigidity of the imaginary, and toward
the establishment of new ‘highest values,’ but also toward the mobility of
the symbolic.”3 The most advanced form of nihilism “calls us to a fiction-
alized experience of reality which is also our only possibility for freedom.”4
An accomplished nihilism offers essentially two things: it unmasks the fic-
tive guise of all truth, but in order to do so it must recognize that every-
thing is the offspring of a fictional mind-set, the idea of nihilism included.
Within this context truth and tradition are understood as fables, or
transmitted messages. As a way to deal with the “crisis of humanism” that
is provoked by the realizations of nihilism, Vattimo proposes a sort of
“crash diet for the subject.” In other words, the subject would attempt to
hear the call of Being that has ceased to emanate from a perennial foun-
dational ground and that instead “dissolves its presence-absence into the
network offered by a society increasingly transformed into an extremely
sensitive organism of communication.”5 The fiction of the poetic sign be-
comes, in such a scenario, the central paradigm for any definition or veri-
fication of distinctions between the real and the unreal. Thus, the thing
that the poets invent and that then remains is an unrepeatable morning,
an unprecedented call to an awakening (Heidegger and others would pos-
sibly employ the term “unhiding,” or “unconcealing”)—namely, the
hermeneutic invention and discovery that what is real is poetry.
The lyric philosophy described in this book allows us to achieve an im-
portant understanding of the relationship between the eternal return of
the same and the unprecedented or unheard of instant of being and mean-
ing, a relationship that is crucial to the idea of poetic logic. When every-
thing is said and done, and after all of the different ideological positions
have spoken (from the extreme right on through the center to the extreme
left), the ashes of the history of ideas leaves us with the following conflict
of directions: one path that leads toward the eternal return of the same, the
other that brings us toward the unrepeatable instant of being and of mean-
ing (however, I do not exclude the possibility of an intersectioning of rep-
etition and unrepeatability). The intention here is not to reduce everything
to the traditional left-versus-right battle. Rather, we are moving beyond
ideology into the realm of an immanent transcendentology (or transcen-
dent immanentology), a domain in which traditional ideological thinking
does not recognize itself. As we will see, one of the most powerful fram-
ings of this discussion (the eternal return of the same versus the unrepeat-
able moment of being) is to be found in the writings of Walter Benjamin.
An Italian semiotician has recently suggested that we move beyond the
idea of the sign. According to Paolo Fabbri, “we should discard the concept
of the sign in order to begin occupying ourselves with efficacy. When we
watch a film we do not make distinctions between iconic, musical, or the-
atrical sign. The signified are not the sum of the signs and above all they are
not neutral. A great part of language, understood in a wide sense, has the
power to transform people. Overlooking this aspect leads us, for example,
to persevere in the myth of a system of mass communication where simple
and neutral information is passed on. But reality is not so innocent.”6
One could argue that there are indeed many things at stake and not
simply the cataloguing of semiotic procedures and processes. With this in
mind the view presented in this book is that semiotics, among other
things, offers us the possibility of understanding and exploring the “unre-
peatable instant of meaning.” Is it possible, however, to formulate a theory
of the unrepeatable instant of meaning, which is unrepresentable and un-
precedented? In the poem “Nothing Twice,” the Polish poet Wislawa
Szymborska writes that nothing is repeatable, but everything is unheard of:
“In consequence, the sorry fact is / that we arrive here improvised / and
leave without the chance to practice. No day copies yesterday.”7 The issue
involves realizing that as we approach the demise of the twentieth century,
“the most pressing questions / are naïve ones.”8 The possibility of answer-
ing the naïve questions is one that has as one of its rewards the redemp-
tion from the language that we know. In essence, this possibility is the
“coming meaning,” where the quest entails finding the other language of
human existence.
The issue of the unrepresentable is key to Jean-François Lyotard’s re-
flections on the postmodern.
Finally, it should be made clear that it is not up to us to provide reality, but

to invent allusions to what is conceivable but not presentable. And this task
should not lead us to expect the slightest reconciliation between “language
games.” Kant, in naming them the faculties, knew that they are separated
by an abyss and that only a transcendental illusion (Hegel’s) can hope to to-
talize them into a real unity. But he also knew that the price of this illusion
is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us our fill of
LYRIC PHILOSOPHY 19
terror. We have paid dearly for our nostalgia for the all and the one, for a
reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, for a transparent and com-
municable experience. Beneath the general demand for relaxation and ap-
peasement, we hear murmurings of the desire to reinstitute terror and fulfil
the phantasm of taking possession of reality. The answer is this: war on to-
tality. Let us attest to the unpresentable; let us activate the differends and
save the honor of the name.9
But is totality synonymous with entirety? If it were, then poetic logic

would be nothing but pathetic nostalgia for a destiny that (apparently)
came and passed away. But within the economy of our poetic logic, en-
tirety and totality are not the same thing. Totality has an absolute sense;
the total floods everything that exists and reduces the irreducible to an un-
representable death. The total is not syncretic; it is not concerned with rec-
onciling but with homogenizing. Entirety does not have an absolute sense;
it refers to things as they actually are—that is, the entirety of a thing as it
actually is. Entirety, along with intimacy, means knowing the thing as it-
self, without the need of any variety of mediation. If anything, entirety is
closer to syncretisms, the need to reconcile, rather than to ravage with the
intent of conquering. Lyric philosophy must pivot on this understanding
of entirety; otherwise it conforms to the death-squad of clarity.
The approach here is one that privileges the particular relationship that
the lyric and philosophical voices share. The poet Giacomo Leopardi was
extremely sensitive to the kinship linking poetic legacy with philosophical
vocation, and he expressed this affinity by means of the idea of an “ultra-
philosophy.” In an entry dated June 7, 1820, we read in Leopardi’s Zibal-
done that “our regeneration depends on, so to speak, an ultraphilosophy,
where by knowing the entirety and intimacy of things, we are brought
back closer to nature.”10
The term “ultraphilosophy” refers to a state of melancholy for a philos-
ophy of the morning, a nostalgia for an uninterrupted reawakening, a way
of seeing the world, in other terms, that is untouched and unaffected by
the eternal return that is at the heart of any advanced form of ratio-logical
thinking. “Ultraphilosophy” coincides with Walter Benjamin’s notion of
the “messianic idea of universal history”: what this means, to paraphrase
Giorgio Agamben, is that the philosophical enterprise will have realized its
final objective by having reconciled itself with the “poetic legacy.” The
yoke of writing will have been dissolved and the spectral signs that haunt
language and which signify our “imprisonment within language” will have
been eliminated.11 Let us gloss this notion with an idea borrowed from
Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: by grasping the
constellation that one’s era “has formed with a definite early one,” one
then “establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which
is shot through with chips of Messianic time.”12 In a fragment from 1919,
Benjamin associates what he called “the currently effective messianic ele-
ments” with a form of art that possesses characteristics “that cause percep-
tions to accumulate.”13 The messianic, then, is the chronothetic
encyclopedia of history that can be taken in doses of unspecified quantity;
the messianic is the sudden surge of a common yet occult energy whose
fate is to dissipate only to surge again. During messianic times there are
messengers, bringers of signs whose signature becomes faint to the point
of submerging into interpretative anonymity (which is not the same thing
as unintelligibility or vagueness. If anything, it is the rigor that is part and
parcel of any attempt to open the gates of a new time). The signs are meant
only to produce meanings. The unsigned information is the basis of a new
philosophy of culture and interpretation in which the joy of anonymity is
measured by the unquantifiable and unprecedented effects to which the
unsigned message gives rise.
However, within the context of this book unsigned/anonymous does
not mean that we do not know the identity of the individual who an-
nounces the message. The “author,” Michel Foucault reminds us, is “the
ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the
proliferation of meaning”;14 it follows, for the French philosopher, that the
“author” is to be divested of his or her role as originator, as what actually
counts is the discursive act that is at the core of any microphysics of real-
ity. By “unsigned message” we mean a sign that is so much a part of the
unexpected and unprecedented formation of a constellation of other signs
that its authorial identity disappears once the messianic surge takes place.
In essence, the identification of the message’s source is invisible in the same
way in which the Angel’s corpse has no name.
E
APPARITIONS
P
oetic logic and the figure of the Angel shared the same fate, like
parallel lives. The idea of fullness that they offered was gradually
emptied out of any significance. In a definite sense, this book con-
taminates the angelic with the poetological, and for a specific reason. One
of the intents is that of recovering the terrifying strangeness of the Angel
(as Rilke would term it) and move beyond the harmless, naturalistic, and
all too familiar idea of the Angel, or what Harold Bloom calls the “cur-
rent debasement” of angels.1 The other focus is that of coming to terms
with the strangeness of the poetological, which itself has been, like the an-
gelological, reduced to a fleeting memory.
What would a “grave” study of the Angel look like? What is it we have
to know in order to get an idea of the Angel that is not limited to the facile
and acritical musings of the current trend in Angel spirituality? Goethe
wrote that the individual who “cannot draw on three thousand years is liv-
ing from hand to mouth.” Let us contextualize this quote and state that
understanding the Angel means knowing why and how it appeared and
disappeared from the history of the world of ideas. The lucubrations on
the Angel are not an end in themselves; rather, we are interested in estab-
lishing a grounds for understanding the relationship between the Angel
and the poetological. This relationship sets the stage for the invention of a
“new name of signification.”
The three monotheistic religions of the world have an important el-
ement in common: the reliance on an angelological tradition to explain
their origins and their central doctrinal tenets. The Angel is not only a
“messenger” (as crucial as this function is) but more importantly a fig-
ure for a power, reality, and intelligence whose existence could never be
measured, or, for that matter, proven by means of our current instru-
ments of reason. In basic terms, the Angel is (or, more appropriately,
was) that entity gluing together the visible domain of human temporal-
ity with an invisible dimension that has received a variety of different
names. However, in the eyes of a number of philosophers and theolo-
gians writing in the twentieth century, the Angel died with the advent
of modern science and with the dissolution of a mode of cognition
rooted in the mythological. Rudolph Bultmann (1884 – 1976), for ex-
ample, believes that the Angel is a residue of a fossilized and prescien-
tific mind-set belonging to the past and no longer relevant today. In
Bultmann’s own words, belief in angels “is liquidated by the knowledge
of the powers and laws of nature,” and again, “one cannot use electric
light and the radio, use modern medical and chemical instruments in
cases of illness, and yet believe in the world of spirits and miracles of the
New Testament.”2 A thinker such as Paul Tillich (1886 – 1965), more-
over, interprets angels and demons as being no more than poetic signs
of the good and evil present in the world, and not actual beings. But by
no means is the liquidation of the Angel a unanimously accepted idea.
To be sure, there exist philosophers such as Massimo Cacciari who are
convinced of the cognito-epistemological need of the idea and existence
of the Angel in the human quest for truth and being.
In a study dealing with angelology seen from the combined perspectives
of theology and physics, Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake reach the fol-
lowing conclusions concerning the nature of angels.( These are traits and
properties associated with the traditional idea of the angel. However, the
Angel’s corpse as described in this book provokes a different reaction, fore-
mostly reawakening):
—Angels are very numerous; they exist in astronomical numbers. There

are many other kinds of consciousness in the cosmos besides human
consciousness.
—Angels have been present from the origin of the universe.
—They exist in a hierarchic order of nested levels within levels.
—They are the governing intelligences of nature.
—They have a special relationship to light, fire, flames, and photons. There
are astonishing parallels between Aquinas and Einstein with regard to the
nature of Angels and photons: in their locomotion and mode of move-
ment, their agelessness, and their being massless.
APPARITIONS 23
—They are musical in nature and work in harmonious relationship with

one another.
—They have a special relationship to human consciousness. We human be-
ings help link the earthly world with cosmic intelligences.
—Angels have played a special role in the birth of language.
—They inspire prophets and awaken human imagination and intuition and
thus befriend the artist in a special way.
—Angels are amazed at us, and our actions through the Angels can affect
the entire cosmos.
—They have a variety of functions in their relationship with human beings,
including inspiring, message-bearing, protecting, and guiding.
—They do not have material bodies but can temporarily assume the ap-
pearance of human or other bodies for the sake of communicating with
and helping human beings.
—They accompany people from this life to the next.3
What is indeed interesting about this list is that it combines insights ema-
nating from a number of different disciplinary directions: from the theo-
logical to the artistic and on to the scientific. While it would be fair to say
that some of the conclusions would be palatable to theological and/or
artistic thinking, it is equally true that scientists would characterize these
insights as belonging to a world view that is far from being scientific. The
sort of discourse with which we ultimately need to establish a pact of sol-
idarity is that of critical imagination. It is a discourse that leads to utter in-
telligibility or to radical understanding.
Corbin has offered one of the most informative explanations concern-
ing the necessity of the Angel for the philosophical and theological tradi-
tions. His position may be summarized in the following manner:4
—The Angel’s role is “theophanic” in nature. By means of hermeneutic me-

diation, the Angel allows humans, the philosopher and theologian to
know and name God without compromising God’s transcendence with
respect to humans.
—The Angel is a buffer for monotheism against the threats of agnosticism
(the impossibility of humans to know the divine) and anthropocentrism
(the representation of the divine in human forms and terms).
—The agnostic threat refers to the moment when a philosopher concludes
that the mystery of the transcendent Being is hidden and unknowable
and thus ends up denying the names and the divine attributes in that
they are unknown and ineffable.
—The anthropocentric threat is the philosopher’s interpretation of the tran-

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

is a phenomenology of angelic consciousness. Moreover, precisely because
angelic intelligence is the mirror reflection of the intelligence that comes
before it and that gave birth to it by means of an act of contemplation, the
world, “which is brought about by an act of contemplation by the Angel,
is its mirror, its apparitional form.” The human race is thus the thought of
the Angel who is its parent and guide.5 The Angel is the spirit of the world
that guides humans in their quest for a spiritual knowledge, which brings
humans into contact with worlds that remain hidden to them on earth.
However, Corbin is careful to contrast the angelic spirit of the world with
the absolute typical of Hegel’s philosophy. From the point of view of
Hegelian thought, it is in history and through the finite Spirit, the spirit
of the human, that God reaches absolute knowledge about God. But from
the perspective of a phenomenology of angelic consciousness, history and
humans play a very different role. History is the place where the knowl-
edge of the transcendent Being occurs; however, the contact between the
divine and history takes place between Heaven and earth. The theophany
that the Angel makes possible for humans occurs outside of historical
time.6 The place of the theophanies is the mundus imaginalis, an idea we
will consider at a later point.
When it comes to the idea of the apparition of the Angel, with Rilke’s
poetic meditations we touch upon the terror of seeing the Angel. But why
would Rilke interpret the Angel as being “horrific”? The fact is that “hor-
APPARITIONS 25
ror” is not to be understood in the contemporary sense of an image of dis-

figuration or abomination that instills fear. Rather it is a horror that orig-
inates from the sense that one is before something that is immeasurable.
An angelological trait that stands out “horrifyingly” in this regard concerns
the sphere of cognition. Thomas Aquinas has meditated at length on the
abyss that separates the human cognitive faculty from the Angel’s. What
follows is a citational condensation of Thomas Aquinas’s views on angelo-
logical cognition:
The Angel Has No Imagination

“Intellect in us is agent and potential, because of its relation to the imagi-
nation or to the phantasms. Forms in the imagination are related not to
the potential intellect as colors to the sense of sight but to the agent as col-
ors to light. Now there is no imagination in angels; hence no reason to di-
vide their intellects in this way.”7
The Angel’s Single and Intellectual Cognitive Faculty

“If angels had no knowledge of individual things they could exercise no
providential government over events in this world, since these always
imply individuals at work . . . As a man knows all classes of things by fac-
ulties that differ from each other—knowing by his intellect, universals and
things free from matter, and by sensation the particular and the corpo-
real—so an angel knows both kinds of beings by one and the same intel-
lectual power. For such is the order of the universe, that the nobler a being
is, the more unified and at the same time, the more wide-ranging is its
power . . . Since then the angelic nature is superior to ours, it is unreason-
able to deny that what man can know by one of his various faculties, an
angel can know by a single and intellectual cognitive faculty.”8
Aquinas’s angelogical insights underline the fact that angels possess an

unmediated cognitive faculty that is compared to light: “This is why an-
gels are called intellectual beings, beings who understand. For even in our
case the things we grasp immediately we say we see intellectually, we give
the name understanding to our latent habitual capacity to intuit first prin-
ciples. If our human souls were endowed with an angelic abundance of in-
tellectual light, then in the very act of intuiting first principles, we would
understand all their consequences; we would know by intuition all that

reasoning can deduce from them. We humans have a dimness of intellec-
tual light in our souls. But this light is at its full strength in an Angel who,
as Dionysius says, is a pure and brilliant mirror” (Aquinas, Summa The-
ologiae I, q. 58, a. 4.). Following this logic, then, the Angel is able to know,
to understand without the benefit or need of testing or experimenting. In
truth, we are not dealing with a form of cognition that is parallel to the
spontaneous and corporeal knowledge characteristic of the first age in Gi-
ambattista Vico’s theory of ages. The Angel’s knowledge is spontaneous but
utterly disembodied, and it has its source not in the domain of the senso-
rial but in the unrepeatable instant of intuition.
The name of Descartes, however, deserves an angelological digression
that thickens the plot of the story of poetic logic and the Angel’s corpse.
Thomas Aquinas writes that the “activity of understanding is wholly non-
material . . . The act of understanding is not an action of the body or of
any bodily energy. Hence to be joined to a body is not of the essence of in-
tellectual being . . . Not all intellects are conjoined with bodies; there are
some that exist separately, and these we call angels” (Summa Theologiae I,
q. 51, a. 1). Angelological cognition and epistemology have no links what-
soever with the sensory perceptions typical of human beings. Angels work
with disembodied knowledge, while humans root their cognition in the
experience of their bodies in contact with the external world, as Giambat-
tista Vico would have phrased it. In the history of Western ideas, Descartes
was the most important proponent of knowledge totally divorced from the
contingencies of the body. Fox and Sheldrake qualify Descartes’s scission
of mind and body as favoring the angelic side of humans, namely that of
abstraction.9 The idea, then, is that with Descartes humans expelled the
Angel from the realm of cognition by substituting for the Angel them-
selves. However, if we accept the notions that the Angel resided in the
suprasensory world of the mundus imaginalis and that abstraction contains
only the mortal remains of the Angel, the link between Descartes’s disem-
bodied knowledge and the angelological does not hold. The French
philosopher was not interested in the interworld between the senses and
abstraction but rather in abstraction itself.
The relationship between language and cognition did not escape the at-
tention of those who meditated profoundly on the Angel. For example,
Hildegard of Bingen wrote that “The omnipotent God spoke to Adam in
the words of the angels, because Adam knew their language well and could
APPARITIONS 27
understand it. Through the reason which God had given him and through
the spirit of the prophet’s talents, Adam possessed the knowledge of all the
languages which would later be invented by humans.”10 However, the angels
are unable to utter a comprehensible language, and as a consequence, lin-
guistic communication is “therefore a particular mission for humanity.”11
In the end, an important issue is that of the human’s ability to perceive
the Angel’s apparition, but in Hildegard of Bingen’s mind it is more ap-
propriate to speak of the human potential to see only the disapparition of
the Angel: “The three angels who appeared to Abraham as he sat at the en-
trance to his tent showed themselves in human form because in no way
can humans see angels in their true form. Because of their altering forms,
humans are unable to see an unalterable spirit.”12 This last comment of
Hildegard sums up the angelological problem, a least as far as the con-
temporary rational or empirical mind set is concerned. Unless something
can be concretely seen and measurable by means of mathematically based
instruments or methods, the question of the truth of its existence is placed
in abeyance if not totally dismissed. Thomas Hobbes played an important
role in demythifying the Angel, whom he saw as lacking any form of real-
ity and as being no more than signs or symbols through which God is
made manifest in the world. In fact, in the Leviathan Hobbes denies the
existence of angels as messengers of God; angels are not spirits but merely
a figure of speech to describe the attitude or disposition of an individual.
But the problem is not solely from the point of view of the ratio-logical
mind or the empiricist. What we have heard from Thomas Aquinas,
Hildegard of Bingen, and others seems to us today improbable, infantile,
psychotic, mindless, irresponsible, irrational, or pseudoscientific. But to
articulate the issue in responsible terms, let as say that for us today the
question of the Angel rests in accepting the fact that we have, if anything,
lost or misplaced the context for understanding the Angel. Put otherwise,
appropriating what can never be appropriated is essential to knowing the
meaning of the Angel’s corpse.
But what context are we talking about? If we accept the premise that
the paradigms of the mind condition the way we perceive external real-
ity and history in general, then it would be fair to conclude that the dis-
appearance of a given cognitive paradigm entails at the same time the
disappearance of the particulars and universals whose truth-value were
upheld only by the same paradigm. This holds true for the question of
angelology. One of the most convincing illustrations of the cognitive
context that purportedly housed the reality of the Angel is the one pro-
posed by Henry Corbin, which deals with the mundus imaginalis, or cog-
nitive imagination. This has nothing to do with the “imaginary,” with its
meaning of “unreal” and “false.” Rather it is an “interworld” lodged
somewhere between the world of sensorial data and the domain of ab-
straction. Not only is the mundus imaginalis the lost country of the
Angel, it is also the place where the poetological is qualified as possess-
ing a vibrant and powerful cognito-epistemological trait.
Corbin’s research on esoteric Islamic thought (influenced as it is by a
Platonic idealism) led him to a number of important conclusions, one
being that there existed an intermediate world of perception that has for
centuries remained vacant. What Corbin calls the world of the Image or
mundus imaginalis, is a domain “as ontologically real as the world of the
senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of per-
ception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic
value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual in-
tuition.”13 In outlining an Identikit of what Corbin intends by mundus
imaginalis we could say that
It is a world of images in suspense.

Forms and shapes in the mundus imaginalis do not exist in a similar fash-
ion to the empirical realities in the sensorial world, nor can they exist in the
abstract world of the intellect, since they have extension and dimension.
Within the context of esoteric Islam the mundus imaginalis is a meta-
physical necessity in that the cognitive operations of the Imagination de-
pend upon it.14
The active Imagination is the organ that allows one to enter into the
mundus imaginalis. The active Imagination is the organ the brings about the
metamorphosis of internal spiritual states into external states, “into vision-
events symbolized with those internal states.”15
The visions that Corbin speaks about are those of an Imaginatio vera
that possesses a well defined cognitive value. In an attempt to deal with the
problem of the empirical reality of the mundus imaginalis, Corbin cites
from the prologue of Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s L’ Annonciateur in which
there is reference to a Messenger with eyes of clay who “could not be per-
ceived except by the spirit. Creatures experience only influences that are
inherent in the archangelic unity.” Villiers tells us that “Angels. Are not, in
substance, except in the free sublimity of the absolute Heavens, where re-
APPARITIONS 29
ality is unified with the ideal . . . They only externalize themselves in the
ecstasy they cause and which forms a part of themselves.”16 Corbin com-
ments on the passage from Villiers and states that there is no empirical rea-
son for the revelation of the Angel other than the revelation itself: “The
Angel is itself the ekstasis, the ‘displacement’ or the departure from our-
selves that is a ‘change of state’ from our state.”17
The issue of the relationship between the visible and invisible (a central
theme in angelological discourse) is key to any theory-making that involves
poetic logic as the central actor. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s mind every vis-
ibility rests in a critical relationship with an invisibility: “When I say that
every visible is invisible, that perception is imperception, that consciousness
has a ‘punctum caecum’ that to see is always to see more than one sees—
this must not be understood in the sense of a contradiction—it must not
be imagined that I add to the visible . . . a nonvisible . . . One has to un-
derstand that it is visibility itself that involves a nonvisibility.”18 Poetic sig-
nification arises from the blindness toward reason as it is rooted in frenzy,
fury, and mania. But it is its blindness that makes it indestructible, an in-
destructibility that flat reason can never provide. As Derrida tells us, blind-
ness is inherent in any act of communication: “What happens when one
writes without seeing?” Derrida asks in Memoirs of the Blind.
A hand of the blind ventures forth alone or disconnected, in a poorly de-

limited space; it feels its way, it gropes, it caresses as much as it inscribes,
trusting in the memory of signs and supplementing sight. It is as if a lidless
eye had opened at the tip of the fingers, as if one eye too many had just
grown right next to the nail. This eye guides the tracing or outline; it is a
miner’s lamp at the point of writing, a curious and vigilant substitute, the
prosthesis of a seer who is himself invisible. Language is spoken, it speaks to
itself, which is to say, from/of blindness. It always speaks to us from/of the
blindness that constitutes it. At once virtual, potential, and dynamic, this
graphic crosses all the borders separating the senses, its being-in-potential at
once visual and auditory, motile and tactile. But for now, at this very mo-
ment when I write, I see literally nothing of these letters.”19
The trope of blindness moves in a parallel way with the idea of invisibility
and the divine silence announced by the Angel. A space is opened that
transcends anything that the seeing human eye could ever witness. But the
point is that the Angel is perceivable only to those who do not trust the
truth that the eye claims to irreversibly verify.
F
TRANSCENDENCE FALLS FROM THE SKY
C
orbin dates the beginning of the disappearance of the mundus
imaginalis in the West at the moment that Averroism discarded the
Avicennian world view replete with the animae or angeli caelestes
who possessed cognitive power. Once this took place, the distinction be-
tween the Imaginatio vera and fantasy was dissolved. However, Massimo
Cacciari is convinced that the demise of the mundus imaginalis “does not
mean the end of all encounters with the Angel—it means that every en-
counter will now have to begin by putting ourselves at risk.” What risk?
That of knowing in advance that any encounter with the Angel is “theo-
retically” impossible and that in the end there will be a non-encounter, if
not some variety of hallucination? Cacciari, who faces the responsible chal-
lenge of reconciling the unsemiotizable name of the Angel with the sign of
critico-theoretical inquiry, poses a series of questions that are of great rele-
vance for any probing into the angelological: “What is the relation be-
tween an autonomous logic (no longer reverberation, resonance, medium)
and the thing? In what way can a logos that is metaphysically detached
from every presupposition represent a thing that is different and heteroge-
neous from it? How can the logoi stand for the thing itself if no common
origin is expressible; if the logos, in breaking the net of demonic destiny,
has defined itself absolutely or autonomously? . . . How can one represent
that which is absolutely opposed to the untrembling heart of Aletheia?”1
In commenting on the series of questions posed by Cacciari (and that
we are forced to ask before the strange angelological affirmations of the
likes of Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, and others), we could spec-
ulate that the issues at hand deal with how we understand what cannot be
assimilated into the way we perceive the real; how we judge those visitors
TRANSCENDENCE FALLS FROM THE SKY 31
who do not take a part in our generation of knowledge; the location of the
other-world from which the other-worldly arrive; the history and culture
of those who have no known history and culture to participate in, and so
on. These questions are by no means new as they have, in one way or an-
other, been posed for centuries, even if for different reasons and in differ-
ent ways. While the content of these questions are ancient, the context in
which we pose them today is, to say the very least, radically different.
Thus, one can speculate that the answers have the potential to be new.
Let us put forward some preliminary observations by way of meditating on
the question of semiosis. Floyd Merrell notes that it would be fair to hy-
pothesize that the process of semiosis has its origins in “some sort of dis-
tribution of point-signs as possibilities, and the semiotic agent, fabricator
of thought-signs, is, quite properly speaking, a Deleuze-Guattari ‘nomad,’
with neither retrievable origin, absolutely stable centre, nor determinate
destiny.”2 It would at first appear that we could apply this originary para-
digm of signification to something such as angelology and observe that we
really do not have the cartographic coordinates that indicate to us where
angels live, nor are we sure about any fixed nucleus that is characteristic of
angels, and for that matter, we have no idea what the destiny of any Angel
is (unless, of course, we understand the Angel as being a corpse. Yet, its
purported death does not negate the continued possibility of a destiny, in
that the mortal remains constitute the means of reawakening within the
purview of a new terrain of signification).
This being the case, it would be reasonable to conclude that among the
orders of signification that have been documented for us throughout the
vast continent of different disciplines, there must be either one or a com-
bination of many that could somehow allow us to penetrate the extra-em-
pirical nature of angels. A figure, that is, that in its most important respects
is an unmeasurable projection of the human imagination (another possi-
bility includes a projection of a suprasensorial world into the mind of hu-
mans), unlike a slab of rock in the geologist’s laboratory, which is not a
projection of the human imagination but rather the quantifiable projec-
tion of the natural world. The process of semiosis that Merrell has in mind
is one that is essentially, but not exclusively, rooted in any attempt to un-
derstand what is quantifiable in relation to what is not quantifiable. Mer-
rell’s main contention is that “everything that is is a sign, that whatever
anything is other than its being a sign, it is also a sign.”3 In stating this
Merrell is thinking about things that range from measurable objects to
thought-signs. The Angel, as we will see, is an icon (at times a window, at

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

and enfolded: for the Greeks this was the body and the pleasures but for the
Christians this will be the flesh and its desires.
The second is the fold of the relation between forces; for it is always ac-
cording to a particular rule that the relation between forces is bent back in
order to become a relation to oneself.
The third is the fold of knowledge, or the fold of truth in so far as it con-
stitutes the relation of truth to our being.
The fourth is the fold of the outside itself, the ultimate fold: it is this that
constitutes what Blanchot called an “interiority of expectation” from which
the subject, in different ways, hopes for immortality, eternity, salvation,
freedom or death or detachment.5
The foldings of subjectivation as here described by Deleuze pivot on a mode

of thinking and interpretation that cannot rely exclusively on any sort of
socio-political rationalism, that is to say, a variety of thought that speaks in
the presence of concrete and material bodies and objects but that is silent be-
fore all that which is in turn silent, such as the psyche with the dead and lost
images and pulsations it encrypts. Judith Butler, for example, has argued that
on the one hand the life of the psyche is conditioned by the social discur-
siveness of power, while on the other hand the social articulation of power is
hidden and generated by the psyche.6 The point here is that the domain of
the psyche, whose contemporary study was born out of Freud’s and Jung’s
(respectively different) attempts to fuse science and poetry (with the latter
often being the last resort for a given explanation), can never be overlooked.
Deleuze provides a much fuller development for the idea of the fold
within the context of the Baroque (in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque).
“The Baroque refers not to an essence,” Deleuze writes, “but rather to an
operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds.”7 Moreover, the
Baroque fold moves along two levels characterized by infinity, the pleats of
matter and the folds of the soul: “Below, matter is amassed according to a
first type of fold, and then organized according to a second type, to the ex-
tent its part constitutes organs that are ‘differently folded and more or less
developed.’ Above, the soul sings of the glory of God inasmuch as it fol-
lows its own folds, but without succeeding in entirely developing them,
since ‘this communication stretches out indefinitely.’”8
In the chapter entitled “What is Baroque?” Deleuze provides us with
the six traits of the Baroque, which are included in the operative concept
of the fold:
1) The fold: the Baroque invents the infinite work or process. The problem
is not how to finish a fold, but how to continue it, to have it go through the
ceiling, how to bring it to infinity . . . the fold . . . determines and materi-
alizes Form. It produces a form of expression . . . the genetic element or in-
finite line of inflection, the curve with a unique variable.
2) The inside and the outside: the infinite fold separates or moves be-
tween matter and soul, the façade and the closed room, the outside and the
inside. Because it is a virtuality that never stops dividing itself, the line of
inflection is actualized in the soul but realized in matter, each one on its
own side. Such is the Baroque trait: an exterior always on the outside, an in-
terior always on the inside. An infinite “receptivity,” an infinite “spontane-
ity”: the outer façade of reception and the inner rooms of action . . .
3) The high and the low: the perfect accord of severing, or the resolution
of the tension, is achieved through the division into two levels, the two floors
being of one and the same world (the line of the universe). The façade-matter
goes down below, while the soul-room goes up above. The infinite fold then
moves between the two levels. But by being divided, it greatly expands on ei-
ther side: the fold is divided into folds, which are tucked inside and which spill
onto the outside, thus connected as are the high and the low. Pleats of matter
in a condition of exteriority, folds in the soul in a condition of closure . . .
4) The unfold: clearly this is not the contrary of the fold, nor its efface-
ment, but the continuation or the extension of its act, the condition of its
manifestation. When the fold ceases being represented in order to become
a “method,” a process, an act, the unfold becomes the result of the act that
is expressed exactly in this fashion
5) Textures: As a general rule the way a material is folded is what con-
stitutes its texture. It is defined less by its heterogeneous and really distinct
parts than by the style by which they become inseparable by virtue of par-
ticular folds . . . Texture does not depend on the parts themselves, but on
strata that determine its “cohesion.” The new status of the object, the ob-
jectile, is inseparable from the different layers that are dilating, like so many
occasions for meanders and detours. In relation to the many folds that it is
capable of becoming, matter becomes a matter of expression. In this respect,
the fold of matter or texture has to be related to several factors, first of all,
light, chiaroscuro, the way the fold catches illumination and itself varies ac-
cording to the hour and light of day . . .
6) The paradigm: the search for a model of the fold goes directly
through the choice of a material. Would it be paper fold, as the Orient im-
plies, or the fold of fabric, that seems to dominate the Occident? But the
point is that the composite materials of the fold (texture) must not conceal
the formal element or form of expression . . . 9
The fold is based on an aggregation of monads that produce folds of

