The
Voluntary
Fading of the Subject
Foucault, and Heidegger before him, discover in the writings of certain authors a way to think and be that is other to the constitutive knowledge of the modern human being that is helpful for situating Girri's and Cadenas' later poetry, and which we can identify as posthumanist.
Foucault, and Heidegger before him, discover in the writings of certain authors a way to think and be that is other to the constitutive knowledge of the modern human being that is helpful for situating Girri's and Cadenas' later poetry, and which we can identify as posthumanist.
Trakl - T h e Poet's F ad in g Face- A lb e rto G irri, R afael C ad en as a n d P o s th u m a n is t Latin A m e ric a n P o e try
?
The Poet's Fading Face:
Alberto Girri, Rafael Cadenas and Posthumanist Latin American Poetry
ScuraM, Pollack
College of Staten Island, City University of New York
In 2003, Luis Ca? rcamo-Huechante and Jose? Antonio Mazzotti edited a special issue of Revista de Cri? tica Literaria Latinoamericana that sought to survey the changing panorama of Latin American poetry in the age of globalization. Their descriptive study contrasted recent poetic trends with the most prominent currents of 20th century Latin American poetry. From the prophetic poetic subject of Pablo Nerudas Canto general to the ironic and desacralizing voice of Nicanor Parras antipoesi? a, the editors suggested that the dominant trait characterizing poetry published roughly from 1950-1990--despite the great heterogeneity of writing practices throughout the continent-- was a common faith in the rhetorical and representational power of poetry and its political significance. 1The two critics also identified a common turn towards a "ruta trascendentalista, expansiva, del sujeto y el lenguaje" (10), for which, they proposed, Octavio Paz, as late as La otra voz (1990), was a paragon. In many cases, this type of subjectivity's manifested through the assertion and construction of an "I" that acts as a "voz de la tribu" (Ca? rcamo-Huechante y Mazzotti 11); this "tribu," I would add, can be defined diversely: as modern Western civilization, Latin America, a particular nation, or simply a group of people defined along common ethnic, cultural, economic, political, linguistic, racial or gender lines.
If we start with the description above, it is important to emphasize that this literary current, to draw on Pedro Henri? quez Uren? a's term, hinges on a century-old tradition of Latin American humanism that places subjectivity at its core. Here I refer specifically to Michel Foucault's analysis of humanism as a set of discursive practices operant since the Enlightenment, which he describes in detail as constituent of the "modern episteme" in
The Order o f Things (1966). Central to this reading of humanism is Foucault's observation that within systems of thought as divergent as Christianity, Marxism, Existentialism, phenomenology, and even extreme ideologies like Nazism and Stalinism ("What is Enlightenment? " 44), the figure of Man is the foundation of all positivistic knowledge as well as-- in an unresolved contradiction---the object of that knowledge. 2The generation of intellectuals who, during the first decades of the 20th century, placed humanism at the center of their vision of Latin American culture, had a profound effect on the configuration
13
? of the continent's literary field. The works of Henri? quez Uren? a, Alfonso Reyes, Gilberto Freyre, Mariano Pico? n Salas and Jose? Vasconcelos, among others, served as the epistemic foundation for cultural and political discourses on Latin American identity. As Ignacio Sa? nchez Prado has analyzed, for example, the humanist project led by Reyes in Mexico during the years of the Ateneo de la Juventud, represented the most significant effort to reach "la constitucio? n de una e? tica y una este? tica especi? fica para Ame? rica" (Sa? nchez Prado 13) through Reyes' prescriptive definition of literary discourse as that which "expresa al hombre en cuanto es humano" (12). 3It follows that some of the most prominent figures of Latin American poetry-- Pablo Neruda (after his Residencias), Gabriela Mistral, and Paz, for example-- strove to establish a Latin American subject capable of occupying the central place of the continent's cultural production. 4Although this "humanist" poetry-- as I will refer to it in the present investigation-- often challenges hegemonic formulations of subjectivity by offering other experiences of being a "self," the very epistemology of subjectivity is rarely questioned, as it neither is in many of the studies published recently on contemporary Latin American poetry. 5
In what follows, I propose to decenter the canonicity of this poetic subject by analyzing in conjunction the distinctive, "posthumanist" poetry of Argentinean Alberto Girri (1919--1991) and Venezuelan Rafael Cadenas (1930). Girri wrote over thirty books of poems, was an important translator of English-language poets, and collaborated in the literary journal Sur and the newspaper La nacio? n. Cadenas is the author of seven collections of poetry and six long essays, and also is an accomplished translator and professor. These renowned writers, whose publications span from 1946 (Girri's Playa sola) to 2005 (a collection of Cadenas' translations titled El taller de al lado: Traducciones), have been awarded many of the most important literary prizes of the region. 6Although there are certain aesthetic similarities between Girri's and Cadenas' first works and those of the poets of their respective generations, these soon disappear, accounting for why both have been called solitary writers or raros, which probably accounts for why their work has been most thoroughly examined in monographic studies. 7
Instead of considering them as isolated anomalies, however, I examine Girri's and Cadenas' works here as part of a "corriente alternativa"-- to play on Octavio Paz's terminology-- that is less visible within canonic trends of Latin American poetry and the corresponding academic attention they receive. At the opposite pole of the dominant poetics described at the beginning of the present article, Girri and Cadenas-- and other contemporary poets I will mention later--express their fundamental discontent with the inherent limitations of defining the human being as the subject of knowledge. Both offer important critiques of modern Western subjectivity and humanism by proposing a deliberate reduction and repositioning of the subject, as well as a critical relationship with language: a posthumanist poetics with important predecessors including Argentineans Jorge Luis Borges, Macedonio Ferna? ndez, Cuban Jose? Lezama Lima, and Mexican Jorge Cuesta, for example.
In identifying this genealogy, I wish to distinguish what I am terming posthumanist poetry from other designations. Writing in 1925, for example, Jose? Ortega y Gasset observed an overarching "deshumanizacio? n" in art, a term he used to describe the common thread linking the diverse poetics of the historic avant-garde movements: their distance
14 CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
? from mimetic representation of "la realidad vivida" (31) or what he also called "elementos humanos" (25) through their extreme use of metaphor, irony, changing perspectives, linguistic play and the rupture o f logical nexuses. The "deshumanized" avant-garde indeed prefigures and intersects the posthumanist poetry that I examine here in its questioning of Man as the ultimate subject and object of knowledge. The most obvious examples of this are surrealism's exploration of the subconscious and dreams; the performance of the incommensurability of representation and the real by poets such Oliverio Girondo; or the existential crises and the subjects lack of understanding made explicit in works like Neruda's Residencia en la tierra or Vallejo's Trilce. However, as Fabia? n Jime? nez Flores correctly observes, "Pues si bien la vanguardia latinoamericana experimento? un lenguaje nuevo, siempre lo hizo, por otro lado, desde un sujeto enunciativo muy poderoso" (369). In other words, even though certain avant-garde movements can be understood as being born of a crisis in understanding and experiencing the human being as the locus of knowledge-- the same point of departure for posthumanism-- the poetic subject of their works is generally assertive, even genesiacal, fulfilling what Ortega y Gasset identified as the new mission of "dehumanized" art: "inventar lo que no existe" (Ortega y Gasset 44), such as Vicente Huidobro's famous formula, "el poeta es un pequen? o dios" (Huidobro 2). One could argue, then, that in cases like Creacionismo, the avant-garde's crisis of the subject actually results in a greater exacerbation of humanism, in that it locates meaning and even being in what philosopher Cary Wolfe calls the "ontologically closed domain of [human] consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on" (xxv).
In contrast with this defining element of the "deshumanized" avant-garde, I propose to read Girri's and Cadenas' works as examples of what numerous critics, such as Cary Wolfe, have identified aposteriori as a posthumanist trend in literature and philosophy that beginswiththewritingsofMartinHeideggerinthe 1930s,includesmomentsofGerman existentialism and French poststructuralism, and is currently reworked in contemporary formulations of bioethics (Sa? nchez Prado 8). Wolfe divides the historical evolution of the term posthumanism in two main currents. First, the 1960s poststructuralist wave sought to produce an epistemological fissure with Western metaphysics, which Wolfe locates chiefly in Foucault's famous call for "the death of Man" (xii). With Nietzsche and Heidegger as their foundation, the works of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot and Gili? es Deleuze also posed radical critiques of modern subjectivity, with distinct philosophical aims. Highlighting the metaphysical paradoxes of anthropocentric (humanist) perspectives, these thinkers "proporcionaron elementos para la emergencia de nuevas formas de negatividad que expusieran la precariedad de lo humano [. . . ] y sugirieran otras formas posibles de relacio? n y convivencia entre los vivientes" (Yelin 2-3). Second, as Wolfe summarizes, since the 1980s, the notion of posthumanism has been claimed and reformulated by theorists with divergent frameworks and agendas. From Donna Haraway's groundbreaking "A Cyborg Manifesto" in 1985 to Wolfe's own theorization of animal studies, this second wave of posthumanism attempts a displacement of the human being's self-assigned centrality in the modern world through the deconstruction of anthropocentrism and speciesism. But as with other theoretical currents that seek conceptual breaks with the human being and human identity--from gender and queer studies to biopolitics in the works of Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Giorgio
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 15
? Agamben and Roberto Esposito, among others--these contemporary articulations of posthumanism intend a shift in the politics and cultural dynamics of the gendered human body and its symbolizations in which the transcendental signifier of the human being is no longer operant.
