The legend of modern political theology is well known, and it has received extensive research and documentation. Less so is the legend of the theology of the visible as it relates to the problem of liturgy. For some time now some of us have pondered on a curious historical coincidence: the fact that in 1922 […]| Infrapolitical Reflections
One of the merits of Sandor Agócs’ The troubled origins of the Italian Catholic Labor Movement (1988) is located on the question of Thomism during the rise of a national industrialization and the new centrality of the worker. This is a question that informs the very genesis of modern political thought, so I want to […]| Infrapolitical Reflections
In one of the glosses in Marginalia on theology, Erik Peterson provides a remarkable pictorial image of thought of death and resurrection through the activity of washing a bowl. Peterson writes: “When washing a dirty dish, our thoughts may turn to the dead, to the dead as a genus, as an inferior genus that perhaps […]| Infrapolitical Reflections
In the Spanish language there is a wonderful idiom that has gone out of fashion in our times to express a sudden silence: “ha pasado un ángel”, or an angel passed by. The phrase is commonly used wh…| Infrapolitical Reflections
4 posts published by infrapoliticalreflections during August 2025| Infrapolitical Reflections
In a letter dated from January of 1962 to his friend Carlos M. Luis, José Lezama Lima makes a case for the intimate relation between language and charity: “What lasts [la cantidad] is only possible through faith. Because what lasts with faith is charity. Omnis credit – believe all things. Charity is belief in anticipation. And […]| Infrapolitical Reflections
In 1947, the very young Cuban poet Fina García Marruz published the liturgical poem Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte (Orígenes, 1947), which stands in the modernist tradition series of attempts to probe the divine nature of language after the flight of gods and the triumph of the new secular jargons. If earlier in the […]| Infrapolitical Reflections
Immediately after the end of the Second World War, the historian Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring published a thin book in Havana with the title Weyler en Cuba: un precursor de la barbarie fascista (Páginas, 1947), which made a direct connection between twentieth century political movement fascism and the lurking shadow of the Spanish general Valeriano […]| Infrapolitical Reflections
Surely friendship does not depend on obligations or frequency, but it does posit expectations on something like a movement of reciprocity. In fact, movement (κίνηση) and reciprocity are so intertwi…| Infrapolitical Reflections
9 posts published by infrapoliticalreflections during July 2025| Infrapolitical Reflections
In the late summer of last year, the painter Baruj Salinas (1935-2024) passed away at age 89. I was saddened to learn about his death many months after, and only because I had meant to write to him about a future encounter. For over fifteen years, I had contact with this extraordinary painter, and looking […]| Infrapolitical Reflections
A good place to start on Tetsuro Watsuji’s Climate (1935) is by considering how the very notion of the Japanese fudo as it appears defined in the first pages of the text, as a “structural element of human existence”. Augustin Berque has proposed a slightly different translation: the “structural moment” that speaks semantically to the […]| Infrapolitical Reflections
The essay “Por nada del mundo. Anarquismo y Catolicismo”, by Spanish poet and essayist José Bergamín, should be read as a wartime reflection on the historical impasse of the Spanish Civil War. Firs…| Infrapolitical Reflections
The sudden and uninvited intrusion of Gaia in our world is something rather strange, and yet consistent with the closure of the metaphysical tradition. The call of the outside takes place at the th…| Infrapolitical Reflections
3 posts published by infrapoliticalreflections during June 2025| Infrapolitical Reflections
It is too often that we hear a common critique raised against the theoretical skepticism of the primacy of politics in the form of an alleged prefigured “mysticism”, as if the destructive operation…| Infrapolitical Reflections
It is well known that Aristophanes’ late comic work on wealth, Plutus (388), provides us with what is perhaps the most dramatic and conceptual elaboration of the mythic personification of poverty (…| Infrapolitical Reflections
In his most decisive confrontation with the scientific method and the legitimacy of science through objective knowledge, Carlo Michelstaedter introduces a rather loosely expression from Plato’s Gor…| Infrapolitical Reflections
In the following months some of us will offer an eight week seminar exclusively dedicated to a close and analytical reading of the enigmatic work La persuasione e la rettorica (1910) by Italian thi…| Infrapolitical Reflections
There is something vessel-like in communication, and the need to keep it alive and to give it consistency and texture; to prolong it in both time and space. If it is true that ‘empty chatter’ is th…| Infrapolitical Reflections