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

cuss the issue of the eternal return of the same in unit “I.”
Cacciari proposes a reading of the figure of the Angel that is at once
sensitive to the theological tradition and immersed in the cultural and
philosophical issues that characterize the present century. Cacciari gives us
an understanding of the angelic in which the Angelus is the key player in
any strategy we employ in a formulation of a philosophy of culture. “An-
gelological cognition” refers to a mind-set that is conditioned by the phan-
tasmagoric effect that the idea of the Angel has on the way we interpret the
world. This is not a retreat into incommunicable mysticism; rather, it is an
attempt to understand what lies at the axes that bring the real into contact
with the unreal.
But how does one articulate the space of radical cognitive and percep-
tual difference that separates the human from the angelogical? Cacciari
formulates the difference in the following terms: “To entrust ourselves into
the hands of the Angel would mean to be ravished into the pure un-
sayable.”11 In other terms, cognition of the angelic sphere exacts a precise
choice—namely that of disavowing the ordinariness and banality of the
communicable everyday routine detail and replacing it with the wonder of
what cannot be said or ever repeated. In many ways this notion underlies
the central intent of The Necessary Angel—that is, Cacciari is concerned
with dealing with the most important issue in angelology, the epistemo-
logical scission lodged between knowing and contemplation. The task of
the angelology is to explain in what way it is possible for humans to un-
derstand and to be in a relation of correspondence with “that Invisible
which the Angel safeguards precisely in the instant in which it is commu-
nicated through its forms. The paradoxical character of this relation haunts
and dominates Angelology.”12 But in this context thinking the invisible
implies dealing with a “Land-of-no-where,” as Cacciari terms it following
Corbin, the place in which the Angel exists. Humans have access to this
place by means of their imagination. According to Maimonides, “Angel” is
the term used to identify the faculty of the imagination after it has under-
taken active verbal commerce with the cherub. As the faculty engaged in
dialogue with the invisible, the imagination constitutes an epiphanic space
of the future—the place, that is, where the juncture that holds the real
with the hyperreal opens itself into infinity.
Cacciari had something like this in mind when in an earlier book he
sought to articulate the function of art. In fact, in Icone della legge (Icon of
the Law, 1985), within the context of a discussion on the problem of art
in relation to the invisible as presented in the thought of Paul Klee, Cac-
ciari hypothesized that art had the ability to unveil the idea of the invisi-
ble through its infinite materiality: “The infinity of visible things is the
momentary gathering of the Invisible and the Unperceivable.”13 The in-
visible inhabits the infinity of what is immediately perceivable by the
human eye because what is materially present is itself imperfect, a frag-
ment of absolute timelessness. Moreover, on Klee’s authority, Cacciari sug-
gests that a function of art is to make visible the essence of the Visible,
which is “a moment, ‘a case’ of the Invisible and the Unperceivable em-
braced and made up by the universality which is in their powers.”14 Cac-
ciari concludes the discussion on art, Klee, and the invisible by
formulating a semiotics whose final image is the Angel: “Just as any being
is an individual substance and reflects within itself, as opaque as it might
be, the entire universe, so all signs and all meanings are connected with all
of the other ones . . . Difficult equilibriums, suspended polyphonies and
yet the works are here. A clear and ungraspable Being-there, like one of
Klee’s Angels.”15 This passage, which is also the very last passage of Icone
della legge, anticipates the research Cacciari was to undertake for his book
on the figure of the Angel, and it effectively sums up what could be tenta-
tively called an angelological semiosis: that is, where signification is pushed
to its most daring limit, one where the distinction between a sign and a
non-sign undergoes an unprecedented transformation.
Franco Rella has meditated upon Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s Angelus
Novus.16 It is Rella’s view that the image of the silenced Angel is not the
final message in Benjamin’s work. In Rella’s own words, “The image of
the Angel marks the passage from words, from the indiscernible world of
linguistic fragments, to the ‘age of things,’ to the moment of a new and
different relation with the world.”17 The Angel is a figure for the ultra-
linguistic gesture that involves a movement from reason rooted in the
logic of a grammar, to a mode of thought that moves within a certain car-
tography housed in the imagination and that inhabits things. In a general
sense the Angel plays a key role within the economy of Rella’s poetic
thinking. Rella is convinced that a task that belongs to our age, or what
he terms the “new modern,” is to understand the meaning of that space
resting between two beings or two things: “The ‘just as’ which establishes
a relation between two beings or two things, also establishes the irre-
ducible difference: that middle space which Scholastic metaphysics
sought to nullify through the virtus unitiva of love, and which modern
philosophy sought to dominate, reduce, defeat or colonize, with the in-
struments of conceptual abstraction.”18 The interpretative challenge fac-
ing Rella is that of defining the irreducible differences that exist between
being and things, but doing so in terms that do not transcend or phase
out the irreducebility. It is here that the Angel—more precisely, the crim-
son Angel—exercises a critical role.
Rella elaborates the idea of the scarlet Angel within the context of a
reading of Marcel Proust’s Recherche; at a certain point in the work
Proust inserts Vinteuil’s Septuor: “In the Verdurin drawing-room begin
the notes of the Septuor, the ‘new work,’ the ‘auroral rose’ which intro-
duces an ‘unknown universe.’ Its is a red, harsh voice, the call of the eter-
nal morning.”19 The septuor is a reddish light that somehow brings to the
fore the element that holds together scattered fragments. Rella charac-
terizes the reddish light of the septuor as a radically new cognitive expe-
rience, one that brings us into contact with “an unknown homeland,” a
realm lost somewhere in the horizon that divides the visible world from
the invisible world. The defining element of this new knowledge is a
conflict “that has neither winners nor vanquished. It is only that conflict
which allows us to see both the elements confronted in their difference,
which constitutes a new beginning.”20 The hermeneutical gesture rooted
in the cognition of the Angel is one that involves overcoming not the
idea of a conflict but in a more specific sense the conflict whose ratio-
nale for being is the elimination and/or subjugation of what is different.
The authentic conflict is the one that is rooted in the difficult task of un-
derstanding what appears at first impossible to be perceived, let alone
understood.
Rella, however, continues his identification of the septuor and claims
that it is the crimson Angel of the morning. This Angel is defined in terms
that Rella borrows from Nerval and Henry Corbin. In Nerval’s Aurélia,
Rella observes, there is reference to an Angel who is reddish in color, and
who unconceals a knowledge of the mystical that leads to a “knowledge of
all.” Corbin has compared Nerval’s Angel to the crimson Angel found in a
tale by Suhrawardi. In the tale a pilgrim encounters a Sage and asks him
about his crimson color. The Sage, who turns out to be an Angel, states
that his actual color is white but he makes himself visible in the form of
crimson because when the whiteness of lucence is mixed with darkness, the
result is a reddish color. Dawn and dusk inhabit a middle space separating
the whiteness of daylight from the blackness of nighttime. Hence the

crimson-colored skies of dawn and dusk.
Rella relates this tale with the objective of underlining a central point,
namely, that the septuor that appears in Proust’s work belongs to an angelic
genealogy in which the redness of the Angel is contemporaneously the red-
ness of dawn. This Angel is the Angel of the cognitio matutina, “knowledge
of the morning,” a reawakening. The duties assigned to this Angel, Rella
informs us, is that of revealing things, of exegesis, of recomposing what
was fragmented. The color red, in being a color of mixture, stands for the
middle space, or “the knowledge which links heaven and earth, the many
forms and the many fragments by which the world offers itself to our ex-
perience . . . this knowledge is the knowledge of ‘reawakening,’ cognitio
matutina . . . It is given in the pilgrimage in foreign land, in the search of
the forgotten homeland, a pilgrimage which dis-places us from any rou-
tine, in the very heart of atopia, where, however, we discover the marvels
of the world.”21 The fact is we find the topos of an angelic cognitio
matutina in the works of a figure such as St. Augustine. Angelological cog-
nition, we are told, is of three varieties and in conformity with the kinds
of light found during the three phases of the day: the light of day, the light
of evening, and the light of morning. In the light of day the Angel comes
to know the things that are part of the Verbum before their creation. Dur-
ing the time of evening light the angels come to know the things that are
part of the Verbum after their creation. By means of the matutina lux,
“morning light,” the Angels achieve knowledge of the things in themselves
and of their relationship with the transcendent Being.22
Angelic cognition is in this way a guiding light that makes visible the
invisible path that leads to a strange understanding of the world, to an “ex-
traneous” explicatio of what we thought we could not know. To know the
unknowable we need to abandon our common and comforting way of un-
derstanding things and move across the fractured and fracturing space of
difference with the objective of experiencing the fracture as the contami-
nated light of other-life.
The Angel’s talent for bringing together what is irreconcilable by un-
veiling the unreal cartography of irreducebility of the differences that exist
between things is articulated by Paolo Valesio in the poem “Il viaggio di
coyote.”23 Images evoking the concrete and at the same time phantasmatic
nature of the Angel’s healing touch are underlined by Valesio. There is
clearly a sense of nostalgia in the poem for a time, like the days of Tobias,
when the presence of the Angel could somehow be assured. Instead one is
left, like the figure from Valesio’s passage, wallowing in an eternal desire
for the touch of the invisible hand. But this eternal desire is countered in
Valesio’s poetic work by the ability of poetological language to collect all
the incompatible and jagged elements of human experience in the “stan-
zas” of the poetic form. In this way, poetry becomes a grammatographic
transposition of what inheres in angelological cognition; in other terms,
poetological semiosis provides a figuration (which is of central importance
to angelological inquiry) of those axes from which suspend the ordinari-
ness of the real and the terrifying signs of the hyperreal.
G
FRAGMENTS OF A RECUMBENT FIGURE
“T
he whole world is thoroughly caught in reason, but the ques-
tion is: how did it get caught in the network of reason in the
first place?” This question posed by F. W. J. Von Schelling1 is
in the same spirit as a statement by Vladimir Solovyov: “But reason is only
a means, an instrument, or a medium of knowledge; it is not the content
of knowledge.”2 The concern expressed in these two citations (that is, the
implicit accusation that some other form of thinking has had its powers
confiscated) assumes a different guise in Wittgenstein’s meditations on
what can and what cannot be the object of intelligible signification. The
final series of propositions found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus deals with the
ultimate limit or failure of linguistic convention (“When the answer can-
not be put into words, neither can the question be put into words” [6.5].
“There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make them-
selves manifest. They are what is mystical” [6.522]. “The correct method in
philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can
be said, that is, propositions of natural science—something that has noth-
ing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to
say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to
give meaning to certain signs in his proposition . . .” [6.53].) In the penul-
timate proposition of the Tractatus Wittgenstein advises that the reader
must “transcend these propositions” in order to see the “world aright.”
But let us magnify and extend the context in which Wittgenstein’s
thinking takes place and ask ourselves whether or not the unsayable is in-
stead merely the invention of a linear rationalism grounded in the purest
forms of abstraction. It is not a question of ascertaining whether or not
humans can think, know, and speak “infinitely.” It is rather a question of
illustrating the extent to which those “things” that are now unsayable
were once (or in the future will be) able to be made manifest through the
medium of verbal semiosis.
Poetic logic is the patron saint of the unsaid and the unsayable, of those
words, images, ideas that are now destitute and laying recumbent on the
ground as in some painting or statue from the Renaissance depicting a
moribund figure. What Wittgenstein states about the unsayable at the end
of the Tractatus is true about the figure of poetology. What was once per-
ceived (under the aegis of Aristotle) as being a “strong” form of philoso-
phizing, must now be passed “over in silence” [7]. What we are dealing
with here is that which cannot be repaired; however, in Giorgio Agamben’s
words, “At the point you perceive the irreparability of the world, at that
point it is transcendent.”3
H
LYRIC FRAGMENTS OF A REAWAKENING
“N
ietzsche,” Walter Benjamin reminds us in his massive collec-
tion of textual ruins entitled Passagen-werk, “defined the ear-
liest stages of his thought as philosophy of dawn and of the
morning, in order to distinguish them from his philosophy of high noon—
the doctrine of the eternal return.”1 In many ways the formulation of a lyric
philosophy follows a trajectory that involves a movement tracing the path
linking a philosophy of the morning with the Angel’s corpse, which is fig-
ured in the guise of the idea of the eternal return of the same. But is it a ques-
tion of looking forward, backward, or rather upward, downward, or within
something? In other terms, what are the critico-topologico coordinates of
this trajectory? The coordinates are rooted in our potential to see what is pre-
sent but at the same time what is not present in a material form. But ulti-
mately, what is at issue here is an essential reawakening that occurs in the
morning. As Benjamin states in the Passagen-werk, “Just as Proust begins his
life story with the moment of awakening, so every presentation of history
must begin with awakening; in fact it actually must not deal with anything
else.” Marina Cvetaeva, in fact, makes a clear connection between the idea
of a reawakening and the Angel in “The Song of Angels” from Le Gars: “The
voice of dawn, the voice of the host; / the voice of dawn, the voice of being.”
The lyric fragments of a reawakening are similar to thieves hidden by
the roadside who attack passersby and make them lose the weight of their
conviction, as Benjamin would have it when he describes the function of
citations. In another passage on the nature of citations, Benjamin writes:
In the quotation that both saves and chastises, language proves the matrix
of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from
its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin. It appears, now
with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congruously in the structure of a new
text. As rhyme it gathers the similar into its aura; as name it stands alone
and expressionless. In quotation the two realms—of origin and destruc-
tion—justify themselves before language. And conversely, only where they
interpenetrate—in quotation—is language consummated. In it is mirrored
the Angelic tongue in which all words, startled from the idyllic context of
meaning, have become mottoes in the book of Creation.2
And so the function of a sea of citations is to force one to move toward a

conjugal closeness with a constellation of signs pushing from different di-
rections, with the final aim of being reawakened from the slumber of the
brothel of history.
There is a connection between our ability to move towards a new cul-
tural-historical time, and our capacity to see fragments of quotations as a
new invention.
The Copernican turn in the historical point of view is this: one used to take
“the past” as the fixed point and saw the present as attempting to lead
knowledge gropingly to this firm ground. Now this relation shall be re-
versed and the past should become the dialectical reversal, the sudden
thought of an awakened consciousness. Politics is granted primacy over his-
tory. Facts become something that hit us just now; to establish them is the
task of memory. And indeed, awakening is the exemplary case of remem-
bering: the case in which we succeed in recalling the nearest, the most banal,
the most obvious. What Proust means by the experimental rearrangement
of furniture in the half-slumber of the morning, [what] Block understands
as the darkness of the lived moment, is nothing other than what we should
determine here, on the level of the historical, and collectively. There is a not-
yet-conscious-knowledge of the past, whose furthering has the structure of
awakening.3
The potential reawakening carries the signature of an unnamable hand—

that is, a hand whose authentic imprint is pure potentiality. A reawaken-
ing, in other terms, that is rooted in a chronologically vast remoteness
whose main theme is unrepeatable nothingness.
However, while “reawakening” possesses a semantic currency that
makes it understood in a variety of contexts, what exactly is “unrepeatable
nothingness”? Giorgio Agamben phrases the idea of reawakening in a way
LYRIC FRAGMENTS OF A REAWAKENING 45
that pivots on the notion vacuity: “If instead you patiently dwell in the
emptiness of representation, this, O blessed one, is what we call the mid-
dle way. Relative emptiness is no longer the image of nothing. The word
draws its fullness from its very vacuity. This peace of representation is the
awakening.”4 In Leonardo da Vinci’s mind, “that which is called nothing
is found only in time and in words” (Leonardo, Cod. Arundel); and again,
“Within it nothingness contains all the things that have no being; within
time it resides in the past and the future and possesses nothing of the pre-
sent; and within nature it has no place” (Leonardo, Cod. Arundel f. 132v).
Commenting on Leonardo’s artistic practices, Freud (who wanted to get to
the heart of Leonardo’s nothingness) wrote:
When he dissected cadavers of horses and human beings, and built flying
apparatus, or when he studied the nourishment of plants and their behav-
iour toward poisons, he naturally deviated from the commentators of Aris-
totle and came nearer the despised alchemists, in whose laboratories the
experimental investigations found some refuge during these unfavourable
times. The effect that this had on his paintings was that he disliked to han-
dle the brush; he painted less and, what was more often the case, the things
he began were mostly left unfinished; he cared less and less for the future
fate of his works. It was this mode of working that was held up to him as a
reproach by his contemporaries, to whom his attitude toward his art re-
mained a riddle.5
Leonardo knew that the most radical dimension of lived experience was
the nothingness that it housed, a nothingness that could never be ab-
stracted or structured as an aprioristic entity. And Freud was keen to ob-
serve that Leonardo’s affinity with the hated alchemists was at the root of
a passive, ante litteram nihilism that at a certain point conditioned
Leonardo’s attitude toward his art. The alchemists, after all, concretized
nothingness to it most dangerous extreme. Leonardo felt the devastating
weight of nothing, whose galaxy no one was able to escape: “Among the
magnitude of things that are around us, the being of nothingness holds the
highest position and its grasp extends to things that have no being, and its
essence resides within time, within the past and the future, and it possesses
nothing of the present” (Leonardo, Cod. Arundel, f. 131r).
Freud himself was fascinated by the gazing that nothingness could in-
spire. His psychoanalytic thought was surely an attempt to find a material
guise for this nothingness. The vacuity offered by Michelangelo’s Moses

reawakens such an awareness about the unrepeatable nothing:
The figure of [Michelangelo’s] Moses, therefore, cannot be supposed to be

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

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

(which is at the center of any attempt to interpret the strangeness of the
Angel’s corpse) involves tracing the cognitive space that leads from phe-
nomenology to a noumenal logic (a logic, that is, focusing on the thing or
object, in itself inaccessible to experience but to which a phenomenon is
referred for the basis or cause of its sense content. The noumenon is the
object itself that is to be distinguished from a phenomenon or object as it
appears). P. D. Ouspensky developed a line of thinking that gave or rather
restored life to precisely a noumenal or what he termed “higher” logic. He
called the system the Tertium Organum which somehow followed the tra-
dition established by Aristotle’s Organon and continued by Bacon’s Novum
Organon. In fact, in Ouspensky’s view, the “third organon” existed before
the other two.
The axioms of Ouspensky’s “higher logic” are supralinguistic as they
belong to a signifying realm that is unreconcilable with the logic of con-
ventional language. As a result of not having any concepts, “the ideas of
higher logic are inexpressible in concepts. And when we come up
against this inexpressibility, it means that we have come into contact
with the world of causes.”7 According to Ouspensky, higher logic ex-
isted before the advent of both deductive and inductive logic, but it re-
sembles a logic of intuition, infinity, ecstasy. Traces of higher logic are
preserved in poetry, mysticism, and idealistic philosophy. One of the
most powerful formulations of this logic is to be found in Plotinus’s
“On Intelligible Beauty.” In describing the gods and their celestial
abode, Plotinus writes:
All gods are venerable and beautiful, and their beauty is immense. What else
however is it but intellect through which they are such? For all things there
are diaphanous; and nothing is dark and resisting, but every thing is appar-
ent to everyone internally and throughout. For light everywhere meets with
light; since every thing contains all things in itself, and again sees all things
in another. So that all things are everywhere, and all is all. Each thing like-
wise is every thing, there each part always proceeds from the whole, and is at
the same time each part and the whole. For it appears indeed as a party; but
by him whose sight is acute, it will be seen as a whole. And the life there is a
wisdom; a wisdom not obtained by a reasoning process, because the whole
of it always was, and is not in any respect deficient, so as to be in want of in-
vestigation. But it is the first wisdom, and is not derived from another.8
As we will see in the latter part of this book, what Ouspensky is theo-
rizing about on the basis of Plotinian philosophy participates in the same
genealogy of what Umberto Eco calls hermetic drift or semiosis. We dis-
cuss hermetic semiosis at greater length at a later point, but for the mo-
ment let us say that higher logic constitutes a lost and forgotten frontier of
inquiry as far as semiotics is concerned. On the one hand it could be la-
beled as “primitive” in that it ignores the ratio-logical distinctions that gov-
ern much of contemporary thinking, but on the other, and this is this
potential paradox, “higher logic” is the interpretative frontier that was
quickly disposed of with the advent of Cartesian rationalism.
Ouspensky speaks in the clearest terms of the limits that must be over-
come (he never uses the expression “ratio-logical” but instead the “idols
of dualism”). The first limit is the belief that what we see and sense is
what in fact exists; it is important that we sensitize ourselves to the in-
correctness of the representation of the world and to the idea “That the
real, new world must exist in some quite different forms, new, incompa-
rable, incommensurable with the old.” Moreover, we must realize that the
divisions of the world are not necessarily correct: “things which appear to
be totally different and separated from another, may be a part of some
whole incomprehensible to it, or that they may have much in common,
although this may not be noticed; whereas things which seem one and in-
divisible, are actually complex and manifold.”9 But an essential factor in
Ouspensky’s explanation of higher logic is one’s ability to entertain a cog-
nitive strategy that leads toward an awakening that consists in recogniz-
ing the previously unknown or unheard of common properties of things,
“which result from their similar origin or similar functions, incompre-
hensible on a plane.”10
To sum up Ouspensky’s supralogical noumenal world, the following
observations can be advanced:
1. Time must exist spatially—that is, temporal events must exist both
prior to and following their accomplishment. Effects and causes
must exist contemporaneously.
2. There exists nothing that could be quantified by means of our
methods of quantification.
3. There is neither matter nor motion, nor is there anything that can
photographed or formulated in terms of physical energy.
4. There exists nothing that is dead or unconscious. To the contrary,

everything is conscious and is able to speak.
5. Precisely because there exists nothing finite there, mathematical ax-
ioms could never be applied there.
6. This world is outside the laws of logic.
7. The multiplicity and the divisions that it brings are alien to this
world. Everything is the whole.
8. There is no duality. For example, “Being” does not rest in opposi-
tion to “non-being.” This world is based on the notion of the unity
of contraries.
9. As a result of there being no difference between the unreal and the
real, the idea of unreality of that world is to be coupled with the idea
of unreality of the world we live in.
10. The world we live in and the other world are not, in the end, two
different domains. What we call our world is but a flawed figuration
of that world. We sense that world as being opposed to the reality
of our own world. However, as we state this our terrestrial world as-
sumes a guise of unreality.11
On the basis of this discussion on Ouspensky, it would seem that we

are dealing with a variety of thinking that is alien to the ratio-logical and
materialist philosophies that dominate the present time. If anything,
higher logic seems to have much more in common with ancient philoso-
phies that are no longer, as some erroneously claim, of use to us. However,
the history of ideas occults all kinds of unexpected and unheard of rela-
tions or analogies: for example, Ouspensky’s higher logic bears an uncanny
resemblance to some postmodern philosophies. I am specifically thinking
of the idea of rhizome as conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guat-
tari. On the one hand the rhizome is an upside-down mirror-reflection of
higher logic, but on the other hand it is an application of higher logic to
our terrestrial world.
Deleuze and Guattari borrow the figure of the rhizome from the botan-
ical world to explain the relationship between things and beings. In the
French philosophers’ own words, a rhizome “ceaselessly establishes con-
nections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circum-
stances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles. A semiotic chain
is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also
perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself,

nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois,
slangs and specialized languages.”12 The main features of the rhizome can
be summarized as follows:
1. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple.

2. It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions
in motion.
3. It has neither beginning nor end but always a middle from which it
grows and which it overspills.
4. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is short-term memory, or an-
timemory.
5. The rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced and con-
structed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible.
6. The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system
without a General and without an organizing memory or central
automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states.13
An important feature of the rhizome is the absence of a transcendental

element or Being that brings about a unity of the many scattered in mul-
tiplicity. However, while there is no “angelic or superior unity” there is
something else in its place, namely the figure of the rhizome itself. The el-
ement that brings about a relationship between itself and all things, as well
as between all things themselves is the rhizome, which at any given point
“can be connected to anything other, and must be.”14 While this is quite
different from the idea of a monad, it is equally true that it establishes a
potential relationship of affinity with higher logic; that is, while there is no
transcendent unifying force in the properties of the rhizome, there is an
immanent one that allows a multiplicity of different units and dimensions
to come into contact with each other. The rhizome can be seen, at once,
as both a topsy-turvy version of higher logic and as a materialization of it.
Even the manner in which Deleuze and Guattari explain the book-as-
rhizomatic figure bears an unquestionable resemblance to the “diaphanous
truth” that Plotinus talks about and that Ouspensky uses as a basis to
claim, as we saw, that time must exist spatially—that is, temporal events
must exist both prior to and following their accomplishment: “The ideal
for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this
kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determina-
tions, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.”15 Moreover, like

Ouspensky, Deleuze and Guattari expel dualism from their scheme of
things (“That is why one can never posit a dualism of dichotomy, even in
the rudimentary form of the good and the bad”).16
My point in this comparison between Ouspensky and Deleuze/Guat-
tari is not to suggest that they are linked by some sort of genealogical re-
lationship, nor is it to claim that somehow the tertium organum and the
rhizome are the same thing. They clearly are not. Instead I am searching
for that frontier that has been the object of a millennial quest, and, in my
view, that frontier is located somewhere between the world of noumenal
logic and the materialist schizophrenia of the rhizome. This frontier be-
longs to neither but partakes of both, and its signpost is the dead Angel.
The defining feature of this frontier is that it “deterritorializes.”
Here again I make reference to Deleuze and Guattari, who made deterri-
torialization a key element in their philosophy. In A Thousand Plateaus, they
write, “Signs are not signs of a thing: they are signs of deterritorialization and
reterritorialization, they mark a certain threshold crossed in the course of
these movements.”17 The French philosophers are interested in finding a
way of articulating not so much the total collapse of systems (be they polit-
ical, economic, social, or intellectual and so on) as the fact that processes of
creating meaning are almost irretrievably lost in the epistemological crevices
that are located in the ever changing boundaries that divide these systems.
In another passage we read that “every sign refers to another sign, and
only to another sign, ad infinitum. The limitlessness of significance replaces
the sign.”18 In other terms, the deterritorialization of the sign consists in the
fact that “it is thought of as a symbol in a constant movement of referral
from sign to sign. The signifier is the sign in redundancy with the sign. All
signs are signs of signs.”19 And finally, “The most deterritorialized element
causes the other element to cross a threshold enabling a conjunction of their
respective deterritorilizations, a shared acceleration.”20
What is the message here? We invoke the deterritorial in attempt to ar-
ticulate, to figure that frontier existing somewhere between the noumenal
and the rhizomatic. It is a place that turns the ratio-logical into a “slippery”
logic but that encourages a materialist mysticism that is unintelligible. The
solution, so to speak, is the deterritorial, which opens (by virtue of an im-
munity to any conceptual or epistemological limit or boundary) the pos-
sibility of a reawakening through sensing the semiosis that is inscribed in
the Angel’s corpse.
I
ENCRYPTED SIGNS
N
o one has ever seen a living dinosaur, but the skeletal remains of
the various species are on display in many museums throughout
the world, and so no one doubts that these prehistoric animals
ever existed. Many people claim to have seen “real” angels, but there is no
scientific proof that they ever existed, the way there is empirical evidence
for the existence of dinosaurs. However, the comparison between the di-
nosaur and the Angel is misleading. The proof for the existence of di-
nosaurs exists on a cognitive plane, that of physical and empirical
evidence, which is part of our everyday, quantifiable existence. Moreover,
the physical/empirical is the plane on which dinosaurs are said to have ex-
isted. As we have seen, the Angel is purported to exist on a cognitive plane
that we have lost, the mundus imaginalis, which is the perceptive space
lodged somewhere in between the perception of abstract ideas and the per-
ception of the physical/empirical world. The unquantifiable world of the
mundus imaginalis, which according to tradition is the home of the Angels,
is lost to us, and as a result the only contexts we have for thinking and fig-
uring the Angel are the contexts of abstraction and of the measurable
world of the senses.
What is truly astounding about Corbin’s claim according to which “ra-
tional abstraction, at best, deals only with the ‘mortal remains’ of an
Angel”1 is that he is suggesting the “skeletal remains,” so to speak, of the
Angel are not to be found in the empirical world, as in the case of the di-
nosaur, but in the realm of abstract thinking. Rational abstraction contains
within its genealogy the trace of a living Angel; abstraction reveals the
corpse of the Angel, but at the same time it hides the signs of its life. Thus
a critical imagining of the Angel necessarily entails a critical imagining of
ENCRYPTED SIGNS 53
the cognitive space in which it is housed, namely, the mundus imaginalis.

But rather than recomposing the living Angel, let us rethink the evidence
of its life, which means gazing at and beyond the mortal remains that ra-
tional abstraction offers us. Precisely because we no longer perceive the
mundus imaginalis, we are put into a situation whereby we must necessar-
ily conjugate the critical with the unimaginable; thus the interpretative ac-
tivity becomes a late form of alchemical practice.
But which “alchemy” are we speaking about here? It is definitely not the
ethereal musing of a late twentieth-century New Age mind; nor is it the
trendy resurrection of some harmless esoteric hobby. In other terms, it is
not the discredited and mocked occult bookstore alchemy that no longer
makes a difference. Instead, it is a case of reinventing alchemy as an epis-
temo-cognitive category. In doing so we select the most disquieting ele-
ments of alchemical practice, the bizarre and often noxious contamination
of different substances, including metals, gases, and the various types of
human and animal secretions and excretions—the attempt to take nature
apart and then to reassemble it. The point is that the aggressive contami-
nation at the heart of alchemy is what Deleuze and Guattari would call de-
territorializing, a dissolution of all types of boundaries leading to a
marriage of the chemical and the metaphysical.
Alchemy, in its most radical sense, was the attempt to disclose the
space that existed between the visible and the invisible, the spiritual and
the material, the noumenal and the rhizomatic. Moreover, alchemy was
a mind-altering experience, a scientific high, as the alchemist who gazed
at the substances he sought to transform inevitably ended up ingesting
the fumes of the intoxicating gases that were part and parcel of his craft.
The contamination that alchemy encouraged was also bio-psychic in na-
ture, one that involved ripping apart the boundaries that separated the
mind from the body. The alchemist projected his psyche into the matter
that was the object of his gaze. Hence the relevance of psychoanalytic
discourse to gauging the presence of the Angel’s corpse. The mortal re-
mains of the Angel rest at once in conscious rational abstraction and in
the unconscious.
The task is that of discussing the unimaginable, the unsayable; the
elements that come into play here are that of the haunting phantom,
the crypt and the secret entombed there. The lyric psychoanalysis of
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok is a point of reference here. Abra-
ham and Torok developed the notion of transgenerational haunting,
which purported the idea that repressed secrets are handed down from
one generation to another if they are “encrypted” as traumatic data.
Freud had already noted the presence of communication between the
unconsciouses of two individuals: “It is a very remarkable thing that the
Unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another, with-
out passing through the Conscious. This deserves closer examination, es-
pecially with a view to finding out whether preconscious activity can be
excluded as playing a part in it; but, descriptively speaking, the fact is
uncontestable.”2
As Nicholas Rand observes, the idea of the phantom as elaborated by
Abraham and Torok displaces the focus of psychoanalysis much beyond
the individual being in that it proposes that some individuals unknow-
ingly inherit the entombed psychic substance of their ancestors. “The
phantom represents the interpersonal and transgenerational consequences
of silence. The concept of the crypt designates a secret psychic configura-
tion arising from an individual’s own life experiences; the idea of the
phantom concerns itself with the unwitting reception of someone else’s
secret.”3 Abraham and Torok’s theory may be summed up in the follow-
ing manner:
1. The phantom is a formation of the unconscious that has never been

conscious.
2. The phantom works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the
subject’s own mental topography.
3. The phantom counteracts libidinal introjection; that is, it obstructs
our perception of words as implicitly referring to their unconscious
portion.
4. The words used by the phantom to carry out its return do not refer
to a source of speech. Instead, they point to a gap, they refer to the
unspeakable.
5. The phantom is alien to the subject who harbors it.4
Let us ask, then, what does the Angel’s corpse have to do with all of
this? Since the advent of Cartesian rationalism the Angel’s ability to offer
messages has become obfuscated, voided of any “serious” meaning and ul-
timately unrealized and unfulfilled. The Angel’s specter, which assumes
the guise of a corpse, is like the analysand whose message has not been
perceived, as in Abraham and Torok’s description: “those whose message
ENCRYPTED SIGNS 55
they [the analysts] failed to hear, those whose deficient, mutilated text
they have listened to time after time—the riddles with no keys—those
who left their analysts without yielding up the distinctive oeuvre of their
lives, those people return forever as the ghosts of their unfulfilled destiny
and as the haunting phantoms of the analyst’s deficiency.”5 The Angel’s
corpse is more than the figure for something else—it is itself the thing
haunting the present time that has not resolved the conflict that the an-
gelic remains provoke.
The provocation takes the form of a traumatic experience, or, more pre-
cisely, a “secret.” I am here using the word as Abraham and Torok use it:
that is, a “secret” as a traumatic experience whose destructive psychologi-
cal consequences are occulted in a tomb and thus delivered to internal si-
lence by the sufferers. But for the psychoanalysts, “reality” in its
metapsychological sense, is linked to “secret”: “Reality can then be defined
as what is rejected, masked, denied precisely as ‘reality’; it is that which is,
all the more so since it must not be known; in short, Reality is defined as
a secret. The metapsychological concept of Reality refers to the place, in the
psychic apparatus, where the secret is buried.”6 The secret that the Angel’s
corpse encrypts is its own traumatic death. How is this trauma articulated
in cultural and intellectual practices? By means of a consistent search for
the unnamable that engulfs the material.
Freud himself was well aware of the strange places in reality in which
secrets hid themselves.
Long before I had any opportunity of hearing about psychoanalysis, I learnt

that a Russian art-connoisseur, Ivan Lermolieff, had caused a revolution in
the art galleries of Europe by questioning the authorship of many pictures,
showing how to distinguish copies from originals with certainty, and con-
structing hypothetical artists for those works whose former supposed au-
thorship had been discredited. He achieved this by insisting that attention
should be diverted from the general impression and main features of a pic-
ture, and by laying stress on the significance of minor details, of things like
the drawing of fingernails, of the lobe of an ear, of halos and such uncon-
sidered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet which every
artists executes in his own characteristic way. I was then greatly interested to
learn that the Russian pseudonym concealed the identity of an Italian physi-
cian called Morelli, who died in 1891 with the rank of Senator of the King-
dom of Italy. It seems to me that his method on inquiry is closely related to
the technique of psychoanalysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and
concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-

heap, as it were, of our observations.7
Truth is found somewhere in the refuse of lived experience. It is found in

the folds of the psychic waste that we often deem unsemiotizable. But for
Freud it is the paleopsychic refuse in particular that allows us to divine the
hidden secrets of Being. It is the Recording Angel who runs his fingers
through the documents of lived experience only to find that humans hold
dearly their fragile remains, their scattered parts. Humans have abandoned
that nostalgia for a sense of total gathering that was purported to be found
in the idea that the human race is the singular thought of the Angel.
J
THE EARTH HAS NO WAY OUT

