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Can the poem be thought?

On Marco Dorfsmans Heterogeneity of


Being
Gerardo Muoz
In the last chapter of Heterogeneity of Being: On Octavio Pazs Poetics
of Similitude (UPA, 2015), Marco Dorfsman tells of how he once encountered
a urinal in the middle of a library hallway. It was a urinal possibly waiting to
be replaced or already re-moved from a public bathroom. The details did not
matter as it recalled the origin of the work of art, and of course Duchamps
famous readymade, originally lost only to be replicated for galleries and
mass spectatorship consumption. Duchamps urinal, or for that matter any
manufactured displaced thing reveals the essence of technology, at the
same time that it profanes its use well beyond appropriation and
instrumentalization. I recall this late anecdote in the book, since Dorfsmans
strategy in taking up Octavio Pazs poetics is analogous to the dis-placing of
a urinal. In Heterogeneity of Being, Paz is de-grounded from the regional and
linguistic archive, dis-located from the heritage and duty of national politics,
and transported to a preliminary field where the aporetic relation between
thought and poem co-belong without restituting the order of the
Latianermicanist reason.
Heterogeneity of Being is Dorfsmans leap (a versuch that gathers also
the innate ability for failure in the Nietzschean sense) to cross the abyss of
the poetic identity; fleeing from the national-popular frame, as well as from
the pitiable origins that enable every ground of transcultural articulation.
Against the good intended abilities to speak on the name of and in the
place of the other, Dorfsman offers an exercise in thought. The initial
hypothesis is how to assimilate, or render thinkable, an ontology of Pazian
poetics in the way of a stimmung that could facilitate the endeavor for
thought (12). Heterogeneity of being is nothing more than this, but it
happens to be also a stroll around Paz's poetical constellation not without
accidental turns, missed encounters with transient signatures, interrupted
articulations and rhythms as an attempt to arrest the echo of a stimmung
as a fold between thinking and the poematic. The poematic is understood
here as a strange habitation of sorts; a stanza for the (im)possibilities of
thought.
Indeed, the poematic is that which allows a tropology that exceeds the
compartmental and sheltered demands of the political, subjective, and
ethical drives. Against the temptation of disciplinary bids (which are, after all,
signs of university semblance), Dorfsman calls for an incomplete Paz that
cannot be an objectified signatory authority, but rather as what unveils the
temporality of being (11).

Pazian poetics co-belong with the existential time, since it is a now


time (the time of a life), which appears at the gates, without entry, of the
culturalist and conventional literary methodologies responsible for the
organization of poetic legistlation. Dorfsman is not interested in what we
could call a signatory local scene of the poetic (Paz in Mexico or Mexico
un Paz the usual postal-service that is always the currency of exchange)
as if the poem, as the poets standing reserve, could supplement what
remains on the side of the unthought or the repressed. (Say an ancient
cosmogony, a non-Western mantra, or a temporality that derails the
homogeneous or messianic time of the modern). Rather, Paz is depository
of a heterogeneity of inheritance that fails to assume the form of an identity,
a destinial time, and therefore is always anachronistic and it involves a
ghost, a specter (Dorfsman 18-19).
Laberinto de la Soledad, Postdata, or guila o sol? attentively read in
the initial chapters of the book are displaced from the topical discussion of
Mexican identity to one of difference and inheritance, or as Dorfsmans
conceptualizes it, of dif-herencia, following Derridas elaboration of
spectrality and heritage in Hamlet-Marx. The temporalization of the poematic
allows Dorfsman to unveil in Pazs thought as a language of dif-herencia that:
is not a concept or a metaphor; it is more like a simile or a pun. It thrives on
its ambiguity and imprecision (23).
Dif-herencia brings to halt the logic of identity and difference, while
attending to a notion of identity that always, like a wound (herida), is
exposed to an internal process of deappropriation and splitting. Thus, more
than drift towards a criollo fictive ethnicity, Paz is reservoir of specters that
punctuate through a politico-ethical relation that bring forth responsibility
and the practice of witnessing emptying identity formations. Pazian poetic
time, suggests Dorfsman, does not inaugurate something like a national I
or a principial Mexican inheritance of the letter, but a dwelling that opens a
singular existence and disavows every nomic organization. Pazian
poematicity is an atopic temporal relation with a groundless tradition.
But the heterogeneity of the singular also resists although
resistance or stasis are not the appropriate words a negativity that
feeds the labor of dialectics. Here Dorfsman deploys along with his concept
dif-herencia that of similitude, which could be conceived as nocturnal
knowledge or the failure of every effort into constructing a people, an
alternative subject [1]. In his strong reading of Laberinto de la Soledad,
contaminated by Heideggers expository understanding of the essence of
technology, the Mexican essence-problem is turned inside-out as one of
masking and simulation. Following Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia, we
could say that in every expository relation one always remains strange or
improper [2]. De-attaching the codifications of masks from Christian morality
(shame, guilt, or purity), Dorfsman reads a poetical-speak of similitude,

