On Speaking Horse

“Só não há determinismo onde há mistério. Mas que temos nós com isso?”
“There is only no determinism where there is mystery. But what does that have to do with us?”
—Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto Antropófago” (“The Anthropophagic Manifesto”)

The French psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis received a peculiar package on the twelfth of November 1963. Addressed to the editors of the publishing house Gallimard in Paris, the brown envelope bore a stamp from the United States, a detail which made its contents all the more surprising. The enclosed manuscript, titled Le Schizo et les langues, ou La phonétique chez le psychotique (Esquisses d’un étudiant de langues schizophrénique) [The Schizo and Languages; or The Psychotic’s Phonetics (Sketches of a Schizophrenic Language Student)] was written in fluent, if somewhat contrived, French. Louis Wolfson, its author, introduced himself as a lifelong New Yorker—a schizophrenic New Yorker at war with the English language. The book stood as a testament to his efforts to “neutralize” and “destroy” his mother tongue through a complex translation procedure that turned every English word that “penetrated” him into a close phonetic and semantic equivalent in one of the languages he had taught himself (French, German, Russian, and Hebrew.) A canonic example: through Wolfson’s translational procedure, the English sentence “don’t trip over the wire!” becomes the multilingual, macaronic, nonsensical “tu’nicht trébucher über èth hé zwirn.”

As per Gallimard’s protocol, Pontalis transferred the book to a reader for review. The assigned recipient was, appropriately, someone with an interest in strange linguistic objects and “literary madmen”: Raymond Queneau, the cofounder of OuLiPo.¹ Within a few days Queneau had handed in his appraisal to Pontalis: the book was of exceptional interest, but it was not literature. The next decades would reveal the extent of Queneau’s miscalculation.

Within a year, the manuscript had made the rounds in Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir encouraged Pontalis to publish an excerpt in their journal, Les Temps Modernes. Gilles Deleuze, who would write the preface to Wolfson’s book once Gallimard agreed to publish it in 1970, first wrote on Wolfson in 1968, in an essay in which he claimed Antonin Artaud and Lewis Carroll––writers working at the limits of language––as Wolfson’s peers.² Le Schizo et les langues landed in the hands of Roman Jakobson, and later Michel Foucault, the latter of whom likened Wolfson to Jean-Pierre Brisset and Raymond Roussel. To them, Wolfson’s writing couldn’t be reduced to pathology. It represented a heightened experience of the most brutal of our common conditions as human animals: alienation in language.

Sometime in the nineties, Wolfson moved to Puerto Rico, where he learned Spanish, won the lottery, and subsequently lost all his savings after the 2008 financial crisis. He was apparently attracted to the island by the presence of the (now-defunct) radio telescope in the town of Arecibo, the largest of its kind until 2016. It seems that Wolfson hadn’t given up on his search for a radical linguistic Other, a language that would annihilate his hegemonic mother tongue once and for all: he wanted to be close to the radio telescope in case aliens ever made contact.

In some of the most recent images we have of Wolfson in Puerto Rico³ he looks out at the overgrown vegetation surrounding the Arecibo telescope, directly into the lush, tropical spaces that dominate Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s works.

***
I begin with this vignette because thinking about Wolfson, and especially a Puerto Rican Wolfson roaming the margins of Santiago Muñoz’s camera, helps me put language onto the recurring concerns and formal gestures of the artist’s filmic works. Santiago Muñoz’s films, in turn, help me come closer to understanding the poetic output of Wolfson’s exercises. (The connection is cemented by Santiago Muñoz’s own interest in the Arecibo telescope, which was the subject of her 2006 film, Densa, Pequeña.)

Elogio al disparate (In Praise of Nonsense) (2024), Santiago Muñoz’s most recent project, is a set of three, interconnected films that enact the logic of the jitanjáfora, a type of nonsense poetry popular in Latin America. Jitanjáforas work by breaking apart recognizable words and putting them back together in ways that are sonically pleasing and surprising; they are enigmatic compounds that press on something quietly deep and real. By taking the jitanjáfora as its conceptual guide, Santiago Muñoz’s trilogy explores the relationship between human language, animal language, and what we could call “subjective freedom”: the freedom to think and act outside any external constraints or determinations, a fantastical freedom in the sense that it names a fantasy of what it could be like to be human.

The central jintanjáfora across the three films constituting Elogio al disparate is “Caballoyo,” or “Horse-I.” The pronoun of self-possession, the most condensed proclamation of humanity, a space of utterance denied to millions and which millions have died to occupy, is here appended to an animal—the horse. Does the “caballoyo” name a human claiming the traits of a horse? A kind of horse whisperer? Or is “caballoyo” an assertion of horse identity, but in human language? The beauty of the jitanjáfora is that it allows for all meanings to be in play, setting contradictory claims to the “I” who speaks horse or speaks as horse alongside each other without tension.

Santiago Muñoz’s camera is hardly didactic; it prefers the leafy brush to the name-tagged face of a speaker, the jagged cut to the clarifying pan. But her films grope their way to one of the central insights of psychoanalytic thought: that anything we are inclined to call a “self” is determined by the languages around it, languages against which it has no choice but to revolt in language, or choose silence. But not all revolts against language in language are honed as sharp as nonsense. If Wolfson’s multilingual, maximalist nonsense offered some respite against the experience of being dominated by language, if nonsense was his treatment for a common form of domination experienced in an extraordinary way, what could nonsense offer us “normal neurotics”?