I find it relevant here to mark a conceptual distance from recent articulations of posthumanism, as my analysis will privilege the earlier posthumanist critique of modern subjectivity. Girri's and Cadenas' projects are, in part, a product of those foundational
1960s French philosophical (dis)articulations of Man, as well as a generalized popular interest throughout the West in certain currents of Asian philosophical and religious thought that also propose radically different conceptualizations of the human being. Not only does this first wave of posthumanist thought correspond chronologically with the work of Girri and Cadenas, but, more importantly, its questions extend beyond the problematic centrality of the human being-- e. g. : the politics of its body, or its claim of domination over the natural world-- and return us to a fundamental inquiry into the very constitution of the enunciating subject as the sole condition of possibility of knowledge, a project that is central in the writing of other Latin American poets today.
In his essay Realidady literatura, Cadenas writes that "Nuestro reino es el fatigado reino de lo sabido. La poesi? a esta? llamada a arrancarnos de e? l y conducirnos a la novedad, que es lo ordinario, pero como si lo vie? ramos por primera vez. El nombrar poe? tico estari? a encargado de acercarnos a la cosa y dejarnos frente a ella como cosa, con su silencio, su extran? eza, su gravedad" (524--25). Similarly, Girri has affirmed that the role of the poet is: "el de realizar a trave? s del poema una indagacio? n de la realidad, una puesta en pra? ctica de un me? todo de conocimiento muy peculiar, distinto del cienti? fico pero igualmente atendible" {Notas sobre la experiencia poe? tica 183--84). Both claims can be illuminated by Alain Badiou's analysis of the specific form of knowledge of works of art, here understood as producers of truths both immanent and singular, that is, as vehicles whose sole purpose is to generate truths that "are given nowhere else than in art" (Handbook 9). In fact, Badiou asserts that a work of art can potentially be understood as "a situated inquiry about the truth that it locally actualizes or of which it is a finite fragment" {Handbook 12). Considering their works in this sense, I contend that the truth procedure that Girri and Cadenas participate in is a posthumanist practice of poetry, beyond the binds of the epistemological figure of Man.
In the following reading of their poetry, I will first discuss Girri's and Cadenas' critique of the commanding centrality of the poetic subject-- the figure, they contend, that obscures poetry's truth-- and then examine the most salient features of their alternative literary project. Although neither author espouses a formal philosophical system, I will highlight how their works echo certain aspects of Heidegger's later essays, with which they were familiar, as well as those of the philosopher's commentators, such as George Steiner. 8 Heidegger's writings from the 1940s and '50s, following the publication of Being and
Time (1927), diagnose the existential condition of modern Man and seek to reposition him ontologically beyond the prevailing metaphysics of the time. Likewise, Girri and Cadenas create a textual space for the dispersion of the subject that inherently challenges predominant cultural and sociological understandings of identity and subjectivity. When
16 CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
? viewed together, as I will do next, Girri and Cadenas represent a revealing but frequently overlooked current in contemporary Latin American poetry.
I. Modern Subjectivity and the Self-Perpetuation of Man
O f the critics who have studied Girri's and Cadenas'works, only Guillermo Sucre has noted some of the extraordinary parallels that exist between both authors' thought, calling their shared goal "una lo? gica verbal que fuese la transparencia del mundo" (294). In contrast, Jose? Balza, for one, states that despite similarities between Cadenas and certain moments in the poetry of Huidobro, Paz, Jose? Antonio Ramos Sucre and Juan Sa? nchez Pela? ez, he cannot cite "otros autores que hubiesen escogido la 'ruta del instante, la ruta de la atencio? n' como destino" (12--13). One of the purposes of the present essay, therefore, is to highlight the remarkable similarities in the poetic itineraries of Cadenas and Girri. In the first place, many readers have observed two different periods in the literary trajectory of each author. 9 Their early poems can be characterized as denunciations of the human being's existential orphanhood, contingency and ignorance: problems they unsuccessfully attempt to resolve through a greater assertion of the speaking subject. In their mature works, as I will show, both agree that the human being's gravest danger is this dominant stance of the subject in relationship to one's own self, language, and other people and things: one that places Man over and against his reality. Although there is no clear dividing line betweeir these phases, El ojo (1963) can be read as marking the shift in Girri's works;10his earlier collections, from 1946 to 1962, can be described, as Girri himself recognizes, as being "de orden existencial" (Vera Ocampo 46). Ba? rbara Crespo de Arnaud writes that Girri's first poetic production shows the more traditional traits of metaphoric lyricism and a strong presence of the enunciating subject, characteristics shared with Girri's co-generational peers. 11 In his later works, on the opposite pole, Crespo observes a more intellectual language based on "formas impersonales" (III).
Likewise, Cadenas' poetry can be read in two movements: the first---influenced by the ideologically revolutionary "Tabla Redonda" group-- spans roughly from Una isla (1958) to Intemperie (1977). These works have in common a subjective and expansive tone in which the first-person poetic voice and persona grow to mythic proportions; his long poem "Derrota" (1963) even came to represent the political experience ofhis generation. 12 The second includes the works written from Memorial (1977) to the present. 13 Such a division is not derived from an artificial pursuit of symmetry meant to mirror Girri's development. Cadenas himself has reiterated the slow transformation of his poetic voice and the distance he feels from his earlier production, whose self-centered focus and verbosity represent the reverse of his later aesthetic: "hay ma? s despersonalizacio? n, un intento de expresarme indirectamente" (Posadas 18). Armando Rojas Guardia, who traces Cadenas' "intellectual diary," summarizes the aim of the poet's second period: "una poesi? a religada (en este sentido, religiosa) a lo Real (familiarizada internamente con la insondabilidad del mundo), la cual desnudada de todo oropel y de todo lujo esce? nico distractores, se levanta desde una 'sequedad insobornable' hasta la 'exactitud como criterio decisivo': una poesi? a de la aletheia"(98).
Beyond these descriptive characterizations of the transformation that occurs in Cadenas' and Girri's poetry, I wish to frame this metamorphosis within a broader inquiry
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 17
? into notions of modern subjectivity, central to poststructuralist debates of the period. Specifically, it is productive to examine how the authors' experience and articulation of subjectivity in their earlier works--which they later disavow and seek to reformulate-- reflect the impasses of modernity. As mentioned before, Foucault's analysis of the episteme of Man captures the human being's historical role as the central subject of knowledge since the end of the 18th century, thus demarcating the field of humanism. 14As an epistemological figure, following Foucault, the human being posits and makes possible representation, while disposing of the objects of representation for himself, thus occupying what the philosopher terms the "the place of the king" (The Order 307). Within this construction, Foucault contends, Man seeks to exert his will and power over all things that come into his gaze, as only through his consciousness are the relationships between words, things and order made evident.
Both Girri and Cadenas in their early writing represent the subject's desire to establish its dominion by becoming the source for all that there is to know. Girri describes in a poem, "La condicio? n necesaria," Man's unattainable ideal as subject: "la ilusio? n de que posees/ un yo creador,/ indestructible,/ justo y sin deformidad,/ fortaleza/ en el dominio de las evidencias,/ sen? or absoluto/ de tu casa, tu camino,/ sen? or/ de los orbes terrenales" {La condicio? n necesaria 313). Likewise, Cadenas confesses in Los cuadernos del destierro, a book- length poem in prose and his first major work, "Una sola certidumbre ansio. Un so? lo lugar que podamos llamar por su nombre, palpar, acariciar [. . . ] quiero dentro de mi? un recodo florido, infranqueable, du? ctil donde yo pueda reinar sin estorbo" (100--01). The poetic subject in both of these poems expresses the desire to be capable of projecting perfect sense and order to the universe. Man, however, Foucault explains, comes to question his own nature as knower, as he discovers the limitations of his knowledge: that which is "other" to himself as subject that his cogito cannot master. 15Foucault identifies the root of the crisis of modernity as originating from Man's discovery of his paradoxical construction: that he is at once the Same and the Other, unable to vanquish his own alterity. Thus, Girri articulates this basic "truth" of Man: ". . . esta sola verdad:/ el orden, orden de lo que sea,/ ? ay! , me esta? vedado" {Playa sola 33). Analogously, Cadenas describes his subject's state of confusion, doubt and internal division saying that despite his best efforts, life "me deja solo frente al enorme bu? falo de lo desconocido" {Los cuadernos 91).
In the essay "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954), Heidegger prefigures in many ways Foucault's description of the modern episteme. Heidegger employs the word Gestell or "Enframing" to signify the way the human being seeks knowledge of the world, bringing forth things into unconcealment through a controlling mastery and "fixing" of them, securing them for himself and ordering them for his use. In this arrangement, "Man," Heidegger writes, "becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. " ("The Age" 128). In this context, language is restricted to instrumentality and representation, as Man attempts to overcome its ambiguity in order to assure the total objectification and "unhiddenness" of all beings, rendering them statically present and at his disposal. Heidegger suggests that this approach to language and the world is the culmination of the Nietzschean will to power, in that it places Being and beings at the
18 CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
? service of the individual subject, a process through which their meaning and value is assigned ("The Word of Nietzsche" 80-83).
