10.13125/2039-6597/2616
This article examines the work of Spanish poet José Ángel Valente (1929-2000) in terms of his exploration of the relation between the poet, poetic language, and community. In it I discuss the tension in Valente’s work between a desire to create a language that would be foundational of community and the ethical commitment to alterity. I argue that the poetry of the second half of Valente’s career, which has been considered hermetic, or even solipsistic, can be read in terms of a contemporary philosophical discourse that seeks to think community in terms that are not exclusive of alterity.  
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Manus O'Dwyer
Between
Roberto Esposito.
Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente
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Belonging in Expression and Representation
2017-06-02
2017-01-23
2017-06-02
2017-06-02
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Manus O'Dwyer
2017/06/02
10.13125/2039-6597/2616
University of Liverpool
2039-6597
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Roberto Esposito.
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Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente
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7
  Poetry and Community in the Work
         of José Ángel Valente
                              Manus O’Dwyer



      The 14th of September 1972 saw a unique event in the history of
Spanish literature – a poet’s work was deemed sufficiently seditious for
him to be brought before a military tribunal and court-marshalled. The
poet was José Ángel Valente (1929-2000); the text, a short prose work
entitled “El uniforme del general” [The general’s uniform]. Valente was
one of the major poets of what in Spanish literary history is termed the
“generación del 50” (the 1950’s generation), the second generation of
poets after the Spanish civil war. His career stretches from the
publication of his first collection of poetry, A modo de esperanza [By way
of hope], in 1955, to the posthumous publication of his Fragmentos de un
libro futuro [Fragments of a future book], in 2001. Apart from the poetical
works, Valente’s collected essays, amounting to over 1500 pages, contain
some of the most influential reflections on poetry written in Spanish in
the second half of the twentieth century.
      “El uniforme del general” was first published in 1971 by a minor
Majorcan publishing house as one of five short stories collectively titled
Número trece [Number 13]. It made reference to a real story Valente had
heard of a village labourer who was executed for dressing up in the
uniform of a Nationalist army general during the Civil War. This
parodic wearing of the uniform occurred during the occupation of the
general’s house, which had been abandoned in Republican territory in
the first years of the conflict. In Valente’s version of the story, the
labourer, denounced and condemned to death on the arrival of the
Nationalist forces, carries out a final act of defiance by drawing the


Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (May/ Maggio 2017)
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



picture of the uniform on his cell wall and urinating on it. Though
Valente’s text was written without explicit reference to real people and
locations, the story was sufficiently recognizable for him to be charged
with an ofensa a clase determinada del ejército [insult to a given rank of the
army], a charge for which he would be tried in a military court. Valente
was found guilty of the charges and court-marshalled in absentia, while
the publisher of the text, Juan José Armas Marcelo, was deprived of his
job as a teacher and placed under house arrest for 14 months1.
      Living in Geneva at the time of his sentencing, the major
consequence for the poet was the invalidation of his passport, effectively
rendering him a stateless person. Unable to safely return to Spain,
Valente’s freedom to travel was limited until the revocation of his
sentence on the passing of the Francoist dictatorship in 1975. Valente’s
experience as someone placed outside of the structures of the state is apt,
given what could be described as a dominant ethos that informs his
writing from the beginning of his career: a commitment to the
experience of outsiders, exiles, and others, those who in the twentieth
century were most vulnerable to the violence of totalitarian states. From
the beginning of his career, Valente defends the figure of the outsider,
and many of the essays are concerned with defending a vision of Iberian
history in sympathy with a heterodox, exilic experience and culture.
Complementing this ethical commitment to alterity is a theory of poetic
language, developed throughout the decade of the 1960s, in which
Valente defends the capacity of poetry to reveal aspects of reality, and
to allow for the emergence of voices, that are hidden or silenced by what
he terms the “totalizing” or “crystallizing” language of ideology.
Valente combines these two strands of his thought in key essays from
the late 1960s, which turn around the figure of Sophocle’s Antigone.
Antigone, who chooses family loyalty over political duty, represents for
Valente all those who are cast as outsiders in the development of
totalizing state powers.



      1
       Details of the incident can be found in Claudio Rodriguez Fer’s
biographical Valente Vital: Ginebra, Saboya, París (2014: 236-255).


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       Valente’s championing of the outsider figure clashes, however,
with other aspects of his poetics, which betray more the influence in his
work of powerful Romantic conceptions of the nature of poetic
language. In this context, Valente on occasion defends a more
conservative poetics, according to which the community would be
founded on the Word before the word, what Valente terms the
antepalabra [beforeword]. The descriptions of a return along a
genealogical path towards a generative but unspeakable logos that
appear in Valente’s essays and poetry imply an ultimately exclusionary
metaphysics that seems to contradict his anti-totalitarian ethos. In this
article I will explore Valente’s work in light of these tensions, and draw
out their relevance to contemporary philosophical discourses on the
relations between poetry, society, and community. I will begin with
Valente’s readings of Sophocle’s Antigone, move to an analysis of his
early poetry in light of these, and conclude with a discussion of the erotic
writings that form an important part of the later collections. I will frame
these questions in terms of the work of Judith Butler, but also in the
context of the discourse on community of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto
Esposito



            Antigone and the Creation of History
       Some of Valente’s most important reflections on the social and
political efficacy of poetry are contained in the two essays he dedicates
to Antigone, one published in 1968 (“Ideología y Lenguaje” in Ínsula),
and the other in 1969 (“La respuesta de Antígona” in Papeles de Son
Ármadans). Both readings are closely related. In the later text, Valente
frames Antigone’s sacrifice, her refusal to bend to the exigencies of the
state and deny her dead brother the rites of burial, in terms of the
achievement of a new horizon of possibility for historical experience2.
According to Valente,

     2
       Valente’s writings on Antigone forms part of the long tradition of
readings and adaptations of the play since the Romantic movement. George