OTHER THAN TO BECOME INVISIBLE
T
he Angel offers humans the impossible science of transformation
into invisibility; in fact, as Rilke writes in a letter of 1912 ad-
dressed to Witold von Hulewicz, the destiny of the Earth will be
realized by means of a transmutation from the guise of visibility to one
that is no longer perceived by the senses: “The earth has no way out other
than to become invisible: in us who with part of our natures partake of the
invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can increase our holdings in the in-
visible during our sojourn here—in us alone can be consummated this in-
timate and lasting conversion of the visible into an invisible . . . The Angel
of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible
into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, appears already consum-
mated.”1 But the transformation of the visible into the invisible necessar-
ily involves an intermediary stage, a place where something is at once real
and unreal. The metamorphosis that Rilke is encouraging must pass
through a state where invisibility is an object of desire but where visibility
has dissolved—that is where a being or a thing is at once visible and in-
visible. Giorgio Agamben, using a very prophetic tone, suggested that the
space of transformation, similar to the one just described, is an “ . . . in-
termediate epiphanic place, located in the no-man’s-land [where] the cre-
ations of human culture will be situated one day, the interweaving
(entrebescar) of symbolic forms and textual practices through which man
enters into contact with a world that is nearer to him than any other and
from which depend, more directly than from physical nature, his happi-
ness and his misfortune.”2 The claim being put forward here, within the
spirit of Agamben’s prophecy, is that a place where this transformation un-

folds itself before our eyes is in the space of the angelogical. But any imag-
ining of a new, unheard state of being involves a radical understanding of
the many paradigms of the world that the imagination can invent. Ulti-
mately we need a science of the “making invisible,” something that Corbin
proposes in his meditations on an angelological philosophy, which consti-
tutes a poetological hermeneutic.
The Angel is the source of prophetic philosophy and hermeneutics, as
Corbin tells us (but not only Corbin; for example, in “The Angel’s Inter-
rogation,” Zbigniew Herbert represents the Angel’s prophetic sense as
something that literally oozes from its body: “from the Angel’s hair / there
fall drops of wax / and they form on the floor / a simple prophecy”).
Corbin uncovered the presence of a “trans-sensory” organ of perception in
his research on the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. This organ, which Corbin calls
the theophanic Imagination, is the instrument “of a prophetic hermeneu-
tics, for it is the imagination which is at all times capable of transmuting
sensory data into symbols and external events into symbolic histories.
Thus the affirmation of an esoteric meaning presupposes a prophetic
hermeneutics.”3 This sort of interpretative mode is accompanied by a
prophetic philosophy that orients itself toward a realm of “pure theophanic
historicity, in the inner time of the soul.” As Corbin explains, prophetic
philosophy “looks for the meaning of history not in ‘horizons,’ that is, not
by orienting itself in the latitudinal sense of a linear development, but ver-
tically, by a longitudinal orientation extending from the celestial pole to
the Earth.”4
The Angel is the fount of this philosophy and hermeneutics in the sense
that it allows humans to perceive the trans-sensory world for the essential
reason that the Angel resides in that dimension. Thomas Aquinas as well
underlined the significance of the Angel’s ability to reveal and make
prophecies:
The spirit works grace in people by means of the angels. The divine en-
lightenments and revelations are conveyed from God to humans by the an-
gels. Now, prophetic knowledge is bestowed by divine enlightenment and
revelation. Therefore it is evident it is conveyed by the angels. Prophecy is a
perfection of the intellect, in which an angel can form an impression.
Prophetic revelation which is conveyed by the ministry of the angels is said
to be divine revelation. Prophecy is between the angels and the people.5
THE EARTH HAS NO WAY OUT 59
The Angel has the ability to tear us away from the limits of a rationalized
idea of sense perception, thus permitting us to come into contact with the
world that remains unheard of for humans. Corbin reiterates this idea in
another passage: “The Angelic function, the Angel’s mediation, which pre-
cisely liberates us for undiscovered, unforeseeable, unsuspected transcen-
dences and prevents us from becoming immobilized in definite, definitive
happening.”6 More than being a messenger of the divine, the Angel is en-
dowed with the capacity to fluidify for humans the space and time of un-
derstanding and thinking. To suggest that today this is a radical idea is
beyond doubt. It is equally true that the trans-sensory nature of interpre-
tation shares similarities with Aristotle’s idea of the poetological, namely,
that it has the potential to bend the barriers established by time and space.
In the end, the issue we are dealing with here is one that pivots on the
problem of cognition, of understanding. Our ability to comprehend how,
outside the laws of a rational physics, something can move back and forth
between visibility and invisibility is conditioned by our “understanding” of
understanding. Corbin writes that “all our acts of understanding are so
many recommencements, re-iterations of events still unconcluded.”7 Any
attempt to probe into the meaning of the visibility/invisibility dynamic
must necessarily keep in mind, among other things, the notion that there
are certain events, ideas, intuitions, sentiments, and so on from the past
that, for whatever reason, never achieved a sense of closure. To a definite
extent, it is a question of thawing out certain ideas or meanings that have
been frozen for centuries in the landscape of intellectual consciousness. Let
us take as an example of an “unconcluded event, idea or meaning” a quote
taken from G. T. Fechner’s On the Question of the Soul, where the author
describes the Earth as being an Angel:
I was walking in the open air on a beautiful spring morning. The wheat was
growing green, the birds were singing, the day was sparkling, the smoke ris-
ing; a transfiguring light lay over everything; this was only a tiny fragment
of Earth and yet the idea seemed to me not only so beautiful, but also so
true that she was an Angel—an Angel so sumptuous, so fresh, so fresh, so
like a flower and at the same time so firm so composed, who was moving
through the sky that I asked myself how it was possible that men should
have blinded themselves to the point of seeing the Earth as nothing but a
dried-up mass to the point where they go looking for Angels above them,
or somewhere in the emptiness of the sky, and find them nowhere.8
The point is the that figuration of the Earth as Angel is not limited to an
ornamental poetic image or technique. We are dealing with a cognitive
perspective that does not adhere to any interpretative grid offered to us by
the empirical or rationalistic sciences. The event of perceiving the Earth as
an Angel is a psycho-cognitive occurrence that happens in neither the do-
main of conceptual abstraction nor in the realm of the sensory perception
of the physical data. In Corbin’s mind, “The perception of the Earth Angel
will come about in an intermediate universe which is neither that of the
Essences of philosophy nor that of the sensory data on which the work of
the positive science is based, but which is a universe of archetype-Images,
experienced as so many personal presences.”9 What the angelological phi-
losophy encourages us to do is not pose questions concerning the essence
of something in the form of “what is it?” but instead ask questions dealing
with individual persons in the guise of “who is it?” or “with whom is it in
correspondence?” By undertaking such an interpretative route we move
from the mind set of quantification to that of qualification; this constitutes
a transportation from the domain of a quanto-reason that places the em-
phasis on the aim of discovering the only truth, that which resides either
in the frigid realm of conceptual abstraction or in the concrete sensorial of
everyday life. These two worlds are able to answer the problem of quan-
tum of any inquiry. But once we pose the problem of qualis (“who is the
Earth?”), the response to this question, Corbin tells us, “causes an Image
to appear and this Image invariably corresponds to the presence of a cer-
tain state.”10
The fact is that the mental apparition of the Angel of the Earth is not
an experience that occurs within sensorial reality. But what we have to ask
ourselves is whether or not the nonvisible forces that assume their mater-
ial guise in the world of nature are the catalysts of mental powers that have
been atrophied or marginalized by the changes in human practices and
conventions, and whether these mental powers come into contact with an
Imagination, which, as Corbin reminds us, is the same as the Imagination
called Imaginatio vera by the alchemists.11 What is interesting about this
active Imagination is that it does not give way to an arbitrary or poetic
form of mediation between the individual and reality; instead it operates
“directly as a faculty and organ of knowledge just as real as—if not more
real than—the sense organs.”12 Corbin is careful to explain that the organ
is not a bio-physiological sense but an archetype-Image, and the attribute
of this Image is that of making sensory perception undergo a transforma-
tion, a dematerialization: “it changes the physical datum impressed upon

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

selves how it is possible for us today to “know” the transmutation into in-
visibility that he so painstakingly describes. Narcosis comes close to
imagining and experiencing this unheard of state. Spinoza tells us that

“The first thing which forms the actual Being of the human mind is noth-
ing else than the idea of an individual thing actually existing” (Ethics, Prop.
XI). The intimacy of the mind’s being is rooted in the idea of something
that exists. Being is thus grounded in material concreteness, rather than in
some hyperuranian abstract notion. If nothing exists, there is nothing that
gives rise to Being in the mind. Narcosis, in other words, is the nothing
that gives rise to a nothing-Being—an idea of narcosis, however, stripped
of its jurisprudential encrustations and humbly restored to its radical cog-
nitive intentions. Benjamin was greatly interested in the cognitive possi-
bilities offered by the state of narcotic ecstasy, as this passage from
“Hashish in Marseilles” attests: “To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy
of trance, one ought to meditate on Ariadne’s thread. What joy in the mere
act of unrolling a ball of thread. And this joy is very deeply related to the
joy of trance, as to that of creation.”17
But just how responsible is it to bring the question of narcosis into the
picture of our investigation? Again we turn to Benjamin:
Any serious exploration of occult surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phe-

nomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn
of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious
side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to
the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectic
optic that perceives everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.
The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example,
will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently tele-
pathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phe-
nomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not
teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the
profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the
thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the
opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention
the most terrible drug—ourselves—which we take in solitude.18
Heidegger has spoken about addiction in Being and Time. “Dasein’s

hankering as it falls makes manifest its addiction to becoming ‘lived’ by
whatever world it is in. This addiction shows the character of Being out for
something. Being-ahead-of-oneself has lost itself in ‘just-always-already-
alongside.’ What one is addicted ‘towards’ is to let oneself be drawn by the
sort of thing which the addiction hankers. If Dasein, as it were, sinks into
an addiction then there is not merely an addiction present-at-hand, but
the entire structure of care has been modified. Dasein has become blind,
and puts all possibilities into the service of addiction.”19
The gazing of the Angel’s mortal remains takes place at the same time
that there is a fall or downward plunge reaching a realm of nothingness.
The fall has a narcotic effect in that it allows one to detach oneself from
the pain of the world. When this happens, then one has reached the
netherworld that exists between being and non-being. But the narcosis
cannot be the end in itself. If anything the narcotic effect is an anaesthetic
that protects one from the disruptive nature of what is the value of truth.
The narcosis plays a role similar to what the Angel recites in being an in-
termediary between the divine and the human. The Angel protects hu-
mans from the violent lucence of the transcendent Being, but the narcosis
of non-being, if it is really to be this, fulfills its goal when it allows us to
rejoin understanding and the projection of authentic possibility. Once
hermeneusis is rejoined with the ontological, then we are able to proceed
toward the terrain resting beyond the Angel’s mortal remains.
Ultimately, the contemporary thirst for narcosis has essentially one
ambition: to annihilate experience, reduce its meaning to a hollow shell,
anything but a desire to transmutate oneself into a state of perfected in-
visibility. In Agamben’s words, “What distinguishes modern addicts
from the intellectuals who discovered drugs in the nineteenth century is
that the latter (at least the less lucid among them) could still delude
themselves that they were undergoing a new experience, while for the
former this is nothing more than the discarding of all experience.”20
Thus we are far away from the possibility of a cosmic narcosis, a recov-
ery of something the ancients experienced as a radical reawakening. “The
cosmic forces,” Benjamin writes, “ have only a narcotic effect on the
empty and fragile man.”21
K
IDEA OF THE NAME
“W
hen it is believed that the nature of a thing is compre-
hended in its name, then on the one hand emphasis is
laid on the idea that knowledge of the name mediates a
direct relationship with the nature, and on the other the name is regarded
as such an extent an expression of the individual character of its owner that
it can, in fact, stand for him, become a concept interchangeable with
him.”1 This statement from Walter Eichrodt supports what Jacques Der-
rida asserts about the human ability to know and understand the signs of
a transcendent Being, about whom nothing can be affirmed that might
hold, “Save his name . . . Save the name that names nothing that might
hold, not even a divinity, nothing whose withdrawal does not carry away
every phrase that tries to measure itself against him.”2 But in the pages of
the Old Testament we find references to the fact that the Name of the tran-
scendent Being appears as an angelomorphic figure: “Behold, I send an
angel in front of you, my Name is in him” (Exod., 23.20). In other terms,
the unsayable “is not that which is in no way attested to in language, but
that which, in language, can only be named.”3 In this way, the name is the
source of the ecstasy of communication in that it encases the fleeting and
mercurial joy whose description defies the slow pace of human thought.
L
DECAYED LOGIC OF
THE ETERNAL RETURN
I
f, as Benjamin maintains, “allegory is in the realm of thought what
ruins are in the realm of things,”1 then it would hold that the cartog-
raphy of thought is populated not only by the edifices of living, actual,
contemporary ideas but also by strata of decayed ones. Yet in the debris
that has accumulated over time we are bound to find relics that have re-
sisted the violence of erosion. What makes these ruins of special impor-
tance is that they function as a vehicle of interpretative mediation as we
seek to envision critically the geography that rests between transience and
eternity. The challenge is that of finding the space and/or the time in
which these two realms intersect, or, for that matter, in which the element
that safeguards the divide between the two dissolves. The idea, then, is that
of witnessing the dissolution of the spatio-temporal logic that supports
and defines the eternal recurrence of things. In a confessional moment
Paul Valéry writes that the poetic sign opens up the path that leads to anti-
repetition: “ . . . the cyclomania of our being. But for me the poetic is the
opposite of this sad drudgery, which is as mortally circular as the diurnal
rotation of the other . . .”2
In his attempt to formulate a rhetoric of walking, Michel de Certeau
states that
it is true that the operations of walking can be traced on city maps in such
a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and
their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin
curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys
of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of
walking, wandering, or “window shopping,” that is, the activity of

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

finds its etymological origin in “hodos,” “wandering.” The peripatetic tra-
dition is a testimony to this practice. But why is cartography necessarily at
odds with the human action that allows for the possibility of geographic
figurations? Is this a displacement of the poetry/philosophy antinomy?
How can a cultural practice deeply rooted in everyday life be erased by its
schematic representation? The problem is that we have in a priori fashion
torn the trace from the practice. We have disengaged the sign for under-
standing the practice from the act itself. This strategy of separating things
participates in the same genealogy that gave rise to divorcing the body
from thinking. However, walking is what allows us to at once invent and
think the moves we make in the spatio-temporal dimension. The point is
that breaking the bonds of the eternal return necessitates breaking a spe-
cific pattern of movement, of “walking” within the heart of the spatio-
temporal, and of cultivating a logic that dissolves and transforms the
“return” linked to the eternal return of the same.
“I am about to see the maga, daughter of the great Sun, who comes for-
ward. You will go free in Circe’s abode which is certainly not confined to
a very tight space. Finally, you will arrive at home, you will be on the verge
of re-discovering the domestic things.” This passage from Giordano
Bruno’s Cantus Circaeus (1582) refers to the need to prepare oneself prop-
erly before being initiated into the occult art of memory. There is a
promise of a liberation, a coming freedom from the darkness of oblivion.
But for us today this promise is weighed down by the yoke of a meta-
physics that has become unintelligible. The sort of metaphysics that makes
sense for us today, for example, is the metaphysics of ether. Ether allows
for the transmission of material signs that we are able to grasp in all of their
clarity and ambiguity. Is it merely, then, the substitution of one meta-
DECAYED LOGIC OF THE ETERNAL RETURN 67
physics for another? This is indeed the case, but it is equally true that the
new metaphysics is inauditum (‘unheard of ’) and untouched by the flat
reason of the eternal return of the same.
In the Yogavasistha (2, 3, 11) we read that “The world is like an im-
pression that the telling of a story leaves behind.” On the trail of this cita-
tion Roberto Calasso4 critically imagines that everything which begins
from the human mind is realized in it as well, almost as if, to remember
what Marcel Proust said, “the universe were a prisoner and lost in my con-
sciousness.” But how many times does one have to re-think history in
order to achieve such a form of consciousness? Morever, what is it that
must be forgotten or accomplished so as to see the history of the world in
such a manner? To a great extent it is a question of moving away from the
signifying structures of the language, which is our routine, toward another
language. It is not a case of recovering a language that is lost or misplaced;
rather it is a question of imagining a language that does not yet exist.
But how does one break the chains of the eternal return of the same?
By eradicating the mythical infrastructures that hold together our under-
standing of history? (“The ‘eternal return,’” Benjamin writes, “is the fun-
damental form of mythical and prehistorical consciousness” in that
mythical being does not involve reflection.”5) But once this is done, then
everything comes apart. Or rather, nothing is the same. At that moment
eternal repetition will become an expression devoid of life and actuality.
But the desire for morning, whether repeated or unprecedented, will
never disappear. It is a desire, at worst a nostalgia, for the most revered
name. The most revered name is everything that belongs to it; that is, a
“name” that is at once the compendium of its own history and the syn-
chronic flash of an absent context. In other terms, this name is both the
delirious joy of narcosis as well as the clinical techno-rationalization of all
that can be vivisectioned. The most revered name then is everything, an
encyclopedia of the human that some have sought to express in one word,
in a poem, in a painting, a movie, a scientific theory, and so on. One of
the most accessible paths to his name is by way of negative theology. The
most revered name is a relic of a faith in the fact that “everything can be
articulated.” It is, however, inconsistent with the notion that only what is
immediately perceived or perceivable by our physical senses can be un-
derstood and explored.
The Italian literary tradition is itself a vast commentary on the revered
name; beginning with Francis of Assisi, Dante, Michelangelo, Bruno and
so on until reaching the names of figures such as Gadda, Calvino, Pasolini,

Levi and others of this century. One figure who has been subsumed and
has thus become the revered name is Petrarch. His poetry becomes the po-
etry that was, is, to be; his poetry burned time by becoming the greatest
absolute fragment in the Italian lyric tradition. Petrarch’s lyric became the
name that offered itself for sacrifice throughout the centuries. His name
was killed but it was also resuscitated. As an emanation of the name Pe-
trarch is the gatekeeper for the descent into the inferno of modern Italian
lyric. Those who enter pay him the coin that is his—this because of their
faith in eventually being able to see the morning.
Benjamin’s reflections on Baudelaire in Central Park are an engaging ex-
ample of how one deals with the tragic demise of traditional aesthetic/po-
etic value and the advent of a new aesthetic value rooted in the economic
value of the commodity. “Neuroses manufactured mass-produced articles
in the psychic economy. There it has the form of the obsession. These ap-
pear in the household of the neurotic as the always-the-same in countless
number. The idea of the eternal recurrence transforms historical events
into mass-produced articles. But this conception carries also in another
way the trace of the economic circumstances to which it owes its sudden
actuality. These announce themselves in that moment in which the secu-
rity of the conditions of life drastically diminished by the accelerated suc-
cession of crises. The idea of the eternal recurrence draws its lustre from
this: that the return of conditions could not be reckoned with within
shorter periods of time than those eternity used to grant.”6
The substitution of the traditional aesthetic value with the commodity
value pivots on the dynamics of the eternal return. This would lead one to
suspect that the eternal recurrence is then the prison house of the new
value; moreover, one breaks away from this condition only by smashing its
infernal logic: “The course of history as represented in the catastrophe has
no more claim on the attention of the thinking man than the kaleidoscope
in the hand of a child which, with each turn, collapses everything ordered
into new order. The justness of this image is well-founded. The concepts of
the rulers have always been the mirror by means of whose image an “order”
was established.—The kaleidoscope must be smashed.”7 The invention or
advent of the unrepeatable instant of meaning and being multiplied infi-
nitely is the potential end of the poetic as commodity value. But it would
not, could not be a return to the traditional poetic value. If anything it
would be a foraying into unrecognizable, yet always present, terrain.
In the movie Groundhog Day (1993), Bill Murray plays the role of Phil
Connors, a Pittsburgh TV weatherman who becomes locked in the infer-
nal dynamics of the always-the-same. February 2, Groundhog Day, is re-
peated over and over again for Murray’s character (and only for him).
Regardless of what Murray does or does not do, and irrespective of how
many times he does or does not do it, February 2 shows up every morn-
ing at 6:00 A.M. Events happen over and over again without there being
any consequences for what occurred in the previous embodiments of Feb-
ruary 2. While Murray’s character is free to acquire an artificial but
nonetheless effective foreknowledge of what happens, and while he be-
comes the master editor, splicer, and censurer of reality, he realizes that he
is living in hell. The infernal is the eternal repetition of the identical in his-
torical time. Even the power of foreknowledge acquired in an under-
handed way dissolves once February 2 begins anew. Murray does
eventually break away from the chains of the eternal repetition but only
after he has sculpted an ice image of his love object, namely, the character
played by Andie McDowell; that is to say, only once he has turned the ob-
ject of his erotic desire into a ruin, a statue that will melt. A ruin that is an
ultra-ruin, it moves from the material to the metaphysical. Murray’s char-
acter gives himself in the ice sculpture to McDowell’s character. This ruin
becomes the liquid that floods the eternal return of the same and gives way
to a new reality of meanings.
We find a similar situation in the movie The Truman Show (1998), in
which Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey, is trapped in the infernal
logic of repetition. However, when a stage light falls, like a burned-out star
from the heavens, Truman begins to suspect that there is a reality amassed
outside of his own. One of his most important discoveries is that his un-
reality is nothing but a repeating loop of events: “If I don’t see you, good
afternoon, good evening, and good night.” Reality as well as unreality are
eternal repetition.
Roberto Calasso is sensitive to the issue of eternal repetition in Freud’s
psychoanalytical thought; to be sure, in commenting on the presence of
this theme in “The Uncanny” he writes: “It is errant, indomitable repeti-
tion: that of random signs that accumulate, that hint at a connection, a
‘mysterious significance.’ Here the repetition is hybrid, at once part of the
changing scene of the outside world and part of the psychical scene, where
it claims a place. The repetition of a sign in the outside world transforms
that sign into an omen—an allusion to the presence of a meaning whose
origin we do not know and of which we cannot rid ourselves. Every mean-
ing that we have not established or produced ourselves is disturbing. Co-
incidences are disturbing, because they hint at a fate, at a network of
meanings that precede us, accompany us, trick us.”8 However, the process
that involves the repetition of the dispersed signs of the world until they
are distilled into numerous omens has an inverse phenomenon; the con-
certed repetition of a word that eventually becomes bereft of all meaning.9
In Calasso’s words, “In these two experiences we find, in the private and
secret space of our mind, the original schism. This was the schism that ap-
peared when the world became too charged with meanings: even as those
meanings took on a life of their own . . . If we fear repetition in the signs
that come to us from the world, it is because in that repetition we discover
that the world’s powers are always there . . . ready to swallow us as if we
were a word in their language.”10
Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary representation of the Angel offers us the
figure we need in order to move through the shards and ruins of history
with the aim of breaking free from the bonds of the ratio-logical but also
from the structure that abstract reason silently safeguards, namely, the eter-
nal return of the same. Moreover, Benjamin’s Angel could be seen as a
corpse rather than the living entity we have described so far. And precisely
because it is a cadaver, as I am suggesting, it is much closer to us than any
living Angel. Benjamin’s Angel is described in the ninth thesis of the “The-
ses of the Philosophy of History.” He understands Paul Klee’s drawing
called Angelus Novus as being a devastating sign of silence.11 The Angel
looks back at the past with the failed hope of playing a role in history as
did the Angel Gabriel who communicated with both the Virgin Mary and
the Prophet Mohammed. But while we humans would see a logical chain
of historical events, the Angel sees a past in total and desperate ruins.
The Angel, as Benjamin sees it, can no longer play a role in history; he
would like to awaken the dead and piece together the fragments, but he
has become completely ineffective. A storm has overtaken Klee’s Angel,
Benjamin tells us, and it is blowing the debris of the past toward the sky.
The Angel is blown toward the future although he continues to gaze at the
past. Benjamin equates the storm with progress, while the Angel stands for
another world, although he is of this world. The Angel is the human fac-
ulty of the imagination that has been supplanted and buried like an ar-
chaeological relic by transgressive and victimizing reason. So while
historically the Angel has been a figure for our ability to grasp the real
through the unreal, in Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s drawing the new Angel
can only name one possession, passive silence. Moreover, the Angel has be-
come a motionless corpse, and it is at this point that Benjamin’s Angel en-
ters into a relation of juxtaposition with the mortal remains of Corbin’s
Angel. In both cases the angelological becomes a figure for the power of
the ratio-logical. But it is a reason that lives through the form of a corpse
and is thus itself a pathetic paradox: reason, as I have described it, is a
corpse that promises to give birth to truth.
Benjamin offers another figuration of the Angel in “One-Way Street”
(1928): “Florence, Baptistery.—On the portal, the Spes [Hope] by An-
drea de Pisano. Sitting, she helplessly extends her arms toward a fruit
that remains beyond her reach. And yet she is winged. Nothing is more
true.”12 Even in this case the Angel is unable to achieve realizing her ob-
jective, as she seeks to grasp something that remains ungraspable. Yet
there is a difference between the two angels. In the “Theses on the Phi-
losophy of History” the Angel looks backwards, while the Angel of One
Way Street extends herself toward the future. But both angels are ulti-
mately the victims of unappropriability as neither one is able to make
anything their own.
The mute and passive Angel of the ninth thesis is not a sign of closure
as far as Benjamin is concerned. If anything, this angelological cadaver is
an important link with the seventeenth thesis, which, according to Ben-
jamin, is the key to a comprehensive project that was to organize the many
fragments of the Passagen-Werk into a complete and unprecedented opus.
According to Franco Rella, the Angel is a figure for the transition from the
signifying domain of a fragmented verbal semiosis to the “age of things”—
in other words, toward a new and different relation with the signs that per-
fuse the world.13 As many have noted, the “Theses on the Philosophy of
History” and the essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” are
the works that best inform Benjamin’s massive textual corpus and corpse,
namely, the Passagen-werk. The reader of this work assumes a relationship
with its pages that is analogous with the one the Angel of the ninth thesis
assumes with the debris and ruins of the past that surround it. Yet we are
on the verge of entering a “one way street” where there are no returns or
detours; where, in other words, nothing can be repeated and where every
single instant is unprecedented and unheard of.
Any attempt to move toward the unrepeatable instant of being must in-
volve the arresting of the eternal return of the same. In the seventeenth
thesis Benjamin states that thinking involves not only the movement of
ideas but also their arresting. When thinking abruptly yields in a constel-
lation charged with tension, it crystallizes into a monad, and in this struc-
ture the historian “recognizes the sign of a Messianic arresting of events,
or, put otherwise, a revolutionary possibility in the struggle for the op-
pressed past.” Arresting the moment means derailing an epoch from the
homogeneous tracks of history. But which moment do we need to arrest
in a messianic fashion in order to find the new time? Eduardo Cadava tells
us that we ultimately need to realize that once the past and the present
come into contact with each other, there is a dissolution of everything that
is part of the algorithm that holds past and present together: “The present
no longer struggles to lead knowledge, as one would lead the blind, to the
firm ground of a fixed past. Instead the past infuses the present and
thereby requires the dissociation of the present from itself. In other words,
the past—as both the condition and caesura of the present—strikes the
present and, in so doing, exposes us to the nonpresence of the present. If
it is no longer a matter of the past casting its light on the present or of the
present casting its light on the past . . . it is because the past and the pre-
sent deconstitute one another in their relation.”14
Benjamin knew that time had to be arrested in order to dislodge the lo-
gorrheic mechanism that allowed history to repeat itself. But Benjamin
sought to transform the repeated meaning of words into the unrepeatabil-
ity of signification by patiently and feverishly copying by hand thousands
and thousands of quotations, as he did for the Passagen-werk. By dislodg-
ing the quotation from its original context into a new network of signs,
Benjamin was in effect tossing the quotation into a constellation of previ-
ously unassociated citations that announced the coming of a unheard of
sphere of production of meaning. Yet, for Massimo Cacciari, it is a new
configuration or vision of the Angel that tears open the path that leads hu-
mans to understanding the significance of antirepetition: “The New Angel
is, so speak, the image of the Angel immanent to the most singular and un-
repeatable individuality of the creature—better, the New Angel is the
name of the force that makes this single being-there unrepeatable and
unique.”15 But this idea finds its semiotic genealogy in Thomas Aquinas
when he discusses, first, the instantaneousness of the Angel’s movement
(“An angel can move in discontinuous time. He can be now here and now
there with no time-interval between. When an angel moves the beginning
and the end of his movement do not take place in two instants between
which there is any time; nor again does the beginning occupy a stretch of
time which an instant at the end terminates; but the beginning is in one
instant and the end in another. Between these there is no time at all. Let
us say then that an angel’s movement is in time, but not in the way that
bodily movements are”16), and, second, the unique nature of the Angel’s
presence (“No two souls exist in the same body and similarly no two an-
gels exist in the same place. Two angels cannot be in the same place at once
because it is impossible that one and the same thing should depend en-
tirely and immediately on two causes . . . In so far as its power is applied
to a given place, and so is containing it completely, we can conclude that
only one angel can be in that place at a given time.”17)
M
HUMAN TERROR
E
rnesto Grassi understood the overbearing weight of ratio-logical
thinking as a means of annihilating the meaning of the “individ-
ual,” who was to be replaced by a “non-individuality” that had
nothing new to “say” or to “find.” An antecedent for such a form of ratio-
nality is found in the thinking of Classical times. On the Delphic coins
bearing the image of Emperor Hadrian (117 – 138 C. E.) and Faustina
(died in 141), there is a depiction of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. Be-
tween the two central columns there hangs a large letter, E. Plutarch in the
De “E” in Delphis1 testifies to the fact that there were many interpretations
of this mysterious verbal sign. The interpretative possibilities include:
a historical meaning: the letter E was the fifth letter of the alphabet and thus
a sign for the number 5 which in turn denotes the five sages of Greece.
a cosmological meaning: E, precisely because it is the second vowel, is the fig-

ure for the second planet, the Sun.
a sacred meaning: E is the symbol for the Delphic form of religious suppli-
cation.
a philosophical meaning: E is the grammatical element that stands for “if ”

and thus plays a key role in the deductive process. That is, “if ” the premise
is true, then conclusions will be drawn by means of a rational process.
In Grassi’s view, the philosophical meaning of E is the essence of the ratio-

logical mind-set in that it represents the processes of deduction. Plutarch,
in fact, clearly states that “reasoning is the tripod of truth. By establishing
HUMAN TERROR 75
the nexus between the consequence and the antecedent and, then, adding
the verification of the existence, it brings the completion of the demon-
stration” (387 c). Grassi comments on this by observing that the prophetic
tripod is made analogous to the three parts of the syllogistic process, and,
as a result, we have “a secularization, demythicization and rationalization
of the prophetic faculty. The fount of knowledge, in the Apollonean
sphere, is no longer identified with the mantic, evangelic phenomenon,
which speaks through signs, but instead with a rational process which sub-
stitutes divinity.”2 When Plutarch states that the individual who is able to
make the rational connection between a cause and its effect is thus legiti-
mately capable of foretelling “what will happen, what is, and what was,”
(387 b) he is, in Grassi’s mind, giving credence to a rational interpretation
of the divine and sacred. The question that rests is whether or not the “if ”
that governs the rational process is valid. This is exactly the sort of issue
that Wittgenstein dealt with in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is
conditioned by the notion that scientific thinking can occur only when
universal truths and the general govern the reasoning process. Moreover,
these truths are valid only within the context of the laws that are depen-
dent upon the relations that exist between terms within a system, and once
we move outside of such system we encounter silence.
“In a manner of speaking,” Wittgenstein writes, “objects are colour-
less” (2.0232). This implies that anything that rests outside of a relation
governed by laws and a system becomes un-thought, unable to be ex-
pressed in a tangible way. What all of this means, Grassi tells us, is that
the only legitimate language is ratio-logical language and any form of ut-
terance that is non-logical is also a non-language in that it communicates
outside of systematic laws and the rigor of precision.3 This leads to the
marginalization of rhetoric, the language of passion, and, we could add,
the poetological.
In section 6.124 Wittgenstein writes that “logic is not a field in which
we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather one in which
the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself.” In other
terms, the only authentic language is thus calculus, as Frege was to argue.
As a result of all of this, Grassi reminds us, the ratio-logical becomes “the
expression of a human terror.”
N
ANGELUS (I)
T o the question “Why should we be interested in Angels nowadays?”