Reflecting critically on writing as a tool for subjectivity, in terms that echo Heidegger, Girri elaborates on the procedure at work in his early poetic constructions-- one that could equally apply to Cadenas-- and his realization of its intrinsic inadequacies: "Por un lado, significaba o significa una voluntad de poderi? o, de dominio sobre la naturaleza, sobre la cosa, sobre si? mismo, y, por otro, es una manifestacio? n de la notable inferioridad o invalidez del hombre, para defenderse de las cuales no hace sino dorarse la pi? ldora con este yo" (Torres Fierro 18-19). This manner of writing characterizes both authors' first poetry-- what Girri meaningfully terms the "vi? a de la representacio? n" (Torres Fierro 41)-- and which they attempt to overcome in their later works. Girri writes of the failed "vi? a de representacio? n" as an incorrect way of seeing: "el ojo izquierdo en efecto es el que mira al tiempo, mientras que el derecho mira a la eternidad. Y demostrar que el ojo izquierdo es el que engan? a, armando una representacio? n tras otra, y provocando asi? un deseo insaciable de propiedad" (. Diario de un libro 54). Cadenas sums up the inevitable result of this mode of subjectivity and technological thought in an untitled poem from Intemperie (1977): "Nada, nada se repite. / So? lo yo, en la memoria, me tengo/ como un vestigio/ entre mis propias manos" (143). These verses echo Heidegger's diagnosis of the human being in the age of technology: "It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself" ("The Question" 27). It is important to note that in the same passage Heidegger goes on to explain that "In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i. e. , his essence" (27) because this mode of being effectively banishes all other kinds of relationships with the world-- and with oneself--that are not Enframing. Unsatisfied with this solipsism, as I will discuss in the next section, Girri's and Cadenas' later poetry is a testimony to their fidelity to a thinking beyond the self-perpetuation of Man.
II. The Voluntary Fading of the Subject
Foucault, and Heidegger before him, discover in the writings of certain authors a way to think and be that is other to the constitutive knowledge of the modern human being that is helpful for situating Girri's and Cadenas' later poetry, and which we can identify as posthumanist.
The Voluntary Fading of the Subject
Foucault, and Heidegger before him, discover in the writings of certain authors a way to think and be that is other to the constitutive knowledge of the modern human being that is helpful for situating Girri's and Cadenas' later poetry, and which we can identify as posthumanist. Foucault perceives in the works of Ste? phane Mallarme? , Antonin Artaud, Raymond Roussel, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski and Blanchot an experience of language in which the historically-based construct of Man disappears. Indeed, Foucault famously predicts the "death of Man" as a new epistemic arrangement unfolds in which Man will be erased "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (The Order 387), alluding here to the human being's eventual separation from the epistemological center and his incorporation into language. In the void of a naming subject, literature offers a unique means of thought, born of and always leading back to itself. In an interview published the same year as The Order o f Things, Foucault states that "literature has been the place where man has never stopped disappearing in favor of language. Where "9a parle," man no longer exists" ("L'homme est-il mort ? " 572). 16Foucault follows Blanchot's understanding that, as a site for the subject's dispersion, literature aims "to escape any essential determination, any affirmation that stabilizes it or even fulfills it" (273). Blanchot
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 19
? and Foucault participate here in a greater debate of French literary criticism of the time that produced analogous ideas, such as Derridas theory of grammatology and Barthes' notion of the "neutral" and his groundbreaking call for the "death" of the author.
Predating these poststructuralist formulations, Heidegger goes further still, finding in literature--particularly in the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin, Georg Trakl, Stefan George and Gottfried Benn-- the place where ontological truth is established in language. Heidegger's lifelong project spirals around the question of Being, taking several prominent turns (Kehre), the first being a move away from understanding Being through the analytic of Dasein-- Heidegger's term for human existence as a "Being-there" or "Being-in-the- world"-- to a disclosure of Being as truth through art, and particularly poetry. 17Heidegger sees poetic language, liberated from the binds of Enframing and the metaphysics of subjectivity, as the most propitious ground for a thinking of Being. Whereas language as "technicity" seeks a totalizing, controlling and exhaustive revealing of things to the human subject, the poetic word allows things to be brought into presence without requiring them to be fully disclosed. Hans-Georg Gadamer explains: "In the work of art, we experience an absolute opposition to this will-to-control, not in the sense of a rigid resistance to the presumption of our will, which is bent on utilizing things, but in the sense of the superior and intrusive power of a being reposing in itself" (227). Being is always only partial, and aletheia-- the ontological structure of truth, which is the unconcealing of beings-- is "always accompanied by concealedness" (Cobussen 68). Heidegger posits art and specifically poetic language as the "house of Being" ("What Are Poets For? " 129), as it is the dimension in which Being's revealing-concealing duality is made evident, as Marc Froment-Meurice elaborates: "The word is not, properly speaking, because it would signify totally, present its transparent sense without obstacles, but because, cut off, it remains open to. . . (The ellipses mark what remains to be said. ) The word is dedicated, promised, and yet, in this promise, nothing else promises itself" (74). Being is brought to the word in language, for it renders apparent the impossibility of absolute univocity for all things, oneself included. This is because poetic language allows us to experience the "excess" of beings over our means and ability to disclose them, due to the "undisclosedness" present in language itself.
Although Girri and Cadenas do not adopt Heidegger's very particular vocabulary, their poetry and paratexts belong to its same situated inquiry. Cadenas directly engages these ideas, for example, in Anotaciones:
'En Heidegger, la verdad no consiste en conocimiento, sino en las cosas mismas, tal como se manifiestan. ' En ellas esta? presente el misterio. [. . . ] Nos encontramos en el reino de la ale? theia, el descubrimiento, la revelacio? n, y lo que aparece en todo su poder es lo ignoto, inseparable de lo que existe. La verdad seri? a mostracio? n de las cosas, que descansan en el misterio, siempre, y lo rezuman inconteniblemente. (562)
In accordance with Heidegger's appreciation of literature, Cadenas ventures that poetry's essential gift is its preservation of the unconcealment of concealment that is experienced in language, which is analogous to the nature of the presencing of things
20 CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
? and the world. In an interview with Danubio Torres Fierro, Girri similarly affirms that a different knowledge or experience of the world is indeed possible for the human being through poetry: "hay algo no conocido en el conocimiento, con lo cual no so? lo manifiesta esa duda, pero tambie? n que la realidad debe ser observada mediante vi? as que no son las del conocimiento habitual, y que el hombre se enfrenta con ma? s de un mundo. La poesi? a puede ser un medio de acceso a tales mundos" (Quincepoetas 36). A briefpoem by Cadenas about a flower illustrates what this type of knowledge might look like through the lens of poetry: "Desde que? profundidad surges/ como llama/ para esconderla" (Memorial 231). In approaching a flower as an ungraspable flame that appears and conceals itself in its own profundity, Cadenas practices what Girri proposes in Lo propio, lo de todos: "Que el poema refleje las cosas con la espontaneidad que ostentan al aparece? rsenos" (75). This attentive disposition opens the human being up for the manifestation of other things and beings in their own unconcealedness and hiddenness.
Such a task requires that one ask oneself, as Girri does in the poem "Preguntarse, cada tanto": "Que? hacer/ del viejo yo li? rico, erra? tico esti? mulo,/ al ir avecina? ndonos a la fase/ de los silencios, la de no desear/ ya doblegarnos animosamente/ ante cada impresio? n que hierve . . . " (Quien habla 188). If the poetic subject is to be reconceived, no longer as the protagonistic "I" in the romantic vein or the locus for representation, the question remains as to how to redefine the human being in, what we are calling here, posthumanist terms. A later poem of Girri's, with the suggestive title "Cuando la idea del yo se aleja," outlines an initial answer, entailing a radical shedding of the "I": "De lo que va adelante/ y de lo que sigue atra? s,/ de lo que dura y de lo que cae,/ me deshago,/ abandonado quedo/
[. . . ]/ abjurando de armas, faltas,/ de oraciones donde borrar las faltas,/ blando organismo, entidad/ que ignora co? mo decir: "Yo soy" (El ojo 46). The loss of subjectivity that Girri proposes here does not equate with self-annihilation, but rather with a vital attitude that Heidegger calls Gelassenheit, a reverent and quiet sheltering that attends to things in their mysterious and ungraspable self-unfolding by letting go of representational thought and subjective will. Cadenas offers a new self-portrait, following this same line o f thinking, by tracing the negative outline of his own presence: "No soy lo que llevo/ sino el recipiente. / Lugar de la presencia,/ lugar del vaci? o" (Memorial 236). Shorn of personal features, the self is recast as an open receptacle that adheres impersonally to the world in its natural unfolding. This way of being is distinguished by its quiet, simple engagement with what is, as Cadenas affirms in another poem: "Soy esta vigilancia. / Soy esta vacilante disponibilidad,/ [. . . ]/ Soy e? ste en que se extingue/ hasta la idea de hombre" (Memorial272). With this new self-definition, any fixed notion of Man and the defining parameters of his relationship with the world are extinguished, inverting his role as the center of knowledge to that of a conscious and purposeful emptiness, available for the fresh presencing of Being and beings.