                                                                                  3
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



         parece naturaleza de héroe trágico romper con su sacrificio los
      condicionamientos históricos que le han dado existencia para abrir
      una nueva posibilidad temporal, una nueva expectativa humana [it
      seems to be the nature of the tragic hero to break with their sacrifice
      the historical conditions within which they exist in order to open
      new temporal possibilities, new human expectations] (OCII: 69).3

     If, in the Periclean model of the state, the civic law (justice)
coincides with the law of the revealed Gods (truth), in Sophocle’s
tragedy it is Antigone’s task to deny this truth, to fight against the Gods
of the city so as to reveal heretofore unknown Gods and historical
possibilities. As Valente writes:

         Antígona existe para forzar una nueva manifestación de lo
      divino que, en última instancia, es decir, en la culminación del
      sacrificio trágico, consiste en la sanción de una nueva órbita de
      human libertad” [Antigone exists in order to force a new
      manifestation of the divine which, in the last instance, that is, at the
      culmination of the tragic sacrifice, consists in the sanctioning of a
      new orbit for human freedom] (OCII: 76).

     In an interesting twist on dominant interpretations of the tragedy,
Valente does not consign Antigone to the realm of the pre-political;
rather, for the Galician poet, she is the only character in the drama who
is capable of creating historical change, she is the «creadora de historia,
de devenir» [creator of history, of becoming](OCII: 75).
       Valente’s reading of Antigone coincides to some degree with
Judith Butler’s reading of the play, and her criticism of the two
influential interpretations of it – those of Hegel and Lacan – in her series
of short essays, Antigone’s Claim. In the Hegelian reading, Antigone
stands for the kinship relationships that must be partially overcome so
that the adult male citizen can come into being. The mother must give

Steiner’s Antigones (1984) remains a standard introduction to the enormous
literature on, and adaptations of, Sophocle’s text.
      3
        All translations of Valente’s work are my own.


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                                            Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



up her son so that he may fight for the polis, a process that she resists,
thus becoming both the foundation and the enemy of the state, the
«everlasting irony of the community»4. Similarly, for Lacan, the realm of
the Symbolic (a quasi-transcendental category, not natural but at the
same time not contingent or social), is derived from the incest taboo, the
universal norm that transforms biological relations into cultural ones. In
Lacan’s theory, transcendental kinship relations, ultimately derived
from the incest taboo, determine the linguistic structures of the
Symbolic, which are themselves the basis of social life. Thus Antigone,
who for Lacan displays an incestuous attachment to her brother, speaks
from an impossible subject position with regard to the transcendental
symbolic structures of kinship, and her destruction is the consequence
of the sheer incoherence of her enunciative position.
       Butler problematizes Hegel and Lacan’s approaches to Antigone,
arguing that they both ignore the fact that we can «critically assess the
status of these rules that govern cultural intelligibility but are not
reducible to a given culture» (Butler 2000: 17). In the context of kinship
relationships, the contemporary legalization of gay marriage and,
perhaps more subversively, the recognition of familial structures that
do not coincide with the strictures of marriage, demonstrate the
possibility of refiguring what are perceived in modern thought as
necessary structures for cultural intelligibility and reproduction.
Antigone, in this regard, would be «precisely the one with no place who
nevertheless seeks to claim one within speech, the unintelligible as it
emerges within the intelligible, a position within kinship that is no
position» (ibid.:78). In this way, Antigone performs in her naming of
relations that are beyond cultural intelligibility the ultimately political


     4
        Hegel’s phrase is the title of Irigaray’s well known discussion on the
play in her Speculum of the Other Woman (1985: 214-226). Butler’s approach
differs from that of Irigary’s in that it avoids the investment of female corporal
difference that is at the heart of Irigary’s work. For a collection of feminist
writings on Antigone, many of which elaborate on the problematics of theories
of feminine corporal specificity as against the social construction of gender see
Feminist Readings of Antigone (2010).


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Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



act, which is to question the founding pre-political categories upon
which the polis is founded. As Butler remarks (2000: 82):

               If kinship is the precondition of the human, then Antigone
      is the occasion for a new     field of the human, achieved through
      political catechresis, the one that happens when the less than
      human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, when kinship
      founders on its own founding laws.



       Butler’s reading of Antigone also coincides in some ways with
Valente’s other reading of the play, which approaches it in the more
specific terms of a theory of language, his article, written in 1968,
“Ideología y lenguaje” [Ideology and language]. Here the «inflación del
estado» [inflation of the state] (OCII: 76) implies a necessary occlusion
of those forces that resist a totalizing order. Creon’s language is, for
Valente, similar to that which inhabits any totalizing social order; it is
what Henri Lefebrve (1966), who Valente quotes, terms discours, a reified
public language that Antigone’s words, which are «de raíz poética»
[radically poetic] (OCII: 76) denounce5. It is in this sense that Valente
argues for the political efficacy of poetic language, which would not
have to conform to the strictures of social realism in order to be
politically significant. For Valente, following Lefebvre, ideology is the
naturalization of relations that are in fact social, and implies a reified
discours for its operation; the genuinely political act is to reveal the
contingency of a given social order, and one of the ways of doing this is
to create linguistic artefacts that rupture a given way of speaking. The
poet’s task in this context is to reveal new linguistic possibilities that
would imply the possibility of a new social order, new divisions
between the political and the non-political, or, ultimately, the utopian


      Valente takes from Lefebvre’s Marxist theory of the reification of
      5

language discussed in Le langage et la société. There are two editions of this
work in Valente´s library, which is held by the University of Santiago de
Compostela: the French edition from 1966 and the Spanish edition from 1967.