Michel Serres replies as follows:
“Because our universe is organized around message-bearing systems, and

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

the role of the Angel in terms that belong to the semantic sphere of infor-
mation theory. But while Serres’s optic is indeed rooted in such a mind-
set, it is also true that what he has to say about the function of the Angel
is consistent with what Cacciari, Rella and others, as we have seen, have to
say. Namely, by communicating the invisible to us the Angel is the figure
that glues together beings and things, in the same way, for example, that
the network of roads built by the ancient Romans kept the then-known
Western world in a state of cohesion for a period of centuries. But Serres’s
point is that we have yet to fully understand the significance of the Angel
because the many interlacing paths in the universe are still unknown to us.
In this regard, the cartography that still needs to be drawn up is one of a
ANGELUS (I) 77
realm that exists, as has already been suggested, somewhere in between the
materiality and visibility of everyday life and the immateriality of the eter-
nal unreal. (When we intersect Serres’s quote with one from Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari [“Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to
do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come”2] it be-
comes evident that thinking the angelological necessarily entails thinking
the infinite possibilities about what can and cannot constitute a significa-
tion that is readily evident or unintelligible in human signifying practices)
Nietzsche’s genealogical philology plays a role in an attempt to come
into contact with the locus that rests between the visible and the invisible.
Nietzsche’s philology, in fact, is a “science of the limits of language.” Ge-
nealogical philology is foremost rooted in “reading” and “listening.” In the
Foreword to Twilight of the Idols, the reader is witness to the author’s
predilection for the sonorous and the phonological in any interpretative act.
To be sure, Nietzsche aspires to “sound out” idols: “ . . . that is my ‘evil eye’
for this world, that is also my ‘evil ear’ . . . For once to pose questions here
with a hammer and perhaps to receive for answer that famous hollow sound
which speaks of inflated bowels—what a delight for one who has ears be-
hind his ears—for an old psychologist and pied piper like me, in presence
of whom that which would like to stay silent has to become audible.” Eric
Blondel is correct in suggesting that for Nietzsche listening implies not just
hearing sounds but also possessing “an ear”—that is, having the capacity to
perceive other sounds, “a resonance of harmony behind the sound.”3
Nietzsche believes that the philologist critic must be at once a musician
with a “fine ear” and a physiologist who hears the life resounding in the
human body. Thus, in order to hear the dimension that houses the Angel
we too must listen for what is not readily present. The problem here is that
more often than not when listening for this dimension we encounter utter
silence, for that matter, a silence beyond silence. In Ascoltare il silenzio (Lis-
tening to Silence), Paolo Valesio offers us a theory of listening to silence that
opens up possibilities for any attempt to hear the voicelessness of the
Angel’s corpse. We can summarize Valesio’s theory in the following manner:
—For Valesio, the relationship to be investigated is the one linking silence

to the incoherent and disjointed events of everyday life. And the question
is one that concerns the relationship between human speech and silence.
—Valesio offers us an alternative to the gazing in the form of listening to si-
lence. However, in his quest for an “ontology of silence,” Valesio employs
the experience of the quotidian as the ultimate illustration of the fact that
the ontics of silence are rooted in and in fact are the discontinuities of
everyday existence. Specifically, Valesio distinguishes between silence as
interruption and silence as plenitude. But the type of silence that estab-
lishes itself as a challenge for a theory of poetic logic is one that is based
on interruption.
—The most recognizable feature of Valesio’s silentarius theory is that of the
everyday; to be sure, the ontological heart of silence rests in the practice
and the happening of the quotidian. This is all too evident in the exam-
ples: the worker on the job, the banal dimension of the artist, scientist,
thinker; the legal, the political.
—Listening becomes the decisive element in a potential opening up to the
future. Moreover, to the rhetoric of plenitude Valesio counters an open
hermeneutics of auscultation. He qualifies this sort of rhetoric as being
“oblative.”
—This added dimension allows for the presence of a spiritual exchange. But
the idea of auscultation is not left to wallow in the confusion of termi-
nological vagueness. For example, Valesio specifies that listening as a
form of thought does not entail a passive way of gazing at the text but
rather the restructuring of the space around the text.4
We are witness to two kinds of listening or auscultation; one that forces

silence to utter its name (Nietzsche), a second one that encourages the
reading subject to gaze at the disjointed muteness that silence offers as “a
gift” (Valesio). But how much closer does all of this bring us to the Angel’s
corpse? By way of an apparent linguistic ludus, Thomas Aquinas stressed
the Angel’s ability to announce silence: “Angels are announcers of divine
silence. For it is clear that a clear conception of the heart or of the intel-
lect that is without voice is with silence. But it is through a perceptible
voice that silence of the heart is proclaimed . . . Angels are always an-
nouncers of divine silence. But it is necessary after something is an-
nounced to someone that they understand the announcement. In
addition, therefore, because we can understand by the intellect the things
that are announced to us through angels, they themselves by the bright-
ness of their own light help our intellect grasp the secrets of God.”5 For
John Chrysostomos, the silence typical of angels is a sign of the fact that
for the spirit that thirsts for knowledge, un-knowing is the “only science.”6
Let us transpose this notion into the present context and state that an un-
knowing that involves dissolving the crust of the ratio-logical with which
ANGELUS (I) 79
the Western mind has become laden allows us to realize that the one sci-
ence that allows us to talk in an intelligible way about the dead Angel is
the poetic. Silence is the time-place of the inaudible (inaudible), but also
of the unheard of or unprecedented (inauditum). The silentarius is in this
way the topo-chronic realm at the basis of unheard of and often unhear-
able inventions. Achille Bocchi’s emblem for hermetic silence is the figure
for the unsignable conjunction that makes way for the posthumous pro-
duction of signs and meanings. But we should also keep in mind that, as
Basil of Caesarea observes, the act of listening to the revelation of the mys-
teries enveloped in silence is proper to the functions of the Spirit-Angel
Gabriel.7 What this means is that the auscultation of silence is the cogni-
tive path best suited to deal with the science of transcendent ineffability.
Strata of silence accumulate. In his 1834 history of Italian art, Luigi
Lanzi, writing during the period of Romantic fermentation, reminds us
that imitation was the only way through which a Renaissance artist could
reach a state of “original genius.”8 Imitation was the sole means for detach-
ing oneself from the past, the implication of course being that imitation is
at once the continuation of the historical sign but also its destruction. Rilke
was able to sum up this paradoxical relationship between the artist and the
past in The Book of Hours I, 3. Rilke first talks about the magisterial nature
of Italian Renaissance art, which, through the genius of imitation, trans-
forms God into an “ardent flame.” However, the poet confesses to us
when I lean over the chasm of myself-

it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.
This is the ferment I grow out of.
More I don’t know, because my branches
rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.9
The historical sign, here expressed by the botanical metaphor, is domi-

nated by a silence that is itself eternal. The poet’s genius consists in tem-
pering, in controlling this silence almost as if it were a musical instrument.
The less the silence appears as silence and the more it seems to be the in-
nocent rustling of the wind, the greater the poet’s ability to orchestrate the
historical sign as a spectrally silent instrument.
The enigmatic nature of lyric philosophy is the sign of its apparent un-
representability. But its representability is obfuscated by the mute signs
that haunt language:
Let us suppose that all signs were fulfilled, man’s condemnation to lan-
guage purged, that all possible questions were answered and that all that
might be said had been uttered—what then would be the life of man on
earth? You say: “But our vital problems wouldn’t even have been
touched.” But supposing we still felt the desire to laugh or cry, what
would we cry or laugh about, what would that cry or laugh be, if, while
we were prisoners of language, these emotions were no more, and could
be no more than the experience, sad or blissful, tragic or comic, of the
limits, the insufficiency of language? Where language were perfectly ful-
filled, perfectly delimited, there would begin the other laugh, the other
cry of humanity.10
But signs can be fulfilled only through other signs—that is to say, a post-
semiotics is defined by the semic valence of “post” as well as the disap-
pearance of a traditional element. Is the fulfillment of a sign the return
of an originary, infantile state, or is it rather a projection into an un-
knowable, unprecedented, and unheard of future? In any event, the re-
lease from the imprisonment of language is a projection into a different
language.
In the end, silence is both the beginning and the end of the destiny
of humans. Wittgenstein writes that his Tractatus “ . . . consists of two
parts: what I have written and moreover everything that I did not write.
And it is precisely the second part which is more important” (Wittgen-
stein writing to Ludwig von Ficker). In Franco Rella’s mind, “What the
great words expressed has now become unsayable. For the Wittgenstein
of the Tractatus it is what we must pass over in silence.”11 But for Otto
Weininger this silence was impossible and to be avoided at all costs. If
anything, what Wittgenstein suggests we must pass over in silence must
be, according to Weininger, formulated in the grammar we know. But
what is this unsayable?
It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.

Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same). (Wittgenstein, Tractatus
6.421)
ANGELUS (I) 81
In Sex and Character Weininger sought to “speak” the impossible union of

ethics and aesthetics, at the cost of being outdated and, ultimately, of
death. Indeed he committed suicide. But we are still before the problem
that Wittgenstein and Weininger dealt with in different ways. Lyric phi-
losophy entails speaking of what has been silenced as far as cultural prac-
tices and public policy are concerned. Poetic logic cannot be put into
words—that is, it cannot be articulated by means of words that have been
bled dry. Lyric philosophy cannot be spoken by words that are corpses; it
can be uttered only by ripping out and recasting collections of words or
quotations; lyric philosophy performs an unoriginal act on a new horizon.
The fact of the matter is that thinking the angelological means moving
in the direction of poetic reason. With this in mind let us correlate what
Martin Heidegger says with the previously cited insights by Henry Corbin
concerning the mortal remains of the angels as being rational abstraction.
In commenting on Nietzsche’s expression that states that “God is dead,”
Heidegger affirms that “Thinking begins only when we have come to
know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary
of thought.” What is significant is that Corbin and Heidegger are stating
something very similar; namely, that rational thinking is only one variety
of intellectual expression. Moreover, if this fact is overlooked then we be-
come blind to the truths or insights made available to us by other modes
of thought. Heidegger himself privileged, especially later in his life, what
could be called poetic thinking.
O
ANGELUS (II)
T
he stanzas imagined here are understood and figured by a move-
ment of thinking that shares the characteristics of Heidegger’s po-
etic thought and the imaginal thinking that Corbin describes. In
other terms, we come to know and understand the signs of the living
Angel and the meaning of its mortal remains through the signifying prop-
erties of the stanza. In offering the stanza as the unknown and unseen car-
tographical space of signification characteristic of the angelological, we are
here following Dante’s definition of the term: “And here one must know
that this term (stanza) has been chosen for technical reasons exclusively, so
that what contains the entire art of the canzone should be called stanza,
that is, a capacious dwelling or receptacle for the entire craft. For just as
the canzone is the container (literally lap or womb) of the entire thought,
so the stanza enfolds its entire technique . . .” (Dante, De Vulgari Eloquen-
tia II.9). The stanza is the element that contains and safeguards all those
irreconcilable differences; it is the form that holds together the real and the
unreal in whose juncture the angelological resides. It is the topological do-
main that allows the meaning of angelological signs to be as intelligible as
they possibly can. In Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture,
Agamben puts forward one of the most challenging discussions on the re-
lationship between the real and the unreal. The reader of Agamben’s book
is encouraged to understand the idea of place not as something that is de-
fined by spatio-temporal coordinates but rather as an entity that is “more
original than space.”1 A place, that is, where the impossible is possible and,
conversely, where the possible is impossible. Such a topological inquiry,
Agamben complains, always tends to be undertaken with the view of find-
ing a utopia.
ANGELUS (II) 83
The point is, however, that such an investigation is a perfectly legiti-

mate one, and it is sanctioned by a history of seeking to discover the hyper-
real as something that, once found, could be understood. The muse that
governs Agamben’s quest is the idea that “whoever seizes the greatest unre-
ality will shape the greatest reality.”2 Among other things, what Agamben
has in mind is the dissolution of a barrier which has not always existed, the
one separating poetry from the critico-philosophical. He is interested in
cultivating a form of writing that abolishes the boundaries between disci-
plines, one that infinitely extends the limits. Walter Benjamin’s The Origin
of German Tragic Drama is cited by Agamben as being the most concrete
and successful example of this type of writing. In my view, Stanzas is in
many ways a rewriting of Benjamin’s book, but not just because Agamben
draws many of his themes from this book (melancholy, the emblem and
others). Hannah Arendt, George Steiner and others have referred to Ben-
jamin’s writing as being informed by a “poetic logic,” and a similar assess-
ment could be made of Agamben’s approach—that is, one grounded in the
attempt to conjugate the lyrical with the critico-rational. A comment on
Agamben’s poetic logic is indeed in order, as it sheds a great expanse of in-
terpretative light on the meaning of the space where the real and the un-
real enjoy a conjugal closeness and where, moreover, the face of angelogical
cognition makes itself visible.
Agamben’s most efficacious depiction of the relationship between po-
etry and philosophy is to be found in The Idea of Prose. This short book is
peculiar in that it assumes the forms of different genres of writing: the
apology, the aphorism, the short story, the riddle, the fable, and a variety
of others that at one time had a defined currency but that today have been
banished from the realm of theory-making. The other interesting particu-
lar, as the back cover of the English translation tells us, is that in the place
of a concerted and overt attempt to make theory, The Idea of Prose is in-
stead informed by a strategy to reawaken the reader to some lost experi-
ence. What is meant by this, and it becomes quite clear throughout the
pages of the book, is that Agamben is interested in finding that place of in-
timacy that beings once shared with other beings but that now has been
supplanted by something else, such as the exchange-value that Agamben
discusses in Stanzas.
In the introduction to the English translation of The Idea of Prose,
Alexander García Düttman sums up the intention of the work in the form
of a question: “Is the constellation of ideas that it forms the product of a
poetic vocation, or a thought that seeks to liberate truth from its linguis-
tic reification?”3 The answer, of course, is that it does both. By unmasking
the poetic genealogy of what we commonly assume to be pure ratio-logi-
cal discourse, The Idea of Prose puts forward the disconcerting suggestion
that the only unique, untranslatable (because it is understood by every-
one), originary, and common language is not to be found in the plethora
of natural languages but in poetry alone. Agamben articulates this notion
in “The Idea of the Unique,” one of the thirty-three fragmentary ideas that
make up The Idea of Prose. Agamben quotes Paul Célan to explain the pe-
culiar nature of poetry: “Poetry is uniqueness in that it is the destiny of
language. . . . it cannot, therefore, be doubleness.”4 This quote is from a
passage in which Célan adamantly insists that poetry cannot be bilingual.
Translation is impossible because in being the destiny of language—that
is, in being the unmediated expression that a natural language cannot be—
poetry is that type of experience that encourages a form of sharing that
does not require the mediation of linguistic utterance.
Agamben’s thinking moves in this direction when, for example, he
claims that, “The language for which we have no words, which doesn’t pre-
tend, like grammatical language, to be there before being, but is ‘alone and
first in mind,’ is our language, that is the language of poetry.” It would not
be difficult to read political implications into this quote. But while I am
not concerned here with constructing a political thought rooted in a po-
etic phenomenology, it would be fair to suggest that just as Heidegger’s
philosophic enterprise is rooted in a de-struction of the ratio-metaphysical
tradition and moves in the direction of poetic thinking, one could specu-
late on the possibility of a political thought that is not grounded in ratio-
logical paradigms, but rather in something quite different. Düttmann sees
the problem of history and politics as being an issue in the question of the
relationship between poetry and philosophy. In fact, Düttmann summons
the testimony of Benjamin to explain the nature of this problem.5 In his
thinking on the concept of history, Benjamin makes a connection between
the idea of language and the “messianic idea of a universal history.” In a
much more specific sense, Benjamin refers to such an idea of language as
the “idea of prose”; moreover, its relation to the messianic idea of univer-
sal history is marked by the total dissolution of the many and differenti-
ated languages along with the dissolution of the multiplicity of histories.
In Benjamin’s words: “The messianic world is the world of general
and integral actuality. Universal history exists only in this world. But this
ANGELUS (II) 85
history is not written; it is a history celebrated as a festival. As a purified

festival, however, it does not have the character of a ceremony and does
not know any hymns. Its language is free prose, a prose which has bro-
ken the chains of writing.”6 The destiny of language, and by implication
that of signification also, is thus marked by a release from the constraints
of a ratio-grammar whose function is to conventionalize language. Fol-
lowing Benjamin’s thinking, Agamben contemplates the possibility of a
way of being and expression that is not rooted in presupposition but in
“ . . . itself, the thing no longer separated from its intelligibility, but in
the midst of it, is the idea, is the thing itself.”7 The idea of a newly dis-
covered immediacy is central to the critico-poetic dynamics of The Idea
of Prose as in the case of the fragment called “The Idea of Matter,” where
we read that the outer limits of language do not provide the threshold
that leads to the realm of the unsayable. The extreme limits of verbal
semiosis is instead the threshold that opens the “woody substance of lan-
guage, which the ancients called silva”; moreover, those entering this
realm are liberated from representation.8
Lyric philosophy is an unconsummated destiny, whereby the unity of
knowledge is seen in its most terrifying, destructive familiarity. (Stephen
Hawking is dealing with his own lyric philosophy, one rooted in the as-
trophysical attempt to discover the theory of everything.) But what are the
problems intrinsic to thinking poetico-philosophically? According to
Maurice Blanchot, “Poetry is a question for philosophy which claims to
provide it with an answer, and thus to comprehend it (know it). Philoso-
phy, which puts everything into question, is tripped up by poetry, which
is the question that eludes it.”9 But what is the “question (of ) poetry”? “R.
C. [Réné Char] is so much a poet that after him poetry shines like a fact,
but he is such a poet that after this fact of poetry all facts become ques-
tions and even poetic questions.”10 Blanchot is telling us that poetry is the
most originary mode of “putting everything into question,” a mode that
philosophy has appropriated for itself. But any attempt to think philoso-
phy as a poet runs the risk of collapsing into the illusory void that poetry
safeguards. In fact, “A philosopher who would write as a poet would be
aiming for his own destruction. And even so, he could not reach it.”11
Only in an illusory way is poetry a fact. The truth of the poetic sign is that
it is empty, but at the same time it embodies anamorphosis, which is “ . . .
any kind of construction that is made in such a way that by means of an
optical transposition a certain form that wasn’t visible at first sight trans-
forms itself into a readable image. The pleasure is found in seeing its emer-
gence from an indecipherable form.”12
Benjamin’s approach to interpretation and reflection is at its minimum
a lyric philosophy, as George Steiner reminds us:
At other points it [The Origin of German Tragic Drama] is a poetic-meta-

physical meditation unique to Walter Benjamin’s intellectual world and pri-
vate feelings. The Jewish facets make this obvious. Franz Rosenzweig’s Der
Stern der Erlösung had appeared in 1921. It seemed to articulate, as no other
book had, the unstable glories of the German-Jewish connection and of the
bearing of that connection on the Jewish past and on the enigma of the
messianic future . . . And what of the Kabbalah? The question is relevant to
the Erkenntniskritische Vorrede (The “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” . . .) This
is, together with Heidegger’s work of whose beginnings Benjamin was un-
easily aware, one of the more impenetrable pieces in . . . any modern lan-
guage. Gershom Scholem reports that Benjamin had said of this prologue,
to the scholar-critic Max Rychner and to Adorno, that it could be under-
stood only by a reader who also knew the Kabbalah.13
The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico was one of the first in the
post-Renaissance age to qualify critically the nature of poetic logic, which
he sees as the founding mode of thought for the Western tradition of arts
and sciences: “Hence poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world,
must have begun with a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of
learned men now, but felt and imagined as [the] first men must have been,
who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous
imagination. This metaphysics was their poetry, a faculty born with them
(for they were furnished by nature with these senses and imaginations);
born of their ignorance of causes, for ignorance, the mother of wonder
made everything wonderful to men who were ignorant of everything”
(Vico, New Science, P. 375).
But to return to the meaning of the expression “idea of prose” as Agam-
ben adapts the notion from Benjamin, let us say that it is in fact neither
poetry nor prose but their middle term. Enjambment becomes the metri-
cal term used to explicate the nature of this “middlenness”; as a metrical
figure its role is to unhide the disjunction that characterizes the relation-
ship between prose and poetry. “In this way, enjambement brings to light
the original gait, neither poetic nor prosaic, but boustrophedonic, as it
were, poetry, the essential prose-metrics of every human discourse, whose
ANGELUS (II) 87
early appearance in the gatha of Avesta, or in Latin satire, bears out the
non-coincidental character of the Vita Nuova on the threshold of the mod-
ern age. The versura, the turning-point which displays itself as enjambe-
ment, though unspoken-of in the treatises on metrics, constitutes the core
of verse. It is an ambiguous gesture, that turns in two opposed directions
at once: backwards (versus), and forwards (pro-versa). This hanging-back,
this sublime hesitation between meaning and sound is the poetic inheri-
tance with which thought must come to terms.”14 The destiny of lan-
guage, then, is the poetic inheritance to which Agamben refers. We are not
dealing with the eternal return of the same here. The issue is a different
one. It is more like the event that has yet to occur and that can never be
duplicated. This because there are no ratio-grammatographic chains that
exercise control over events.
As if to counter or halt the movement of the eternal return in favor of
the unrepeatable instant we see Agamben formulate a strange assessment
of the poet’s vocation. The office of the poet, as it were, involves trans-
mitting things to oblivion, to forgetfulness.15 Thinking and being will
move backwards and forwards, not according to some inherent law of
movement (a law that regulates and anticipates and presupposes events).
The movement will be unmediated, untranslatable, and transparent for
all to witness.
Poetic utterance is rooted in the dynamics of memory, both natural and
artificial (mnemonics): “ . . . there was nothing more fearful and uncanny
in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. ‘If something is to
stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to
hurt stays in the memory’—this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily
also the most enduring) psychology on earth. . . . Man could never do
without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a
memory for himself; the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of
the first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilation (castration, for
example), the cruelest rites of all the religious cults (and all religions are at
the deepest level systems of cruelties)—all this has its origin in the instinct
that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics” (Nietzsche, On the Ge-
nealogy of Morals 2.1–3) But the highest form of support for mnemonics
is the corpse of an idea. The living idea is too unreal, and the only way it
can be approached or grasped is through its corpse. Anything else would
be too immature or unreal. Today the poetic sign is a corpse for many rea-
sons: its historical constitution as a cadaver, the current cultural practices
and public policies that are able to interpret the poetic sign only as a dead
idea. For very different reasons, the poetic has consistently recited the role
of a corpse in the history of human culture. The lyric is much too unreal.
We try to make it accessible by exchanging traditional aesthetic value for
the economic currency currently associated with the commodified object.
But in the end, we inevitably find ourselves with a carcass in our hands.
P
MADONNA WITH CHILD
I
n Plotinian philosophy the icon brought about a nostalgia for Beauty
and Eros. (In the end, Hölderlin tells us, the wise move toward
Beauty.) Is it possible to think of Beauty as the most privileged of epis-
temological categories given that knowledge follows a trajectory that has
Beauty as its end? The aesthetic, in its most originary manifestation, as the
caput mundi of thought? “Beauty,” Rilke tells us
is only
the first touch of terror
we can still bear
and it awes us so much
because it so cooly
disdains to destroy us.
(Duino Elegies, p. 19)
The beauty in this context is of course the beauty of the Angel, next to
whose existence Rilke claims he cannot survive. Among the many ques-
tions Rilke’s poem poses is, how could beauty be so horrifying (“every
single Angel / is terrible”)? Beauty, within the context of understanding
a destiny that is yet to emerge, rests outside the purview of quantifiabil-
ity. It is not the beauty of (un)symmetrical ratios, of (un)measured order.
The idea of beauty that is part and parcel of the answer to Rilke’s ques-
tions is characterized by an opening up of new worlds and realities.
Michelangelo praised the beauty that once was, and in doing so he im-
plied that we are left in its oblivion. Michelangelo was in many ways an
epochal poet-thinker; his lyric poetry was a meditation on the demise of
the life he understood as being unrepresentable. The epochal nature of

Michelangelo’s poetry did not escape Rilke. In the Book of Hours (I, 29)
Rilke tells us that Michelangelo was a titan who, in being above all mea-
sure, “forgot immensurability.” That is to say, the Italian artist-poet re-
membered for his age (and for us today) the moment at which the limits
and bounds had not yet been imposed. He is the person, Rilke contin-
ues, who always returns when an epoch that is about to come to an end
rediscovers its own value. It is the epochal characteristic of beauty that
needs to be rethought.
The first question we need to pose is: apart from the aesthetic di-
mension circumscribed in the history of art, what exactly does the Angel
have to do with the idea of Beauty? In a general and reductive sense, the
Angel brings to mind images of delicateness, innocence, and youthful-
ness. One of the sources for such an artistic interpretation of the Angel
is to be found in Federico Borromeo’s De Pictura Sacra, where we read
that “to indicate its speed we give it wings, a garment for decorum, a
human aspect because there is none other as perfect, the figure is youth-
ful, so as to indicate the force and vigour that no senile decadence can
attack.”1 But this icon of fragility is also one of the darkest signs of psy-
chological terror. As already anticipated, we owe the most efficacious de-
piction of Angel-as-horror to Rilke, in whose work the fragile sign of the
Angel is transformed into the icon of a coming existence that, for now,
is too much to bear. Is it possible today to provide a new response to a
bewildering (and to some unanswerable) question that Rilke poses at the
beginning of his Duino Elegies: “If I cried out / who would hear me up
there / among the Angelic orders?” As some people would say, the re-
sponse is that one would be accused either of being a mindless believer
in the spiritual world or of being afflicted by some form of psychic dys-
function. This is so because we have limited our points of reference to
the sensory domain of the body and the cold abstraction of reason. The
point is, however, that in a theological and philosophical sense the Angel
and Beauty are holders of the same communicative function, namely, the
unveiling of a transcendent silence.
The base of departure for understanding the angelic link with Beauty
is the figure of the Holy Spirit. In an analysis of Suhwravardi’s Book of the
Temples of Light, Corbin makes reference to the fact that for the three
monotheistic religions, the Holy Spirit and the Angel of humanity are
one and the same figure. The Paraclete-Angel helps humans in their at-
MADONNA WITH CHILD 91
tempt to understand the transcendent truths that are unreachable by any

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

“The human soul has lost its music—music understood as the scoring in
the soul of the inaccessibility of the origin.”7 This is linked to the notion
that the present is without a destiny—that is, the activity of documenting
new sentiments and moods (or what Agamben calls “the listening to and
the transcription of the silent music of the soul”) has ceased for some time
now.8 Moreover, the inability to express a new time in human history is
figured, in Agamben’s terms, in “the leaden light of our apathy [which] is
the never yet seen sky of an absolutely non-epochal situation in human
history.”9 If all of this is indeed the case, then of what cultural significance
is the mnemonic resurrection of the Orphic cells that lay asleep in the
human psyche? Have we, as Agamben suggests, indeed lost the will to ex-
cavate in the direction of unhiding the originary because it might appear
as a naïve idea, or because we are terrified by the possibility of discovering,
like Nietzsche, a monkey standing at the gates of the origins?
Looking for the Orphic cells constitutes a search for the silent music
of the soul. This search does not necessarily imply a regression, or a
movement toward the superfluous and the unintelligible. If anything, it
is a movement toward an unheard-of destiny, one that moves counter to
the ratio-linear direction of measurable time. To be sure, it is a destiny
liberated from the chains of linguistic grammar and residing instead in
the emptiness of the poetic image. Empty, that is to say, in that one of
its central roles is not to contain the meaning of but to give meaning and
thus origin to lived experience. The void inherent in the poetic word is
not a manifestation of calculated nihilism but the emptiness of an un-
reached and never-before inhabited destiny that exists on some uniden-
tified horizon. So what horizon is this, if it is indeed a horizon as the
term is generally understood? It is the horizon of beauty, and as Schiller
suggested, we enter the land of knowledge through the auroral gate of
beauty. In Rella’s own words, “ . . . beauty is not only the splendour of
Being in its appearance: it is being itself, the sought after object of
knowledge.” With the advent of the new reason of Novalis, Hölderlin,
and Schelling, Rella reminds us, the Orphic cells dormant in the psyche
of the West suddenly awoke. Moreover, these Orphic cells assume a par-
ticular figure, that of Dionysius, the “coming god,” as Hölderlin writes
in Bread and Wine, who “unites in himself day and night.”10 The point
Rella is seeking to make is that the Greek deity is at once the multiplic-
ity and the unity of the divine:
MADONNA WITH CHILD 93
“the middle space” which is the point of departure for philosophy itself.
This coming deity is also the god of Eros and of Beauty, he opens a path
to the real that remains unsayable through philosophical language. It is
within this cultural context that the idea of Beauty assumes a characteris-
tic of fragility that empowers it to flood our critical imagination. This is
not the metaphysical Beauty that was defined in terms of relationship
whereby components were assembled together to form a harmonic entity,
it is instead the Beauty which is the explanation and “the visibility proper
of the world.11
As a result of the poetic philosophy of Schlegel, Novalis, and Leopardi

philosophy was eventually to become the reason of Beauty: “ . . . thus
‘the highest act of reason’ is ‘an aesthetic act.’ A philosophy that does not
have this ‘aesthetic force,’ typical of the poet, is Scholastic philosophy,
the philosophy of the literal: it does not accede to truth, but only to the
order or the classification of the existing. ‘The poetic art will become,
thus, in the end, what it was in the beginning . . . the guide of human-
ity.’” 12 This is to be understood in connection with the idea of “beauty
saving the world.”
On more than one occasion, poetry has saved the world. A phrase cir-
culated in the early to mid-1970s that went something like this: “Rock ‘n’
roll prevented World War Three.” That is to say, given the East-West ten-
sions that dominated the fifties, sixties, and seventies, the grounds for a
clash of the titans, the United States versus the Soviet Union, was set. The
apocalyptic war never took place because, among other reasons, Western
youth were seduced by music, drugs, and sex. Aesthetic and corporeal plea-
sure along with cosmic intoxication won the day over military instinct.
While I do not deal with a modern version of poetry, namely rock ‘n’ roll,
I am claiming that the same poetry that prevented World War Three will
also save the world from itself. Poetry is what brings us closer to ourselves,
to the cosmic reality we inhabit. In fact, in Rella’s meditation on beauty we
witness the conjugation of politics with philosophy and poetry when he
claims, in the spirit of Dostoevsky, that “Beauty will save the world”: what
we need to focus upon today is
the very meaning of thinking: . . . in order to think the reality of the world,
and the reality of the subjects of the world. The thought of beauty has
taught us this. Concepts can tell us much about us and about our destiny,
but concepts do not exhaust reason, thinking, nor the experience of reality.
Beside the “sun” of the philosopher and of the scientist there still remains
the other sun of my individual experience, of many individual experiences.
Only a form of thought that moves through concepts and figures can give
us the form in which these two experiences are offered as a complex experi-
ence of the world. A form in which the unexpressible of difference can fi-
nally make itself visible. Philosophy has always moved as an equalizing
force. . . . Today I believe it is important, necessary, to think the difference.
To arm oneself with a thought that cannot only, as Simone Weil said, think
things separately, “but think thoughts that think separately.”13
Q
DE AMORE FRAGILI
I
f one were to describe Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonic hermeneutics of
love, we would see a line that flows from the lower level of human de-
sire and passion, and on to the perfect and de-sensed Idea of love. But
if one were to offer an graphic explanation of Heidegger’s analytic of Da-
sein, we would have a line that moves from an image that is erased down
into the phenomena of everyday existence. God is “dead” for Heidegger
because the eternal space of the Idea is erased from the cartography of the
life-world. What matters for (and since) Heidegger is the lower level from
which Ficino sought to rise. The world that Heidegger (following Niet-
zsche’s suggestion) erased is intelligible only to the devoutly religious and
to Jung and his followers, to cite some examples. Following this necessar-
ily brief sketch, one would conclude that Ficino and Heidegger have very
little to say to each other as they each follow different directions. Heideg-
gerian reflection has no time for the metaphysical and ethereal quality of
Ficinian thought. In fact, Ernesto Grassi believed that while Heidegger
finds a natural affinity with a number of Renaissance philosophers who
were interested in the ontological nature of language, once we get to Fi-
cino’s ahistorical Neoplatonism, Heidegger’s affinity with the Renaissance
ceases to be. Moreover, we are told that Paul Oskar Kristeller had originally
intended for Heidegger to direct his dissertation on Ficino, although Hei-
degger had no knowledge about the Medicean philosopher.
But the listing of elements that add up to an absence of possible affini-
ties between Heidegger and Ficino is ultimately a useless exercise, as it be-
comes the obsessive repetition of the same idea. What would not be
repetitive is looking at Ficino’s erased world in relation to the non-erased
version of the same world and at the same time looking at Heidegger’s new
world of every Dasein in relation to Ficino’s lower world of desire. Hei-

degger inverted Ficino’s upward moving world in which the bottom be-
came the top; he virtually stood Ficino on his head. So what does this
upside-down Ficino look like? Is he the same as Heidegger now that he is
upside down? Is Heideggerian philosophy essentially an inverted version of
Ficinian thought? What would Ficino look like if we read him upside
down? What would Heidegger look like if he were comparably inverted?
The answer is somewhere in between. Love is a fragile sign that is the
category of a destiny hidden on some horizon. Love, Rilke tells us, “is the
possibility of one unveiling their destiny to the other.” For Giorgio Agam-
ben these words would mean something like this: In love, the loved one ar-
rives, at the same time as the lover, to the light of his / her veiled Being, in an
eternal facticity and beyond Being. These are seemingly cryptic words that
belong to the Heideggerian philosophico-semantic sphere. If we follow
Agamben’s trajectory of thinking, there is no sense in distinguishing au-
thentic love from inauthentic love, celestial love from mundane love, the
love of God from the love of self. Why? Because love, as this philosophico-
semantic sphere suggests, is the “opening up and closure to an opacity.”
We thus need to remove all adjectives and qualifiers from love, but what
we are left with are two polarities of human existence: origin and destiny.
Love is not to be perceived as a relation between subject and object, or as
a relation between two subjects. Love needs to find its niche in Being-al-
ready-alongside-the-World which, as Agamben reminds us, is what char-
acterizes the transcendence of Dasein.
In The Coming Community, Agamben provides a reading of love that is
the outcome of his Heideggerian meditation on the question of love:
“Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being
blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect
the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover
wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover
desires the as only insofar as it is such—this is the lover’s particular
fetishism. Thus, whatever singularity (the Lovable) is never the intelligence
of some thing, of this or that quality or essence, but only the intelligence
of an intelligibility.”1 In order to gloss this passage we should keep in mind
what Agamben states about the relationship between the “common” and
the “singular”: “it is the Most Common that cuts off any community.
Hence the impotent omnivalence of whatever being. It is neither apathy
nor promiscuity nor resignation. These pure singularities communicate
DE AMORE FRAGILI 97
only in the empty space of the example without being tied by any com-
mon property, by any identity. They are expropriated of all identity, so as
to appropriate belonging itself, the sign E.”2
But what does Agamben mean in his critique of the “Most Common,”
whose debilitating force we need to overcome to achieve a real commu-
nity? The key to finding an answer rests in commenting on the notion of
the ordinary or whatever Being. In a fragment of an “idea” Agamben un-
derlines the notion that what is implied in the “idea of love” is our seek-
ing to understand something as what it actually is, not as what we would
want it to be. In Agamben’s own terms, the idea of love means “To live in
intimacy with a stranger, not in order to draw him closer, or to make him
known, but rather to keep him strange, remote: unapparent—so unappar-
ent that his name contains him entirely. And, even in discomfort, to be
nothing else, day after day, than the ever open place, the unwaning light
in which that one being, that thing, remains forever exposed and sealed
off.”3 Agamben is here playing on the notion of a somethingness that is ir-
reducible, something that is itself and nothing else, but which ceases being
so once it is contaminated with extraneous elements. Is this a hermeneu-
tic challenge on Agamben’s part? A provocation to interpret the signs that
perfuse the world by weakening the overwhelming matrix or framework of
an interpretative strategy? To a great extent this is surely the case, as Agam-
ben wants to highlight the dangerous fragility of love. The peril rests in the
fact that once the weight of the extraneous imposes itself on an under-
standing of love, it will consequently dissolve into an indifference that will
have lost any inkling of the idea of love. However, in any way we look at
the issue an interpretative strategy or attitude will always be present.
Agamben’s reading of Heidegger’s thinking on love4 unveils the necessary
strangeness that is love; that same strangeness is the medium through
which any understanding of the unrepeatable semiosis of love becomes
possible.
Agamben quotes the Scholastic cataloguing of transcendentals
(“quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum”—‘whatever en-
tity is one, true good, or good’) and suggests that the “whatever” here refers
to the idea of singularity in being something “such as it is.” In this way,
singularity is freed from “the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to
choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of
the universe.”5 Moreover, the being-in-question is freed from possessing
the given properties that allow it to belong to any group or community;
rather, it is reclaimed “for belonging itself.”6 The idea of a “being-such-as-