where appropriation (of meaning) is de-appropriated in the name of an echoplurality that is always-already unappropriable threshold for a modality of
truth (45). In a substantial passage from the third chapter, Dorfsman writes:
the revolution, perhaps the most authentic because it set up a
confrontation with the interior nothingness of being, only managed to
produce a new mask, an institutional mask, the PRI, whose transfigurations
and unmasking continue to this day. The chain of identities, Spanish, Indian,
Mestizo, Catholic, liberaletc, can all be inherited and disavowed, they are
all interchangeable and all empty (47-48).
The poematic in Paz is in the order of the profane, although not
because it dwells in the radical historicity of the singular seeking to
represent or donate the real world with measured political action, but
because it has no desire in instantiating a historical event (or a new politics).
The profanity of the mask vis--vis the logic of similitude is a space of
potential use that trans-figures the other for becoming. It is a style that is
both singular and disjointed. In Dorfsmans propositional hermeneutics, Pazs
discussion of identity is only preparatory for a de-identification of the beingplural that destitutes every politics of location, and in fact, all politics of
being within history.
Pazian culturalism is dissolved not only in similitude / simulation, but
also in the poetic temporality of language. Here, similitude coincides with the
event of language itself, making the poetic the very singularity of
profanation. In Piedra de sol, Dorfsman reads the verse unnime presencia
en oleaje in light of Heideggers poetological exegesis of Parmenides poem
and the poetic universe of Georg Trakl (94-96). But Dorfsman goes further,
since for him the Pazian poematic bear witness to the rhythm of singular life
(I would also argue of the immanent cause, although this is not explicitly in
the analysis) where the way of language builds its own path or camino.
Hence, it is no longer a subject that enacts or wills, but the time of being
which against the order of signification, stems from the stasis of language
(en el seno del lenguaje hay una guerra civil sin cuartel) (97). Crossing
tracks with Heidegger and Trakl, Dorfsmans disobeys the exegetical
command of the Pazian archive, only to re-direct it to the spiral of errancy of
language. This is the proper region of the poetic temporality or the silence or
the simulation in the poem.
The temporality of the poem becomes for Dorfsman the possibility of
speaking in language, in the tongue of the other. This is why the end of
Heterogeneity of Being should be read as poetic desistence, as the call for a
practical exodus from every determination of the poetic arrival in meaning or
History for a peal of language [102]. The poem, in its exigent silence and
means of desistance, opens in this way to thought:

To say no the world is to flee, to escape, perhaps towards an elsewhere:


poetry. At least towards a certain kind of poetry, the kind of hermetic,
escapist aestheticism which Paz seems to be attacking but which,
paradoxically, he was himself accused of writing. But no, what the poem here
says is not no or yes; it a refusal of both. Is it a negation, then? Rather, it is
the recognizing of the aporetic status of the world, to which affirmation and
negation are irrelevant. The poet hears a call to either affirm or deny, but he
cannot place the call. (109).
It is here, however, where the poematic becomes a problem for
thought, as well as an impersonal exigency. This is why it is odd that
Dorfsman vacillates in calling Pazs poetics mysticism as temporalizing of
language, since it is the mystic reverse what allows for the tracking of
silence, for the breathing in of a permanent wound that is its second voice.
This is the silent voice that dwells in the event of the calling of thinking,
which turns (and the turn here is not just a word in passing, but indicative of
the taking place of language) any iteration of everything unsaid in the event
of language [3].
The exodus of the poematic does not lead to the desert but to the
nocturnal and illegible knowledge of the pyramid. The pyramid knowledge
knows no disclosure. This is where Duchamps readymade crosses path with
Heideggers thought on the essence of technology. This very encounter is
pyramidal, even if Dorfsman does not attempt the elaboration and keeps it
secret. But Dorfsmans suggests that Duchamps painting as philosophy is
what speaks (in silence) to the unveiling of modern technology.
The duchampian injunction poses another tactical movement: it
radically suspends the modern closure on aesthetics (aisthesis), which
entails the ruin of the technology of critique (Thayer) for the production of
visibility, of making it visible.
It is only in Duchamp where the
Heideggerian maxim the painting spoke, earns something like a covert
instance of life; or in Dorfsmans terminology, a poetic similitude. The notion
of the poem itself becomes profane simulation of every distance relative
between language and world. It through this transfiguration of the power of
the dichtung (still a revelatory substitution in the later Heidegger) to the
ready-made, that a heterogeneity of being ceases to be supplementary to
the order of history and of epochal destiny.
And it is at this instant where the poematic touches and falls into the
strange welcoming site where literature, paintings, shoes, and urinals may
speak, but their secretions may be otherwise than meaning (124). This is no
longer a region for aesthetics or production, but desistance in language.
Perhaps at this point one could say that the poem has conducted an exodus
from itself into the inner sense of silence.

Notes

1. Emanuele Coccia. Sensible Life: a micro-ontology of the image.


Fordham University Press, 2016.
2. For a take on desistance in the specific context of the Chilean AvantGarde and the readymade, see Villalobos-Ruminotts "Modernismo y
desistencia. Formas de leer la neo-vanguardia. Archivos de Filosofia,
N.6-7, 2011-2012.
3. Giorgio Agamben. Il silenzio del linguaggio. Arsenale Editrice, 1983.

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