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                                           Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



destruction of the very division itself. In the context of our reading of
Antigone, this possibility is related to the irruption within the political
of those who, according to the divisions upon which the political sphere
is raised, have no voice within it, someone who, like Antigone, as Butler
puts it, «is dead in some sense and yet speaks» (Butler 2000: 77).
       Thus Valente can argue that the political import of his work, in the
context of the post-war Spain in which he writes, lies in the attempt to
create a poetic language that would resist a Francoist public language
which he would later describe as constituting a linguistic «estado de
ocupación» [state of occupation] (OCII: 1216). It is important to note,
however, that Valente identifies this corruption of language not only as
a characteristic of society under the fascist Spanish dictatorship, but also
characteristic of contemporary neo-liberal governments, the democratic
bases of which were, for Valente, more than suspect6. It is important to
remember, also, that in the context of Spanish history, the figure of
Antigone is especially important, as her ethical stance is based on a
desire to declare publically a grief that can find no legitimate expression
within the polis7. It is impossible not to link this desire to the

     6
        As Valente notes in his interventions to the congress “40 anni di poesia
in spagna: tra realism e avanguardia,” which took place from the 7th to the 8th
of October, 1976 in Venice: «En regimens fascistas, cuya natureleza totalitarian
es manifiesta, el poder opera sobre el lenguaje brutal y directamente, mediante
sistemas de censura o incluso de eliminación física. En otros sistemas se actúa
sobre el lenguaje por manipulación indirecta, ocupando el lenguaje – gracias,
en gran parte, a los llamados mass media – con contenidos prefabricados, con
paquetes de información (packaged information)» [In fascist regimes, in which
totalitarianism is manifest, power operates on language in a brutal and direct
way, in systems of censorship or even physical elimination. In other systems
it acts on language through indirect means, occupying language – thanks in
part to the so-called mass media – with prefabricated content, with packaged
information] (OCII: 1219-1220). We might turn here to a contemporary,
neoliberal version of this institutionalized language, the “bankspeak”
described by Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre (2015).
      7
        The philosopher Maria Zambrano, a friend and philosophical guide for
Valente, also wrote on Antigone in these years. Significantly, the action in her


                                                                                    7
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



contemporary silencing of the suffering of the losing side in the Civil
War, and the fact that, even today, the bodies of the victims of violence
lie in unmarked graves throughout the country. Perhaps no figure
exemplifies the injustice of a society in which the victims of violence
cannot receive proper burial than that of Lorca, to whom Valente
dedicates the following memorial in Fragmentos de un libro futuro:

               Desde Granada subimos hasta Víznar. Vagamos por el
      borde sombrío del barranco - ¿Dónde?, decíamos. Era el otoño. Los
      hermanos, las viudas, los hijos de los muertos venían con grandes
      ramos. Entraban en el bosque y los depositaban en algún lugar,
       inciertos, tanteantes. ¿En dónde había sucedido? – Lo mataron a
      él, decía la mujer, pero también mataron a otros muchos, a tantos,
      a ésos que ahora nadie ya recuerda. – Él ya no es él, le dije. Es el
      nombre que toma la memoria, no extinguible, de todos.
                                                           (Víznar, 1988)

         From Granada we ascend towards Víznar. We tarry along the
      dark edge of the cliff. “Where?” we asked. It was autumn. Brothers,
      widows, children of the dead came with large wreaths. They
      entered the forest and laid them in various places, uncertain,
      tentative. Where had it happened? “They killed him,” the woman
      said, “but they also killed so many others, those that no-one now
      remembers.” “He is no longer he,” I told her. “His name now stands
      for the non-extinguishable memory of all those who died.”
                                                            (Víznar, 1988)

         (OCI: 558)



    The body of Lorca, like the unburied body of Polyneices, becomes
the figure through which a grief that could not find legitimate
expression within the Francoist state begins to speak, and reflects the


La tumba de Antígona (1967) takes place within the tomb of Antigone, a gesture
that reflects the preoccupation with giving voice to the disappeared.


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                                         Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



way in which, for Valente, the subversion of language and the
exploration of the enunciative complexity of testifying for the victims of
violence constitutes the political task of the poet within his community.



  The Figuration of Language in Valente’s Early Poetry
       The problems central to Valente’s reading of Antigone – the
relation between the poet, his language, and the wider community – are
taken up in many of the poems of his first six major collections of poetry,
which run from 1955 to 1970. It is worth examining in detail the
figurations of language through which Valente approaches these issues
in this early half of his career, as the poems reveal certain tensions that I
argue are central to his poetic project. On the one hand, Valente’s
describes a corrupt public language in terms of organic putrefaction, or,
more usually, empty words that float in a vacuum. On the other, the
language of truth is also figured in organic terms, with a healthy growth
opposed to the rotten fruit of the language of lies. The desire to break
with existing linguistic conventions and create new political horizons
exists alongside a desire to restore the memory of generations to a
society that experiences the traumas of war as a profound rupture. The
poet longs for a poetic language that could found or celebrate a sense of
community, but at the same time recognizes the dangers inherent in the
jingoism that can cause a false sense of solidarity based on the exclusion
of others. I argue that these contradictions, which are manifest in the
collections of poetry up until the collection from 1976, Interior con figuras
[Interior with figures], allow us to read the political import of the
stylistic and thematic transformation visible in the poet’s work from this
collection on, and also allow us to explore the difficulties involved in
writing poetry that is attentive to historical and political context, while
at the same time negotiating a literary and philosophical tradition in
which the desire to cast poetry as a “new mythology”8 that would found

     8
      In 1797 the writers of the Oldest System Programme of German Idealism –
Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin – place the aesthetic at the height of all


                                                                                  9
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



a community in which each member identifies themselves with a
communitarian essence entails the dangers of a totalitarian exclusion of
otherness. I will begin with a reading of the poems in the first five
collections that are given over to the theme of language and community.
        In” “La rosa necesaria” [The necessary rose] from Valente’s first
collection, A modo de esperanza [By way of hope], the poetic voice appeals
for a language that would allow for the creation of a polis bound by
shared experience:

               La rosa no;
               la rosa sólo
               para ser entregada.