Much of the global avant-garde in the twentieth century (Wolfson’s attributed literary kin) was concerned with this question: how of nonsense could be a line of flight, a burst of creative activity to ward off the domination of the mind by capital, or rather by the languages that dissimulate how capital plunders the world. One can think of the Dadaists here, or the American Language poets, but the example Santiago Muñoz draws on is the work of the Peruvian writer and Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui. Elogio al disparate riffs on the title of a 1928 essay by Mariátegui, “Defensa del disparate puro” (“Defense of Pure Nonsense”), a short text in which he comments on the poems of Martín Adán. Mariátegui, like Antonio Gramsci, anticipated what in the latter half of the twentieth century would be referred to as the “turn to the superstructures”—a Marxist view of cultural activity (and poetry was, for many Marxists in the Global South, the preeminent cultural activity) as having the potential to overturn bourgeois consciousness and produce revolutionary sensibilities. Weaponized, politicized nonsense was a handsome weapon for the task of ungluing the identification between the self and the camouflaged discourses of the ruling classes: “Pure nonsense has a revolutionary function because it consummates and completes a process of dissolution,” Mariátegui asserted. “It is not order—neither the new nor the old—; but it is disorder proclaimed as the only artistic possibility. And—this is of great psychological importance—it cannot remove itself from the ascent of the terms, symbols, and concepts of the new order.”⁴

Nonsense as the midwife of a new language, new concepts––an idea of freedom as alien and desired as Wolfson’s extraterrestrials. But adapted by Santiago Muñoz’s films, the question feels renewed and exciting: if alienation in language is a universal experience for human animals, what does it mean to work with human language—to work at the limits of human language—in the search for freedom, especially but not only if one is a horse? Santiago Muñoz’s Elogio al disparate probes the idea from a number of different viewpoints, alternating in formally striking ways between the perspectives of horse and rider, between assumptions of communication born out of genuine care (the “rider view”) and acts of resistance that push back against those assumptions (the “horse view”). She manipulates the structures of the game of recognition gently, by way of unexpected leaps and associations, and without making either the rider’s fantasy of interspecies communication nor the horse’s fantasy of total revolt appear as anything but necessary—and necessarily limited. When, in the second film, the viewer assumes the perspective of a horse, and the horse describes in human language how it became aware of its oppression by its rider, I felt a quiet pang of identification.

But I also felt, at other times, a sense of release from the incessant contradictions of speech. If the search for a linguistic home can be termed the search for a vernacular, what can a vernacular image be? The “I” must always be the one who speaks, until it doesn’t (and hence isn’t), but the camera can occupy ambivalent positions that float between the entrenched and antagonistic poles of self and other. Had the logic of Santiago Muñoz’s images been perfectly translatable to the perspectives of a human trying to speak horse and a horse speaking human language, the trilogy would remain rich and sympathetic but lack the subtle lift it achieves by plunging us into an enigmatic third space: an image that remains irreducible to a pronoun. This is the image that dominates the latter half of the third film, where the “I” of the horse is distended, unfought for.

Santiago Muñoz ultimately elevates Mariátegui’s defense of nonsense as a disruptive political weapon into praise by claiming the genre of the elogio. In doing so, she creates an intertextual bridge to one of the most important manifestos in twentieth-century Caribbean poetics, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant’s 1989 Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness.) Written in the context of debates around Négritude’s inattention to Creole identity, Éloge called for a new literature written in the Creole languages of the Caribbean. “Creoleness liberates us from the ancient world,” the manifesto’s authors wrote in French––a language of the ancient world.⁵

This dash doesn’t point an accusatory finger; it acknowledges the constitutive impasse that compels us to keep breaking apart how we speak until we can speak otherwise, until the day Wolfson’s aliens arrive. In Elogio al disparate, Santiago Muñoz reminds us that the Emperor Charles V claimed he would speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to his horse. What language would Wolfson have spoken to the aliens? Perhaps he would have spoken horse.

^NOTES

¹ Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) is a group of French writers which spearheaded experiments in constrained writing.
² See Louis Wolfson, Le Schizo et les langues (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), and Gilles Deleuze’s preface to the book, “Schizologie.”
³ See Sqizo, directed by Duccio Fabbri (Episfilm/FilmAffair, 2020).
⁴ José Carlos Mariátegui, “Defense of Pure Nonsense,” trans. Tavid Mulder, Forma Journal 3, no. 2 (2024), https://www.formajournal.org/essays/autonomy-of-art-yes-but-not-the-closure-of-art-jos%C3%A9-carlos-mari%C3%A1tegui-on-modernism-and-the-avant-gardes. Originally published in Amauta, no. 13 (1928). Reprinted in José Carlos Mariátegui, “Defensa del disparate puro,” Peruanicemos al Perú (Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta, 1972).
⁵ Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la créolité, trans. Mohamed Bouya Taleb-Khyar, bilingual ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 113.

Maru Pabón is a Puerto Rican writer, scholar, and translator. She is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, where she teaches courses on Arabic poetry, literary theory, and anticolonial thought. Along with Laure Guirguis, she is the co-editor of the volume Art and Politics Between the Arab World and Latin America (Brill, 2025). Her writing and research have appeared in Middle Eastern Literatures, Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, Bidoun, Momus and elsewhere.