In his 1950 essay "The Thing," Heidegger envisages human beings--here referred to as "mortals"--as decentered and brought together on equal footing with the other elements of the world: earth, sky and divinities. These elements, called das Geviert or the "fourfold," are betrothed to each other and freely appropriate one another in an unique relationship described as a "round dance," a play of reciprocal mirroring that sets "each of the four free into its own, but it binds these free ones into the simplicity of their essential being toward one another" (177). This fourfold is best understood, not in fixed
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 21
? representational terms, but rather as a dynamic shining or flashing forth, allowing for the illumination and concealedness of all things through their interplay. 18A similar mirror play seems to be at work in Cadenas' poem "Rilke" in which things and man come into themselves through their mutual belonging and lighting:
Las cosas supieron, ma? s que los hombres, de su mirada
a la que se abri? an
para otra existencia.
El las acogi? a transforma? ndolas
en lo que eran, devolvie? ndolas a su exactitud, ban? a? ndolas en su propio oro,
pues ? que? sabe de su regia condicio? n
lo que se entrega?
Piedras, flores, nubes
renaci? an
en otro silencio
para un distinto transcurrir. (Gestiones 443)
In this poem, things-- stones, flowers, clouds-- are allowed to be
through a practice of silence in which the human being also participates, receiving their presence so that they and he shine in their "propio oro. "
This role involves the voluntary fading of the poetic subject, an example of which Girri discovers in Keats's experience of writing: "despojarse, mientras el poema progresa (esto a expensas de aquello), de los incontables yoes que en e? l conviven, y cuya fase u? ltima, el sentimiento de nulidad, coincidiri? a con la culminacio? n del poema" {Lopropio 71). The human being is not eliminated, but rather reappropriated to his world through his open attention to it, which, Girri and Cadenas advise, is also the necessary condition for writing poetry. Girri's poem "Dormir que hace el poema" further exemplifies the relationship between the work, the reality that inspired it, and the "hacedor"-- the term Girri adopts instead of "poet," as a nod to Borges and a way to eschew certain connotations of the latter word, particularly those stemming from the Romantic tradition and its reformulations:
22
CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
El poema, desprendido de la visio? n,
y del que no podri? as explicar, so? lo ofrecerlo,
y ofrecerlo
en homenaje a lo recibido pero no su enigma,
asi? como
un bebedor no penetra en su vino,
themselves
? lo bebe,
pero no sabe que? es,
adema? s de a? spero y seco,
subido de color. (Existenciales 99-100)
In these verses, the poem is described as being "separated" or "disjoined" from the vision that inspired it, having its own existence. The poem is autonomous and ultimately inscrutable; it is not the subjects stage, domain or possession. It is first "received" through the undivided attention of the "hacedor" and then offered back to the world in its homage as a thanking. The "hacedor" partakes of the poetic experience, as writer and then as reader, but renounces all efforts to apprehend the word and world by imposing upon them a determinate order or meaning. These verses are directives for an exercise in observing, inhabiting and attending to the world by adhering to the present with a lucid gaze and detached attention, thus forgoing fixed goals. An epigrammatic poem by Cadenas distills the same message: "Atencio? n/ redoma hechizada,/ ne? ctar de estar presente" (. Memorial 246).
This attention, and the poetry that results, should not be confused with the dominant Latin American poetic trend identified by Ca? rcamo-Huechante and Mazzotti characterized by its "fe en la representacio? n y trascendencia de la poesi? a [que] subyace una cadena estable de identidad y correspondencia entre los componentes de una totalidad universal, donde la poesi? a es capaz de otorgarles una configuracio? n armo? nica de representacio? n y unidad" (12). Unlike this paradigm, Girri and Cadenas are not interested in writing as universal representation, nor do they seek transcendence of the world. Rather, as Girri writes,
En vez de ser edificada con lo recordado, que la escritura, sin memoria y sin yo, se convierta en construccio? n del presente.
Que el escribir sea mecanicidad, estado en el que no se dan li? neas ni de mayor ni de menor resistencia. Como en la reiteracio? n de mantras.
Que el ser siempre lo mismo, el escribir ya no tenga un objetivo, y que de haberlo sea el vaci? o; o el silencio, versio? n ma? s suave de ese vaci? o. (El motivo es el
poema 287)
Girri's and Cadenas' poetry, like Heidegger's thinking, ultimately points to a non-saying that is only possible when the "yo" is reconceived in posthumanist terms, as an open space for language to speak and the world to presence. The poem demands a thoughtful listening that leads one away from a form of speech that seeks to define and apprehend things through language, and back to an area of ambiguity where in the interstices of the verses, things and the subject present themselves through revealing and concealing, in a dynamic relationship in the present moment. This mode of writing challenges the demands and restrictions of the modern episteme, with the human being at its center as the articulator of knowledge and the wielder of language. Naturally, such a position is tenuous and paradoxical, for the "hacedor" must be engaged in his attention but simultaneously abandon the habitual structures of the self; as such, the poem is not of the poet's dominion, but without him, the poem would not come to fruition. This poetry, therefore, exhorts
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1
23
? that it be practiced as an ascetic and meditative exercise that (re)moves and displaces the subject. Cadenas aptly observes that this existential path, however, is rarely chosen, as Man is his own obstacle: "Los hombres esta? n atascados,/ hacen ruido para no escuchar,/ su corazo? n ya no los soporta. / Todo respiray da gracias,! menos ellos" [Gestiones 454). Girri's and Cadenas' poetry, ultimately, is the exploration of such a possibility, an opportunity to give thanks.
In concluding, I would like to briefly touch upon some of the implications of Girri's and Cadenas' poetry with regard to the question of the subject and the methodology pursued in the present essay. First, by formulating my theoretical approach within the immediate resonances of the chosen corpus, I seek to shed light on a posthumanist literary current alternative to canonic readings of Latin American poetry and its central figures in the second half of the 20th century. While recent theoretical vogues may consider it problematic to refer to the works of Heidegger or the most poststructuralist Foucault (as opposed to his later works at the College de France that constitute the foundation for current posthumanist agendas that I discussed earlier), their texts directly and indirectly form the philosophical and discursive backdrop of much of Girri's and Cadenas'writing. 19 Not only are they historically relevant, but they also serve as a starting point to revisit and elucidate the basic question of the subject in relation to Being and epistemic knowledge, which is central to the poets' works.
Second, new iterations of this same question lie at the heart of the poetry of various younger writers such as Mexicans Elsa Cross (1946), Alberto Blanco (1951), Coral Bracho (1951) and Leo? n Plascencia N? ol (1968), Cuban Jose? Kozer (1940), and Peruvian Jose? Watanabe (1945), among others, who also actively explore the displacement of the modern subject. Perhaps it is no coincidence that all of the above writers have been drawn to Asian philosophies and/or religious practices as part of their rethinking, reformulating and experience of the self through their poetry, a connection that must be explored in full as an integral variant ofLatin American Orientalism, and one that has mostly been overlooked by critics. 20 In the case of Girri and Cadenas, both authors engage with Taoist and Zen texts, as well as the writings of J. Krishnamurti, in poems and prose pieces I have not touched on in the present essay for lack of space. Badiou reminds us that a truth inquiry is multiple and potentially infinite, unbound by time, space or culture, and, as many academics have noted, the articulations of the subject in these philosophical frameworks, although fundamentally different from traditional Western approaches to subjectivity, complement
many of Heidegger's posthumanist theories, as discussed here. 21The need to reconsider the intersections of the first current of posthumanism and/or Asian thought and recent Latin American poetry signals the potential limitations of contemporary cultural studies, that privilege the politics of identity and the human body but sometimes underplay the epistemological and ontological conditions of possibility of their enunciating subjects.
Finally, the poetry of Girri, and Cadenas, in its search for a way to speak beyond the constraints of the modern subject, like Heidegger's often tortuous thinking of Being, highlights the inherent conundrum at the heart of their projects: a true eclipse of the subject's speaking must be something Man cannot say. Can such an undertaking be anything but solitary and silent? Girri explicitly identifies this contradictory challenge: "lo ilusorio/ de verse uno mismo so? lo/ como un yo que percibe. / Intentar corregir,
24 CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
? corregirnos/ ensayando con la vi? a negativa/ [. . . ]/ no mueren/ los pensamientos cuando callan,/ cesan/ para que aflore, se exponga/ la continuidad del silencio" (A? rbol 303). Or, as Cadenas asks: "? Necesita palabras/un rostro? / ? La flor/ quiere sonidos? / ? Pide vocablos/ el perro, la piedra, el fuego? / ? No se expresan con so? lo estar? " (. Memorial 262). Does the possible incommunicability and experiential nature of their task make for infertile grounds for writing, especially for academic explorations? Cadenas' humble and tentative answer, however, is also worth reproducing: "Soy/ apenas/ un hombre que trata de respirar/ pol- los poros del lenguaje. " (Gestiones 420). It is to this space, between this question and this answer, between the revealed and the concealed, between the present and the absent, that Girri and Cadenas invite us to dwell and from where, perhaps, new paths of thinking can emerge.