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

—In what sense is Dasein always close to the world and the things that sur-
round it before even knowing them?
DE AMORE FRAGILI 99
—How is it possible for Dasein to open itself to something without making

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

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

ALL COVERED WITH EYES
SVLPICIVS MARTYR. SERVILIANVS MARTYR

–Inscription from the catacombs of St. Calixtus in Rome
I “Even if the necessity for accepting ideas were not based on clear logical
foundations, we would still have to accept them on factual grounds, which give
them the certainty of universal-human experience: the reality of ideas and of
intellectual intuition is indisputably proved by the fact of artistic creation. In-
deed, those ideal images that artists embody in their works are neither a sim-
ple reproduction of observed phenomena in their particular and accidental
reality nor general concepts abstracted from that reality. Both observation and
abstraction, or generalization, are necessary for the working out of artistic
ideas, but not for their creation. Otherwise, every observing and thinking per-
son, every scientist and thinker, could be a true artist, which is not the case.
Anyone familiar with the process of artistic creation is well aware that artistic
ideas and images are not complex products of observation and reflection but
appear to mental vision all at once, in their wholeness . . . Everyone knows that
both abstract rationality and the servile imitation of external reality are defi-
ciencies in artistic creation.” (Vladimir Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Hu-
manity, trans. Peter Zouboff, ed. Boris Jakim [Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne
Press, 1995], pp. 61–62)
Solovyov intuited that the moment of aesthetic creation would vanish
or dissolve once we attempted to rationalize it. This moment is like a flash
of lightning that stops for no one. The spontaneous aesthetic moment is
as close as humans get to angelic cognition.
II “The angel of death, who in some legends is called Samael and with
whom it is said even Moses had to struggle, is language. Language announces
death—what else does it do? But precisely this announcement makes it so dif-
ficult for us to die. From time immemorial, for the entire duration of man’s
history, humanity has struggled with this angel, trying to wrench from him the
secret he restricts himself to announcing. But from his childish hands one can
wrench only the announcement he had in any case come to bring. The angel is
not at fault for this, and only those who understand the innocence of language
likewise grasp the true sense of the announcement and may, in the event, learn
to die.” (Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 129)
The Angel of Death is language in that it communicates a message that
only humans are able truly to understand. The main trait of human lan-
guage is not its communicability but rather its reflexivity. Thus, the Angel
of Death is the reflexive moment that weighs down wingless humans with
the gravity of pondered meaning.
III “I should like to know what is this phantasm, this unheard of mon-
ster, this human portent, this extraordinary brain, and what is the fresh news
brought by him to the world? Or rather what are these ancient and obsolete
views thus renewed, what amputated roots sending forth fresh shoots in our
age? They are amputated roots which germinate, ancient things which return
yet again, occult truths which are discovered; it is a new light which after the
long night rises over the horizon in the hemisphere of our knowledge and little
by little approaches the meridian of our intelligence.” (Giordano Bruno, On
the Infinite Universe and Worlds, p. 348)
The Angel of Death signals the reawakening that occurs once humans
are finally disembodied. But the disembodying powers of death lead to a
realm of signs that humans are able to comprehend only with the inno-
cence of a child.
IV “In antiquity when a man had to direct a prayer to the statue of the god,
he stepped upon a stone that was erected at its side to enable people to shout their
prayer into the ear, so that the god would hear them; and then he stared at the
image until the god nodded his head or opened or shut his eyes or answered in some
way. You see this was an abbreviated method of active imagination, concentrating
upon the image until it moved; and in that moment the god gave a hint, his as-
sent or his denial or any other indication, and that is the numinosum.” (C. G.
Jung, “Psychological Analysis of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,” from privately
mimeographed 1937 seminar notes of Mary Foote, cited in M. Watkins,
Waking Dreams [New York: Interface/Gordon and Beach, 1976]p. 43)
THE ANGEL OF DEATH IS ALL COVERED WITH EYES 103
The true sign of despair is the impatience we bring with us when we

seek to interpret what remains unreachable. Impatience is the refusal to
yield our perceptual faculties over to the critical, intuitive imagination.
But once the yielding takes place, the signs that fill the world assume a
new color.
C. G. Jung constitutes an example of angelological consciousness oper-
ating in the twentieth century. Jung, who asserted that all of his writings
were rooted in the testimony of empirical evidence, emphasized that re-
gardless of the “occult” nature of his work, its hub was the lived experience
taken from the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry. He made refer-
ence to the figure of the Angel in order to explain the nature of the human
psyche. For example, Jung claims that the fall of the angels constitutes “a
premature invasion of the human world by unconscious contents. The an-
gels are a strange genus; they are precisely what they are and cannot be
anything else. They are in themselves soulless beings who represent noth-
ing but the thoughts and intuitions of their Lord. Angels who fall, then,
are exclusively ‘bad’ angels. These release the well-known effect of ‘infla-
tion’, which we can observe nowadays in the megalomania of dictators.”1
For Jung, the mental gaze was endowed with cognitive properties that
are not defective or ratio-logically impaired. If anything, the mental gaze
was as epistemologically privileged as other roads to knowledge. With this
in mind, let us consider the parapsychological experience Jung had in
Ravenna, which he claims to have been “among the most curious events”
of his life. Jung paid a visit to the tomb of Galla Placidia located in
Ravenna in 1913 and again in 1933. On the occasion of both visits the
tomb had an unusual effect on him. But what was particularly strange is
that during the second visit, Jung tells us in his own words, “I was some-
what amazed because, in place of the windows I remember having seen on
my first visit, there were now four great mosaic frescoes of incredible
beauty which, it seemed, I had entirely forgotten.”2 As we are going to see,
Jung is not confusing his memories, the presence of the mosaics was veri-
fied by a woman who accompanied him on the visit. To be sure, he is quite
certain of what he thought he saw:
The mosaic on the south side represented the baptism in the Jordan; the
second picture, on the north, was of the passage of the Children of Israel
through the Red sea; the third, on the east, soon faded from my memory. It
might have shown Naaman being cleansed of leprosy in the Jordan . . . The
fourth mosaic, on the west side of the baptistery, was the most impressive
of all . . . It represented Christ holding out his hand to Peter, who was sink-
ing beneath the waves . . . I retained the most distinct memory of the mo-
saic of Peter sinking, and to this day can see every detail before my eyes: the
blue of the sea, individual chips of the mosaic, the inscribed scrolls pro-
ceeding from the mouths of Peter and Christ . . . 3
Immediately after leaving the baptistery, Jung decides to go to buy pho-

tographs of the mosaic but is unable to find any. Upon returning to
Switzerland Jung asks an acquaintance who was going to Ravenna to seek
out photographs of the mosaics. As it turns out, the friend informs Jung
that the mosaics do not exist.
Jung was sure that he saw what is in fact not there, as was the woman
who accompanied him on the visit. Before being informed by his friend of
the nonexistence of the mosaics, Jung had gone to the extent of discussing
them at a seminar.4 Jung provided a tentative explanation for this bewil-
dering experience by recalling that during a dangerous sea voyage from
Constantinople to Ravenna, the empress Galla Placidia vowed that if she
arrived at her destination safely she would have a church built in which the
dangers of the sea would be portrayed. Her voyage did turn out to be a safe
one and she did build the Basilica of San Giovanni in Ravenna which was
furnished with mosaics. However, Jung reminds us, the basilica was even-
tually razed to the ground because of a fire, but a depiction of Galla
Placidia in a boat is to be found in the Ambrosiana in Milan.
Jung confesses that Galla Placidia is what he terms a “suitable embod-
iment” of his anima. “The anima of a man,” Jung writes, “has a strongly
historical character. As a personification of the unconscious she goes back
into prehistory, and embodies the contents of the past. To the individual,
the anima is all life that has been in the past and is still alive in him.”5
What I am interested in exploring is the most originary reading possible
of this event—originary, of course, from Jung’s point of view. Once we
move in the direction of the most primordial interpretation possible of
Jung, we will find what all manuals on the history of psychoanalysis have
excluded from the museology of the science of the psyche, namely, the
fatal gaze of Renaissance hermeticism. An important bridge between Jung
and the hermetic past is Friedrich Creuzer (1771 – 1858), a student of
Schiller’s. According to Attilio Momigliano, Creuzer’s sought “ . . . to give
a scientific basis to the Neoplatonic interpretation of Greek mythology.
THE ANGEL OF DEATH IS ALL COVERED WITH EYES 105
Though soon dismissed by responsible philologists, it was greeted with

enthusiasm by philosophers like Schelling, lastingly influenced the erratic
genius of Bachofen, and altogether played a very important part in the de-
velopment of mythological studies.”6 Creuzer’s interpretative strategy was
rooted in a search for the symbolic meaning of an image, statue, text or
any other product of the cultural imagination. To be sure, he was not in-
terested in historical, causal, or naturalistic explanations but rather in the
hidden symbolic meaning that could be reached by means of a mytho-
logical imagining. Creuzer was thus a Neoplatonist as he afforded inter-
pretative privilege to the essence hidden within the veil of the image.7
We are offered an important insight into the parapsychological event at
Galla Placidia’s tomb by way of a footnote that Aniela Jaffé provides. She
relates that Jung had confided to her that the vision of the mosaics was “a
momentary new creation by the unconscious, arising out of his thoughts
about archetypal initiation. The immediate cause of the concretization lay,
in his opinion, in a projection of his anima upon Galla Placidia.”8 This is
the essence of Jung’s angelological consciousness: probing beyond the
weight of thought and death into the unnamable land of knowing-without-
reflection.
S
THE FIXED GAZE OF MELANCHOLY
T
he stanza allows a “conscious representation” of an enigma that
consists in the fact that philosophy is not able to enjoy what it
possesses, while poetry is not able to know what it enjoys. Hence
the figure of the Angel’s perfumed corpse, a sense of enjoyment that can
never be correlated with a sense of presence or possession. In other words
there is a scission that keeps joy apart from knowing, but the bond be-
tween pleasure and scientia is available in the form of the stanza, which
creates a new space of reality and human culture. Thus the problem is as
much a topographic or cartographic one as it is anything else, in that the
locus of cultural and intellectual activity conditions the results. Ulti-
mately, as we will see, it has everything to do with the ‘black sun of
melancholy, which emits paralyzing rays, as Julia Kristeva testifies:
“Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its
invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my
bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?”1 (And here we would
have Georges Bataille respond that “The sun is black” and that, such a
solar icon goes hand in hand with the image of “the beauty of an Angel
at the bottom of the underground”([“L’Archeangélique” 1944]).
It is at this point that Agamben’s thought intersects with Corbin’s re-
search on Sufism, to be sure; for the French Islamist the problem of knowl-
edge, or at least the problem that the West has with other forms of
knowing such as Sufism, is in many ways rooted in how different cultures
understand the geography that governs knowing. The essence of Agam-
ben’s quest to understand the phantasm that accompanies the “word” is
synthesized in the closing remarks of Stanzas, which shed light on alterna-
tive possibilities for understanding the process of semiosis: “ . . . the
THE FIXED GAZE OF MELANCHOLY 107
human is precisely this fracture of presence, which opens a world and over
which language holds itself. The algorithm S/s must therefore reduce itself
to simply the barrier (/) but in this barrier we should not see merely the
trace of a difference, but the topological game of putting things together
and articulating . . .” and a model for this is the “melancholic profundity
of the emblem . . .”2 In other words, the fracture separating the space of
the signified from that of the signifier must be “healed” or overcome, thus
transforming the difference or barrier into the place where the signifier
and the signified are collected and no longer differentiated as a result of
the newfound invisible harmony.
Agamben is concerned with articulating the idea that acedia, and in a
more specific sense melancholy, was a psycho-physiological attempt to
transform the object of desire into something seemingly real. Agamben
begins by reconstructing the medieval phenomenology concerning ace-
dia. He cites a number of provocative passages whose words announce the
essence of the pathological and philosophical dimensions of the unreal’s
attempt to become real. In the first passage the gaze is fixed upon the
window; the imagination takes possession of the victim who imagines
that someone is about to visit him. He fixes his gaze upon the wall and
spends time doing seemingly idle things. The accent is upon what is not
immediately present and specifically on the powers of the imagination,
which is able to invent things by transposing images wandering in the
realm of the unreal to the domain of the real that remains nonetheless a
fictional construct.
The second passage that Agamben focuses upon is that of alienation.
Once the “demone meridiano” invades the mind of the victim, the first ob-
session it inculcates is a “horror of place.” The victim is convinced that un-
less he abandons the place in which he presently finds himself, he will
never be able to function in a productive manner. The victim imagines dis-
tant or nonexistent monasteries where he is sure he would find peace of
mind. The loathing of the present place and the longing for the place that
possibly does not exist lead to a sense of total confusion and leave him
completely empty and inert.
What we have here is an attempt to appropriate the unreal by trans-
forming it into a semblance of the real. Central to this process is a knowl-
edge of the repulsion of place coupled with an imagination that is not
bound by the logic of time and place. It is indeed a question of privileging
the absent over the present, and there is here an uncanny resemblance to
Derrida’s grammatological project, which is in many ways a poetics of ab-

sence. The analogy comes to a halt, however, once we realize that while
Derrida believed he had overcome the metaphysical tradition by uncover-
ing the great lie of presentness, in these patristic writings the opposite oc-
curs. That is, what is overcome is not the metaphysical world but the
material world whose concrete sign or grammé dissolves in the imagination
of the acedioso who in truth imposes the unreal on the real.
Agamben believes that Western thought has yet to overcome the phan-
tasmalogical past, which is necessarily intertwined with the metaphysical
tradition of which it is an important, even if forgotten, dimension. As
Agamben implies in the final pages of Stanzas, by privileging writing over
speech, Derrida is only working within the “other side” of the metaphysi-
cal tradition. No one, including Derrida, has been successful in overcom-
ing the metaphysical tradition.
Acedia, in Agamben’s view, is not necessarily a form of laziness, but
rather one of anxiety and desperation. The acedioso is directed into hid-
denness as a result of a sense of anxiety vis-à-vis the world created by God.
The anguish is cultivated into a sense of despair as the acedioso does not
feel an affinity with the world God has created, and as a consequence he
conceals himself from the view of God by rejecting the path created to
reach Him.
As Julia Kristeva reminds us, the melancholic mood is made up of “in-
scriptions, energy disruptions, and not simply raw energies.” In other
terms, moods direct us to a process of signification which, although rest-
ing on the limen of bioenergetic constancy, “insures the pre- conditions for
(or manifests the disintegration of ) the imaginary and the symbolic.”3 To
say that melancholy is a source of poetological invention would be to re-
peat ideas expressed by Ficino half a millennium ago. The fact is, there is
a psychiatric component to poetic logic, and it consists in the conjugal
closeness linking the poetological strategy of excogitating things belonging
to different temporal realms and the black sun of an originary sadness.
Kristeva, in fact, has something similar in mind when she writes that “lit-
erary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to
the affect—to sadness as imprint of separation and beginning of the sym-
bol’s sway.”4
In Benjamin’s reading of melancholy within the context of Baroque al-
legoresis, the emphasis is placed on the fragmentary nature of the signify-
ing process:
THE FIXED GAZE OF MELANCHOLY 109
The deadening of the emotions . . . the distance between the self and the
surrounding world to the point of alienation from the body. As soon as this
symptom of depersonalization was seen as an intense degree of mournful-
ness, the concept of the pathological state, in which the most simple object
appears to be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom because it lacks in any
natural, creative relationship to us, was set in an incomparably productive
context. It accords with this that in the proximity of Albrecht Dürer’s fig-
ure, Melencholia, the utensils of active life are lying around unused on the
floor, as objects of contemplation. This engraving anticipates the baroque in
many respects.5
We have in this scenario a radical alternation as far as the use of a given

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

OF HUMAN LIFE
F
ragility is at once the first and last sign of human life. Everything else
is a threshold between the fragile poles linking conception and birth
to the dissolution that accompanies death. The vitreous nature of
the human is present in Peirce’s thought. Peirce wrote that the human is
essentially a transparent sign, and more specifically a “glassy essence” and
not unlike a word. The human and the word share a common nature and
a common destiny as their essence, their meaning, and their essential sig-
nificance depend on a future interpretant.1 In her research on the illness of
mourning, Maria Torok discovered that those who lose a love-object expe-
rience an increase in libido;2 in other terms, the fragile corporeal ecstasy
that accompanies the act of conception is repeated immediately after the
event of death. The experience of the fragile was one of the last things to
which Italo Calvino gave critical reflection. The initial image of his Lezioni
americane is that of Perseus who places Medusa’s head in a bed of algae,
and the marine reeds in contact with Medusa (who is the figure of pure
horror) “are transformed into corals, and the nymphs, in an attempt to
adorn themselves with corals, rush to bring the reeds and the algae closer
to the terrible head.”3 In Calvino’s view, this image somehow reflects an at-
titude that Eugenio Montale makes manifest in Piccolo testamento, where
“very subtle elements which are like emblems of his poetry” are compared
to “a frightening infernal monster.” As never before, Calvino continues,
Montale has portrayed a vision of apocalyptic proportions—in other
words, Montale’s poetry highlights the “minimal luminous traces that he
contrasts with dark catastrophe.”
THE FIRST AND LAST SIGN OF HUMAN LIFE 111
But the central point of Calvino’s reading of Montale is to be found in

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

Peirce elaborates a definition of the icon that is particularly fitting in this
case: “In contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the
consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real copy dis-
appears, and it is for the moment a pure dream—not any particular exis-
tence, and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an
icon.”11 In a more specific sense, Peirce is here thinking about a pure icon,
which as a sign conveys “ . . . no positive or factual information; for it af-
fords no assurance that there is any such thing in nature.”12 In another
context we read that a pure icon is limited to being “ . . . a fragment of a
completer sign.”
This string of Peircian quotations sheds light on what is intended by
a “fragile icon”: a sign that is a fractal of something greater but that in it-
self is empty of any content or information, a sign that exists in the
netherworld between the unreality of what has not occurred and the re-
ality of what has taken place. The fragility of this icon rests in the fact
that it exists simultaneously in the state of nascence and of death. The
poetological theory I cultivate in this book belongs to a similar state of
being. Thus, it is “coming,” which does not necessarily mean that it is
not rooted in the interpretative strategies of the present. If anything, it
participates in the infinity of the present moment, an infinity we often
neglect precisely because it is hidden in the actions and the matter that
are a part of the quotidian.
A critical gaze at the semiotic issues involved in the “theology of the
icon” opens the door to an enriched understanding of what is intended by
the “icon” in ‘the “fragile icon.” Put interrogatively, how is the ineffable,
the unsayable, the inexpressible expressed? Or to put it in terms employed
by Cacciari, “ . . . is the unrepresentable, that which is conceived as Other
with respect to any determination of essence . . . thinkable in the act of
giving itself?”13 As we will see, these questions touch upon the topic of an-
gelology in a very direct way, but they also, as Cacciari correctly observes,
bear upon any “theology of the icon.” The theological nature of the icon
sheds light on the semiotic qualities and properties that allow it at once to
produce signs that speak to the process of making the unsayable sayable,
and also be the medium through which the unrepresentable achieves its
most radical degree of unrepresentableness through an “unprece-
dented”/”unrepeatable” (inauditum) semiosis. L. Ouspensky indicated the
paradoxical nature of the theological icon: “Although it may appear
strange, for the Church the sacred image derives precisely from the absence
of image directly from the Old Testament: it is its result and fulfillment.”14
What is of course of interest here, among other issues, is the fact that the
theological icon does not root its genealogy in the pagan icon. Instead it is
grounded in the absence of image. The fact is that the Incarnation of the
Verbum can somehow reconcile the Old Testamentary absence of the
image by disassembling the rational philosophy of the icon that Plotinus
had a role in cultivating, a philosophy rooted in a nostalgia for beauty and
eros. A defining feature of the theology of the icon is the way in which the
Pauline passage where Christ is portrayed as the Eikón (Col.1.15) is inter-
preted. In Cacciari’s words: “The theology of the icon puts everything at
stake in the commentary of that eikón of the Invisible, and precisely: in the
possibility of commenting on the Pauline text without allegorically-
metaphorically reducing its tremendous engagement. All would fail if that
eikón were simply the reflection of the Invisible, or if it solely concerned
the pre-existing Christ; the incarnation would be a vain image, the resur-
rection a tale, the New Testamentary eschatological dimension would be
reduced to nothing.”15 What is clear here is that the icon is far from a sim-
ple fragmentary representation of something more complete. To be sure,
the icon of Christ is not a sign that is a series of grades removed from an
ultimate signified: if anything the iconic Christ is the absoluteness of the
eikón, one that gathers together conflicting elements. As Cacciari notes,
the icon does not have equivalents in the realm of discourse, instead it has
the challenge of revealing itself as the Showing, beyond any limit of ratio-
nal explanation.16 In other terms, the icon is a sign that transcends the log-
ical rationalization that grammatical language is able to provide.
Pavel Nikolajevic Evdokimov offers an important distinction between
the concept of “sign” and that of the “symbol” when dealing with the the-
ology of the icon. “The sign informs and notifies. Its content is the most
elementary and empty of any presence.” Evdokimov includes here the
signs belonging to domains such as those of algebra, chemical formulas,
street signs, and so on. In all of these cases there exists no relationship of
communion and presence between signifier and signified. Evdokimov in-
cludes allegory in this category as its function is purely of an illustrative na-
ture. “Neither the sign nor allegory are in any way ‘epiphanic.’”17 On the
other hand, the symbol, according to liturgical tradition, actually contains
that which it sets out to symbolize. The symbol, in Evdokimov’s own
words, “fulfills the function of revealing the ‘meaning’, and, at the same
time, erects itself in the expressive place of the ‘presence.’”18 Symbolic cog-
nition calls upon the vera imaginatio and encourages it to find the message
of the symbol and to grasp its epiphanic role of allowing the transcendent
to come into presence. The purpose of the icon, like the Angel, is to per-
mit humans to come into contact with the invisible transcendent.
To explain his point the Russian thinker makes reference to the paleo-
Christian art found in the catacombs. There we find mural drawings,
paintings, etchings that take their themes from sacred history: Daniel
among the lions; images of fish, bread, and wine; the Good Shepherd, and
so on. Evdokimov’s point is that the catacombal depictions are not in-
tended to be art (very little care is taken in perfecting the forms) but the
representation of the act of salvation. “The ‘Good Shepherd’ does not rep-
resent the historical Christ, but instead means: the Saviour truly saves.”19
The catacombal art is meant to offer a direct meaning, a direct intuition
of the transcendent Being. In Evdokimov’s mind the catacombal depic-
tions were to find their fulfillment in the art of the icons: a visual theology
that is the symbol of a divine presence. The icon opens the door, like the
Angel, to a theophany; the idea of “art” and “artist” dissolves in the pres-
ence of a tradition that speaks. There is no place for aesthetic spectacle but
in its place an experience that obliterates the space and time of human his-
tory. To be sure, the theophanic event that the icon provokes does away
with history, leaving only enough to recognize the face of the saint, or the
event from sacred history.20
Pavel Florenskij also has meditated on the signifying qualities of the
icon. In describing the nature of the iconostasis (in the Eastern Church a
partition or screen on which icons are placed and that separates the sanc-
tuary from the main part of the church), he defines it as the limit placed
between the visible world and the invisible world. “The iconostasis is the
vision. The iconostasis is the manifestation of the saints and of the an-
gels—an angelophany . . .”21 In order to explain the antinomic content of
the icon, Florenskij uses the image of the window. The icon is the window
that opens itself in the most unprecedented way (that is without traces of
signs of a contamination from spatio-temporal extraneity) on the originary
mystery, and the icon safeguards is unexpressibility.22 Moreover, Florenskij
employs the figure of the magnet to characterize the essence of the icon.
An important element in Florenskij’s theology of the icon is the idea that
the visible is “abstracted” from the invisible, a signifying process that be-
gins with the window of the icon, which in itself creates a maelstrom in
the invisible. To use Cacciari’s words, “The icon . . . imagines the force of
the magnet, in the purity of its principle: lines, forces, energies that come
from it and which it unleashes . . . The natural dimension [of the invisible]
is not denied, but, literally, abstracted . . . by the invisible force of the mag-
net, which transforms it into eros-movement, dynamics, the pure compo-
sition of signs, colours, forms. . . . The form of the visible becomes the
complex of the traces, the paths, the signs that the invisible produces by
extracting the visible from itself.”23 Thus the semiotic relationship between
the visible and the invisible is “clarified” by the icon whereby there exists
a signifying relationship that pivots not on the signifier/signified paradigm
but on a more originary matrix, one that does not privilege one compo-
nent of semiosis over another but that instead gathers the different antin-
omic signs in the essence of the icon.
The theological nature and implications of the icon do not fall within
the purview of this study. Yet what has and what can be said about the
semiotic processes that are properties of the theological icon have a great
bearing on the iconic in general. An important consideration is that while
the icon could be seen as being “frail” or “fragile” (that is, following the
Peircian definitions in which the icon is the fragmentary piece of some-
thing else), it is equally the case that this frailty is also a completeness or
absoluteness that resists the grammatical machinations of verbal semiosis.
But can we have it both ways? Is it legitimate to interpret the icon as an
incompleteness that achieves its fullest exposition by way of a greater and
more complete sign, on the one hand, and read the icon as the most intact
and incommunicable essence, on the other hand? Let us say that the icon
is both the weakest and the strongest sign in that it abstracts, in a way that
defies communicability, the many polarities that are signs of life on earth.
The icon, as understood within the context of the theological tradi-
tion, is a sign of “transcendental instants,” which Sergej Trubeckoj de-
scribed as the moments when the anima mundi unhides itself. Looking at
the world through the perspective of the icon, as N. A. Morozov and later
P. D. Ouspensky wrote, has as a consequence the entry into the fourth di-
mension. Florenskij opens himself to the fourth dimension; moreover, he
sees science and philosophy as belonging to the umbrella of “transcen-
dental instants.” As Elémire Zolla observes, at the basis of Florenskij’s
thought there is a very particular way of understanding things; everything
is at the service of the promotion of Knowledge (Sapientia). Florenskij,
Zolla writes, understood Knowledge as the “fourth hypostasis,” that is to
say, “the originary substance of beings,” and Sophia itself is the living idea
of all creation.24
But the idea of the transcendental instant is by no means the exclusive
domain of theological discourse. To be sure, in notes that he took during
his lifetime, we find Nietzsche describing something that has great bearing
on the transcendental instant that is connected to the fourth dimension
and ultimately to the icon. During the period before his nervous break-
down, which was to result in insanity, Nietzsche makes the following an-
notation: “Five, six seconds and no more: there you suddenly feel the
presence of the eternal harmony. You cannot bear it [any longer] in your
mortal body. You would need to form another [superior] body or die. It is
a clear and unmistakable feeling. You seem to be in contact with the whole
of nature and you say: ‘Yes, this is right!’ . . . This is not emotion, this is
[pure] happiness. You do not forgive, because there is nothing to forgive.
You no longer love—oh, this feeling is higher than love . . . In these five
seconds I live an entire human existence, for them I would give my entire
life and would not have paid too much.”25 This type of expression is by no
means unique or rare in Nietzsche’s writings, as we find a similar passage
in Ecce Homo: “An ecstasy whose tremendous tension sometimes dis-
charges itself in a flood of tears, while one’s steps now involuntarily rush
along, now involuntarily lag; a complete being outside oneself with the
distinct consciousness of a multitude of subtle shudders and trickles down
to one’s toes; a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy
things appear, not as an antithesis, but as a condition, demanded, as a nec-
essary colour within such a superfluity of light.”26 The icon is a window
that opens onto the transcendental instant through which we see frag-
ments of a total being that resist the signifying razor of verbal language.
But to continue with the window metaphor, the icon is necessarily fragile
in that the transparency it provides is frail beside the signifying force of
ratio-logical language. The translucence of the icon, like glass, is easily
fractured by modes of interpretation that do not “know their own
strength.” The icon, thus understood, must safeguard its own frailty,
which is its greatest possession.
Experiencing and knowing the fragile as the fragile is the beginning of
knowledge. “All cognition of the All,” Franz Rosenzweig writes in The Star
of Redemption, “originates in death, in the fear of death.” In Massimo Cac-
ciari’s view, philosophy is oblivious to the anguish of individuals and is al-
ways seeking to flee the sepulchral gates that open themselves at every
move philosophy makes. “Only the Individuum can die,” Rosenzweig

continues, “and all that which is mortal is alone.” But this solitude of the
single mortal individual is exactly what philosophy must overcome and
abolish. Moreover, the nothingness, which is the last word that death pro-
nounces, should be for philosophy the new beginning: “ . . . in truth,
death is not what it appears to be, or what it has appeared to be in the
philosopher’s mirror, it is not nothing, ‘but an inexorable, uneliminatable
Something’ . . . a re-claiming voice . . . that breaks the expected uncondi-
tionableness of philosophy, which turns to us in order to re-turn us to ‘the
obscure presupposition of all life.’”27 In being Something, the Presupposi-
tion that comes “before” philosophy, death is what philosophy has sought
to overcome. The fragility that is the heart of death is the icon of the bous-
trephedonic movement between the signposts that enclose life and culture.
The fragile, the fragmented, the shards that are left over and claimed by
no one are the strongest signs of life past and life to be. What is at issue,
however, is the question of metamorphosis: how does this fragility change
into a powerful sign without losing its irreducible qualities? The fragile is
a state in the narrative of metamorphosis; to know the reason of a meta-
morphosis is to understand the absoluteness of the fragment. The hidden
logic of transformations is an object of knowledge Rella searches for
throughout the entire gamut of his writings. Rella’s relationship with the
“scene” and “event” of metamorphosis is twofold: in one sense he traverses
a vast array of texts intent on uncovering the mysteries that underpin the
event of transformation; in a second sense he is himself the agent of the
transformation.
An eloquent example of the latter is to be found in a study that deals
with Montale and Saba, La cognizione del male, in which Rella states: “ I
have, in a word, transformed some poetic sequences into a tale.”28 In
essence, Rella plans to undertake the construction of a textual montage
consisting of fragments, quotations, and images so as to let emerge the
main figures that “ . . . weave within themselves a plurality of meanings, of
Montale’s work.” In other terms, the interpretation of signs becomes sym-
biotically bound with metamorphosis, which in itself is essentially “al-
chemical” since any transformation is also a transmutation. The
interpretative act, the act of understanding involves, in Rella’s case, trans-
mutating a given author’s words and images into something that might be
understood and transmitted to the community and to posterity. But the
first move in such a gesture is that of collecting the fragments that the au-
thor leaves behind, fragments and shards that are icons of the destructibil-
ity that threatens any cultural act.
The point of departure of any logic of transformation, it would seem,
is the coming to terms with the most disconcerting indices of fragility,
death and decay: to this end Rella asks, “things, humans and events, do
they not perish perhaps in order to be transformed into something pre-
cious and new?”29 Is this some variety of Christian soteriological discourse
that pivots on the need to suffer and die in order to enter the Kingdom of
God? Or is it a nonteleological fascination with the death and decay of ma-
teriality in its own existential context? In other terms, which is the object
of privilege, the transformation into something new, or the decay that pre-
cedes it? If anything, it is a recognition of the fact that the signs that per-
fuse the world are not so much unstable as they are icons that speak to the
need to experience the event of the “fragile fragment.”
While Rella is indeed intent on transforming what he reads, he is
equally fascinated by the face and character of impermanence. To begin
with, Rella initiates his metamorphosis of Montale by seeking to under-
stand the nature of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who “ . . . seems to be overtaken
in a continuous and inarrestable oscillation. And this oscillation impresses
upon things a vertiginous movement, which makes everything unstable,
apparent and unapparent, along the line of a shadow, along the precarious
limit between being and nothingness.”30 Rella is intrigued by Hamlet’s at-
tempt to freeze life magically in its impermanence, and makes use here of
the still life image that in Italian is translated as natura morta. In a general
sense, Rella is seeking to come to terms with what he terms elsewhere “the
new modern,” in which people live in “ a perverse rapport with space and
with time.” What is perverse about the spatio-temporal relationship is that
the massiveness of the modern metropolitan obliges people to have only
fragments of perceptions, “an atomization of experience without precedent
in the past.”31
(Paul Virilio is acutely sensitive to the revolution of the senses of per-
ception that is currently taking place. “Before long,” Virilio writes, “we
will be forced to undergo a lacerating revision of our figurative concep-
tions. This ‘reconstruction’ involves more than physicists and philoso-
phers. It embraces architects, urbanists, and other geometricians, because
the product of today’s man/machine interface, the overexposure of screens,
is also the product of the man/environment face-to-face encounter, the ex-
posure of immediate vision. If, in the physics of the infinitesimally small,
the appearance of surfaces hides a secret transparence that is a thickness

without thickness and a volume without volume, then the greatest lengths
of time and the widest expanses no longer occult direct vision. Today, the
perception of facts has given way to unprecedented facts of perception.
While these facts of perception can readjust the components of conscious-
ness, no one can apprehend their sensate reality.”32 We are on the verge of
a radical overhaul of the way in which we perceive everything that can pos-
sibly be perceived. And yet, we behold all of this without any sense of won-
der or marvel. If anything, we are spellbound by a form of narcosis that
protects us from the shock of falling into the radical overhaul. The “lacer-
ating revision of our figurative conceptions” assumes the same sort of banal
triviality that driving to the closest mall to buy an unnecessary object in-
spires in the economy of everyday ordinary experience. But whether we ac-
cept the revision as lacerating or not, the fact remains that change moves
at a pace that we are not able to detect through our sensory faculties. In
the same way, we are not able to perceive the speed at which our planet ro-
tates as it revolves around the sun).
Alberto Moravia’s The Indifferent was published in 1929, two years after
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. No one has ever paid serious attention
to the possible affinity linking these two works. But in many respects
Moravia’s book is a rhetorically reorganized version of Heidegger’s monu-
mental philosophical reflection. The two books share a central notion: the
deluge of a radically banal quotidian existence. Indifference is the being-
beside-the-world that has de-sensitized us to the point where apocalypse is
no longer possible, and where wonder is nothing but the insignificant
residue of a dead metaphysics that had God at its center. Indifference is the
posthumous dissolution of a signifying process that distinguishes the vir-
tual from the nonvirtual.
Similar to the objects in still life paintings, the people who populate the
space of the modern are immobilized in a perverse ontology; that is, the fic-
tion of being alive is undermined by the atrophic frame of non-being. This
is the space that functions as limen, as threshold between the two fragile
poles of existence, which are the bases for both the eternal return of the
same, and the unrepeatable instant of being.
U
THE UNREPRESENTABLE COMMUNITY
S
ince the time of antiquity there has been a tendency to perceive a
strong link between poetic language and the political community.
Renaissance humanists such as Angelo Poliziano praised the value of
metaphorical utterance precisely because it was believed to have a civiliz-
ing factor in that it led to the foundation of communities and to the main-
taining of civil order. But putting aside the Classical and Renaissance point
of view, how do we today understand the relationship between language in
its most originary or poetic sense and the community? When thinking
about the unthought dimension of human language, Agamben writes,
“Only because man finds himself cast into language without the vehicle of
a voice, and only because the experimentum linguae lures him, grammar-
less, into that void and that aphonia, do an ethos and a community of any
kind become possible.”1 That is to say, between “voice” and “language”
there exists a void caused by the inability of phónè and logos to communi-
cate with each other. Any attempt to find a path of articulation between
the two leads to “a radical revision of the very idea of community.”2
However, as Maximus the Confessor affirms, “language is the symbol
of the soul’s cognitive energy.”3 What this means, according to Christos
Yannaras, is that the “cognitive energy” of the soul constitutes the individ-
ual’s possibility to accept the logos of things and of other people, and it an-
nounces the ecstatico-logical unhiding of the individual to the community
of others.”4 In other terms, language is at once the voice of a pneuma and
the pneuma itself that bridges the gap existing between individuals. The
void that Agamben speaks about is inhabited by this pneumatological fig-
ure, which, in being unrepresentable itself, becomes the means to ap-
proach “unrepresentability.” But how does this abyss of unrepresentability
THE UNREPRESENTABLE COMMUNITY 121
make itself manifest in the diurnal exchange of humans? Augusto Illumi-

