“What is the genealogical figure that best recalls this form of enmity in late American imperialism? The pirate.” This was written by Rodrigo Karmy, who sets up the ground for a timely inquiry. In fact, it is necessary to understand the accelerated processes that are currently underway as a civilizational choreography that only now finds an intense vortex of legibility. In what sense, then, can we speak of an order of pirates that have taken hostage the fleet of imperial politics and the empire of politics? At this point I would like to recall a brilliant and forgotten book by Charles Olson titled Call Me Ishmael (1947), which offers a perceptive interpretation of the essence and orientation of Americanism as an unbounded planetary civilization. Unlike many others interpretations – Max Weber on Calvinism and communitarian deification; Marxists on the Fordist mode of production and passive revolution; and even those that recast the economy of the spectacle and the psyche of mass culture – for Olson, who takes a necessary stepback, the civilization deployed by Americanism is essentially a production regime that first rose from the extraction of whale oil in the 19th century [1]. And as some economic historians have reminded us, before the first oil wells were found in Pennsylvania in the mid-nineteenth century, oil was embedded in the species of the sea, that is, in the fishing and cutting up of the mythic sea creature [2].
The veiled settlement of expansionism to which Daniel Immerwahr has drawn attention recently can only be understood if we start from the premise that the arcana imperii of Americanism is a maritime enterprise that takes the world itself hostage. This means that unlike the English trading companies of early liberal capitalist modernity, Americanism is no longer concerned with the neutralisation of a common space for the exchange of goods and values, but rather with something more terribly vast: the domination and total extraction of the sea and its species. Whoever rules the seas rules the earth; in other words, whoever is able to guide the threshold of the earth has been able to do so because he has already crossed every possible limit in the land surveying (agrimensura meant precisely the measurement of the land) art of territorial appropriation and separation.
The civilizational differential of such achievement should now be evident: this production regime does not have a territory or a specific mode of production as its objective, and this is precisely Olson’s thesis, but its sole purpose is to release an effective domination of the world. And only the world can be its most coveted object. Hence, it is worth remembering, that for Herman Melville – as he puts in the mouths of some of his characters – the enterprise of Americanism embodies in the secularized time of modernity something truly monstrous: nothing less than the consummation of the presence of evil; that is, the mystery of inequity (mysterium iniquitatis) in suspense and processed through the wager of the strongest whaler. How is humanity introduced and lodged in the courtyard of the mystery of inequity? Well, not only by fishing for each other, but by calling into question the very existence of the world. The religious imagination surrounding the fisherman as a prophetic symbol of salvation of the human species, as illustrated in a well-known plate from Herrad of Landsberg’s Hortus Deliciarum (1167), reappears in Americanism as an unbearable parody of all living things on earth. As one of the characters in the late novel Pierre (1852) says: “I hate this world.” And one could say that the inner belief in hatred is the fundamental stimmung of Americanism.
Thus, it is no longer just that we are hostages on the San Dominick, thrown into the groundless instance of the decision; it is something more sinister, lethal, and inconspicuous. The whaler is ultimately not the politician, he is the common man, a hollow-crowned qualunque, whose fate is shipwreck and whose tongue is commanding force. In the existential struggle between Ahab and the whale the only destiny is to caress the sea floor, as Olson says, will amount to something “all scattered in the bottom of the sea”. The post-mythic historicity of the flood reaches its definitive realization in Americanism as the genesis of a devastated world without an ark – propagated by the extinction of all species and all worlds and all presences, putting an end to the soft and untimely music of redemption.
A redemption that, not by chance, Melville only managed to find in the possible restitution of the original garden in the lands and landscape of Palestine: “Looks pearly as the blossoming / And youth and nature fond accord / wins Eden back…”, we read from the verses of Clarel (1876) [3]. Being able to preserve this acoustic garden besieged by the metaphysical force of the whalers may be the only ark left for us to land somewhere on Earth.