Notas
1Ca? rcamo-Huechante and Mazzotti do note that "en los ma? rgenes" of this trend are poets like Jose? Lezama Lima with "poe?
Alberto Girri, Rafael Cadenas and Posthumanist Latin American Poetry
ScuraM, Pollack
College of Staten Island, City University of New York
In 2003, Luis Ca? rcamo-Huechante and Jose? Antonio Mazzotti edited a special issue of Revista de Cri? tica Literaria Latinoamericana that sought to survey the changing panorama of Latin American poetry in the age of globalization. Their descriptive study contrasted recent poetic trends with the most prominent currents of 20th century Latin American poetry. From the prophetic poetic subject of Pablo Nerudas Canto general to the ironic and desacralizing voice of Nicanor Parras antipoesi? a, the editors suggested that the dominant trait characterizing poetry published roughly from 1950-1990--despite the great heterogeneity of writing practices throughout the continent-- was a common faith in the rhetorical and representational power of poetry and its political significance. 1The two critics also identified a common turn towards a "ruta trascendentalista, expansiva, del sujeto y el lenguaje" (10), for which, they proposed, Octavio Paz, as late as La otra voz (1990), was a paragon. In many cases, this type of subjectivity's manifested through the assertion and construction of an "I" that acts as a "voz de la tribu" (Ca? rcamo-Huechante y Mazzotti 11); this "tribu," I would add, can be defined diversely: as modern Western civilization, Latin America, a particular nation, or simply a group of people defined along common ethnic, cultural, economic, political, linguistic, racial or gender lines.
If we start with the description above, it is important to emphasize that this literary current, to draw on Pedro Henri? quez Uren? a's term, hinges on a century-old tradition of Latin American humanism that places subjectivity at its core. Here I refer specifically to Michel Foucault's analysis of humanism as a set of discursive practices operant since the Enlightenment, which he describes in detail as constituent of the "modern episteme" in
The Order o f Things (1966). Central to this reading of humanism is Foucault's observation that within systems of thought as divergent as Christianity, Marxism, Existentialism, phenomenology, and even extreme ideologies like Nazism and Stalinism ("What is Enlightenment? " 44), the figure of Man is the foundation of all positivistic knowledge as well as-- in an unresolved contradiction---the object of that knowledge. 2The generation of intellectuals who, during the first decades of the 20th century, placed humanism at the center of their vision of Latin American culture, had a profound effect on the configuration
13
? of the continent's literary field. The works of Henri? quez Uren? a, Alfonso Reyes, Gilberto Freyre, Mariano Pico? n Salas and Jose? Vasconcelos, among others, served as the epistemic foundation for cultural and political discourses on Latin American identity. As Ignacio Sa? nchez Prado has analyzed, for example, the humanist project led by Reyes in Mexico during the years of the Ateneo de la Juventud, represented the most significant effort to reach "la constitucio? n de una e? tica y una este? tica especi? fica para Ame? rica" (Sa? nchez Prado 13) through Reyes' prescriptive definition of literary discourse as that which "expresa al hombre en cuanto es humano" (12). 3It follows that some of the most prominent figures of Latin American poetry-- Pablo Neruda (after his Residencias), Gabriela Mistral, and Paz, for example-- strove to establish a Latin American subject capable of occupying the central place of the continent's cultural production. 4Although this "humanist" poetry-- as I will refer to it in the present investigation-- often challenges hegemonic formulations of subjectivity by offering other experiences of being a "self," the very epistemology of subjectivity is rarely questioned, as it neither is in many of the studies published recently on contemporary Latin American poetry. 5
In what follows, I propose to decenter the canonicity of this poetic subject by analyzing in conjunction the distinctive, "posthumanist" poetry of Argentinean Alberto Girri (1919--1991) and Venezuelan Rafael Cadenas (1930). Girri wrote over thirty books of poems, was an important translator of English-language poets, and collaborated in the literary journal Sur and the newspaper La nacio? n. Cadenas is the author of seven collections of poetry and six long essays, and also is an accomplished translator and professor. These renowned writers, whose publications span from 1946 (Girri's Playa sola) to 2005 (a collection of Cadenas' translations titled El taller de al lado: Traducciones), have been awarded many of the most important literary prizes of the region. 6Although there are certain aesthetic similarities between Girri's and Cadenas' first works and those of the poets of their respective generations, these soon disappear, accounting for why both have been called solitary writers or raros, which probably accounts for why their work has been most thoroughly examined in monographic studies. 7
Instead of considering them as isolated anomalies, however, I examine Girri's and Cadenas' works here as part of a "corriente alternativa"-- to play on Octavio Paz's terminology-- that is less visible within canonic trends of Latin American poetry and the corresponding academic attention they receive. At the opposite pole of the dominant poetics described at the beginning of the present article, Girri and Cadenas-- and other contemporary poets I will mention later--express their fundamental discontent with the inherent limitations of defining the human being as the subject of knowledge. Both offer important critiques of modern Western subjectivity and humanism by proposing a deliberate reduction and repositioning of the subject, as well as a critical relationship with language: a posthumanist poetics with important predecessors including Argentineans Jorge Luis Borges, Macedonio Ferna? ndez, Cuban Jose? Lezama Lima, and Mexican Jorge Cuesta, for example.
In identifying this genealogy, I wish to distinguish what I am terming posthumanist poetry from other designations. Writing in 1925, for example, Jose? Ortega y Gasset observed an overarching "deshumanizacio? n" in art, a term he used to describe the common thread linking the diverse poetics of the historic avant-garde movements: their distance
14 CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
? from mimetic representation of "la realidad vivida" (31) or what he also called "elementos humanos" (25) through their extreme use of metaphor, irony, changing perspectives, linguistic play and the rupture o f logical nexuses. The "deshumanized" avant-garde indeed prefigures and intersects the posthumanist poetry that I examine here in its questioning of Man as the ultimate subject and object of knowledge. The most obvious examples of this are surrealism's exploration of the subconscious and dreams; the performance of the incommensurability of representation and the real by poets such Oliverio Girondo; or the existential crises and the subjects lack of understanding made explicit in works like Neruda's Residencia en la tierra or Vallejo's Trilce. However, as Fabia? n Jime? nez Flores correctly observes, "Pues si bien la vanguardia latinoamericana experimento? un lenguaje nuevo, siempre lo hizo, por otro lado, desde un sujeto enunciativo muy poderoso" (369). In other words, even though certain avant-garde movements can be understood as being born of a crisis in understanding and experiencing the human being as the locus of knowledge-- the same point of departure for posthumanism-- the poetic subject of their works is generally assertive, even genesiacal, fulfilling what Ortega y Gasset identified as the new mission of "dehumanized" art: "inventar lo que no existe" (Ortega y Gasset 44), such as Vicente Huidobro's famous formula, "el poeta es un pequen? o dios" (Huidobro 2). One could argue, then, that in cases like Creacionismo, the avant-garde's crisis of the subject actually results in a greater exacerbation of humanism, in that it locates meaning and even being in what philosopher Cary Wolfe calls the "ontologically closed domain of [human] consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on" (xxv).
In contrast with this defining element of the "deshumanized" avant-garde, I propose to read Girri's and Cadenas' works as examples of what numerous critics, such as Cary Wolfe, have identified aposteriori as a posthumanist trend in literature and philosophy that beginswiththewritingsofMartinHeideggerinthe 1930s,includesmomentsofGerman existentialism and French poststructuralism, and is currently reworked in contemporary formulations of bioethics (Sa? nchez Prado 8). Wolfe divides the historical evolution of the term posthumanism in two main currents. First, the 1960s poststructuralist wave sought to produce an epistemological fissure with Western metaphysics, which Wolfe locates chiefly in Foucault's famous call for "the death of Man" (xii). With Nietzsche and Heidegger as their foundation, the works of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot and Gili? es Deleuze also posed radical critiques of modern subjectivity, with distinct philosophical aims. Highlighting the metaphysical paradoxes of anthropocentric (humanist) perspectives, these thinkers "proporcionaron elementos para la emergencia de nuevas formas de negatividad que expusieran la precariedad de lo humano [. . . ] y sugirieran otras formas posibles de relacio? n y convivencia entre los vivientes" (Yelin 2-3). Second, as Wolfe summarizes, since the 1980s, the notion of posthumanism has been claimed and reformulated by theorists with divergent frameworks and agendas. From Donna Haraway's groundbreaking "A Cyborg Manifesto" in 1985 to Wolfe's own theorization of animal studies, this second wave of posthumanism attempts a displacement of the human being's self-assigned centrality in the modern world through the deconstruction of anthropocentrism and speciesism. But as with other theoretical currents that seek conceptual breaks with the human being and human identity--from gender and queer studies to biopolitics in the works of Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Giorgio
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 15
? Agamben and Roberto Esposito, among others--these contemporary articulations of posthumanism intend a shift in the politics and cultural dynamics of the gendered human body and its symbolizations in which the transcendental signifier of the human being is no longer operant.