               La rosa que se aísla
               en una mano, no;
               la rosa connatural al aire
               que es de todos.

               La rosa no,
               ni la palabra sola.

               La rosa que se da
               de mano a mano,
               que es necesario dar,
               la rosa necesaria.

possible knowledge, and claim that ideas must become sensual, a new
mythology, in order to achieve universal progress: “The highest act of reason,
which, in that it comprises all ideas, is an aesthetic act,  and that truth
and goodness are united like sisters only in beauty. The philosopher must
possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet. The people without aesthetic
sense are our philosophers of the letter. The philosophy of the spirit is an
aesthetic philosophy” (1999: 309). The ideal to achieve, through poetic
language, a relation with the absolute and a communitarian identity is a
constant throughout Valente’s writings on poetry, with the proviso that this
ideal is undermined by Valente’s commitment to an alterity that would escape
any subsumption under the category of absolute being or system.


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La compartida así,
la convivida,
la que no debe ser
salvada de la muerte,
la que debe morir
para ser nuestra,
para ser cierta.
              Plaza,
estancia, casa
del hombre,
palabra natural,
habitada y usada
como el aire del mundo.
(OCI: 85)

The rose no;
the rose only
to be given.

The rose that is kept
in the hand, no;
the rose that is natural as the air
that is for all.

The rose no,
nor the single word.

The rose that is given
from hand to hand,
which one needs to give,
the necessary rose.
That which is shared,
lived in common,
that which should not be
saved from death
that should die
to be ours,
to be certain.


                                                                       11
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



                               Square
               room, house
               of man,
               natural word,
               inhabited and used
               like the air of the world.



      Despite the Heideggerean overtones of a language that would be
“house of man,” what is described here is a language that exists as pure
exchange, and which can circulate between members of a community
metonymized as a “plaza” or town square. «La rosa necesaria» seems to
demonstrate an adherence to the view expounded in the early 1950s by
the poet Vicente Aleixandre, according to which poetry should be above
all communicative, a view which Valente would later repudiate.9 This
stance is repeated, with a subtle variation, in the critique of
representative democracy in the penultimate poem of the collection,
«Acuérdate del hombre que suspira…» [Remember the man who
breathes] (OCI: 98), opposes the everyday experiences of the subject who
laughs and dies to the powerful, those who speak for others «en
representación de todo el mundo» [in representation of everyone] (OCI:
100).
       The latter poem opposes political discourse to the singular voice
of the carnal human being who laughs, eats, and cries, but also, in
allowing this singular voice to apostrophize the political world, brings
into the public sphere an enunciative position that is usually denied

      9
       Aleixandre’s views were expressed in inaugural speech at the Instituto
de España and later published under the title Algunas caracteres de la nueva poesía
española (1955). Aleixandre’s comments should be understood in the context of
a contemporary debate within Spanish literature as to the communicative
capacity of poetic language, a debate which was itself influenced by Jean-Paul
Sartre’s well known arguments for the political inefficacy of poetry of the late
1940s. For the context and significance of these debates within the
contemporary discourse on poetic language in the Spanish literary sphere, and
Valente’s protagonism in this regard, see Pozuelo Yvancos (2011: 653-667).


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                                               Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



political speech, allowing us to see the fault line along which the division
of the political and the non-political is drawn, implying that the truly
political act would be similar to that of Butler´s Antigone – the
reformulation or the destruction of the division itself. It is from this
perspective that we can understand the political task of the poet, who,
as we are told the poem from Breve son [They are short], «Segunda
homenaje a Isadore Ducasse» [Second homage to Isadore Ducasse],
«debe ser más útil/ que ningún ciudadano de su tribu» [should be more
useful/ than any citizen of the tribe] (OCI: 264), but is only so in regard
to his knowledge of «diversas leyes implacables/ La ley de la
confrontación con lo visible,/ el trazado de líneas divisorias» [diverse
implacable laws/ The law of confrontation with the visible, / the drawing
of dividing lines] (OCI: 264). That is, the poet’s difficult task is to redraw
the lines of the political and the non-political, and give voice to those
who are refused the right to speak in the public sphere. The preceding
poem, “El crimen” [The crime], pushes this questioning of enunciative
position to its limit, as in it the voice that speaks is that of a murder
victim who laments the absence of witnesses to the crime that ended his
life. Reminiscent of Butler´s description of the irruption of Antigone’s
speech in the political sphere, the poem is spoken from the position of a
murder victim, the impossible position of enunciation that reflects a
refusal of a political system that silences the powerless.
      Valente’s second collection, Poemas a Lázaro [Poems to Lazarus], is
characterized by a more ambiguous attitude with regard to the capacity
of poetic language to effect political change. In the “Primer poema”
[First poem] that opens the collection the «odiosamente inútil» [hatefully
useless] poetic voice asks «cuento los caedizos latidos/ de mi corazón y
¿qué importa?, /¿qué sed o qué agobiante/ vacío llenaré de un vacío más
fiero» [I count the weak beatings/of my heart and who cares?, / what
thirst or stifling/ vacuum will I fill with a more fierce vacuum] (OCI:
107). The political power of the poem in this context would only arise
from the poet´s absorption in the community:

             ...............................
             Para vivir así,


                                                                                       13
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



               para ser así anónimamente
               reavivida y cambiada,
               para que el canto al fin,
               libre de la aquejada
               mano, sea sólo poder,
               poder que brote puro
               como un gallo en la noche,
               como en la noche, súbito,
               un gallo rompe a ciegas
               el escuadrón compacto de las sombras.



