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201  8 Mules and Snakes: On the Neo-Baroque Principle of De-Localization Alberto Moreiras Baroque Practice The baroque theoria or procession, not only attends to the passion of the god. Fundamentally, as the saetas show, it is also an adventure, an exposure to the open. The baroque paso, as a passion in the open, is the site of an event. Something happens (pathos) that establishes a relationless relationship with the outside . The baroque pathos, if St. Teresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross can offer a possible model, is the trace of an undefined pilgrimage against the background of a lit house or of a dream of community. The protagonist of Peter Handke’s On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, a novel written after a long stay in Castile and in deep reference to St. John’s experience, has two dreams: “In one of them, adjacent to the small cellar in his house were suites of underground rooms, one grand hall leading to the next, all sumptuously decorated, festively lit, yet all of them empty, as if in expectation, awaiting a splendid, perhaps also terrible event, and not just recently, but since time immemorial” (40). In the second dream, “the hedge barriers to the neighboring properties were suddenly gone, removed by force or simply fallen away, and people could see into each other’s gardens and onto each other’s terraces, and not merely onto them, but also into every corner of their houses, now suddenly laid bare, and likewise one *MoranaFinalPages.indd฀฀฀201 12/1/04฀฀฀7:13:34฀PM 202 ALBERTO MOREIRAS neighbor could see the other, which in the first moments caused immense mutual embarrassment and shame, but then gradually gave way to a kind of relief, almost pleasure” (40–41). On the basis of that second dream, we must perhaps reinterpret Vélez de Guevara’s “devil on two sticks” as a cipher of the longing for a transparent community, a baroque utopia, whose sinister reverse is the anticipation of the society of control as prefigured in sixteenth-century Spain. But the first dream inverts utopia and gives us its key: the community is empty, it is only the potential site of the drive towards an event that does not happen. The baroque pilgrim—the pilgrims, in Handke’s novel—“outside the community , tied to no community” (29), start their banishment in the awareness that it has always already happened. “What they shared, however, was their condition, or their consciousness: of an adventure, dangerous in some unspecified way, one in which a great deal, indeed, everything, was at stake, an adventure, furthermore , on the verge of the forbidden, the illegal, even of a criminal offense. Against the law? Against the way of the world? And none of them could have said where this shared consciousness came from. In any case, what they were doing, or especially would be doing in the future, could bring punishment down on their heads, a punishment without mercy. But turning back now was out of the question for them. And accordingly, in spite of everything, they really experienced their journey as something new and unprecedented” (72–73). The step of the pilgrim, “ship-wrecked, and love-sick though spurned,” in Luis de Góngora’s famous description, is de-localizing. Its relation with any possible community is de-localizing. Hence the necessity, also baroque, of its containment. Or it is perhaps containment itself that forces the pilgrim to be a pilgrim—hence the danger. Everything can bring on punishment, but without risking punishment, there is no adventure. If localization seeks in every case tendentially the constitution of a community, and if all community seeks communion —a communion regarding the localizing parameters—then the step or the work of de-localization is against communion: it moves towards the invention of a countercommunitarian or de-communitarian space, towards a relationless relation. As a relationless relation, the baroque paso is also a love relation: “Write nothing but love stories from now on! Love and adventure stories, nothing else!—Someone went away. The house became silent. But something was still missing: I hadn’t heard a certain door close” (186). How can we think de-communication politically? How does one de-communicate or excommunicate politically? Through exodus, or affirmative renunciation . There is perhaps a way in which the renunciation or abandonment of positions, rather than antipolitical, unconceals the disciplining conditions of the political and can...

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