I find it relevant here to mark a conceptual distance from recent articulations of posthumanism, as my analysis will privilege the earlier posthumanist critique of modern subjectivity. Girri's and Cadenas' projects are, in part, a product of those foundational
1960s French philosophical (dis)articulations of Man, as well as a generalized popular interest throughout the West in certain currents of Asian philosophical and religious thought that also propose radically different conceptualizations of the human being. Not only does this first wave of posthumanist thought correspond chronologically with the work of Girri and Cadenas, but, more importantly, its questions extend beyond the problematic centrality of the human being-- e. g. : the politics of its body, or its claim of domination over the natural world-- and return us to a fundamental inquiry into the very constitution of the enunciating subject as the sole condition of possibility of knowledge, a project that is central in the writing of other Latin American poets today.
In his essay Realidady literatura, Cadenas writes that "Nuestro reino es el fatigado reino de lo sabido. La poesi? a esta? llamada a arrancarnos de e? l y conducirnos a la novedad, que es lo ordinario, pero como si lo vie? ramos por primera vez. El nombrar poe? tico estari? a encargado de acercarnos a la cosa y dejarnos frente a ella como cosa, con su silencio, su extran? eza, su gravedad" (524--25). Similarly, Girri has affirmed that the role of the poet is: "el de realizar a trave? s del poema una indagacio? n de la realidad, una puesta en pra? ctica de un me? todo de conocimiento muy peculiar, distinto del cienti? fico pero igualmente atendible" {Notas sobre la experiencia poe? tica 183--84). Both claims can be illuminated by Alain Badiou's analysis of the specific form of knowledge of works of art, here understood as producers of truths both immanent and singular, that is, as vehicles whose sole purpose is to generate truths that "are given nowhere else than in art" (Handbook 9). In fact, Badiou asserts that a work of art can potentially be understood as "a situated inquiry about the truth that it locally actualizes or of which it is a finite fragment" {Handbook 12). Considering their works in this sense, I contend that the truth procedure that Girri and Cadenas participate in is a posthumanist practice of poetry, beyond the binds of the epistemological figure of Man.
In the following reading of their poetry, I will first discuss Girri's and Cadenas' critique of the commanding centrality of the poetic subject-- the figure, they contend, that obscures poetry's truth-- and then examine the most salient features of their alternative literary project. Although neither author espouses a formal philosophical system, I will highlight how their works echo certain aspects of Heidegger's later essays, with which they were familiar, as well as those of the philosopher's commentators, such as George Steiner. 8 Heidegger's writings from the 1940s and '50s, following the publication of Being and
Time (1927), diagnose the existential condition of modern Man and seek to reposition him ontologically beyond the prevailing metaphysics of the time. Likewise, Girri and Cadenas create a textual space for the dispersion of the subject that inherently challenges predominant cultural and sociological understandings of identity and subjectivity. When
16 CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
? viewed together, as I will do next, Girri and Cadenas represent a revealing but frequently overlooked current in contemporary Latin American poetry.
I. Modern Subjectivity and the Self-Perpetuation of Man
O f the critics who have studied Girri's and Cadenas'works, only Guillermo Sucre has noted some of the extraordinary parallels that exist between both authors' thought, calling their shared goal "una lo? gica verbal que fuese la transparencia del mundo" (294). In contrast, Jose? Balza, for one, states that despite similarities between Cadenas and certain moments in the poetry of Huidobro, Paz, Jose? Antonio Ramos Sucre and Juan Sa? nchez Pela? ez, he cannot cite "otros autores que hubiesen escogido la 'ruta del instante, la ruta de la atencio? n' como destino" (12--13). One of the purposes of the present essay, therefore, is to highlight the remarkable similarities in the poetic itineraries of Cadenas and Girri. In the first place, many readers have observed two different periods in the literary trajectory of each author. 9 Their early poems can be characterized as denunciations of the human being's existential orphanhood, contingency and ignorance: problems they unsuccessfully attempt to resolve through a greater assertion of the speaking subject. In their mature works, as I will show, both agree that the human being's gravest danger is this dominant stance of the subject in relationship to one's own self, language, and other people and things: one that places Man over and against his reality. Although there is no clear dividing line betweeir these phases, El ojo (1963) can be read as marking the shift in Girri's works;10his earlier collections, from 1946 to 1962, can be described, as Girri himself recognizes, as being "de orden existencial" (Vera Ocampo 46). Ba? rbara Crespo de Arnaud writes that Girri's first poetic production shows the more traditional traits of metaphoric lyricism and a strong presence of the enunciating subject, characteristics shared with Girri's co-generational peers. 11 In his later works, on the opposite pole, Crespo observes a more intellectual language based on "formas impersonales" (III).
Likewise, Cadenas' poetry can be read in two movements: the first---influenced by the ideologically revolutionary "Tabla Redonda" group-- spans roughly from Una isla (1958) to Intemperie (1977). These works have in common a subjective and expansive tone in which the first-person poetic voice and persona grow to mythic proportions; his long poem "Derrota" (1963) even came to represent the political experience ofhis generation. 12 The second includes the works written from Memorial (1977) to the present. 13 Such a division is not derived from an artificial pursuit of symmetry meant to mirror Girri's development. Cadenas himself has reiterated the slow transformation of his poetic voice and the distance he feels from his earlier production, whose self-centered focus and verbosity represent the reverse of his later aesthetic: "hay ma? s despersonalizacio? n, un intento de expresarme indirectamente" (Posadas 18). Armando Rojas Guardia, who traces Cadenas' "intellectual diary," summarizes the aim of the poet's second period: "una poesi? a religada (en este sentido, religiosa) a lo Real (familiarizada internamente con la insondabilidad del mundo), la cual desnudada de todo oropel y de todo lujo esce? nico distractores, se levanta desde una 'sequedad insobornable' hasta la 'exactitud como criterio decisivo': una poesi? a de la aletheia"(98).
Beyond these descriptive characterizations of the transformation that occurs in Cadenas' and Girri's poetry, I wish to frame this metamorphosis within a broader inquiry
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 17
? into notions of modern subjectivity, central to poststructuralist debates of the period. Specifically, it is productive to examine how the authors' experience and articulation of subjectivity in their earlier works--which they later disavow and seek to reformulate-- reflect the impasses of modernity. As mentioned before, Foucault's analysis of the episteme of Man captures the human being's historical role as the central subject of knowledge since the end of the 18th century, thus demarcating the field of humanism. 14As an epistemological figure, following Foucault, the human being posits and makes possible representation, while disposing of the objects of representation for himself, thus occupying what the philosopher terms the "the place of the king" (The Order 307). Within this construction, Foucault contends, Man seeks to exert his will and power over all things that come into his gaze, as only through his consciousness are the relationships between words, things and order made evident.
Both Girri and Cadenas in their early writing represent the subject's desire to establish its dominion by becoming the source for all that there is to know. Girri describes in a poem, "La condicio? n necesaria," Man's unattainable ideal as subject: "la ilusio? n de que posees/ un yo creador,/ indestructible,/ justo y sin deformidad,/ fortaleza/ en el dominio de las evidencias,/ sen? or absoluto/ de tu casa, tu camino,/ sen? or/ de los orbes terrenales" {La condicio? n necesaria 313). Likewise, Cadenas confesses in Los cuadernos del destierro, a book- length poem in prose and his first major work, "Una sola certidumbre ansio. Un so? lo lugar que podamos llamar por su nombre, palpar, acariciar [. . . ] quiero dentro de mi? un recodo florido, infranqueable, du? ctil donde yo pueda reinar sin estorbo" (100--01). The poetic subject in both of these poems expresses the desire to be capable of projecting perfect sense and order to the universe. Man, however, Foucault explains, comes to question his own nature as knower, as he discovers the limitations of his knowledge: that which is "other" to himself as subject that his cogito cannot master. 15Foucault identifies the root of the crisis of modernity as originating from Man's discovery of his paradoxical construction: that he is at once the Same and the Other, unable to vanquish his own alterity. Thus, Girri articulates this basic "truth" of Man: ". . . esta sola verdad:/ el orden, orden de lo que sea,/ ? ay! , me esta? vedado" {Playa sola 33). Analogously, Cadenas describes his subject's state of confusion, doubt and internal division saying that despite his best efforts, life "me deja solo frente al enorme bu? falo de lo desconocido" {Los cuadernos 91).
In the essay "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954), Heidegger prefigures in many ways Foucault's description of the modern episteme. Heidegger employs the word Gestell or "Enframing" to signify the way the human being seeks knowledge of the world, bringing forth things into unconcealment through a controlling mastery and "fixing" of them, securing them for himself and ordering them for his use. In this arrangement, "Man," Heidegger writes, "becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. " ("The Age" 128). In this context, language is restricted to instrumentality and representation, as Man attempts to overcome its ambiguity in order to assure the total objectification and "unhiddenness" of all beings, rendering them statically present and at his disposal. Heidegger suggests that this approach to language and the world is the culmination of the Nietzschean will to power, in that it places Being and beings at the
18 CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
? service of the individual subject, a process through which their meaning and value is assigned ("The Word of Nietzsche" 80-83).