               To live like that
               to be anonymously
               revived and changed,
               so that the song can finally,
               free from the suffering
               hand, be only power,
               power that rises pure
               like a cockerel in the night,
               as in the night, suddenly,
               the cock blindly breaks
               the compact squadron of the shades.
               (OCI: 108)



     “Objeto de poema” [Object of the poem] from the same collection,
seems to flatly contradict the optimism with regard to poetic
communication expressed in “La rosa necesaria” [The necessary rose]
from the previous collection. Here, the “object” of the poem is hidden
by an excess of words whose potential to deceive related precisely to
that airy lightness that in the previous poem was their virtue: «Te pongo
aquí cercado/ de palabras y nubes: me confundo» [I place you here/
surrounded by words and clouds: I confuse myself] (OCI: 133). There is
a distrust of common language, and a Cavafy influenced distain for the
public sphere: «…hablo/ de lugares communes, pongo/ mi vida en las



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                                               Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



esquinas/ no guardo mi secreto» [I speak/ of common things, I put/ my
like on the corners/ I don’t keep my secret] (OCI: 133). In “La mentira”
[The lie] this possibility of a language that would unite a community and
express the truth is described in organic terms, a language that would
«enarbolar la verdad» [enroot the truth] (OCI: 149) as opposed to the
«palabras de globos hinchados» [words of bloated balloons] (OCI: 149)
of the «mercadores de mentira» [merchants of lies] (OCI: 149). In the
following poem, «Sobre el lugar del canto» [On the place of the song],
language is again described with organic metaphors of generation:

            ...........................................
            La cólera terrible de la tierra
            que no alimenta la raíz del aire
            y se acuesta en la tierra boca abajo.

            La palabra que nace sin destino.
            …
            Un fruto triste se desgarra y cede
            más débil que su proprio podredumbre.

            The terrible rage of the earth
            which air’s root does not feed
            and lies face down on the earth.

            The word born without destination.

            a sad fruit that tears itself apart and falls
            weaker than its own putrefaction
            (OCI: 150)




     Already in these first two collections we can see a figurative tension
that has a significance throughout Valente’s work. It is expressed in the
division between a figuration of poetic language figured as organic
growth, a natural substance that unites a community, and a vision of


                                                                                       15
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



language as unbounded, a transparent substance the very lightness of
which allows for linguistic exchange and thereby communitarian
relation. Language conceived in this second sense can be understood
either positively or negatively, as that which can freely circulate among
citizens or as that which deceives, a sterile word which empties the town
square, once the place for the celebration of community, but, in the
context of the post-war, the site that reveals the destruction of solidarity.
       “La memoria y los signos” [Memory and signs] again takes up the
thematics of a new poetic language that would work against the
corrosive language of the Spanish public sphere. “No puede a veces”
[Sometimes it cannot] is pessimistic as to poetry’s capacity for political
regeneration. There is, perhaps, a time for poetry within a community
that celebrates and sacralises itself through song, but equally, as the first
line of the poem reads, «No puede a veces alzarse al canto lo que vive»
[Sometimes life cannot raise itself to the song] (OCI: 216). In a recurrent
trope in these poems, the failure of languge is linked to the failure of
generation, «la solidificación del tibio/fluido seminal en los lechos
vacíos» [the solidification of tepid/ seminal fluid in the empty beds]
(OCI: 216). The place of communitarian celebration is replaced by
«vastos salones preparados/ para un ceremonial que no veremos» [vast
rooms prepared/ for a ceremony that we will never see] (OCI: 216). The
restorative function of poetry, the notion, dear to Wordsworth (spots of
time) and Eliot (approach to meaning is approach to experience) is lost:
“Y la memoria/ irreparable, hunde su raíz en lo amargo” [And memory/
irreparable, plunges its roots in bitterness] (OCI: 216).
       The penultimate poem of this section, “Para oprobio del tiempo,”
is a devastating dissection of this time which makes the celebration of
community in poetry an impossible task, and also the poem in Valente’s
work that makes most obvious reference to Antigone. Similar to the
stench that betrays the corruption of Thebes, the broken world of the
poem contains «…algo que había quedado sin sepultar/ y hedía»
[something that had remained unburied/ and reeked] (OCI: 217). The
public sphere is falsified; rather than a plaza where the community can
convene, it has become «…un ensayo general/ con trajes, música, el
director de escena/ y un telón espantoso cayendo de improviso/ antes de


16
                                         Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



terminar el tercer actoÈ [a generalized rehearsal/ with constumes, music,
stage director/ and a horrible curtain falling without warning/ before the
end of the third act] (OCI: 217). Behind the theatrical generations of
royalty, the «…sucesión/ de los monarcos godos» [succession of the
Gothic monarchs] there is something “roto o insepulto” [broken and
unburied], something that remains to be said, but unsaid, diminishes
language itself. But if this time is not propitious to poetry that might
inspire an effective revolution in the present, there is the possibility that
words, given their irrepressible and uncontrolled circulation, might in
the future reach actors with the capacity to change the given order: «las
palabras, que no nos pertenecen, se asocian como nubes/ que un día el
viento precipita/ sobre la tierra/ para cambiar, no inútilmente, el
mundo» [words, which do not belong to us, associate like clouds/ which
one day the wind blows/ over the earth/ so as to change, not uselessly/
the world] (OCI: 219).
       The aforementioned poems exemplify the sustained reflection on
the relation between poetic language and community that is central to
the first six major collections of Valente’s work. These collections
combine a critique of the public language of Francoist Spain with the
expression of the need to create a new poetic language that would lay
bare the shortcomings of that social and political world, and at the same
time serve in the foundation of a new communitarian self-
understanding. The language of the regime is figured rhetorically as
both a “vacío” and as a rotting corpse, the language of the empty plaza
or the ceremonial room from which the public is excluded. Opposed to
this is a poetic language, which is the organic language of generations,
that which connects the present and the past, but also that which allows
for the rupture of existing conditions, the intrusion of previously
silenced voices into the public sphere, and the opening of horizons
towards a future of political freedom. It is clear, however, that there are
profound tensions within Valente’s approach to the political potential of
poetic language and its relation to the wider community. The desire, as
expressed in the essays on Antigone, to rupture existing linguistic
convention and to include the excluded within the public sphere coexists
with a more conservative desire that poetry restore the memory of


                                                                                 17
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



generations, framed in metaphors that are themselves exclusive – “del
hijo al padre”[from the father to the son]. We might also ask ourselves
whether there are dangers in the desire that poetry founds a community.
Valente himself recognizes this danger in the “Canción de cuna”
[Lullaby] included in Breve son, in which a motley group of Francoist
dignitaries chant in unison:

               - ¡Somos las fuerzas vivas,
               somos las fuerzas vivas,
               somos las fuerzas vivas
               de toda la nación!