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

nihilism, the meaning which mutilates and fragments. This right to not
have meaning is in any case the most misrecognized, the most openly placed
under foot. (Georges Bataille, L’expérience intérieure)7
Illuminati comments on the quote by observing that we are at the “am-

biguous limit between communication and communion, which is the
being-in-common of the singularities, and also the repartitioning of ter-
ritory and property subsumed under immanent collectivity. By com-
munity I mean not the counter-utopic community that is always
mourned as recently lost, but the thought of the being-in-common of
the singularities, of their alterity. In turning toward the community

democracy creates its very experience from its impossibility, from the
impossibility of constraining the excess of desire to fit in an immanent
representation.”8 The point here is thinking the idea of community in
such a way as to encourage the flow of multiple interpretations. Not a
community of chaos and disorder but rather one that rigidly upholds
the need to allow meanings to remain unlatent and unhidden. This be-
comes possible when we consciously experience the articulated void that
creates the “unthought” gap between voice and language.
Illuminati offers a chilling and disturbing example of the difference be-
tween remaining oblivious to the unthought abyss and consciously experi-
encing it. The latter is an invitation to open up to the difference, while the
former closes itself to difference. The refusal of difference articulates itself
in the thought of violence:
In the museum of the history of German Jewry, housed in Berlin’s Martin

Gropius-Bau, with a view on the ex-Wall and on the ruins of the torture
chambers of the Gestapo headquarters in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, there
hangs a synoptic image of the persecutions. The last punitive measure is a
January 1945 decree that prohibits all of the Jews in the Reich territory
from stopping in the heated waiting-rooms of the railway stations. Natu-
rally, at that time there were no longer living Jews in Germany nor coal for
heating or stations that were in operation. And, nonetheless, the State imag-
inarily reconstructs by way of decree the scenario of persecution, it legally
revives the victims and the executioners for an infinite torture. One is ap-
palled more by the stupidity than by the ferociousness and one has the im-
pression of being admitted into the essence itself of domination, into the
meticulous perversity of bureaucracy, where the logic of exclusion survives
the concrete capacity to achieve it. The gloomy determination of the
Sophoclean Creon or of De Sade’s characters to want a “second death” for
their victims, yields to a metaphysical farse of horror. And yet, the Nazi per-
version that wishes to extinguish difference belongs to the logic of repre-
sentation as much as the liberal grotesqueness that overlooks it, thus equally
prohibiting the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges. In the idol-
atrous adoration of the pure means this could without distinction be power
or money, with variable effects on the concrete political regimes.9
In the end we are dealing with destitution, with extreme poverty of the
body, psyche and soul, with a prelinguistic state. All of these barbaric ac-
THE UNREPRESENTABLE COMMUNITY 123
tions reduce the victims to the state of utter wretchedness. But as Michel
Serres writes, “The wretched of the earth are messengers of an extraordi-
nary state which is unknown to us.” Radical destitution forces one to
wander aimlessly in the streets, to assume a very low profile, one becomes
mute and a mendicant. Utter poverty constrains one to disappear and
then out of nowhere to reemerge on some street corner. The destitute are
specters that are real “in the sense that they pierce through our illusory re-
ality.”10 Radical poverty opens up for us an existential space that defies
our notion of common sense. “The absolutely destitute of the earth,” Ser-
res tells us, “risk seeing even the seeds of humanity destroyed in them and
around them by the horror of this assault.”11 What all of this means, ac-
cording to Serres, is that the individual who challenges the risk of the de-
struction of his or her humanity is an archangel, in the etymological sense
of arche—namely, source, origins.
V
ANTI-ANNUNCIATION
I Metaphor and passion, the basic material of lyric utterance, have

vanished into the night of history.
II It is impossible to speak of a poetic philosophy (harmless lip ser-

vice will not suffice) when ethics is understood as being only a sci-
ence of manners.
III If the lyric is only the aged and sick grandparent of the ratio-logi-
cal, then it needs to die a thousand deaths.
IV Myth and meter are not the content of the poetological. They are
the means that allows us to rationalize how it is possible for hu-
mans to invent at all.
V Orpheus, Dante, Benjamin, and others descended to hell, whether

the supersensory one or the empirical one, only to discover that
there exists an unrepresentable meaning of hell on earth.
VI After all, the otherworldly ecstasy that the erotic offers humans is
the event that allows a glimpse of the eternity housed in our own
bodies.
VII “ . . . first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the mean-

ing of this question” (Martin Heidegger at the incipit of Being and
Time). Contrary to what Heidegger implies at the beginning of
Being and Time, the question of being was not the most important
ANTI-ANNUNCIATION 125
concern of Plato or Aristotle. It was instead the question of the

soul. Such a sleight of hand (or exaggerated reawakening) on Hei-
degger’s part set twentieth-century thought off onto an unantici-
pated and labyrinthine course.
VIII “To be out-of date at the risk of death . . . The death which situ-
ates itself as the actual and extreme limit of any discourse” (Franco
Rella commenting on Otto Weininger in Il silenzio e le parole).
Such an interpretative attitude is indispensable when dealing with
that which refuses the benediction of convention and fashion.
IX One of the most intoxicating depictions of the epistemology of the

scent is found in “The Perfume” from Baudelaire’s poem “A Phan-
tom” contained in The Flowers of Evil: “During your lifetime,
reader, have you breathed, / Slow-savouring to the point of dizzi-
ness, / That grain of incense which fills up a church? . . . Out of
the phantom’s dense, resilient locks, / Living sachet, censer of the
alcove, / Would rise an alien and tawny scent”).1
X “ . . . what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by
the secrets of others” (Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok).2 Even
the most materialist and anti-transcendentalist of philosophies is
forced to recognize the idea of “secrets that haunt,” not unlike
phantoms.
XI “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only
as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recog-
nized and is never seen again . . . every image of the past that is not
recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to
disappear irretrievably” (Walter Benjamin);3 “To articulate the past
historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was . . .
It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of
danger” (Walter Benjamin).4 The ghosts of the past escape the me-
chanics of a logic that seeks to homogenize or rationalize the vari-
ous movements and irrational tensions that add up to what is
generally called history.
W
THE ANGEL SIGNS ITS NAME
I
The Angel’s semiotic signature resembles most, but not exclusively, the in-
terpretative paradigm of hermetic semiosis. The Angel’s philosophy is a
hermetic reason. But the ethico-political dimension of this paradigm has
been the object of sharp criticism. Geoff Waite, for example, from the
point of view of political ideology, criticizes what he terms an “esoteric
semiotics,” which in his view conceals truth for an elite. Hermeticism is a
form of exclusivistic politics in that it deals with a false truth, that is, some-
thing which cannot be rationally explained to a multitude.1 But Waite’s
critique had already been anticipated by Adorno in the “Theses Against
Occultism” and “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times As-
trology Column.” “The attraction to the occult,” Adorno writes, “is a
symptom of the retrogression of consciousness”; and “Occultism is a reflex
to the subjectification of all meaning, the complement of reification.” At
other points Adorno states that “occultism is the metaphysics of dopes,” or
“they bitch about materialism. But they want to weigh the astral body.” Fi-
nally, “the cardinal sin of occultism is that, by making existence an at-
tribute of spirit, both become contaminated.”2
We need to be, however, very sensitive to Adorno’s perspective; the Ger-
man Jewish thinker was condemning the occult primarily, but not exclu-
sively, for its association with Nazi-Fascist anti-Semitism, as Adorno makes
explicit in the fifth thesis (“Like fascism, the power of the occult is not just
a pathos—the two being related by a model of thought as in the case of
antisemitism”).3 Umberto Eco was to level a similar accusation against the
despised ideologies of Nazism and Fascism.4 But while the link between
THE ANGEL SIGNS ITS NAME 127
Nazi-Fascism and anti-Semitism is more than evident, the nature of the

occult/hermetic/esoteric is not defined as easily. Suffice it to say that
Adorno was ambivalent about the intellectual orientation of his friend and
mentor Walter Benjamin, for whom “it is difficult to say to what extent he
was influenced by the neo-platonic and antinomian-messianic tradition.”5
Benjamin was at once a materialist and an occultist in a way that was to
cause anxiety for his Marxist readers.
The hermetic signifying paradigm, or hermetic, drift as Umberto Eco
terms it, is one of the most problematic issues in the contemporary study
of semiotics. But what exactly is the problem? Most of the critiques of
hermetic semiosis in the wake of Eco’s writings have approached the ques-
tion in a limited, often superficial way. In almost all of the cases, the cri-
tiques took what Eco had to say about hermeticism at face value and
limited any understanding of the hermetic tradition to what one finds in
Foucault’s Pendulum—that is, in the forms of titles of books and names of
authors, which Eco cites in great abundance. There exists no scholarship
on Eco’s theory of hermetic semiosis that makes use of a sustained and
comprehensive understanding of the historical dimensions of the her-
metic tradition, from Hellenism on to late antiquity, up to the Renais-
sance and thereafter.
The defining feature of hermetic semiosis is, according to Eco, the idea
of the “Hermetic drift,” which he defines as the “ interpretative habit
which dominated Renaissance Hermeticism and which is based on the
principles of universal analogy and sympathy, according to which every
item of the furniture of the world is linked to every other element (or to
many) of this sublunar world and to every element (or to many) of the su-
perior world by means of similitudes or resemblances. It is through simil-
itudes that the otherwise occult parenthood between things is manifested
and every sublunar body bears the traces of that parenthood impressed on
it as a signature.”6
Eco stresses that according to the hermetic paradigm, not only is there the
possibility of acquiring knowledge of the similar by means of the similar;
moreover, there exists the possibility of a connection among all things by way
of an excessively flexible conception of resemblance. After all, Eco reminds us,
Peirce did conjecture that “any two things resemble one another just as
strongly as any two others, if recondite resemblances are admitted.”7 Eco’s fas-
cination with hermeticism is best articulated in the cultural artifact known as
Foucault’s Pendulum; this is Eco’s second novel and it traces and explores a
dead space lost somewhere in the Western psyche. It is the empty space
lodged somewhere between sense perception, which is validated by the em-
pirical data it collects and organizes in its various archives, and the intuitions
and categories that are properties of the intellect. This forgotten domain, the
mundus imaginalis, is where post-Enlightenment poetic imagination finds its
home. But the artifacts originating from this imagination is understood by
most today as being unreal, irrational, illogical, and worst of all, not relevant
to human culture. However, Corbin encourages us to rethink the meaning of
this dormant psychic space:
On this account there remains no hope for recovering the reality sui generis
of a suprasensible world which is neither the empirical world of the senses
nor the abstract world of the intellect. It has furthermore for a long time now
seemed to us radically impossible to rediscover the actual reality—we would
say the reality in act—proper to the “Angelic World,” a reality prescribed in
Being itself, not in any way a myth dependent on socio-political or socio-
economic infrastructures. It is impossible to penetrate, in the way in which
one penetrates into a real world, into the universe of the Zoroastrian An-
gelology . . . we would say as much as of the Angelophanies of the Bible.8
The space that Corbin describes here is what Eco not only traces but in-
deed also parodies and ironizes in his second novel. The space is a grave-
yard of ideas and ruins of the imagination. Seen in this light, Foucault’s
Pendulum is a landscape replete with ruins in the form of words, ideas,
names, titles of works that have lost any critical currency, just as the buried
and unearthed edifices and objects of ancient Rome have no contemporary
functional currency.
In the end Eco’s novel is not only a parody but also an imagining of
what this dead space would be like if it were to come back to life. The
major obstacle to this is that we would have to forget four hundred years
of intellectual history in order to be able to see, for example, what Renais-
sance hermeticism was actually like. This imagining is a melancholic act,
as Walter Benjamin would suggest: “To historians who wish to relive an
era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that they blot out everything they
know about the later course of history. There is not better way of charac-
terizing the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a
process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia,
which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it
flares up briefly . . . Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: ‘Few will be
able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.’”9
One of the main reasons why Eco is able to parody and ironize the her-
metic tradition is that he is supported by several centuries of intellectual
history. The ultimate deconstruction of Foucault’s Pendulum would be to
read it as if Cartesian rationalism and the persecutions of the Church had
not yet taken place. But as Eco admits in “Ars Oblivionalis” forgetting is
extremely hard, often more difficult than remembering. The fact is that if
we could “unremember” the several centuries, Eco’s second novel would
resemble a “theatrum philosophicum hermeticum,” a hermetic philosophy
theater, much like Giulio Camillo’s Idea del theatro and Giordano Bruno’s
memory treatises.
Foucault’s Pendulum is filled with ruins, and to a certain extent it is it-
self a ruin like the hermetic texts it makes reference to. Of course the major
difference between Eco’s book and the hermetic works is that while the au-
thors of the latter took hermetic thought quite seriously, Eco (on one level
at least), wants to expel hermetic reason from the domain of legitimate sci-
ence and philosophy. But on another level Eco has implicated himself in
the hermetic project by constructing the edifice of his novel upon the ar-
chitectural ruins of the hermetic tradition. We need to recall what Linda
Hutcheon stated about Eco’s use of the trope of irony in Foucault’s Pendu-
lum: “Without irony, Eco’s novel would be an exemplar of hermetic semi-
osis; with irony, it becomes simultaneously both an exemplar and a
critique.”10
The point that needs to be stressed here is that the paradigm of her-
metic semiosis as practiced in the past is different from the interpretative
paradigm that is genealogically linked to it and that constitutes a major el-
ement of poetic logic. In other terms, the hermeticism of, say, the Renais-
sance is not to be confused with the hermetic reason of late capitalism
which is a strong form of poetic logic. The Corpus Hermeticum has been
transformed into a hermetic corpse, which is to say that the hermetic tra-
dition of Ficino, Bruno, and many others has today assumed a different
guise; it has become the signifying substance of the poetic sign. The evil,
irrational, Nazi-Fascistic hermeticism that Adorno, Eco, Waite, and others
speak about is nothing but the unmediated and uncritical transposition of
the tradition of the occult sciences from one historical period to another.
The fact is that all unmediated spatio-temporal translocations are doomed
to madness and catastrophe.
We are dealing with something quite different; the mutation, filtering,

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

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

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

“need, implicit in Proclus’s system, to mediate the transition from the Uno
to the multiple, from the intelligible to concrete existence, from God to
the world.”14
Basilides’s thought is characteristic of the Gnostic reflection on angels.
In Basilides’s mind, from the innate transcendent Being there come forth
an infinite number of eons, beginning with the Nous (Christ), and follow-
ing with the Logos, the Fronesis, the Sophia, and the Dynamis. The union
of Sophia and Dynamis brings about the generation of angels.15
Hermetic semiosis is not pure transcendence; it contaminates the visi-
ble with the invisible; it seeks the noumenal in the material and vice versa.
Alchemy, itself a hermetic science, is an illustrious example of such an in-
terpretative mind-set. Moreover, hermeticism/occultism is not the exclu-
sive domain of the New Agers, of the weird esoteric cults. Nor is it the
exclusive property of those who practice a form of cultural spirituality that
bases its premises on a permanent mental vacation. As we will see, figures
such as Benjamin and others were intrigued by the epistemological possi-
bilities that occultism offered. Hermetic semiosis offers us a useful glimpse
of how the dynamics of reawakening, as provoked by the Angel’s corpse,
operate.
One of the limits of scholarship on hermetic semiosis is the resistance
to rethinking the signifying process as it relates to the pre-modern world—
the period, that is, when hermeticism reached its highest point of theory-
making. There has been a tendency to understand hermetic drift strictly
from the vantage point of the present; what is needed is a re-evaluation of
the question from a perspective that owes as much to the world that elab-
orated the hermetic mind-set as to the present time. Hegel offers a useful
“allegory” to explain the nature of the signifying world that characterized
the periods during which hermetic thought was elaborated. In a passage
from Jenaer Realphilosophie, the German philosopher makes use of the ex-
pression “night of the world” to describe the experience of pure Self as “ab-
stract negativity,” the “the eclipse of (constituted) reality and the
contraction into self of the subject: The human being is this night, this
empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending
wealth of many representations, images, of which none happens to him—
or which are not present. This night, the inner nature, that exists here—
pure self—in phantasmagorical presentations, is night all around it, in
which here shoots a bloody head—there another white shape, suddenly
here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when
one looks human beings into the eye—into a night that becomes awful.”16
Slavoj Zizek comments on this passage first by observing that the lan-
guage of reason “can only emerge from the experience of this abyss”;17
however, by juxtaposing the quote from Hegel with the philosophy of
F. W. J. Von Schelling, he underscores an important insight of German
Idealism, namely that “the real, material world is not merely a (distorted)
reflection of suprasensible Ideas in the mode of Plotinus’s emanation but
involves a violent reversal of the proper hierarchical relation between
ideas . . . Schelling’s crucial point is that the domain of Ideas becomes ac-
tual Spirit only through its ‘egotist’ perversion/inversion, in the guise of
the absolute contraction into a real Person . . . reality emerges insofar as
the true ideal order gets inverted in itself, runs amok—in Schelling’s terms,
the inertia of external material reality is a proof of the divine madness, of the
fact that God himself was ‘out of his mind.’” 18
This insight sheds light of the epistemological break that took place and
that separates our present world views from the pre-modern one. A defin-
ing feature of the Neoplatonic subtext of hermeticism, as we will see, is the
hierarchical relationship that exists between the Eternal Idea and its ter-
restrial mutable ratios. Once this cognitive and epistemological hierarchy
is disrupted, in the way, for example, as described by Zizek, then the semi-
otic process is necessarily bound to reorganize itself. In the simplest of
terms, the semiotic processes that govern our current world views neces-
sarily clash with the one rooted in the Plotinian notion of “ideas that offer
transient emanations”—a notion which is of pivotal importance to her-
metic thought.
This shift in paradigms is what underscores the contemporary trend,
evinced in the critics of hermetic semiosis, the temptation to brand her-
metic reason as weak, deficient, and—why not?—infantile. Dealing with
the past is always problematic in that we speak about it from the point of
view of the present. Critics of hermetic semiosis accuse hermetic reason of
not being reliable because of its interpretative excesses. But many forget or
are not aware of a singularly important point: namely, that the ties to an
epistemological framework that established the Eternal Idea and the tran-
sient emanations as the poles of existence, also established rigid limits of
interpretation. But one can reach such a conclusion only after having paid
very close attention to the semiotic processes that characterized the pre-
modern world view.
The passage from Hegel bears somewhat of a resemblance to a passage

from Vico from the first book of the New Science:
But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so re-
mote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a
truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been
made by men, and its principles are therefore to be found within the mod-
ifications of our own human mind (New Science, P. 331)
This passage is autobiographical, Antonio Corsano suggests, as it de-

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

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

relationship to themselves and to something “other.” According to Merrell,
qualisignification pertains mostly to:
1) artworks that relate chiefly to themselves and only secondarily to the

physical world; 2) scientific metaphors, models, and theories before they are
placed alongside the teeming field of empirical objects, acts, and events; and
3) narrative portraying no particular perspective, much like that of medieval
writing . . . and to self-referential narrative of the “postmodern”
Sinisignification instead refers to:
1) artworks presumably “representing” the “real world,” which, as it invari-

ably turns out, are by and large false to their very premises; 2) scientific the-
ories and their respective observation statements arising from empirical
“data,” which, if at all viable, are destined sooner or later to be “refuted” and
replaced by other theories and observations; and 3) so-called mimetic prose,
which is likewise over the long haul false to itself.
Legisignification deals with:
1) art as “text,” “texture,” to be “read” and as such says what it is not more
that what it is; 2) the language of science, which is invariably and implicitly
meta-linguistic (it speaks about the nature of its utterances) and it is not
concerned with saying what the real world is, and 3) textuality and intertex-
tuality, the holistic field of written signs making up the self-organizing,
bootstrapping universe of narrative.23
Merrell offers a further explanation of these three categories by sug-

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

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

categories proposed by Merrell, we come to the following conclusion
about the semiotic nature of alchemical practice specifically, and generally
also the nature of the hermetic mind:
—qualisignification was hypertrophied and raised to a shrill pitch of me-

dieval feeling, emotion, sentiment, faith and belief.
—legisignification, what could be if only the proper conditions were to pre-
vail, became an ideal aided and abetted by the hopes and desires invested
in qualisignification, with relatively little regard for the actuality, the ex-
istent “semiotic objects,” of sinisignification.26
Qualisignification best typifies the semiotic process that characterizes

the practice of alchemy. Although alchemy was presented by way of its
constituent parts, it was understood by its practitioners as being a “science”

that was part of the “whole,” which included the human subject, nature,
and God. In alchemy there existed an unquestionable sense of total pres-
ence that was verified by the emotions and faith. Alchemy was a self-re-
flexive, self-contained, self-sufficient corpus of practices and beliefs that
instilled a sense of continuity in those who practiced it. In essence, there
existed no differentiation between alchemical work and the world in which
it occurred and for that matter no distinction between the alchemical
product and the individual who oversaw or perceived its creation. Nor was
there a subject/object or mind/body division that came about in the after-
math of Descartes’s philosophical revolution.
The art of Giotto di Bondone (1276 – 1337), which has little to with
the hermetic tradition but much to do with the human mind projecting
the union of noumenal and material onto works of art, is of assistance in
helping understand how the pre-modern semiotic process worked in that
art is a figuration, if you will, of this process. If one considers, for exam-
ple, his Lamentation (ca. 1305) it gradually becomes clear that the way in
which early-fourteenth-century Giotto perceived the relations of things in
the world shares little in common with us today. In the Lamentation there
is a depiction of a dead Christ surrounded by terrestrial figures in mourn-
ing below and angelic entities above. What is characteristic of this work is
that the images appear to be unreal and exaggerated. In Robert D. Ro-
manyshyn’s words, “ . . . they appear to be like cartoon figures we are so fa-
miliar with today . . . Giotto’s bodies . . . are bodies which shape, define,
gather, give form to, and/or outline an emotional situation. Or more di-
rectly said, these bodies are the emotional outline and form of the situa-
tion. If they seem unreal to us, it is because we have become accustomed
to defining the body apart from this situation . . . It is because within that
neutral, abstract, and geometric space of linear perspective vision we have
invented a neutral, abstract, and anonymous body to place within that
space. Giotto’s figures, however, are not in space. On the contrary, they are
the genesis of a space, the pivot around which the emotional space of sit-
uations appears. If they seem unreal to us, it is because we have become ac-
customed to regarding the body as being in a situation and have thereby
forgotten that the body is a situation. Giotto’s figures can remind us of this
fact, if we can open ourselves up to and reclaim the experienced sense of
an embodied life which still exists for each of us beneath the anonymous
and neutral body we have invented.”27
While Giotto does not belong to the canon of the hermetic tradition,
what this citation suggests are the many ways that are valid to make an
extended definition of hermetic semiosis. The problem of perspective
and the relation of body to space discussed in art history is not limited
just to the domain of the figurative arts. If anything, art becomes a fig-
ure that offers a visible representation of how humans perceive the way
in which they are linked to themselves and to the world. In fact, one
could replace Giotto’s Lamentation in the quotation from Romanyshyn
with the word “alchemy” and little would change as far as the semiotic
perception is concerned.
X
KABBALISTIC THESES
I When the Kabbalists talk about the light under the candelabra of
the seven arms that shines greater than the light that has been left
to us, they are thinking about an idea that coincides perfectly with
the new arithmetic that has been completely forgotten.
II Before the advent of the unsayable word, people would announce

messages by way of the idea of infinity.
III After announcing the message by means of this idea, people spoke
with the aid of the daughter of the Voice.
IV No one knows where the sepulcher is since it was raised to the level
of the highest joy, and in that joy it grounds its roots.
V Any pneuma that receives the breath of goodness is a new pneuma

that arrives from the Orient.
VI Angels with six wings are the Seraphim. They never take on a form
other than their own as they do not come into contact with the ter-
restrial world.
VII When the light of the mirror that gives reflection will come to re-
semble the mirror that gives no reflection, the distinction between
day and night will be dissolved.
VIII A Renaissance hermetic philosopher relates that while in Bologna

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

Sextus Empiricus, in his Adversus Mathematicos, conjectures that
given that there are things that are evident and those that are
nonevident, we necessarily have to make recourse to signs and
demonstrations. Sextus Empiricus suggests there are two types of
sign: the common (or the commemorative) and the proper (or in-
dicative). Any understanding of the sign, however, pivots on an
analysis of the nonevident. The nonevident includes within its
purview the unreal. The more we analyze the nonevident, the more
it becomes evident that unreality is not necessarily hyperuranian
but rather hidden in the presence of the immanent.
Y
AN OCCULT KIND OF ASCESIS
I
In a study on the spectral dimensions of cyberculture, Erik Davis offers ev-
idence concerning the link between cybertechnology and the hermetic
philosophy of the Renaissance.1 The past and the present, as it were, es-
tablish a relationship of seamlessness. However, as research in psychiatry
will tell us, confusing the present with the past or not being able to dis-
tinguish between the two could be a sure sign of a pathological psyche. But
we, like Davis, invoke the name of Benjamin to establish a critical frame-
work for envisioning the past and the present as being partners in a net-
work of seamless relationships. The issue here is not that of outlining a
genealogy rooted in the dynamics of cause and effect—that is, of demon-
strating the continuity linking a specific hermetic element rooted in a pre-
cise historical moment with a later element based in a different epoch. The
point is rather to explain how two different historical epochs can come
into contact with each other. In an attempt to underline the decayed na-
ture of any logic that seeks to link a cause to an effect, Benjamin, in a pre-
viously quoted thesis from “These on the Philosophy of History,” writes
that the historian who understands that an event can be only in an arbi-
trary sense the cause of a posthumous and disjointed effect “grasps the
constellation which his own era formed with a definite earlier one. Thus
he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is
shot through with chips of Messianic time.”
In other terms, history is not flat and linear but instead resembles a
labyrinth or a Chinese box in which the unthought relics of the past come
into contact, unbeknownst to us, with the present. As a result we maximize
the possibility of encountering unpredicted and unheard of links and con-

nections. In Richard Sieburth’s terms, “Instead of positing the past as a fixed
point toward which the present must somehow return in order to recover
or reconstruct it ‘as it really was,’ and conversely, instead of hypostatizing
the present as that which has been ineluctably prefigured or predetermined
by the past, the historian must make it clear that if there is any knowledge
of the past or present to be had, this can only result if there is the dialecti-
cal interchange that occurs when the two meet. The place they meet is what
Benjamin (following Proust) calls ‘awakening’ or ‘remembering,’ for just as
the moment of waking up provides a precarious synthesis whose thesis is
the dream from which it is just emerging and whose antithesis is the state
of total wakefulness it has yet to achieve, so what once was and what is still
to come momentarily collide to create the Now which the historian sud-
denly remembers.”2
“The Renaissance,” Will-Erich Peuckert informs us, “is a rebirth of the
‘occult sciences’ and not, as taught in the schools, the resurrection of clas-
sical philology and a forgotten vocabulary.” While it is true that this
provocative assertion could be debated at great length, it is equally true
that the Renaissance was the period in which hermetic reason witnesses its
greatest theoretical maturation as well as the beginning of its (violent)
demise, which resulted in its being relegated to the margins of intellectual
history. The fact is, however, that during the Renaissance hermeticism was
proposed as a new philosophy that would somehow help resolve the con-
flicts that afflicted Europe. In 1591 Francesco Patrizi published a work ad-
vocating a “new philosophy,” the Nova De Universis Philosophia. In the
preface addressed to Pope Gregory XIV (Nicolò Sfrangiati), Patrizi hopes
for the restoration of a sapientia that is not mere vacuous speculation but
instead informed by the same critical tenets that dominated the day. The
new philosophy, which was deeply rooted in the hermetic tradition, was in
Patrizi’s mind reconcilable with Catholic theology. But the new philoso-
phy soon became a condemned philosophy, as Patrizi’s book met the same
fate as did Bernardo Telesio’s De Rerum Naturam, and the Omnia Opera of
both Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella, in that it was placed in
the Index.
A question that the history of ideas has not taken seriously enough:
What was and what is the fate of Renaissance hermeticism? Giorgio Agam-
ben has proposed a suggestive response to this question. In his view the en-
tire development of modern philosophy takes place in the semantic
AN OCCULT KIND OF ASCESIS 145
juxtapositions that link pneuma-spiritus-esprit-Geist. This is so, Agamben

continues, since the modern subject of experience and knowledge has its
origins in a mystical idea; as a consequence, all explanations of the link be-
tween experience and knowledge in contemporary culture inevitably en-
counter obstacles that are difficult to overcome. But ultimately, the link
between hermeticism and modern science appears much stronger than one
might at first believe. In Agamben’s own words:
Through science, it is in fact Neoplatonic mysticism and astrology that

make their entry into modern culture, not Aristotle’s separate mind and in-
corruptible cosmos. And if astrology was subsequently abandoned (only
subsequently: we must not forget that Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Copernicus
were also astrologers, as was Roger Bacon, a fervent advocate of astrology
who anticipates experimental science in many respects), it is because its fun-
damental principle—the union of experience and knowledge—had been so
much assimilated as a principle of the new science through the constitution
of a new subject that its essentially mythic-divine apparatus became super-
fluous. The rationalism/irrationalism which is so irreducibly a part of our
culture has a hidden genesis in this primary kinship between astrology, mys-
ticism and science; the astrological revival among Renaissance intellectuals
is the most striking symptom of this. Historically, this genesis is linked to
what has now been firmly established thanks to Warburghian philology:
that the humanistic restoration of Antiquity was a restoration not of classi-
cal Antiquity but of the culture of late Antiquity, in particular of Neopla-
tonism and Hermeticism. Thus a critique of mysticism, astrology and
alchemy must necessarily imply a critique of science, and only the recovery
of a dimension in which science and experience were each to find their own
place of origin could prevail over the rationalism/irrationalism opposition.3
To the surprise of many, the events in Michel Foucault’s life shed an ex-
panse of light on the question of Renaissance hermeticism’s fate. We should
recall that in the second chapter of The Order of Things Foucault had made
a link between contemporary linguistic theories and Renaissance hermeti-
cism, as well as encouraging the reappearance of the hermetic materiality of
the sign.4 According to one of his biographers, Foucault’s most sublime
form of philosophical investigation involved seeking a different, occult
truth hidden somewhere in the crevices of his soul and body. “But think-
ing and writing,” James Miller states about Foucault, “ were not the only
ways in which he had tried to take care of himself: for at the same time, he
had pursued a ‘critical ontology,’ trying to transform and transfigure his

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

non hiding of the hidden being by beings and then thematized through the
notion of Lichtung as lucus a non lucendo, like that light which gives itself
only in the sporadic dispersing of the obscurity in the clearing.8
The presence of a link between Heidegger and the hermetic tradition

has not escaped the attention of an historian of philosophy such as Paolo
Rossi. Rossi establishes a fivefold analogy between the author of Being and
Time and hermetic thought. According to Rossi, both hermeticism and
Heideggerian thought share
1. the notion of a originary concealed knowledge