Reflecting critically on writing as a tool for subjectivity, in terms that echo Heidegger, Girri elaborates on the procedure at work in his early poetic constructions-- one that could equally apply to Cadenas-- and his realization of its intrinsic inadequacies: "Por un lado, significaba o significa una voluntad de poderi? o, de dominio sobre la naturaleza, sobre la cosa, sobre si? mismo, y, por otro, es una manifestacio? n de la notable inferioridad o invalidez del hombre, para defenderse de las cuales no hace sino dorarse la pi? ldora con este yo" (Torres Fierro 18-19). This manner of writing characterizes both authors' first poetry-- what Girri meaningfully terms the "vi? a de la representacio? n" (Torres Fierro 41)-- and which they attempt to overcome in their later works. Girri writes of the failed "vi? a de representacio? n" as an incorrect way of seeing: "el ojo izquierdo en efecto es el que mira al tiempo, mientras que el derecho mira a la eternidad. Y demostrar que el ojo izquierdo es el que engan? a, armando una representacio? n tras otra, y provocando asi? un deseo insaciable de propiedad" (. Diario de un libro 54). Cadenas sums up the inevitable result of this mode of subjectivity and technological thought in an untitled poem from Intemperie (1977): "Nada, nada se repite. / So? lo yo, en la memoria, me tengo/ como un vestigio/ entre mis propias manos" (143). These verses echo Heidegger's diagnosis of the human being in the age of technology: "It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself" ("The Question" 27). It is important to note that in the same passage Heidegger goes on to explain that "In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i. e. , his essence" (27) because this mode of being effectively banishes all other kinds of relationships with the world-- and with oneself--that are not Enframing. Unsatisfied with this solipsism, as I will discuss in the next section, Girri's and Cadenas' later poetry is a testimony to their fidelity to a thinking beyond the self-perpetuation of Man.
II. The Voluntary Fading of the Subject
Foucault, and Heidegger before him, discover in the writings of certain authors a way to think and be that is other to the constitutive knowledge of the modern human being that is helpful for situating Girri's and Cadenas' later poetry, and which we can identify as posthumanist.
The Voluntary Fading of the Subject
Foucault, and Heidegger before him, discover in the writings of certain authors a way to think and be that is other to the constitutive knowledge of the modern human being that is helpful for situating Girri's and Cadenas' later poetry, and which we can identify as posthumanist. Foucault perceives in the works of Ste? phane Mallarme? , Antonin Artaud, Raymond Roussel, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski and Blanchot an experience of language in which the historically-based construct of Man disappears. Indeed, Foucault famously predicts the "death of Man" as a new epistemic arrangement unfolds in which Man will be erased "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (The Order 387), alluding here to the human being's eventual separation from the epistemological center and his incorporation into language. In the void of a naming subject, literature offers a unique means of thought, born of and always leading back to itself. In an interview published the same year as The Order o f Things, Foucault states that "literature has been the place where man has never stopped disappearing in favor of language. Where "9a parle," man no longer exists" ("L'homme est-il mort ? " 572). 16Foucault follows Blanchot's understanding that, as a site for the subject's dispersion, literature aims "to escape any essential determination, any affirmation that stabilizes it or even fulfills it" (273). Blanchot
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 19
? and Foucault participate here in a greater debate of French literary criticism of the time that produced analogous ideas, such as Derridas theory of grammatology and Barthes' notion of the "neutral" and his groundbreaking call for the "death" of the author.
Predating these poststructuralist formulations, Heidegger goes further still, finding in literature--particularly in the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin, Georg Trakl, Stefan George and Gottfried Benn-- the place where ontological truth is established in language. Heidegger's lifelong project spirals around the question of Being, taking several prominent turns (Kehre), the first being a move away from understanding Being through the analytic of Dasein-- Heidegger's term for human existence as a "Being-there" or "Being-in-the- world"-- to a disclosure of Being as truth through art, and particularly poetry. 17Heidegger sees poetic language, liberated from the binds of Enframing and the metaphysics of subjectivity, as the most propitious ground for a thinking of Being. Whereas language as "technicity" seeks a totalizing, controlling and exhaustive revealing of things to the human subject, the poetic word allows things to be brought into presence without requiring them to be fully disclosed. Hans-Georg Gadamer explains: "In the work of art, we experience an absolute opposition to this will-to-control, not in the sense of a rigid resistance to the presumption of our will, which is bent on utilizing things, but in the sense of the superior and intrusive power of a being reposing in itself" (227). Being is always only partial, and aletheia-- the ontological structure of truth, which is the unconcealing of beings-- is "always accompanied by concealedness" (Cobussen 68). Heidegger posits art and specifically poetic language as the "house of Being" ("What Are Poets For? " 129), as it is the dimension in which Being's revealing-concealing duality is made evident, as Marc Froment-Meurice elaborates: "The word is not, properly speaking, because it would signify totally, present its transparent sense without obstacles, but because, cut off, it remains open to. . . (The ellipses mark what remains to be said. ) The word is dedicated, promised, and yet, in this promise, nothing else promises itself" (74). Being is brought to the word in language, for it renders apparent the impossibility of absolute univocity for all things, oneself included. This is because poetic language allows us to experience the "excess" of beings over our means and ability to disclose them, due to the "undisclosedness" present in language itself.
Although Girri and Cadenas do not adopt Heidegger's very particular vocabulary, their poetry and paratexts belong to its same situated inquiry. Cadenas directly engages these ideas, for example, in Anotaciones:
'En Heidegger, la verdad no consiste en conocimiento, sino en las cosas mismas, tal como se manifiestan. ' En ellas esta? presente el misterio. [. . . ] Nos encontramos en el reino de la ale? theia, el descubrimiento, la revelacio? n, y lo que aparece en todo su poder es lo ignoto, inseparable de lo que existe. La verdad seri? a mostracio? n de las cosas, que descansan en el misterio, siempre, y lo rezuman inconteniblemente. (562)
In accordance with Heidegger's appreciation of literature, Cadenas ventures that poetry's essential gift is its preservation of the unconcealment of concealment that is experienced in language, which is analogous to the nature of the presencing of things
20 CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
? and the world. In an interview with Danubio Torres Fierro, Girri similarly affirms that a different knowledge or experience of the world is indeed possible for the human being through poetry: "hay algo no conocido en el conocimiento, con lo cual no so? lo manifiesta esa duda, pero tambie? n que la realidad debe ser observada mediante vi? as que no son las del conocimiento habitual, y que el hombre se enfrenta con ma? s de un mundo. La poesi? a puede ser un medio de acceso a tales mundos" (Quincepoetas 36). A briefpoem by Cadenas about a flower illustrates what this type of knowledge might look like through the lens of poetry: "Desde que? profundidad surges/ como llama/ para esconderla" (Memorial 231). In approaching a flower as an ungraspable flame that appears and conceals itself in its own profundity, Cadenas practices what Girri proposes in Lo propio, lo de todos: "Que el poema refleje las cosas con la espontaneidad que ostentan al aparece? rsenos" (75). This attentive disposition opens the human being up for the manifestation of other things and beings in their own unconcealedness and hiddenness.
Such a task requires that one ask oneself, as Girri does in the poem "Preguntarse, cada tanto": "Que? hacer/ del viejo yo li? rico, erra? tico esti? mulo,/ al ir avecina? ndonos a la fase/ de los silencios, la de no desear/ ya doblegarnos animosamente/ ante cada impresio? n que hierve . . . " (Quien habla 188). If the poetic subject is to be reconceived, no longer as the protagonistic "I" in the romantic vein or the locus for representation, the question remains as to how to redefine the human being in, what we are calling here, posthumanist terms. A later poem of Girri's, with the suggestive title "Cuando la idea del yo se aleja," outlines an initial answer, entailing a radical shedding of the "I": "De lo que va adelante/ y de lo que sigue atra? s,/ de lo que dura y de lo que cae,/ me deshago,/ abandonado quedo/
[. . . ]/ abjurando de armas, faltas,/ de oraciones donde borrar las faltas,/ blando organismo, entidad/ que ignora co? mo decir: "Yo soy" (El ojo 46). The loss of subjectivity that Girri proposes here does not equate with self-annihilation, but rather with a vital attitude that Heidegger calls Gelassenheit, a reverent and quiet sheltering that attends to things in their mysterious and ungraspable self-unfolding by letting go of representational thought and subjective will. Cadenas offers a new self-portrait, following this same line o f thinking, by tracing the negative outline of his own presence: "No soy lo que llevo/ sino el recipiente. / Lugar de la presencia,/ lugar del vaci? o" (Memorial 236). Shorn of personal features, the self is recast as an open receptacle that adheres impersonally to the world in its natural unfolding. This way of being is distinguished by its quiet, simple engagement with what is, as Cadenas affirms in another poem: "Soy esta vigilancia. / Soy esta vacilante disponibilidad,/ [. . . ]/ Soy e? ste en que se extingue/ hasta la idea de hombre" (Memorial272). With this new self-definition, any fixed notion of Man and the defining parameters of his relationship with the world are extinguished, inverting his role as the center of knowledge to that of a conscious and purposeful emptiness, available for the fresh presencing of Being and beings.