               We are the living force,
               we are the living force,
               we are the living force
               of the entire nation
               (OCI: 262)



    The nationalist rhetoric invoked, and implicitly criticised, reminds
us of the dangers inherent in the desire that poetry provide a
foundational mythology for a community.

                    Community in the Later Poems
      Notwithstanding the complexity of Valente’s discussions of
language in his early essays, his figuration of language in the poems
allows us to identify a major tension within his work in the division
between language conceived as organic, natural, and constitutive of
community, and language conceived as nihilistic and corrupt, rupturing
a community that has lost connection with past generations. The call for
a new language and for the inclusion of the voices of the excluded within
public discourse is thereby framed in terms of a restoration of the public
sphere in which the celebration of community would be the expression
of a genealogical history in which each member identifies with an



18
                                          Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



original and total Word which absorbs him/her, «para ser así
anónimamente/ reavivada y cambiada» [to be in this way anonymously/
revived and changed] (OCI: 108).
       That this division leads to tensions within Valente’s poetry is
inevitable. To oppose a conception of poetic language that binds a
community to its metaphysical foundation in an antepalabra to an empty
language that, floating in a nihilistic void, fails to mean what it says puts
the poet in a difficult position – either he accepts a loss of linguistic value
and meaning, or he defends the existence of a metaphysical arche-palabra,
thereby sustaining a totalizing discourse of community. The work of the
Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito (2009)10, allows for a reformulation
of this opposition that might help us create an alternative to the path
that Valente takes in his earlier works. For Esposito, modern thought on
the relation between community and nihilism pits the presence of the
thing of community against the destructive nothing of nihilism. His
argument is that this opposition leads to insuperable dilemmas similar
to those provoked in our reading of Valente’s poetry – either we accept
a complete loss of values or meaning or we base our truth claims on
ungraspable, and ultimately indefensible, metaphysical categories.
       What is necessary, for Esposito, is to recognize that nihilism and
community are bound up with each other. Esposito identifies
community with the munus, the sharing that constitutes community, the
fact that to enter into community the subject must encounter the other,
and that being in common is precisely this – the «sequence of alterations
that never coalesce into a new identity» (Esposito 2009: 26). Subjects in
community do not possess any quality that constitutes their essential
identification with a communitarian totality; rather, their very
dispossession, their alteration in the face of the other, constitutes their
place within the community. Thus, «community is structurally


     10
        Esposito’s writings should be seen in the context of the development
of a discourse on community that has developed since the early 1980s the main
protagonists of which are Maurice Blanchot (1988), Jean Luc Nancy (1991),
Giorgio Agamben (1993).



                                                                                  19
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



inhabited by an absence – of subjectivity, identity, and property»
(Esposito 2009: 26-27). In fact, the very being of community is this
absence, the gap that relates subjects in a common giving of themselves
without compensation; as Esposito notes, the term munus refers to a gift
given, that which exceeds reciprocity and remains always in excess with
regard to exchange.
       For Esposito, modern thought on community from Hobbes on errs
in attempting to fill in this gap, creating the totalizing category of the
sovereign in an attempt to guarantee the coherence of a community, but
in effect annihilating the essence of community, the space of relation
between subjects. The modern tradition replaces the gap with a direct
relation between the individual and the sovereign, or the absolute
identity of subjects united under the general will. But these visions of
community ultimately create a more radical nihilism, as that which they
are supposed to recreate, a non-historic golden age of total community,
is non-existent. The communitarian attempt to retrieve the lost origin
that would found community inevitably leads to violence, as the origin
that would allow for absolute community is always unavailable, and
ultimately the search for it leads to violence not only against those
perceived as outside the community, but also to the self-destruction of
community itself. For Esposito, the contemporary world, in which the
lack of stable sense is exacerbated by globalization, allows for the
opportunity to escape modern concepts of community. The sheer lack of
sense that the constant barrage of mediatized representations provoke
would allow us to ultimately let go of the illusion of transcendent
categories that would ground our understanding of the world, and
would reveal a «world reduced to itself, able to be simply what it is»
(Esposito 2009: 35). Our communities would be the passage «between
this immense devastation of sense and the necessity that each
singularity, each event, each fragment of existence must be in itself
meaningful» (ibid.:35). I take Esposito here to mean that, in the absence
of illusions of transcendent grounding of our communities, we have the
opportunity to reappraise their constitutive lack as something other than
privation.



