A hangover is to Descartes what Diogenes’ plucked chicken is to Plato: a crude, all-too-physical rebuttal of the fantasy of a disembodied human being.

This essay was first prepared as a talk for a gathering at the Santuari del Miracle.

Freud describes the taming of fire as a renunciation—an act in which the impulse to extinguish the flame is restrained and the destructive force is spared, carried off, and subdued to human use.

If the world is burning, the task is not to play the lyre while writing a history of fire.

If hunger makes eating horrifying, so too does excess. The line between pleasure and disgust is thinner than we like to think.

This project attempts to move past the iconostasis into what lies behind the veil—the Hagia tōn Hagiōn. Not as a return to theology, but as an experiment in its grammar. A shift from seeing to eating. From visual mediation to material implication. From eye to mouth.

If murder “begins with the intention to kill,” forgiveness begins with the intention to spare.

If Brillat-Savarin belongs to a tradition, it is not one that passes cleanly through the genealogies of philosophy proper. It is, rather, a minor and often overlooked lineage.

Before discernment, there was only devouring. The hunger of Cronos was absolute, unable to be questioned or measured. But when Eve lifts the fruit, something unprecedented occur.

Middle features the original score composed for Lo que hay en el medio, a choreographic piece by dancer and researcher Vanessa Vargas.

If taste is an epistemology—if the mouth knows, if incorporation is cognition—then wine is its philosophical provocation par excellence: a substance that troubles the line between body and mind, clarity and intoxication, presence and loss.

The mouth, uniquely positioned at the threshold of inside and outside, is perhaps the most heightened organ of contact—and still, Aristotle has very little, almost nothing to say about it.

“An animal swallows its food,” Brillat-Savarin wrote. “A man eats it. But only a man of intelligence knows how to dine.”

Socrates’ final words in Crito carry the weight of both an ending and a promise.

Walter Benjamin famously wrote that “hell is the province of those who are not allowed to finish what they have started.”

Is the merciless, unrepentant, genocidal history of Venezuela (since its very colonial inception) just another historical instantiation of the unforgivable?