In his 1950 essay "The Thing," Heidegger envisages human beings--here referred to as "mortals"--as decentered and brought together on equal footing with the other elements of the world: earth, sky and divinities. These elements, called das Geviert or the "fourfold," are betrothed to each other and freely appropriate one another in an unique relationship described as a "round dance," a play of reciprocal mirroring that sets "each of the four free into its own, but it binds these free ones into the simplicity of their essential being toward one another" (177). This fourfold is best understood, not in fixed
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1 21
? representational terms, but rather as a dynamic shining or flashing forth, allowing for the illumination and concealedness of all things through their interplay. 18A similar mirror play seems to be at work in Cadenas' poem "Rilke" in which things and man come into themselves through their mutual belonging and lighting:
Las cosas supieron, ma? s que los hombres, de su mirada
a la que se abri? an
para otra existencia.
El las acogi? a transforma? ndolas
en lo que eran, devolvie? ndolas a su exactitud, ban? a? ndolas en su propio oro,
pues ? que? sabe de su regia condicio? n
lo que se entrega?
Piedras, flores, nubes
renaci? an
en otro silencio
para un distinto transcurrir. (Gestiones 443)
In this poem, things-- stones, flowers, clouds-- are allowed to be
through a practice of silence in which the human being also participates, receiving their presence so that they and he shine in their "propio oro. "
This role involves the voluntary fading of the poetic subject, an example of which Girri discovers in Keats's experience of writing: "despojarse, mientras el poema progresa (esto a expensas de aquello), de los incontables yoes que en e? l conviven, y cuya fase u? ltima, el sentimiento de nulidad, coincidiri? a con la culminacio? n del poema" {Lopropio 71). The human being is not eliminated, but rather reappropriated to his world through his open attention to it, which, Girri and Cadenas advise, is also the necessary condition for writing poetry. Girri's poem "Dormir que hace el poema" further exemplifies the relationship between the work, the reality that inspired it, and the "hacedor"-- the term Girri adopts instead of "poet," as a nod to Borges and a way to eschew certain connotations of the latter word, particularly those stemming from the Romantic tradition and its reformulations:
22
CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
El poema, desprendido de la visio? n,
y del que no podri? as explicar, so? lo ofrecerlo,
y ofrecerlo
en homenaje a lo recibido pero no su enigma,
asi? como
un bebedor no penetra en su vino,
themselves
? lo bebe,
pero no sabe que? es,
adema? s de a? spero y seco,
subido de color. (Existenciales 99-100)
In these verses, the poem is described as being "separated" or "disjoined" from the vision that inspired it, having its own existence. The poem is autonomous and ultimately inscrutable; it is not the subjects stage, domain or possession. It is first "received" through the undivided attention of the "hacedor" and then offered back to the world in its homage as a thanking. The "hacedor" partakes of the poetic experience, as writer and then as reader, but renounces all efforts to apprehend the word and world by imposing upon them a determinate order or meaning. These verses are directives for an exercise in observing, inhabiting and attending to the world by adhering to the present with a lucid gaze and detached attention, thus forgoing fixed goals. An epigrammatic poem by Cadenas distills the same message: "Atencio? n/ redoma hechizada,/ ne? ctar de estar presente" (. Memorial 246).
This attention, and the poetry that results, should not be confused with the dominant Latin American poetic trend identified by Ca? rcamo-Huechante and Mazzotti characterized by its "fe en la representacio? n y trascendencia de la poesi? a [que] subyace una cadena estable de identidad y correspondencia entre los componentes de una totalidad universal, donde la poesi? a es capaz de otorgarles una configuracio? n armo? nica de representacio? n y unidad" (12). Unlike this paradigm, Girri and Cadenas are not interested in writing as universal representation, nor do they seek transcendence of the world. Rather, as Girri writes,
En vez de ser edificada con lo recordado, que la escritura, sin memoria y sin yo, se convierta en construccio? n del presente.
Que el escribir sea mecanicidad, estado en el que no se dan li? neas ni de mayor ni de menor resistencia. Como en la reiteracio? n de mantras.
Que el ser siempre lo mismo, el escribir ya no tenga un objetivo, y que de haberlo sea el vaci? o; o el silencio, versio? n ma? s suave de ese vaci? o. (El motivo es el
poema 287)
Girri's and Cadenas' poetry, like Heidegger's thinking, ultimately points to a non-saying that is only possible when the "yo" is reconceived in posthumanist terms, as an open space for language to speak and the world to presence. The poem demands a thoughtful listening that leads one away from a form of speech that seeks to define and apprehend things through language, and back to an area of ambiguity where in the interstices of the verses, things and the subject present themselves through revealing and concealing, in a dynamic relationship in the present moment. This mode of writing challenges the demands and restrictions of the modern episteme, with the human being at its center as the articulator of knowledge and the wielder of language. Naturally, such a position is tenuous and paradoxical, for the "hacedor" must be engaged in his attention but simultaneously abandon the habitual structures of the self; as such, the poem is not of the poet's dominion, but without him, the poem would not come to fruition. This poetry, therefore, exhorts
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 1
23
? that it be practiced as an ascetic and meditative exercise that (re)moves and displaces the subject. Cadenas aptly observes that this existential path, however, is rarely chosen, as Man is his own obstacle: "Los hombres esta? n atascados,/ hacen ruido para no escuchar,/ su corazo? n ya no los soporta. / Todo respiray da gracias,! menos ellos" [Gestiones 454). Girri's and Cadenas' poetry, ultimately, is the exploration of such a possibility, an opportunity to give thanks.
In concluding, I would like to briefly touch upon some of the implications of Girri's and Cadenas' poetry with regard to the question of the subject and the methodology pursued in the present essay. First, by formulating my theoretical approach within the immediate resonances of the chosen corpus, I seek to shed light on a posthumanist literary current alternative to canonic readings of Latin American poetry and its central figures in the second half of the 20th century. While recent theoretical vogues may consider it problematic to refer to the works of Heidegger or the most poststructuralist Foucault (as opposed to his later works at the College de France that constitute the foundation for current posthumanist agendas that I discussed earlier), their texts directly and indirectly form the philosophical and discursive backdrop of much of Girri's and Cadenas'writing. 19 Not only are they historically relevant, but they also serve as a starting point to revisit and elucidate the basic question of the subject in relation to Being and epistemic knowledge, which is central to the poets' works.
Second, new iterations of this same question lie at the heart of the poetry of various younger writers such as Mexicans Elsa Cross (1946), Alberto Blanco (1951), Coral Bracho (1951) and Leo? n Plascencia N? ol (1968), Cuban Jose? Kozer (1940), and Peruvian Jose? Watanabe (1945), among others, who also actively explore the displacement of the modern subject. Perhaps it is no coincidence that all of the above writers have been drawn to Asian philosophies and/or religious practices as part of their rethinking, reformulating and experience of the self through their poetry, a connection that must be explored in full as an integral variant ofLatin American Orientalism, and one that has mostly been overlooked by critics. 20 In the case of Girri and Cadenas, both authors engage with Taoist and Zen texts, as well as the writings of J. Krishnamurti, in poems and prose pieces I have not touched on in the present essay for lack of space. Badiou reminds us that a truth inquiry is multiple and potentially infinite, unbound by time, space or culture, and, as many academics have noted, the articulations of the subject in these philosophical frameworks, although fundamentally different from traditional Western approaches to subjectivity, complement
many of Heidegger's posthumanist theories, as discussed here. 21The need to reconsider the intersections of the first current of posthumanism and/or Asian thought and recent Latin American poetry signals the potential limitations of contemporary cultural studies, that privilege the politics of identity and the human body but sometimes underplay the epistemological and ontological conditions of possibility of their enunciating subjects.
Finally, the poetry of Girri, and Cadenas, in its search for a way to speak beyond the constraints of the modern subject, like Heidegger's often tortuous thinking of Being, highlights the inherent conundrum at the heart of their projects: a true eclipse of the subject's speaking must be something Man cannot say. Can such an undertaking be anything but solitary and silent? Girri explicitly identifies this contradictory challenge: "lo ilusorio/ de verse uno mismo so? lo/ como un yo que percibe. / Intentar corregir,
24 CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
? corregirnos/ ensayando con la vi? a negativa/ [. . . ]/ no mueren/ los pensamientos cuando callan,/ cesan/ para que aflore, se exponga/ la continuidad del silencio" (A? rbol 303). Or, as Cadenas asks: "? Necesita palabras/un rostro? / ? La flor/ quiere sonidos? / ? Pide vocablos/ el perro, la piedra, el fuego? / ? No se expresan con so? lo estar? " (. Memorial 262). Does the possible incommunicability and experiential nature of their task make for infertile grounds for writing, especially for academic explorations? Cadenas' humble and tentative answer, however, is also worth reproducing: "Soy/ apenas/ un hombre que trata de respirar/ pol- los poros del lenguaje. " (Gestiones 420). It is to this space, between this question and this answer, between the revealed and the concealed, between the present and the absent, that Girri and Cadenas invite us to dwell and from where, perhaps, new paths of thinking can emerge.
Notas
1Ca? rcamo-Huechante and Mazzotti do note that "en los ma? rgenes" of this trend are poets like Jose? Lezama Lima with "poe?