20
                                         Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



      It is in this context that we can read the relation between
community and poetry in Valente’s later work, which stretches from
Interior con figuras to his final Fragmentos de un libro futuro, and in which
the references to political and communitarian themes diminish, and his
poetic language becomes more abstract and self-referential. This
movement from a more obvious engagement with political themes,
whether through direct reference to political events and cultural decay,
or through the collage poems in which the most dangerous clichés that
lent support to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century are laid
bare, does not mean that Valente completely discontinues his
exploration of the relation between poetic language and community.
Paradoxically, it might be best to explore the notion of community in
Valente’s later work through a consideration of that which is generally
taken to be its opposite, the emptiness of the “vacío.”
        Esposito identifies Martin Heidegger as the thinker who first
opened the question of the interconnection of community and
nothingness. Esposito reads Heidegger’s essay from 1950, “The Thing,”
as the first recognition that the thing is constituted in its essence as
nothingness, and that this intermingling of the thing and the nothing is
relevant to a discussion of community. Heidegger’s essay turns on his
famous example of the jug, the everyday thing which is constituted by a
hollow space. The absence that allows that allows the jug to exist as a
thing that can be filled with liquid serves to show that an object can have
as its essence the void. Heidegger goes on to relate this void with the
etymological roots of donation, the munus, which he then relates to the
Germanic roots of the word “thing,” which signify reunion or meeting
place. This munus, or giving, is associated, in Heidegger’s essay, with the
pouring of liquid from the jug, an act that, for Heidegger, constitutes a
“gathering.” If contemporary nihilism, for Heidegger, is the destruction
of “nearness,” the flattening of all entities to a distanceless homogeneity
in a globalized media culture, the giving of the void that occurs in the
pouring of liquid from the jug is the maintenance of “nearness,” the
distance in relation that constitutes community.
        It is significant, in this regard, that one of the earliest poems in
which Valente takes up the theme of emptiness or the “vacío,” “El


                                                                                 21
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



cántaro” [The pitcher] from Poemas a Lázaro, seems to be inspired by
Heidegger’s discussion of the jug in “The Thing”:

               El cántaro que tiene la suprema
               realidad de la forma,
               creado de la tierra
               para que el ojo pueda
               contemplar la frescura.
               El cántaro que existe conteniendo,
               hueco de contener se quebraría
               inánime. Su forma
               existe sólo así,
               sonora y respirada.
                               El hondo cántaro
               de clara curvatura,
               bella y servil:
               el cántaro y el canto.

         The pitcher that has the supreme
              reality of form,
              created from the earth
              so that the eye can
              contemplate its freshness.
              The pitcher that exists containing,
              empty of containing it would break
              lifeless. Its form
              only exists in this way,
              resonant and breathed.
                             The deep pitcher
              of clear curvature,
              beautiful and useful:
              the pitcher and the song.
              (OCI: 134)



    In a conceptually difficult pun, reminiscent of Heidegger’s tortured
musings on the word “nothing,” the equivocal significance of the word


22
                                         Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



“hueco” is used to imply that the “cántaro” would not exist if it was void
of the void, if it lacked emptiness: “hueco de contener se quebraría/
inánime” (OCI: 134). The “cántaro,” which we know, through
paronomasia, is also the “canto,” without an animating breath that is
also a void would be “inánime,” and further, would not fulfil the
classical duty to be both beautiful and useful. In the context of
Heidegger’s discussions in “The Thing,” the emptiness that is the
essence of the “cántaro” constitutes the resistance of the poem to the
destruction of the distance of relation that constitutes community.
       From this perspective, the second half of Valente’s career, in
which he develops a discourse based on the series of terms related to
absence – silence, nothingness, emptiness – would not be a solipsistic
turning from communitarian issues towards a hermetic discourse that
refuses communication. Rather, the development of Valente’s poetry on
this trajectory in some ways reflects a radicalization of the
communitarian impulse.
      This tendency is nowhere more evident than in the erotic poetry of
the later collections. We can understand the relevance of this poetry to
the conceptualization of community if we turn to one of the key works
in the development of the discourse of community, Jean Luc Nancy’s
The Inoperative Community. For Nancy, if lovers reveal something about
community it is not that they form a special bond above society, but
because they «expose that fact that communication is not communion»
(Nancy 1991: 37). Lovers are at the extreme limit of communication,
touching each other in the joy of intimacy, but nevertheless know of no
absolute communion, and are as such something like the exemplars of
community. Literature, for Nancy, would be the writing of this
speechless co-appearance of beings in the singularity of loving relation:
      There is community, there is sharing, and there is the exposition of
this limit. Community does not lie beyond the lovers, it does not form a
larger circle within which they are contained: it traverses them, in a
tremor of ‘writing’ wherein the literary work mingles with the most
simple public exchange of speech. Without such a trait traversing the
kiss, sharing it, the kiss itself is as despairing as community is abolished
(Nancy 1991: 40).


                                                                                 23
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente



     The poetry of the second half of Valente’s career is marked by the
presence of this erotic sharing of limits. “El deseo era un punto inmóvil”
[Desire was an immobile point] from Interior con figuras is an
outstanding example:

               Los cuerpos se quedaban del lado solitario del amor
               como si uno a otro se negasen sin negar el deseo
               y en esa negación un nudo más fuerte que ellos mismos
               indifinidamente los uniera.

               ¿Qué sabían los ojos y las manos,
               qué sabía la piel, qué retenía un cuerpo
               de la respiración del otro, quién hacía nacer
               aquella lenta luz inmóvil
               como única forma del deseo?

                Their bodies remained in the solitude of love
         as if they denied each other, without denying desire,
         and in that denial
         a knot stronger than each
         infinitely bound them.

         What could eyes or hands or skin know,
         what did the body retain
         of the other’s breath,
         who created
         that slow, still light,
         the single shape of desire?
                (OCI: 356)



      The lovers in the poem negate themselves so that the ecstatic
relation that they share becomes the expression of their love. The “lenta
luz inmóvil” that inhabits the space of relation is the form of their desire,
that which binds them in the separation of unknowing eyes, hands,
body, and breath.