2. the fact that history moves from a primordial essence to decay and
oblivion
3. a strongly elitist approach to knowledge
4. a powerful emphasis on the charismatic nature of a spiritual leader
and a corresponding de-emphasizing of skepsis and intellectual
transparency
5. a strong preference for obscurity over clarity9
Rossi is approaching Heidegger in a polemical way as the emphasis is

on the German philosopher’s delegitimization of a rigorousness and
sound understanding of what defines philosophical discourse. And his
attitude to hermetic reason is equally negative. As some would have it,
the problem with hermetic semiosis, or what in general we can term es-
oteric semiotics, is that its validity, as a way to produce meanings and as
far as the ethics of interpretation are concerned, is highly suspect if not
a hallucinatory aberration of human culture. For example, Umberto Eco
characterizes hermetic semiosis as being essentially a weak, defective, im-
paired mode of linguistic communication. The hermetic sign is an icon
of frailty as far as the potential for human signifying practices are con-
cerned. Paradoxically, it is precisely the fragile nature of the hermetic
sign that allows it to perform a basic function of the lyric sign—that is,
to grasp the ungraspable.
But what is it about hermeticism that makes it such a powerful ally of
the postmodern experience, as some have argued? In his essay “Goethe’s
Elective Affinities,” Walter Benjamin offers a way of dealing with this ques-
tion. In an attempt to explain the dynamics of any interpretative enterprise,
Benjamin finds himself obliged to take the retro-hermetic path and conju-
gates the name of the critic with that of the alchemist:
Critique seeks the truth of a work of art; commentary, its material content.
The relation between the two is determined by that basic law of literature
according to which the more significant the work, the more inconspicu-
ously and intimately its truth content is bound up with its material content.
If, therefore, the works that prove enduring are precisely those whose truth
is most deeply sunken in their material content, then, in the course of this
duration, the concrete realities rise up before the eyes of the beholder all the
more distinctly the more they die out in the world. With this, however, to
judge by appearances, the material content and the truth content, united at
the beginning of a work’s history, set themselves apart from each other in
the course of its duration, because the truth content comes to the fore.
More and more, therefore, the interpretation of what is striking and curi-
ous—that is, the material content—becomes a prerequisite for any later
critic. One may compare him to a paleographer in front of a parchment
whose faded text is covered by the lineaments of a more powerful script
which refers to that text. As the paleographer would have to begin by read-
ing the latter script, the critic would have to begin with commentary. And
with one stroke, an invaluable criterion of judgement springs out for him;
only now can he raise the basic critical question of whether the sem-
blance/luster of the basic truth content is due to material content, or the life
of the material content to the truth content. For as they set themselves apart
from each other in the work, they decide on its immortality. In this sense
the history of works prepares for their critique, and thus historical distance
increases their power. If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a burn-
ing funeral pyre, then the commentator stands before it like a chemist, the critic
like an alchemist. Whereas, for the former, wood and ash remain the sole objects
of his analysis, for the latter only the flame itself preserves an enigma: that of
what is alive. Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame con-
tinues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has
been experienced [italics my own].10
Hannah Arendt was astonished to see Benjamin equate the critic with the
alchemist, and writes, “[T]he critic as an alchemist practicing the obscure
art of transmuting the futile elements of the real into the shining, endur-
ing gold of truth, or rather watching and interpreting the historical process
that brings about such magical transfiguration—whatever we may think of
this figure, it hardly corresponds to anything we usually have in mind
when we classify a writer as a literary critic.”11 But then again Benjamin

was fond of fusing together materialist ideology with his style of philo-
sophical interpretation, which he had once described as being “innocently
archaic.”12 We also need to remember the role that the Jewish Kabbalistic
tradition played within his writings up to his death. Benjamin is a sign of
the living hermetic idea that has incubated itself in the monumental texts
of this century.
In his provocative book on Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Cou-
liano offers one of the most incisive readings of Renaissance hermeticism,
a reading that overlaps with a meditation on the nature of modern
thought. After illustrating the great extent to which the hermetic tradition
has been neglected and misunderstood (thanks, in Couliano’s view, to the
censoring of the phantasmatic imagination on the part of the Reforma-
tion, the Counter Reformation, and in turn by modern science), and how
this neglect has brought about “fatal results” for Western civilization, Cou-
liano expresses a hope: “ . . . that a new Renaissance, a rebirth of the world,
may overcome all our neuroses, all conflicts, and all divisions existing be-
tween us. For such a Renaissance to appear a new Reformation must arise,
effecting once again a profound modification of the human imagination
in order to impress on it other paths and other goals.”13 It would not be
difficult to mistake such a wish for some form of New Age babbling. The
fact is, however, that Couliano was a serious scholar of the history of reli-
gions and had a strong scholarly interest in Renaissance hermeticism. As
vague as his wish might appear, it is nonetheless the sentiment and ex-
pression of someone who has crossed the cartography of ideas, including
the many sediments, that have shaped the West.
II
In the late 1970s, when the crisis of reason was on the research agenda of
many Italian thinkers, Franco Rella saw it necessary to invent a new form
of knowing: “ . . . if it is necessary to destroy a rationality founded on the
occulting of unconscious pulsational tensions, it is necessary, however, to
construct a new type of rationality, mercilessly secular, that heeds attention
also to obscurity, also to the irrational, of that which, repressed and hid-
den, reveals itself as mystery and enchantment.”14 In Gabriele La Porta’s
view, Rella’s project for a new rational metaphysics bears an extraordinary
similarity to Giordano Bruno’s lucid investigation into the creative and
epistemological powers of the imaginative faculty.15 But let us align Rella’s

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

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

things in mind, foremostly the nature of transformations. According to
Jean Baudrillard, transformation “knows neither metaphor nor the opera-
tion of meaning.” That is to say, meaning does not slide from form to
form; instead, in Baudrillard’s view, the forms themselves slide from one to
another, “as in dance movements or in oracular prophecies.” Moreover,
this form has rather specific characteristics as it is neither a psychological
nor a sexual body but “a body freed from all subjectivity, a body recover-
ing the animal felinity of the pure object, of pure movement, of a pure ges-
tural transparition.” Baudrillard qualifies this notion by adding that the
movement from one form to another is a means of disappearing and not
of dying. Disappearance entails one’s dissemination in appearances: “and
dying doesn’t do any good; one must still know how to disappear. Living
doesn’t do any good; one must still seduce.”20
Baudrillard builds on his logic of metamorphosis by claiming that
transformation lacks a symbolic order; instead, it is equipped with a “ver-
tiginous succession where the subject loses itself in ritual sequences . . . it
is only when this transfiguration of forms from one into the other comes
to a halt that a symbolic order appears, that meaning is metamorphized ac-
cording to the law.” In fact, the metaphor, an essential component in the
logic of metamorphosis, is a tropological figure for the experience of exile.
However, Baudrillard speculates, “in exile one can always maintain a com-
fortable distance, a pathetic, dramatic, critical, aesthetic distance—the or-
phan-like serenity of one’s own world, this is the ideal figure of the
territory.” But exile is something quite different from deterritorialization,
which “is no longer exile at all, and it is no more a metaphoric figure, it is
a figure of metastasis; a deprivation of meaning and territory, lobotomy of
the body resulting from the turmoil of the circuits.”21 For example,
Bruno’s presence as it is projected to the present century assumes a deter-
ritorialized form in that the body of his thought means something quite
different from what it might have meant for his own time.
However, in observing the role that a purely materialist science has
played in defining the operations of the human, thus displacing the reli-
gious, metaphysical, and philosophical definitions, Baudrillard observes:
“We are in a system where there is no more soul, no more metaphor of the
body—the fable of the unconscious itself has lost most of its resonance.
No narrative can come to metaphorize our presence; no transcendence can
play a role in our definition; our being is exhausting itself in molecular
linkings and neuronic convolutions.”22 One of the aims of this unit as well
as of this book in general is to suggest that not only can a narrative (which
I employ here aphoristically as a definition for poetic logic) recite a criti-
cal role in defining both the existential and the hyperreal, but transcen-
dence itself (which now constitutes a conceptual and practical element
that needs to be rediscovered and then archaeologically unearthed) has the
potential to play an important role as far as understanding the real is con-
cerned. So while Baudrillard is essentially correct in his assessment of the
hegemony of a materialist scientific mode of cultural exegesis, it is equally
true that we need to make the effort to rediscover the use of narrative or
poetic reason and transcendence in a new cultural time and place.
To this very day Giordano Bruno remains one of the most controversial
and enigmatic figures of the history of ideas. Bruno is essentially a two-
pronged problem: What did he mean for his time, and what does he mean
today? While I remain sensitive to the first question, it is the latter issue that
most concerns me. Carlo Sini provides an eloquent point of departure for
understanding Bruno in respect to contemporary intellectual practices. In
a discussion dealing with Bruno’s De Umbris Idearum, Sini comments that
“these expressions of calculated prudence will certainly not surprise those
who are familiar with Bruno’s Latin and Italian texts, so exuberant, rich
with double-meanings and interlaced with allusive and allegorical images,
in . . . the style of the times, but also in the style of a thought that found its
centre and its essential reason in the images of the art of memory and in the
notion of thought as arcane writing and as painting which is in its own way
hieroglyphic. This style of thinking, which perished with the imposition of
that which we today call modernity, has only recently achieved conceptual
clarity . . . The day is still far, but perhaps not very remote, when free the-
oretical thought will be able to recover this obscure region of its past and
will be able to traverse it and adventure in it, in order perhaps to discover
that not only behind Leibniz’s reflections on language and writing, and
more generally on logic, but also behind Peirce’s research on ‘graphs’ and
semiotics, or behind Wittgenstein’s arduous meditation on the logic of rep-
resentation, there is an unthought and unwitting heritage, issues that re-
emerge from the most remote antiquity of human thought and its signs,
which assume, from time to time, different semblances, incomparable va-
lences, but also exigencies of truth which tenaciously return to provoke
thought.”23 Sini is suggesting, among other things, that we need to scruti-
nize the fundamental contributions of figures such as Leibniz, Peirce, and
Wittgenstein in order to uncover a palimpsest that belongs to a radically

different cultural context, such as Bruno’s.
Bruno’s philosophy was heavily indebted to the hermetic tradition:
Bruno had absorbed the Corpus Hermeticum and the teachings of impor-
tant hermetic figures such as Marsilio Ficino. The most important aspect of
Bruno’s hermeticism was the art of memory. He transformed (in a way sim-
ilar to the work of Giulio Camillo) the art of memory from a technique for
remembering to a means of knowing and manipulating the secrets of the
universe. According to the hermetic mind-set, the truth rests in the ex-
traterrestrial bodies that contain the spirit animating the universe. The Re-
naissance magus sought to control the spirit or energy through talismans or
special images that they would manipulate through their memory. By ma-
nipulating mental images we can also control the way we and others per-
ceive reality. Reality is transformed by means of the psyche’s ability to store,
recall, and dispose images. That is to say, by means of the art of memory we
discover new dimensions of reality and unreality from our subjective point
of view, but we also encourage or seduce others to see things in a different
way. Hermetic art of memory was evidently also about power.
Bruno wrote a series of memory treatises: De Umbris Idearum (1582),
Cantus Circaeus (1582), Explicatio Triginta Sigillorum (1582), Lampas
Triginta Statuarum (1587), and De imaginum, signorum, et idearum com-
positione (1591). These works could be described as manuals for the sci-
ence of the imagination. One could also argue that the hermetic art of
memory is a cognitive science, a process for creating and for knowing.
The memory manuals are also self-help books, as they offer a wealth of
information on the nature of mental images and how to use them for
one’s benefit.
In the De Umbris Idearum we see that the star-images are what consti-
tute the “shadows of ideas,” shadows of realness that are much closer to re-
ality than are the corporeal shadows in the terrestrial world. The text
granted to the philosopher by Hermes, as Bruno writes, is concerned with
“the shadows of ideas contracted for inner writing” in that it offers a cata-
logue of magical images of the stars to be impressed on the memory. The
process of impressing the images of “superior agents” on memory is gnose-
ological in nature since one will know things below from the perspective
of above. The De Umbris Idearum begins with an unambiguous warning:
the reader will be permitted to participate in the secret knowledge Bruno
is about to impart on the condition that the adeptus be willing to enter
into the labyrinth of the hermetic sciences without the aid of a thread
stemming to a previous reality. What is implied in Bruno’s advice is that
the construction of memory is very much an anti-teleological activity. The
aim of Bruno’s art of memory is to create knowledge, a mnemonic com-
position of the world within the cartographic space of the memory’s the-
ater. Bruno’s science is non-aprioristic as it moves not under the aegis of
pre-established impulses but rather under the influence of the transient
shadows’ unpredictable reaction to the fixedness of the eternal. It is only
when we begin to perceive Bruno’s mnemonic philosophy in this manner
that his closeness to late-twentieth-century thought becomes progressively
evident. Bruno’s art of memory is not limited to being a mode of remem-
bering things; moreover, the memory is not the medium but the very
“thing” of a hermeneutics that attempts to find paths linking the eternal
with the unpredictable.
In the De Umbris Idearum Mercury clearly states that the book on the
shadows of ideas has been hidden for much time in tenebrosity. Bruno will
unconceal the book to the light of day with stipulated conditions. The
knowledge contained in the book is secret; it is occult, inaccessible except
for a select few. The knowledge is hermetic and antidemocratic and must
be protected from those who would never be able to understand it.
Bruno is cautious in his usage of the word “shadow.” A shadow is not
darkness but images of darkness in light or even images of light in dark-
ness, or possibly participating in both light and darkness, or composed of
light and darkness, or a mixture of light and darkness. This is so “not be-
cause the truth is not full of light, or because it is false light . . . but be-
cause it is an image of that which is true or false. The shadow is then an
image of light, participating in light, light which is not full.” The shadow
is an image of a murky light, of a lucence that does not blind.
A notion central to both Bruno’s philosophy and Benjamin’s poetic logic
is the relationship between the eternal and the transience of temporal exis-
tence. A major function of hermetic mnemonics is that of inventing or dis-
covering the passage that links the transient to the eternal. The morphology
of the passage consists of the images of the many terrestrial forms whose im-
perfection is redeemed in their “ideal” celestial counterpart. Thus while the
teleology of this process consists in knowing the perfect unity of things that
exist in the domain of eternity, the means pivots on the mental manipula-
tion of the incomplete images within the geography of the memory. The
mind will know eternity only once it has experienced the precariousness of
earthly figures. Indeed, since the eternal ideas are the principal forms of
things, in adherence to which all is given life, we should therefore form in
ourselves the shadows of ideas. The shadows become the language and texts
we employ to interpret the silence of the eternal.
While Bruno is undoubtedly creating a hierarchy that privileges the
“Idea” over the terrestrial manifestation or shadow, what must not be un-
derestimated is the centrality of the shadowy figures in the process upon
which cognition of the eternal pivots. The transformation of images in the
memory system will lead the intellect to an intelligible vision of the world.
Moreover, the world of the psyche that houses the image-laden memory is
much closer to the truth than is the external world of historical time. The
figure transformed by memory speaks with greater proximity to the eter-
nal than does any language that intentionally disrupts the artery, however
jagged it may be, connecting shadows to ideas.
But any discussion concerning the relationship between the time of
decay and the atemporality of the eternal in Bruno must be highly sen-
sitive to what the hermetic philosopher terms the triad of the infig-
urable. “Ipsa sunt Chaos, Orcus, Nox.”24 Between Chaos, “primum
omnium,” and Night, “materia prima,” there hides the liquid mael-
strom of Orcus, or infinite desire. A maelstrom of seduction inscribed
in Chaos itself: an enchanting vertigo, as Adelia Noferi would phrase it,
that constitutes the occult and intoxicating wonder of Chaos.25 There is
clearly a logic that governs the symbiotic relationship between desire
and Chaos. The former is characterized by absence, which unyieldingly
defers the discovery of a final tangible origin of all things. Chaos also is
absence and its wonder rests in a desire to locate it cartographically.
This is, however, impossible and thus Chaos-desire remains an undi-
vidable binomial.
Bruno provides a very concise definition of Chaos: “Unfigured, infig-
urable. And since any figure is necessarily corporeal physical matter it
[Chaos] precedes any body or matter and is thus free of them.”26 More-
over, Chaos is free of any predetermined telos that would attenuate the sig-
nificance of the uncanny, awe-inspiring unpredictability of human
experience. This is the root of the conflict that Bruno’s hermetic philoso-
phy would encounter with any form of classical rationalism. While the
method of classical rationalism is faithful to fixed rational postulates,
Bruno’s science hovers above a rhetorical geography in which any hierar-
chy that privileges an ordained end is absent.
Similar to the mind of God, Chaos is a void that could never be filled
although it holds everything. It can be perceived solely as a boundary of
demarcation that separates the various dimensions. Chaos is the simulta-
neous presence of absence and emptiness for all that is present and full:
“Nothing exists in it, it has nothing. We must not perceive the presence of
bodies in it as a sign of its ability to receive a fullness. Rather, the bodies
exist since the dimensions of the void exist alongside the dimensions of the
bodies . . . thus nothing could escape its presence.”27 Chaos is the obscu-
rity that resides in the tangible and audible but that is nonetheless fleeting
and incommunicable. It is the specter that haunts the act of communica-
tion. Chaos is indivisible yet it constitutes division and dimension:
Chaos is nothing else but the receptacle of dimensioned and divisible bod-
ies in which there occurs division and where everything is indivisible . . .
Chaos is one and continued everywhere: it is not distinguishable from di-
versity, distinction, contiguity and continuity of bodies . . . It does not enter
into composition as a part although it is inscribed in any compound.28
Chaos, this atopic obscurity, is the mother of images. To use technical

Brunian language, Chaos is the “subjectum,” the place where images are
clothed with figures and given traces of intelligible meaning. The faceless
obscurity is what grants to things accessible signification. The “subjectum”
is the “sinus inexplebilis formarum et specierum,” the locus of metamor-
phosis, of multiplicity, of the infinite combination of things.29 The shapes
that emerge from Chaos are akin to the images that surge forth from the
imagination. The shadow of the simulacre is impressed on the universe of
both the res and the res significativae.
Chaos and the infinite productivity of the imagination is made explicit
in Bruno: “Hic adeo amplissimus sinus intitulatus Phantasia.”30 Images
and figures are endowed with the lability of erring and aimless simulacre
that peregrinate metamorphically from one form to another within the
context of their incessant composition and decomposition.
This unfigured thing is characterized by thirty conditions, the first being that
the vicissitude and order of light to light be understood. The appearance and
the return of light indicates darkness and light . . . Just as we do not know
the shadow if not for its difference from light [light of course is known for
itself ], so we are not able to know Night or matter if not through succession
on the same subject of the forms that are the daughters of light.31
But what is of interest is not just the nature of Bruno’s hermetic science
but indeed its fate. If we are to believe what scholarship has to say about
Bruno and his kind, the occult sciences (and the art of memory in partic-
ular) died with the advent of classical rationalism. But while we are not
claiming that the news of its death was an exaggeration, it is true that there
are much too many affinities between the thought of some important
thinkers of this century and the hermetic past. In the present case, the
thought of Walter Benjamin. The Passagen-werk and Bruno’s memory trea-
tises tread parallel paths. Both are an accumulation and assortment of
ruins. Benjamin’s work is the outline of an edifice, while Bruno’s works are
an outline of a structure. Both are based on the idea of a reawakening. We
reawaken to find these ruins, we reawaken again every time we assemble
and reassemble them.
For Benjamin, David Michael Levin asserts, “modernity under late capi-
talism is dominated, and haunted, by dream-images and commodified visual
fetishes: visual processes re-enchanting the world that the Enlightenment,
and then Marxism, had struggled to free from illusion.”32 However, the core
of Benjamin’s hermetic mind-set is to be found in what Gershom Scholem
calls “Walter Benjamin’s Angel.” This Angel is at once Klee’s Angelus Novus,
the description of Klee’s Angel in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”
but also the figure Benjamin talks about in the “Agesilaus Santander.” Sc-
holem states that Benjamin’s genius is “concentrated in this angel”; the Angel
is for Benjamin “the occult reality of his self.”33
Against the image of a Benjamin imbued in Marxist materialism, Sc-
holem presents a Benjamin who is closely linked to the mystical and the
occult. Such an interpretation is encouraged by passages, among others,
such as the section entitled “To the Planetarium” from Benjamin’s “One-
Way Street,” where we read that “Nothing distinguishes the ancient from
the modern man so much as the former’s absorption in a cosmic experi-
ence scarcely known to later periods.” But the relationship between hu-
mans and the cosmos had been in the past characterized by a form of
epistemological narcosis that was to be supplanted by the empirical and
ratio-logical mind-sets: “The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had
been different: the ecstatic trance [Rausch]. For it is in this experience
alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is
remotest from us, and never one without the other . . . It is the dangerous
error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoid-
able, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry
nights.”34 The cognito-epistemological experience Benjamin describes

here is one that restitutes to the empty poetic sign a property essentially
unknown to us today: the poetic sign as the messenger of an experience
and a body of knowledge that has its own “reason.”
Any understanding of Benjamin’s hermetic philosophy is informed by
insights offered by a short piece he wrote, “Doctrine of the Similar,” dur-
ing the spring of 1933 on the island of Ibiza, which expounds a theory of
occult phenomena. The element that brings Benjamin in relatively close
intellectual contact with other hermetic philosophers is the insistence on
the issue of hidden, secret correspondences that exist between entities in
the life-world in general. In fact, the opening sentence of “Doctrine of the
Similar” reads: “Insight into the areas of the ‘similar’ has a fundamental
importance for the illumination of large areas of occult knowledge.”35
Benjamin does suggest that the magical correspondences that humans per-
ceived in the past have been greatly reduced in the present age. Yet, he also
admits the possibility of a transformation of the magical correspondences
into something else, and cites the example of the horoscope to explain this
notion. To be sure, the astrological charts contain information and data
whose “rational” significance is barely intelligible to us but fully under-
stood by humans in the past. “The horoscope,” Benjamin writes, “must be
understood as an original totality which astrological interpretation merely
analyzed . . . we must always take account of the fact that celestial process
could be imitated by those who lived earlier, both collectively and indi-
vidually.”36 The central point that Benjamin is seeking to make is that the
faculty of human imitation is at the root of the experiential nature of as-
trological thinking.
The understanding of similarity does not involve the mechanical lu-
cubrations of ratio-logical reflection but rather occurs like an instanta-
neous flash: “It offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a
constellation of stars.”37 For this reason the cognition of similarities is en-
cased within the purview of a “time-moment.” The fact remains, however,
that we no longer possess the cognitive trait necessary in order to perceive
the similarities existing between humans and a constellation of stars. We
do have, Benjamin states, at least one instrument that allows us to shed
light on the mystery of hidden similarities, namely, language. Benjamin
locates the residue of the mimetic faculty in verbal language, the strongest
example being the role of onomatopoeia in human speech. In fact, Ben-
jamin quotes Rudolph Leonhard’s idea that “every word—and the whole
language—is onomatopeic.”38 This notion is verified, in Benjamin’s view,

in the concept of similarity: “If, from the different languages, one were to
arrange words meaning the same thing around what they mean as their
centre, then it would be necessary to examine if these words, which often
have not the slightest similarity to each other, are similar to that meaning
in their center.”39 Benjamin does recognize here that such an interpreta-
tion has much in common with theological and mystical ideas of lan-
guage, but without necessarily “being alien to empirical philology.” In
essence, Benjamin is convinced that language and writing constitute an
archive of hidden correspondences; but the human being is himself or
herself the carrier of these occult affinities: “What the stars effected mil-
lennia ago in the moment of being born into human existence wove itself
into human existence on the basis of similarity.”40 The hermetic theories
expounded in “Doctrine of the Similar” inform the essence of Benjamin’s
short autobiographic writing “Agesilaus Santander,” whose main figure is
the Angel and that Scholem terms a “thoroughly hermetic text.”41 There
are two versions of this brief piece, a first one dated “Ibiza, August 12,
1933” and a second and longer version dated the following day. Just as in
the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the main subject of “Agesilaus
Santander” is Klee’s Angelus Novus. However, the name “Agesilaus San-
tander,” Scholem tells us, is an anagram for “Der Angelus Satanas,” “The
Angel Satan.”42 This name, according to Scholem, “joins together the an-
gelic and demonic forces of life in the most intimate union . . . Like every
truly secret magic name, it may not be entrusted or disclosed to unau-
thorized ones.”43 The point is that the Angel hides and protects the name
of Benjamin’s life and existence, and in approaching his vision of the self
in such a way, Benjamin is unquestionably rehearsing some of the main
traits of monotheistic angelology. For example, in the second version of
“Agesilaus Santander,” Benjamin writes that the Angel “resembles all from
which I have had to part: persons and above all things. He makes them
transparent, and behind all of them there appears to me the one for
whom they are intended.”44 In other words, the name of the Angel is the
invisible archive of Benjamin’s spiritual and material existence; in fact, in
the first version Benjamin actually makes reference to summoning the
Angel.45 But the element that the Angel seeks the most is happiness that
is figured in the unrepeatable instant of meaning and of being, which
shatters the repetitive logic of history. In Benjamin’s own words, the
Angel “wants happiness: the conflict in which lies the ecstasy of the
unique, [‘once only’] new, as yet unlived with that bliss of the ‘once
more,’ the having again, the lived.”46
We conclude this unit on occult correspondences and ascesis by offer-
ing an observation about Bruno’s hermetic heresy in relation to Benjamin’s
Angel and Foucault’s epistemo-erotic practices. In a document dated
Rome, September 9, 1599, and pertinent to Bruno’s trial for heresy, we
read that the six members of the tribunal looking into his case all agree on
submitting Bruno to corporeal torture as a means to obtaining a more sat-
isfying confession.47 Pope Clement VIII did not however grant the ap-
proval necessary for the carrying out of the torture. In other words, while
Foucault, we are told, practiced Sado-masochism as a means to experience
an occult ascesis, Bruno’s occult ascesis lead to an unwilling and finally
aborted torture session. But what does this superimposition of facts and
interpretations mean? Is Foucault a victim of the eternal return of the same
(is his life a demonic parody of Bruno’s)? Or was his erotico-philosophic
gesture an unprecedented and possibly unrepeatable act of human signifi-
cation? For now let us say that what Bruno, Benjamin, and Foucault share
is the notion that something (both non-rational and obscure, yet that gives
light) of great import rests occult in the material culture of human experi-
ence. It is the occult truth of psychic and corporeal illumination for
Bruno; the occult philosophical light of sado-masochist pleasure for Fou-
cault; the occult and intoxicating affinities between material objects pro-
tected by the name of the Angel for Benjamin. Finally, in all three cases it
is a search for the ancient experience of the infinite joy of cosmic narcosis
for which we today have a great nostalgia.
Z
ANNUNCIATION
O
skar Panizza, a man learned in music, philosophy, medicine, and
psychiatry, and whose deranged mind forced him into the Her-
rogshöhe mental asylum where he died, imagined the scene of the
Annunciation in The Inn of the Trinity (1899): “In her sleep, Mary heard
what seemed like a storm hit her house. One of the shutters opened and
suddenly she saw a huge white shape with luminous hair standing on its
feet in front of her. This shape hovered over her and whispered something
into her ear.” The Angel who utters the inaudible words into the Virgin’s
ear announces itself as a meteorological disturbance. This is so because the
Angel is “disturbing” the invisible line that separates the perceivable from
the unperceivable. Any transmutation that involves the visible and the in-
visible necessarily disturbs humans living in a sensorial-centric world.
When we say that someone is “disturbed” with reference to their mental
health, what we are actually saying is that they receive messages and an-
nouncements that pay no heed to the distinction between what is real and
what is unreal, what is visible and what is invisible. But although humans
have no wings, as Paul Claudel writes in Positions and Propositions, there is
enough strength to fall. That is, they have the weight (PENSUM) of
thinking (PENSARE). Instead, the Angel possesses only the lightness of
unrepeatable and unthought knowledge. The closest that humans come to
such a state of being is through the unbearable empty truth of the poetic
sign. Alberto Moravia had a similar idea in mind when, in commenting on
the violent (indeed sacrificial) death of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975, he an-
nounced that “il poeta dovrebbe essere sacro” (the poet should be sacred).
The “lyric sacredness” conjured up here would ultimately become the new
name of signification.
NOTES
A
1. Lorenzo Papi, Marino Marini (Turin: Priuli e Verlucca Editori, 1987).
B
1. M. H. Keefer, “The Dreamer’s Path: Descartes and the Sixteenth Cen-
tury,” Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996), 30–76.
2. Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, trans. Nancy Pearson
(Boulder and London: Shambhala, 1978), pp. 5–6.
3. Corbin, The Man of Light, pp. 5–6.
4. Shaikh Ahmad Ahsa’i, “On the Esoteric Meaning of the Tomb,” in Henry
Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, trans. Nancy Pearson (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 189.
5. Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, trans. William Weaver and Stephen
Sartarelli (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 187.
6. Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, trans.
Ralph Manheim. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 22.
7. Corbin, Creative Imagination, p. 220.
8. Rafael Alberti, Sobre Los Ángeles (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, S. A.,
1959), p. 86.
9. Alberti, Sobre Los Ángeles, p. 22.
10. Eugenio Montale, Satura (Milan: Mondadori, 1971), p. 90.
11. John Chrysostomos, Hom. III, 326–329 in Sur l’incompréhensibilité de
Dieu, ed. J. Daniélou, A. M. Malingrey, R. Flacelière. Sources Chrétiennes
28 bis (Paris, 1970).
12. John Chrysostomos, Hom., IV, 222–228.230.
13. Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso,
1997), pp. 86, 87.
14. Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis and Lon-
don: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 69.
15. Cited in Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, The Physics of Angels (San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 83.
16. Rilke, “Orchards” from The Roses in The Complete French Poems of R. M.
Rilke, trans. A. Poulin (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1986), p. 138.
17. Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations, trans. Felicia
McCarren(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 76–77.
18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and
B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 6.44.
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Dithyrambs of Dionysus, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Red-
ding Ridge: Black Swan Books, 1984).
20. Henri Meschonnic, Le signe et le poème (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 48.
C
1. Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets for?” in Poetry, Language, Thought,
trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), p. 91.
2. Heidegger, “What Are Poets for?,” p. 92.
5. Giacomo Leopardi, “Dialogo della moda e della morte” in Operette morali,
ed. P. Ruffilli (Milan: Garzanti, 1995), p. 35.
D
1. Franco Rella, La battaglia della verità (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986), p. 41.
2. Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, trans. P. A. Schlipp (La Salle and
Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1979), p. 7.
3. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 28.
4. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, p. 29.
5. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, p. 47.
6. “Interview,” Corriere della sera (Terza pagina), Tuesday, May 6, 1997.
7. Wislawa Szymborska, View with a Grain of Sand, trans. S. Baranczak and
C. Cavanaugh (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace,
1993), p. 6.
8. Szymborska, View with a Grain of Sand, p. 148.
9. J.-F. Lyotard, The Post Modern Explained, trans. and ed. J. Pefanis and M.
Thomas (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),
pp. 15–16.
10. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri, in Tutte le opere, ed. F. Flora
(Milan: Mondadori, 1967) I, 140.
NOTES 165
11. Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam
Whitsitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), p. 104.
12. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations,
ed. H. Arendt and trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 263.
13. Walter Benjamin, “The Currently Effective Messianic Elements,” in Se-
lected Writings, Volume 1: 1913 – 1926, p. 213.
14. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 119.
E
1. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and
Resurrection (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), pp. 42 ff.
2. Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma und Mythos (Hamburg: Reich, 1954), p. 17.
3. Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, The Physics of Angels (San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 193–194.
4. The points summarize the contents of “Necessità dell’angelologia” found
in Corbin’s Il paradosso del monoteismo, trans. Gabriele Rebecchi (Casale
Monferrato: Marietti, 1986).
5. Corbin, Il paradosso del monoteismo, p. 39.
6. Corbin, Il paradosso del monoteismo, pp. 41–42.
7. Summa Theologiae I, q. 54, a. 4.
9. Fox and Sheldrake, The Physics of Angels, p. 87.
10. Hildegard of Bingen, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Migne,
1844–91), 197, 1041C.
11. Hildegard of Bingen, Patrologia Latina, 1045A.
12. Hildegard of Bingen, Patrologia Latina, 1043C.
13. Henry Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, trans. Leonard Fox (West
Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 1995), p. 9.
14. Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, pp. 10–11.
15. Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, pp. 14–15.
16. Cited in Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, p. 31.
17. Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, p. 32.
18. Maurice Merleau–Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 257.
19. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins,
trans. P. Brault and M. Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993),
pp. 4–5.
F
1. Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, trans. Miguel E. Vatter. (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 41–42.
2. Floyd Merrell, Signs Grow: Semiosis and Life Process (Toronto, Buffalo, and
London: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 275.
3. Merrell, Signs Grow, p. x.
4. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Foreword by Paul Bové
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p.
105.
5. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 104.
6. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997).
7. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. and foreword by
Tom Conley (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), p. 3.
8. Deleuze, The Fold, p. 3.
9. Deleuze, The Fold, pp. 34–38.
10. Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, p. 33.
13. Massimo Cacciari, Icone della legge (Milan: Adelphi, 1985), p. 283.
14. Cacciari, Icone della legge, p. 283.
16. “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though
he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His
eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one
pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we
perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would
like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But
a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress”
(Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illumina-
tions, p. 257).
17. Franco Rella, Il silenzio e le parole (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), p. 169.
18. Franco Rella, “L’Angelo e la sua ombra,” Rivista di estetica 31 (XXIX)
1989, 118.
19. Rella, “L’Angelo e la sua ombra,” p. 120.
NOTES 167

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

I
1. Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, p. 6.
2. Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” Standard Edition XIV, p. 194.
3. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, Vol 1, trans.
and intro. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
pp. 166, 168.
4. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, pp. 173, 181.
5. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 139.
6. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 157.
7. Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” p. 222.
J
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2 (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1947), p. 275.
2. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans.
R. Martinez (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), p. 25.
3. Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, pp. 80–81.
5. Cited in Fox and Sheldrake, The Physics of Angels, p. 91.
7. Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, p. xiv.
8. Quoted in Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 271.
9. Corbin, Spiritual Body, p. 4.
17. Walter Benjamin, “Hashish in Marseilles,” in Reflections, p. 142.
NOTES 169
18. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Reflections, pp. 189–190.

19. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson.
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 240.
20. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experi-
ence, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1993), p. 16.
21. Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, p. 126.
K
1. Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J. Baker (London:
SCM, 1967), II, 40.
2. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. D. Wood, J.P. Leavey, and I.
McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 55.
3. Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 105.
L
1. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne
(London and New York: Verso, 1977), p. 178.
2. Paul Valéry, Cahiers (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), vol. I, 313, 175.
3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berke-
ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 97.
4. Roberto Calasso, Ka (Milano: Adelphi, 1996).
5. Benjamin, Paris, capital du XIXe siècle, p. 143.
6. Benjamin, “Central Park,” New German Critique (34) Winter 1985: 36.
7. Benjamin, “Central Park,” p. 34.
8. Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, trans. William Weaver and Stephen
Sartarelli (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp.
189–190.
9. Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, p. 192.
11. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” pp.
257–258. See unit F, note 16 for the full quotation.
12. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” Selected Writings, p. 471.
13. Franco Rella, Il silenzio e le parole, p. 169.
14. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light. Theses on the Photography of History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 71.
15. Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, p. 25.
M
1. Plutarch, De “E” in Delphis in Diatriba isiaca e dialoghi delfici, ed. V.
Cilento (Florence: Sansoni, 1962).
2. Ernesto Grassi, La potenza della fantasia, trans. C. Gentili and M. Marassi
(Naples: Guida editori, 1989), p. 31.
3. Grassi, La potenza della fantasia, p. 32.
N
1. Michel Serres, Angels: A Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper, ed. Philippa
Hurd (Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1995), p. 293.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, pp. 4–5.
3. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Seàn Hand (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 101.
4. Paolo Valesio, Ascoltare il silenzio. La retorica come teoria (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 1986).
5. Cited in Fox and Sheldrake, The Physics of Angels, p. 94.
6. J. Daniélou, Introduction to John Chrysostomos, Sur l’incompréhensibilité
de Dieu, p. 47.
7. Basil of Caesarea, De Spirito Sancto, ed. B. Pruche, Sources Chrétiennes 17
bis (Paris, 1968), XVI, 38.
8. Luigi Lanzi, Storia pittorica della Italia. Dal Risorgimento delle belle arti
fin presso al fine del XVIII secolo (Florence: Presso Giuseppe Molini,
1834).
9. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, trans. A. Barrows and J. Macy.
(New York: Riverhead, 1996).
10. Agamben, Idea of Prose, p. 109.
11. Rella, Il silenzio, p. 16.
O
1. Agamben, Stanzas, p, xviii.
2. Agamben, Stanzas, p. xix.
3. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 3.
5. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 17ff.
6. Cited in Agamben, The Idea of Prose, pp. 17–18.
7. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p.123.
NOTES 171
9. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. A. Smock (London

and Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 63.
10. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 63.
11. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 63.
12. Jacques Lacan, “Marginal Comments” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959 – 1960, trans. D. Porter. (New
York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), p. 135.
13. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 14
14. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, pp. 40–41.
P
1. Federico Borromeo, De Pictura Sacra (Castglioni, 1932), p. 38.
2. Corbin, Il paradosso del monoteismo, pp. 39 ff.
3. Pavel Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza. L’arte dell’icona, trans. P.
Giuseppe da Vetralia (Cinisello Balsamo: Edizioni San Paolo, 1990), p. 30.
4. Cyril of Alexandria, In Johannis Evangelium 16, 25 in Patrologia Graeca 73,
464B.
5. Quoted in Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza, p. 63.
6. Franco Rella, L’enigma della bellezza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991), p. 12.
10. Rella, L’enigma della bellezza, p. 96.
Q
1. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 2.
2. Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 10.
4. Giorgio Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity: Heidegger and the Problem
of Love,” trans. P. Colilli, in The Ancients and the Moderns, ed. R. Lilly
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp.
211–229.
7. Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,” p. 211.

12. Heidegger, cited in Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity.”
13. Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, The Divine Names and Mystical Theology,
trans. John D. Jones (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), p. 144.
14. Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, The Divine Names p. 144.
15. Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, The Divine Names, p. 146.
R
1. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. R. and C. Winston (New
York: Vintage Books, 1963), p. 328.
2. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 284.
3. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 284–285.
6. Attilio Momigliano, “Friedrich Creuzer and Greek Historiography,” Jour-
nal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9, 1946, p. 152.
7. Cf. James Hillman, “Plotino, Ficino and Vico” in Loose Ends (Dallas:
Spring Publications, 1975), p. 148.
S
1. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1989), p. 3.
2. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, p. 156.
3. Agamben, Stanzas, p. 22.
4. Agamben, Stanzas, p. 22.
5. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 140.
6. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota, 1984), p. 69
7. Benjamin, “Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, p. 362.
T
1. C. S. Peirce: Collected Papers, ed. A. W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1931 – 1958), 7.579–596.
NOTES 173
2. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 109.
3. Italo Calvino, Lezioni americane (Milan: Garzanti, 1988).
5. Calvino, Lezioni americane, pp. 7–8.
6. Pavel Florenskij, Le porte regali. Saggio sulli’icona, ed. Elémire Zolla
(Milan: Adelphi, 1977), p. 74.
7. Evgenij Trubeckoj, Contemplazione nel colore. Tre studi sull’icona russa,
trans. Piero Cazzola (Milan: La Casa di Matriona, 1988), p. 13.
8. John Damascenus, De fide orthodoxa II, 3, in Patrologiae cursus completus,
ed. J. Migne, Series Graeca 94, 865 A-B (Paris, 1928 – 1936)
10. Franco Rella, “Beauty’s Ulterior Gaze” in The Myth of the Other, trans. N.
Moe (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1994), pp. 82- 83.
11. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vols. 1–6, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1931 – 1958),
3.362.
12. Peirce, Collected Papers, 4.447; 4.422.
13. Massimo Cacciari, Icone della legge (Milan: Adelphi, 1985), p. 173.
14. Leonide Ouspensky, Théologie de l’icône (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1980), p.
17.
16. Cacciari, Icone della legge, p.185.
17. Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza. L’arte dell’icona, pp. 171–172.
18. Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza, p. 172.
19. Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza, p. 177.
20. Evdokimov, Teologia della bellezza, pp. 183–184.
21. Florenskij, Le porte regali, p. 56.
22. Florenskij, Le porte regali, p. 58.
24. Elémire Zolla, Uscite dal mondo (Milan: Adelphi, 1992), pp. 246–247.
25. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. VIII-2, ed. Colli
and Montanari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967 – 1978), p. 388; trans. D. Scott
Korn in “Zarathustra Returns: A Study in Nietzschean Spirituality,” The
Quest 9. 3 (Autumn 1996), p. 44. As Janco Lavrin has observed, these
notes are a verbatim version of a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed
(Lavrin, Dostoevski: A Study [New York: Macmillan, 1947] p. 12).
26. F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin,
1979), p. 103.
27. Cacciari, Icone della legge, p.14.
28. Rella, La cognizione del male: Montale e Saba (Rome: Riuniti, 1985), p. 11.
29. Rella, La cognizione del male, p. 11.
30. Rella, La cognizione del male, p. 12.
31. Rella, La cognizione del male, pp. 13–14

32. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. D. Mashenberg (New York: Semi-
otexte, 1991), p. 116.
U
1. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experi-
ence, p. 9.
2. Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 9.
3. Maximus the Confessor, Various Chapters on Theology and Economy, on
Virtue and Vice, Centuria Secunda 89, Patrologia Graeca 90, 1253C.
4. Christos Yannaras, “L’icona come ‘semantica’ del logos non conven-
zionale,” in In un’altra forma. Percorsi di iniziazione all’icona (Sotto il
Monte: Servitium-Interlogos, 1996), p. 73.
5. Augusto Illuminati, “Unrepresentable Citizenship,” trans. P. Colilli, in
Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. P. Virno and M. Hardt
169.
6. Illuminati, “Unrepresentable Citizenship,” p. 172.
7. Cited in Illuminati, “Unrepresentable Citizenship,” p. 174.
10. Michel Serres, Angels, p. 20.
11. Serres, Angels, p. 17.
V
1. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan. (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
2. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 171.
3. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 255.
W
1. Geoff Waite, Nietzsche’s Corps/e. Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy. Or, The Spec-
tacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. (Durham and London: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1996).
2. Theodor Adorno, “Theses Against Occultism,” Telos: A Quarterly Journal
of Radical Social Theory 19 (Spring 1974), pp. 7–11. Adorno’s “The Stars
NOTES 175
Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column” is published

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

Routledge, 1989), pp. 111–112.
Y
1. Erik Davis, “Techgnosis: Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information,”
in The South Atlantic Quarterly 92.4 (Fall 1993), 585–616.
2. Richard Sieburth, “Benjamin the Scrivener” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aes-
thetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 18–19.
3. Giorgio Agamben, History and Infancy. Essays on the Destruction of Experi-
ence, p. 21.
4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1973).
5. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schus-
ter, 1993), p. 348.
6. See, for example, Kent Biel, “Critical Reflection and the Hermetic Tradi-
tion: A Study of Michel Foucault’s Politics of the Imagination and Sub-
jectivity in Relation to the Western Counter-Tradition of Gnosis,” Ph.D.
Diss. McGill University, 1984.
7. Maurizio Ferraris, La filosofia e lo spirito vivente (Bari: Laterza, 1991), p.
204.
8. Ferraris, La filosofia e lo spirito vivente, p. 202–203.
9. Paolo Rossi, Paragone degli ingegni moderni e postmoderni (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 1989), p. 20.
10. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” in Selected Writings, pp. 297–298.
11. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” in Illuminations, p. 5.
12. Cited in “Introduction,” Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, p. 20.
13. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. M. Cook
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 223.
14. Rella, in Anna Cavallaro, Pittura visionaria e metafisica (Milan: Fratelli
Fabbri Editori, 1978), p. 43.
15. Gabriele La Porta, “Introduzione,” in Giordano Bruno, Il canto di Circe.
(Rome: Editrice Atanor, 1978), p. xxx.
17. Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Selected Writings, p. 478.
18. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 235.
19. Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle, p. 825.
20. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, tran. B. and C. Schutze
(New York: Semiotexte, 1988), p. 46, 47.
21. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, p. 47, 50.
22. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, p. 50.
NOTES 177
23. Carlo Sini, “Presentazione,” in Giordano Bruno Le ombre delle idee

(Milan: Spirali edizioni, 1988), p. 11.
24. Giordano Bruno, Lampas Triginta Statuarum in Opera Latine Conscripta,
ed. Felice Tocco (Florence: Le Monnier, 1879 – 1891), III, 9.
25. Adelia Noferi, Il gioco delle tracce (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1979).
26. Bruno, Lampas, p. 10.
27. Bruno, Lampas, pp. 10–11.
28. Bruno, Lampas, pp. 13–14.
29. Giordano Bruno, De Compositione Imaginum, in Opera Latine Conscripta,
II, III, 119–120.
30. Giordano Bruno, Triginta Sigillorum in Opera Latine Conscripta II, II,
121.
31. Bruno, Lampas, p. 15.
32. David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berke-
ley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 23.
33. Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” in On Walter Ben-
jamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. G. Smith (Cambridge, MA and
London: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 51–89.
34. Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Selected Writings, p. 486.
35. Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” trans. K. Tarnowski, New
German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), 65.
36. Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” p. 66.
40. Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” p. 69
41. Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” p. 59.
44. Cited in Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” p. 59.
47. Luigi Firpo, Il processo di Giordano Bruno, ed. D. Quaglioni (Rome:
Salerno Editrice, 1993), pp. 327–329.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Vol. 1 Ed., trans.,
and intro. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Adorno, Theodor. “Theses Against Occultism.” Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Rad-
ical Social Theory 19 (Spring 1974), 7–11.
———. “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column.”
Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Radical Social Theory 19 (Spring 1974), 13–89.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
———. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. R. Martinez. Min-
neapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
———. Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz
Heron. London-New York: Verso, 1993.
———. The Idea of Prose. Trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt. Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1995.
———. “The Passion of Facticity: Heidegger and the Problem of Love.” Trans. P.
Colilli in The Ancients and the Moderns. Ed. R. Lilly. Bloomington and Indi-
anapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 211–229.
Alberti, Rafael. Sobre Los Ángeles. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, S. A., 1959.
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae (Latin text and English trans.) Blackfriars
Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Trans. L. Golden. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1968.
Augustine of Hippo. De Genesi ad litteram libri 12. Patrologia latina 34.
Basil of Caesarea. De Spirito Sancto. In Sources Chrétiennes 17 bis. Ed. B. Pruche.
Paris, 1968.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Trans. James McGowan. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Trans. B. and C. Schutze. New
York: Semiotexte, 1988.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations. Ed. H.
Arendt. Trans. H. Zohn. (New York: Schocken, 1969): 253–264.
———. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. J. Osborne. London and New
York: Verso, 1977.
———. “Karl Kraus.” In Reflections. Trans. E. Jephcott. New York: Schocken

Books, 1978.
———. “Doctrine of the Similar.” Trans. K. Tarnowski. New German Critique 17
(Spring 1979), 65–69.
———. “Central Park.” New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985).
———. Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle. Trans. J. Lacoste. Paris: Les éditions du cerf,
1989.
———. Selected Writings. Vol. 1. 1913 – 1926. Ed. M. Bullock and Michael W.
Jennings. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Biel, Kent. “Critical Reflection and the Hermetic Tradition: A Study of Michel
Foucault’s Politics of the Imagination and Subjectivity in Relation to the West-
ern Counter-Tradition of Gnosis.” PhD Diss. McGill University, 1984.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. A. Smock. London and Ne-
braska: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Blondel, Eric. Nietzsche: The Body and Culture. Trans. Seàn Hand. Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1991.
Bloom, Harold. Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrec-
tion. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.
Borromeo, Federico. De Pictura Sacra. Castglioni, 1932.
Bruno, Giordano. Opera Latine Conscripta. Ed. Felice Tocco. Florence: Le Mon-
nier, 1879 – 1891.
———. On the Infinite Universe and Worlds. In Dorothea W. Singer, Giordano
Bruno. His Life and Thought. New York: Schuman, 1950.
———. Il canto di Circe. Roma: Editrice Atanor, 1978.
———. Le ombre delle idee. Milan: Spirali edizioni, 1988.
Bultmann, Rudolf. Kerygma und Mythos. Hamburg: Reich, 1954.
Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Cacciari, Massimo. Icone della legge. Milan: Adelphi, 1985.
———. The Necessary Angel. Trans. Miguel E. Vatter. Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
1994.
Cadava, Eduardo. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997.
Calasso, Roberto. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Trans. Tim Parks. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
———. The Ruin of Kasch. Trans. William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
———. Ka. Milan: Adelphi, 1996.
Calvino, Italo. Lezioni americane. Milan: Garzanti, 1988.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 181
Cavallaro, Anna. Pittura visionaria e metafisica. Milan: Fratelli Fabbri Editori,

1978.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. S. Rendall. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.
Chrysostomos, John. Sur l’incompréhensibilité de Dieu. Ed. J. Daniélou, A. M. Ma-
lingrey and R. Flacelière. Sources Chrétiennes 28 bis. Paris, 1970.
Corbin, Henry. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. Trans. Ralph Man-
heim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
———. Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. Trans. Nancy Pearson. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1977.
———. The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Trans. Nancy Pearson. Boulder and
London: Shambhala, 1978.
———. Il paradosso del monoteismo. Trans. Gabriele Rebecchi. Casale Monferrato:
Marietti, 1986.
———. Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam. Trans. Leonard Fox. West Chester, PA.:
Swendborg Foundation, 1995.
Corsano, Antonio. “Vico e la tradizione ermetica.” In Omaggio a Vico. Naples:
Morano, 1968.
Corsini, E. Il trattato ‘De divinis’ dello Pseudo-Dionigi e i commenti neoplatonici al
Parmenide. Turin: Giappichelli, 1962.
Couliano, Ioan. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Trans. M. Cook. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Cyril of Alexandria, In Johannis Evangelium 16, 25 in Patrologia Graeca 73, 464B.
Damascenus, John. De fide orthodoxa II, 3. Patrologiae cursus completus. Ed. J.
Migne. Series Graeca 94. Paris, 1928 – 1936.
Davis, Erik. “Techgnosis: Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information.” In The
South Atlantic Quarterly 92:4, (Fall 1993), 585–616.
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Foreword by Paul Bové. Minneapo-
lis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
———. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993
———, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind. The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. P.
Brault and M. Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
———. On the Name. Trans. D. Wood, J. P. Leavey, and I. McLeod. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995.
Eco, Umberto. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indi-
ana University Press, 1990.
———. “Ur-Fascism.” The New York Review, June 22, 1995: 12–15.
Eichrodt, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament. 2 vols. Trans. J. Baker. London:
SCM, 1967.
Einstein, Albert. Autobiographical Notes. Trans. P. A. Schlipp. La Salle and Chicago:
Open Court Publishing Company, 1979.
Evdokimov, Pavel Nikolajevic. Teologia della bellezza. L’arte dell’icona. Trans. P.
Giuseppe da Vetralia. Cinisello Balsamo: Edizioni San Paolo, 1990.
Ferraris, Maurizio. La filosofia e lo spirito vivente. Bari: Laterza, 1991.
Firpo, Luigi. Il processo di Giordano Bruno. Ed. D. Quaglioni. Rome: Salerno Ed-
itrice, 1993.
Florenskij, Pavel. Le porte regali. Saggio sulli’icona. Ed. Elémire Zolla. Milan: Adel-
phi, 1977.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Random House, 1973.
Fox, Matthew, and Rupert Sheldrake. The Physics of Angels. San Francisco: Harper-
Collins, 1996.
Freud, Sigmund. Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality. Trans. A. A. Brill.
New York: Vintage Books, 1947.
———. “The Moses of Michelangelo.” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. XIII. Trans. J. Strachey. London: The
Hogarth Press, 1957.
———. “The Unconscious.” Standard Edition, XIV.
Grassi, Ernesto. La potenza della fantasia. Trans. C. Gentili and M. Marassi.
Naples: Guida editori, 1989.
———. Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism. Binghamton, NY:
CEMERS, 1983.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New
York: Harper and Row, 1962.
———. “What Are Poets For?” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofs-
tadter. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975.
Hildegard of Bingen. In Patrologia Latina. Ed. J. P. Migne. Paris: Migne, 1844 –
91, 197.
———. Liber Vitae Meritorum. Pitra, 1882.
Hillman, James. “Plotino, Ficino, and Vico as Precursors of Archetypal Psychol-
ogy.” In Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology. Dallas: Spring Pub-
lications, 1994: 146–169.
Hutcheon, Linda. “Eco’s Echoes: Ironizing the (Post)Modern.” Diacritics 22.1
(Spring 1992): 2–16.
Illuminati, Augusto. “Unrepresentable Citizenship.” Trans. P. Colilli. In Radical
Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Ed. P. Virno and M. Hardt. Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Jung, Carl G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Trans. R. and C. Winston. New York:
Vintage Books, 1963.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 183
———. Preface to Ian MacPhail, Alchemy and the Occult: A Catalogue of Books and
Manuscripts from the Collections of Paul and Mary Mellon. New Haven: Yale
University Library, 1968. vii.
Keefer, M. H. “The Dreamer’s Path: Descartes and the Sixteenth Century.” Re-
naissance Quarterly 49 (1996): 30–76.
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1989.
Lacan, Jacques. “Marginal Comments.” In The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII:
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959 – 1960. Trans. D. Porter. New York and Lon-
don: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997.
Lanzi, Luigi. Storia pittorica della Italia. Dal Risorgimento delle belle arti fin presso
al fine del XVIII secolo. Florence: Presso Giuseppe Molini, 1834.
Lavrin, Janco. Dostoevski: A Study. New York: Macmillan, 1947.
Leopardi, Giacomo. Zibaldone di pensieri. In Tutte le opere. 2 vols. Ed. F. Flora.
Milan: Mondadori, 1967.
———. “Dialogo della moda e della morte.” In Operette morali. Ed. P. Ruffilli.
Milan: Garzanti, 1995.
Levin, David Michael, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley, Los An-
geles, and London: University of California Press, 1993.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Post Modern Explained. Trans. and ed. J. Pefanis and
M. Thomas. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Maximus the Confessor. Various Chapters on Theology and Economy, on Virtue and
Vice. Centuria Secunda 89, Patrologia Graeca 90, 1253C.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Merrell, Floyd. Peirce’s Semiotics Now. Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 1995.
———. Signs Grow: Semiosis and Life Process. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1996.
Meschonnic, Henri. Le signe et le poème. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.
Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1993.
Momigliano, Attilio. “Friedrich Creuzer and Greek Historiography.” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946).
Montale, Eugenio. Satura. Milan: Mondadori, 1971.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 8.2. Ed. Colli and Mon-
tanari. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967 – 1978. 388. Trans. D. Scott Korn in
“Zarathustra Returns. A Study in Nietzschean Spirituality.” The Quest 9. 3 (Au-
tumn 1996), p. 44.
———. Ecce Homo, Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1979.
———. Dithyrambs of Dionysus, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Redding Ridge: Black
Swan Books, 1984.
Noferi, Adelia Il gioco delle tracce. Florence: La nuova Italia, 1979.

Ouspensky, Leonide. Théologie de l’icône. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1980.
Ouspensky, P. D. Tertium Organum. Trans. E. Kadloubovsky. New York: Vintage
Books, 1982.
Papi, Lorenzo. Marino Marini. Turin: Priuli a Verlucca Editori, 1987.
Papini, M. Il geroglifico della storia. Bologna: Cappelli, 1984.
Peirce, C. S. Collected Papers. Vols. 1–6. Ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Bloom-
ington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1931 – 1958; vols. 7 and 8.
Ed. A. W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931 – 58.
Plotinus. Select Works of Plotinus. Trans. Thomas Taylor. Ed. G. R. S. Mead. Lon-
don: G. Bell & Sons, 1929.
Plutarch. De “E” in Delphis. In Diatriba isiaca e dialoghi delfici. Ed. V. Cilento. Flo-
rence: Sansoni, 1962.
Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite. The Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Trans.
John D. Jones. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980.
Rella, Franco. Il silenzio e le parole. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981.
———. La cognizione del male: Montale e Saba. Rome: Riuniti, 1985.
———. La battaglia della verità. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986.
———. “L’Angelo e la sua ombra.” Rivista di estetica 31 (XXIX) 1989, 116–134.
———. L”enigma della bellezza. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991.
———. “Beauty’s Ulterior Gaze.” In The Myth of the Other. Trans. N. Moe. Wash-
ington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1994.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke. Vol. 2. New York: W.W. Nor-
ton, 1947.
———. Duino Elegies. Trans. D. Young. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.
———. The Complete French Poems of R. M. Rilke. Trans. A. Poulin. St. Paul:
Graywolf Press, 1986.
———. The Book of Hours. Trans. A. Barrows and J. Macy. New York: Riverhead,
1996.
Romanyshyn, Robert D. Technology as Symptom and Dream. London: Routledge,
1989.
Rossi, Paolo. Paragone degli ingegni moderni e postmoderni. Bologna: Il Mulino,
1989.
Schelling, F. W. J. Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo,
1972.
Scholem, Gershom. “Walter Benjamin and His Angel.” In On Walter Benjamin:
Critical Essays and Recollections. Ed. G. Smith. Cambridge, MA and London:
The MIT Press, 1991. 51–89.
Serres, Michel. Hermès V: Le passage du Nord-Ouest. Paris: Minuit, 1980.
———. Rome: The Book of Foundations. Trans. Felicia Mccarren. Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1991.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 185
———. Angels: A Modern Myth. Trans. F. Cowper. Ed. P. Hurd. Paris and New
York: Flammarion, 1995.
Shaikh Ahmad Ahsa’i. “On the Esoteric Meaning of the Tomb.” In Henry Corbin,
Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. Trans. Nancy Pearson. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977. 189–191.
Sieburth, Richard. “Benjamin the Scrivener.” In Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, His-
tory. Ed. Gary Smith. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Solovyov, Vladimir. Lectures on Divine Humanity. Trans. Peter Zouboff. Rev. and
ed. Boris Jakim. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1995.
Szymborska, Wislawa. View with a Grain of Sand. Trans. S. Baranczak and C. Ca-
vanaugh. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Tiedemann, Rolf. “Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation
of the Theses ‘On the Concept of History.’” The Philosophical Forum 95: 71–104.
Trubeckoj, Evgenij. Contemplazione nel colore. Tre studi sull’icona russa. Trans. Piero
Cazzola. Milan: La Casa di Matriona, 1988.
Valéry, Paul. Cahiers. Vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.
Valesio, Paolo. Prose in poesia. Milan: Guanda, 1979.
———Ascoltare il silenzio. La retorica come teoria. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986.
Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity. Trans. Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Vico, G. B. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Trans. T. G. Bergin and M.
Fisch. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Virilio, Paul. The Lost Dimension. Trans. D. Mashenberg. New York: Semiotexte,
1991.
———. The Art of the Motor. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis and London: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Waite, Geoff. Nietzsche’s Corps/e. Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy. Or, The Spectacular
Technoculture of Everyday Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1996.
Watkins, M. Waking Dreams. New York: Interface/Gordon and Beach, 1976.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F.
McGuinness. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Yannaras, Christos. “L’icona come ‘semantica’ del logos non convenzionale.” In In
un’altra forma. Percorsi di iniziazione all’icona. Sotto il Monte: Servitium-Inter-
logos, 1996. 63–100.
Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1964.
ZIzek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London-New York: Verso, 1997.
———. “The Abyss of Freedom.” In Slavoj ZIzek/F. W. J. Von Schelling, The Abyss
of Freedom/Ages of the World. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Zolla, Elémire. Uscite dal mondo. Milan: Adelphi, 1992.
INDEX OF NAMES
Abraham, N., 53–55 Cacciari, M., 22, 30, 35–37, 72, 76,
Adorno, T., 126–127, 129 111, 112, 113, 114, 116–117
Agamben, G., 19, 42, 44–45, 57–58, Cadava, E., 72
63, 82–85, 86–87, 92, 96–99, Calasso, R., 4–5, 67, 69–70, 150
106–108, 120, 144–145 Calvino, I., 68, 110–111
Alberti, R., 5 Camillo, G., 129, 146, 154
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 7, 25–26, 27, Campanella, T., 144
30, 58, 72–73, 78, 100 Carrey, J., 69
Arendt, H., 83, 98, 148 Célan, P., 84
Aristotle, 12, 13, 14, 47, 59 Certeau, M. de, 65
Augustine, St., 39, 98, 99 Chrysostomos, J., 6, 78
Claudel, P. 162
Bacon, F., 47 Clement VIII (Pope), 161
Basil of Caesarea, 79 Corbin, H., 3–4, 5, 23–24, 28–29,
Basilides, 132 30, 38, 52, 58–61, 71, 81, 82,
Bataille, G., 106, 111, 121 90–91, 106, 128
Baudelaire, C., 68, 125 Couliano, I., 149
Baudrillard, J., 152–153 Creuzer, F., 104–105
Benjamin, W., 3, 18, 19, 20, 30, 37, Cvetaeva, M., 43
43–44, 46, 62–63, 65, 67, 68, Cyril of Alexandria, 91
70–72, 83, 84–85, 86, 108–109,
124, 127, 128, 130, 143, Damascenus, J., 111
147–149, 150–151, 155, 158–161 Dante, 14, 67, 82, 124
Blanchot, M., 85 Davis, E., 143
Blondel, E., 77 Deleuze, G., 31, 32–35, 49–51, 77
Bloom, H., 21 Derrida, J., 29, 64, 108
Bocchi, A., 79 Descartes, R., 2, 26, 139
Borromeo, F., 90 Dostoevsky, F., 91, 93
Bruno, G., 66, 67, 129, 135, 144, Dürrenmatt, F., 1
146, 149, 151, 152, 153–158, 161 Düttman, A. G., 83–84
Bultmann, R., 2
Burger, P., 109 Eco. U., 48, 126, 127–128, 129, 130,
Butler, J., 33 147
Eichrodt, W., 64 Jung, C.G., 103–105, 137–138

Einstein, A., 16
Evagrius, 91 Keefer, M.H., 2
Evdokimov, P. N., 91, 113–114 Keynes, J.M., 2
Klee, P. 35, 37, 70–71, 158, 160
Fabbri, P. 18 Kristeva, J., 106, 108
Fechner, G.T., 59, 61 Kristellar, P.O., 95
Ferraris, M., 146
Ficino, M., 95–96, 100, 108, 129, Lacan, J., 146
146, 154 Lanzi, L., 79
Florenskij, P., 111, 114–115 La Porta, G., 149
Foster, J., 15 Leonardo da Vinci, 45
Foucault, M., 20, 32, 145–146, 161 Leonhard, R., 159
Fox, M. 22, 26 Leopardi, G., 12, 19, 93
Francis of Assisi, St., 67 Levi, P., 68
Frege, F. L. G., 75 Levin, D. M., 158
Freud, S., 45–46, 54, 55–56 Lyotard, J.F., 18
Gadda, C.E., 68 Maimonides, 36

Giotto di Bondone, 139–140 Marini, M., 1
Goethe, J. W., 21 Marx, K., 150
Grassi, E., 74–75, 95 Maximus the Confessor, 91, 120
Guattari, F., 31, 49–51, 77 McDowell, A., 69
Merleau-Ponty, M., 29
Hawking, S., 85 Merrell, F., 31, 135–138
Hegel, G.W.F., 24, 132–133, 135 Meschonnic, H., 10
Heidegger, M., 11–1, 17, 62–63, 81, Michelangelo, 46, 67, 89–90
82, 84, 95–96, 97–100, 119, Miller, J., 145–146
124–125, 146–147 Milosz, O., 1
Herbert, Z., 58 Momigliano, A., 104–105
Hildegard of Bingen, 26–27 Montale, E., 5, 10, 110–111,
Hobbes, T., 27 117–118
Hölderlin, F., 15, 89, 92 Moravia, A., 119, 162
Hulewicz, W. von., 57 Morozov, N.A., 115
Husserl, E., 99 Murray, B., 69
Hutcheon, L., 129
Nerval, G. de, 38
Ibn ‘Arabi, 58 Newton, I., 2
Illuminati, A., 121–122 Nietzsche, F., 9, 35, 77, 78, 81, 87,
92, 95, 116
Jaffé, A., 105 Novalis, 92, 93
BIBLIOGRAPHY 189
Ouspensky, L., 112–113 Sfrangiati, N. (Pope Gregory XIV), 144

Ouspensky, P.D., 47–49, 50–51, 115 Shaikh Ahmad Ahs_’_, 4
Shakespeare, W., 118
Panizza, O., 162 Sheldrake, R., 22, 26
Papini, M., 134–135 Shestov, L., 6
Pasolini, P.P., 68, 162 Sieburth, R., 144
Patrizi, F., 144 Sini, C., 153–154
Peirce, C.S., 110, 112, 127, 135, 153 Solovyov, V., 41, 101
Pessoa, F., 4 Steiner, G., 83, 86
Petrarch, F., 14, 68 Suhrawardi, 5, 38, 90
Peuckert, W.E., 144 Szymborska, W., 18
Plato, 13
Plotinus, 47, 50, 113 Telesio, B., 144
Plutarch, 74–75 Tiedemann, R., 151
Poliziano, A., 120 Tillich, P., 22
Proculus, 131 Torok, M., 53–55
Proust, M., 38, 39, 67 Trubeckoj, E., 111
Pseudo-Dionysius, 91, 100, 131–132 Trubeckoj, S., 115
Rand, N., 54 Valéry, P., 65

Rella, F., 13, 37–39, 76, 80, 91–94, Valesio, P., 39–40, 77–78
111, 117–118, 149–150, 151 Vattimo, G., 16–17, 135
Rilke, R.M., 7, 8, 24, 57, 79, 89, 90, Vico, G.B., 26, 86, 134–135
91, 96, 111 Virilio, P., 7, 118–119
Romanyshyn, R., 139
Rosenzweig, F., 116–117 Waite, G., 126, 129
Rossi, P., 147 Weinenger, O., 80–81
Weil, S., 111
Saba, U., 117 Wenders, W., 35
Sachs, N., 7 Whales, J., 7
Sartre, J.P., 99 Wittgenstein, L., 9, 41–42, 75, 80–81
Scheler, M., 98
Schelling, F.W.J., 41, 133 Yannaras, C., 120
Scholem, G., 150, 158
Serres, M., 8, 76, 77, 123 Zizek, S., 6, 133
Sextus Empiricus, 142 Zolla, E., 115

Colilli, Paul - The Angels Corpse

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Colilli, Paul - The Angels Corpse

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

The Angel’s Corpse

General Editors: Roberta Kevelson and Marcel Danesi

THE SENSE OF FORM IN

OF CIGARETTES, HIGH HEELS,

ART, CULTURE, AND THE SEMIOTICS OF MEANING

THE ANGEL’S CORPSE

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Design by Letra Libre, Inc.

First edition: October 1999

University, while the structure was “discovered” during the summer of

IDEA OF THE WORK

FIRST THE MORTAL REMAINS

solely to the domain of philosophical and scientific thought. In the “The-

to the philosophy of Sufism, Corbin speaks of a signifying world, the

gated, as with the goddess of the Underworld: at every threshold a cloak

of hypervision. According to John Chrysostomos, the Angel’s eyes are a

aesthetic postmodernism is in a number of ways an attempt to reincorpo-

mations. But if we were to go back in time, our sporadic flashes of reason

These insightful words from Serres deserve a commentary. There is one

the most remote distances.”19 Moreover, as Henri Meschonnic informs us,

it, we do not deceive ourselves through reckoning time merely in terms

Fashion: Madame Death, Madame Death.

critico-philosophical utterance that is grounded in the experience of the

couragement to abandon the metalanguage of sanctioned critical dis-

characteristic is lodged in the stratigraphy of modern thought. In a pas-

What, precisely, is “thinking”? When, on the reception of sense impressions,

Scientific thinking as here described by Einstein begins in the ability to

our everyday existence has been totally aestheticized. What is interesting in

Finally, it should be made clear that it is not up to us to provide reality, but

But is totality synonymous with entirety? If it were, then poetic logic

—Angels are very numerous; they exist in astronomical numbers. There

—They are musical in nature and work in harmonious relationship with

—The Angel’s role is “theophanic” in nature. By means of hermeneutic me-

—The anthropocentric threat is the philosopher’s interpretation of the tran-

In a more specific sense, Corbin claims that any philosophy of nature

ror” is not to be understood in the contemporary sense of an image of dis-

The Angel Has No Imagination

The Angel’s Single and Intellectual Cognitive Faculty

Aquinas’s angelogical insights underline the fact that angels possess an

understand all their consequences; we would know by intuition all that

It is a world of images in suspense.

A hand of the blind ventures forth alone or disconnected, in a poorly de-

TRANSCENDENCE FALLS FROM THE SKY

thought-signs. The Angel, as we will see, is an icon (at times a window, at

The first concerns the material part of ourselves which is to be surrounded

The foldings of subjectivation as here described by Deleuze pivot on a mode

The fold is based on an aggregation of monads that produce folds of

ipating or regulating outcomes on the basis of quanto-logic. We will dis-

the whiteness of daylight from the blackness of nighttime. Hence the

FRAGMENTS OF A RECUMBENT FIGURE

LYRIC FRAGMENTS OF A REAWAKENING

And so the function of a sea of citations is to force one to move toward a

The potential reawakening carries the signature of an unnamable hand—

guise for this nothingness. The vacuity offered by Michelangelo’s Moses

The figure of [Michelangelo’s] Moses, therefore, cannot be supposed to be

That which is nothing is everywhere. Once we attempt to provide a figure

Another path to explaining the meaning of “unrepeatable nothingness”

4. There exists nothing that is dead or unconscious. To the contrary,

On the basis of this discussion on Ouspensky, it would seem that we

perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself,

1. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple.

An important feature of the rhizome is the absence of a transcendental

tions, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.”15 Moreover, like