The Illogic of Kassel Read Online Free

Barcelona as well as the book I’d planned to read in bed. Even so, in spite of not having my usual sedatives, I managed to fall asleep, falling literally into a dead sleep, by remembering a Walter Benjamin essay in which he suggested that a word is not a sign, nor is it a substitute for something else, but the embodiment of an Idea. In Proust, in Kafka, in the surrealists, said Benjamin, the word parts company from meaning in the “bourgeois” sense and takes back its elemental and gestural power. Word and the gesture of naming were the same thing back in the time of Adam. Since then, language must have experienced a great fall, of which Babel, according to Benjamin, would only be a stage. The task of theology would consist of the recovery of the word, in all its mimetic originating power from the sacred texts in which it has been conserved.
    I wondered there in Sarzana if fallen languages might still, all of them together, bring us closer to certain truths, truths related to the unknown origin of language. Suddenly realizing that, deep down, my whole life, without being entirely conscious of it, I had been trying to reconstruct a disarticulated discourse (the original discourse, shrouded in the mists of time), I fell asleep and into a very intense dream through which passed, with very quick steps, two of my friends, Sergio Pitol and Raúl Escari. The two of them marched electrically down the alleys of some old, possibly European, city center. The rain, however, seemed to be falling with strange sluggishness and with the same toxic appearance it has in Mexico City. The two of them went into a classroom and Sergio began to write signs I’d never seen, he wrote them with great speed on an extraordinarily vivid green chalkboard. The chalkboard transformed into a door in a pointed Arabic arch, which was even more vivid green and on which Pitol was inscribing, slowing down the rhythm of his hand, the poetry of an unknown algebra, containing formulas and mysterious messages in cabalistic, Jewish style, although perhaps it was Islamic, Chinese Muslim, or simply Italian, from Petrarch’s time; this poetic, strange, stateless algebra sent me to the center of the mystery of the universe, of a universe that seemed full of messages in some secret code.
    When I woke up the next morning, I had a sensation of having been very close to an essential message, which I suspected only Pitol knew to its most profound extent. Sometimes, like today, when I return to that dream, I realize that when María Boston called to say the McGuffins wanted to reveal the mystery of the universe to me, I agreed to go to the meeting in part because my unconscious was still under the influence of the Sarzana dream. It’s not out of the question that when I agreed to go to Kassel, I did so deep down (actually, very, very deep down) expecting to find there the secret of contemporary art, or maybe be initiated into the poetry of this unknown algebra, or perhaps to find what lay behind the door in a pointed Arabic arch, a door leading to a distant Chinese past, where pure language would be leading a hidden life.
    6
     
    A year after that encounter with the fake Chus, at the beginning of September 2012, and a week before I was to fly to Frankfurt to catch the train to Kassel, things had changed, and I was even doubting whether to go on this trip. After a long year in which I’d hardly had any contact with Documenta’s curatorial team, there was almost nothing encouraging me to leave in a week for Germany. In that whole long year I’d received one single succinct email, from someone named Pim Durán, with my Lufthansa tickets attached and instructions for catching the train from Frankfurt to Kassel.
    I had no further news from Chus Martínez (or, rather, from the person I believed to be Chus Martínez), and all my attempts to communicate with her had failed. Even so, I was completely sure I’d be seeing Chus as soon as I arrived at Documenta; a friend of hers