24
                                       Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



      The collection Mandorla can be seen as dedicated entirely to this
space of relation. The Mandorla refers to the space of intersection
between two circles, which in the Christian tradition was the space in
which images of Christ were placed, reflecting the interpenetration of
the divine and the flesh, but which Valente frames in terms of erotic
experience. Here, transcendence does not refer to an otherworldly
realm, but to the impossibility of subsuming the other to the self even in
the moment of greatest intimacy. This is the space of relation that is
produced in the intimate and joyful separation of lovers, as described in
“Borde”:

            Tu cuerpo baja
            lento hacia mi deseo.
                                Ven.
                                No llegues.
                                              Borde
            donde dos movimientos
            engendran la veloz quietud del centro

       Your body lowers
       slowly towards my desire.
                               Come
                               You don’t arrive.
                                               Border
       where two movements
       engender the rapid quietude of the centre.
       (OCI: 411)




    Here, lovers are the exemplars of community as the encounter
between singularities that are mutually exposed, giving of themselves
in an excessive relation to the other without identification or
recompense.




                                                                               25
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente




                                    Conclusion
      It is in this context that we can read the desacralization of the
Catholic Mass in the opening poem of the collection from 1989, El fulgor
[The brightness]. In this poem, the Mass does not culminate in the
presence of the divine in the sacramental wine, but the wine itself is
filled with the power of negativity, the «insidioso fondo» [insidious
depths] of a «dios incognito» [unknown God] that reduces the things of
this world to «ceniza» [ash]. Valente’s desacralization of the Catholic
Mass is a description of a world in which common worship makes for
way for the rituals of the spectacle, in which any grounding for our
language is lost amidst a world of empty chatter. Valente sometimes
responds to this ungrounding of language by attempting to reground
language in the antepalabra, the Word before the word, that appears in
various guises throughout his work, and which remains present in many
of his declarations on poetry right up to his death. The difficulty of such
a stance in terms of community, and in terms of Valente’s commitment
to those who are excluded from nationalistic communities, is clear – the
Word before the word is, like the foundations of community that
Esposito identifies, a hierarchical and inevitably exclusive grounding of
the communal. Valente’s poetry, however, along with the various essays
in his career dedicated to figures of ungrounding – silence, nothingness,
emptiness – make clear the complex tensions that underlie his, and
modern poetry’s, relation to politics and community. Rather than
understanding the turn to a discourse on silence and absence as a turn
away from communitarian themes, a nihilistic quiescence in the face of
global capitalism, we can, with Esposito, attempt to see aspects of
Valente’s later poetry as an approach to a thought of community in the
context of the age of the spectacle and the destruction of stable meaning
brings that goes beyond a nostalgic desire for absolute unity. As
Esposito writes:

        Community is nothing other than the border, or transition,
      between this immense devastation of sense and the necessity that
      each singularity, each event, each fragment of existence must be in



26
                                          Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



     itself meaningful. It refers back to the character, both singular and
     plural, of an existence freed from any presupposed, or imposed, or
     postponed sense; of a world reduced to itself, able to be simply
     what it is: a planetary world, without direction or cardinal points.
     A nothing-else-than-world. And it is this nothing in common which
     is the world that associates us in the condition of exposition to the
     hardest absence of sense and, at the same time, to the opening of a
     sense yet to be thought (Espisito 2009: 35).



     Beyond the suffering for the logos, the pathological desire for the
foundational Word that characterizes many of Valente’s statements on
poetry, the limits of the kiss that Valente describes in his later works
define the constitutive nothing of community, thereby opening, beyond
myth, the possibility to begin to think new ways of being with others. In
the words of Valente’s short poem from the collection Mandorla:

             Cuando ya no nos queda nada,
             el vacío del no quedar
             podría ser al cabo inútil y perfecto

             When nothing remains
             the emptiness of this non-remaining
             could in the end be useless and perfect
             (OCI: 423).




                                                                                  27
Manus O’Dwyer, Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel Valente




                                    Works cited
Agamben, Giorgio, The Coming Community, Trans. Michael Hardt,
    Minneapolis, U of Minnesota, 1993.
Blanchot, Maurice, The Unavowable Community, Trans, Pierre Joris. Bar-
    rytown, NY, Station Hill, 1988.
Butler, Judith, Antigones Claim, New York, Columbia UP, 2000.
Esposito, Roberto, “Community and Nihilism”, Cosmos and History: The
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Rodriguez Fer, Claudio, Valente Vital (Ginebra, Saboya, París),Ed. Santi-
    ago de Compostela. Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2014.
Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, NY, Cornell UP,
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Lefebvre, Henri, Le Langage Et La Société, Paris, Gallimard, 1966.
Moretti, Franco, and Dominique Pestre. "Bankspeak." New Left Review 92
    (2015): 75-99.
Nancy, Jean Luc, The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis, MN, U of
    Minnesota, 1991.
Pozuelo Yvancos, José María, Las Ideas Literarias (1214-2010), Barcelona,
    Crítica, 2011.
Steiner, George, Antigones, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984.
Söderbäck, Fanny, Feminist Readings of Antigone. Albany, State U of New
    York, 2010.
Zambrano, Maria. La tumba de Antígona y otros textos sobre el personaje trá-
    gica, Madrid, Cátedra, 2012.
Valente, José Angel, Obras Completas. Ed. Andrés Sánchez Robayna. Vol.
    I, Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2006. [OCI]
Valente, José Angel, Obras Completas. Ed. Andrés Sánchez Robayna. Vol.
    II, Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2008. [OCII]



                                    The author
       Manus O’Dwyer



28
                                     Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



Manus O'Dwyer has recently completed a doctoral thesis on the work of
Spanish poet José Ángel Valente at the University of Santiago de
Compostela and is currently lecturer of Spanish Literature at the
University of Liverpool.

      Email: manus.od@gmail.com




                             The paper
Date sent: 31/01/2017
Date accepted: 15/04/2017
Date published: 31/05/2017



                   How to quote this paper
O’Dwyer, Manus, “Poetry and Community in the Work of José Ángel
Valente”, Longing and Belonging/ Désir et Appartenance, Eds. Massimo
Fusillo, Brigitte Le Juez, Beatrice Seligardi, Between, VII.13 (2017),
http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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