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Notes
1. Charles Olson. Call me Ishmael (Grove Press, Inc, 1947), 18-19.
2. David Moment. “The Business of Whaling in America in the 1850s”, The Business History Review, 1957, 281.
3. Herman Melville. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1991), 87.
At the outset of L’espéce humaine (1947), Robert Antelme discloses the difficulty between language and experience that lays at the heart of the book, and which is never thoroughly assumed at the level of form in the novel. L’espèce humaine (1947) is ultimately not an account about the impossibility of describing what took place in the camps; from the banal physical violence to the desperate hunger, from the microaggressions to the slightest movements and carnage of bodies in space; from the joyful smiles in the most miserable of scenario where the ultimate goal was for the human life to slowly rot; the sequence of actions engage in no struggle to bring to a crisis the level of representation. And Antelme goes into painstaking efforts to give us a full picture of what took place, only to never talk about it again in writing or in personal conversations as Marguerite Duras tells us [1]. So, what to make of Antelme’s initial affirmation in the “Forword” where he states that: “…during the first days after our return, I think we were all prey to a genuine delirium. We wanted at last to speak, to be heard. We were told that by itself our physical appearance was eloquent enough; but we had only just returned, with us brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was still very much alive and we felt a frantic desire to describe it as such as it had been…[..]. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be checking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable” [2]. The unimaginable for Antelme is a sort of threshold of language; a limit for the unrestricted, that is, for what could allow for an experiment of language after the catastrophe, or in the wake of the civilizational catastrophe that is consummated in the camp.
This delirium and anxiety over language – to tell it now and how it happened and to tell “the world”, only to immediately acknowledge the impossible task of doing so – does not take place at the order of the narrative; it is first and foremost something that we get a glimpse of at the end of the book as the liberating soldiers enter the rubbled towns only to encounter the incontinence of the survivors “talk and talk, and pretty soon he isn’t listening anymore” [3]. At that moment, the face to face between human beings will follow “to a kind of infinite, untransmittable knowledge”, Antelme tells us [4]. But what type of untransmittable and nocturnal knowledge is Antelme referring to here? It is not about some ethical exigency of the defacement of experience through linguistic construction; it is rather the torrential and densely weight of description and events, that numbs and deposes language in the very mediation of its effective sayability. The experience of human suffering and domination is untransmittable not because there is a deficit in language or the effacement of representation; but, on the contrary, precisely because there an excess of language that flattens irreducible suffering to an anaphoric socialization of speech that tacitly accepts inhumanity at face value. And that socialized distribution of speech underserves suffering, in virtue of equalizing an expansive chatter that neutralizes in survival the inherent pain of the irreducible human species within the imposible ordeal of total annihilation.
Antelme’s L’espéce humaine is stubbornly nominalistic in its thick descriptions of things and events, and it wants to avoid metaphoric transports. He prefers to call things as he sees it and get to the thicket of things in the most nauseating of repetitions. In a way, the hellish atmosphere of the concentration camp resides in the slow moving degradation of human life deprived of the world. However, there is one moment where Antelme resorts to calling a situation ‘hell’; that is, precisely, to an account of the transparent use of language, the raw incontinence and commanding force towards exteriority, as if there is no longer a caesura or separation between being and language once enunciation has been homogenized as commanding force. This is a language without a secret or unsaid, moving against the outside of consciousness in the same depretatory form as the same administrative machinery that has lifeless bodies as its target. In this way, language being turned into the force of speech will not only foreclose itself to the world, but it will signal the very intangibility by virtue of the flattening of verbal communication as an immediate and furious call to an annihilation of appearance. Antelme writes in this admirable moment – one of those instances where description of the state of things is incepted by the negation of the very conditions that allow for the narrative order:
“Degradation, and flabbiness of language. Mouths whence nothing any longer ever came that was ordered, or strong enough to last. A weakly woven cloth fraying to bits. Stencens succeeded one another, contradicted one another, expressed a kind of belched up wrtnessness; a bile of words. They were all jumbled together: the son of a bitch who’d done it, the wife left on her own, food, drink, the old lady’s tear, the fuck in the ass, and so on; the same mouth could say it all, one thing after the other. It came forth all by itself; it would be empty. It only stopped at night. Hell must be like that, a place where everything that’s said, everythat’s expressed, comes forth equalized with everything else, homogenized, like a drunkard’s puke” [5].
The incontinence of language at the limit of what can be said is a secondary hell; that is, the last contortion that the inhumanity of the human can offer outwards in order to outlive in a moment of minimal pleasure, since the absolute pain of a glacial existence has been deprived of any real contact with the world and things. It is a linguistic hell – the looping language of the camp, will only mirror also the linguistic codification that around the same years will be elevated to the paradigm of cybernetics and the regime of information theory – will now appear as a unified block of application, enforcement and extraction. Hence, we should take Antelme at his word: language has become “flabby”, and it is a “puke”. It is circulation without sense, as in the looping mechanics of the furnaces charted by the Nazi engineers that appears in the recent sequence of the film Zone of interest (2023). It is not that sayability loses it claim to the autonomy of its form before an event; it is also that by virtue of its own degradation against the erasure of events, it can only be unified, packed, homogenized and rendered into equivalence in the wake of the absolute triumph of the historical project of alienation and external objectivity.
The passage of the old hymnal texture of language as solace and lamentation could only entail the conservation of communication, which for Theodor Adorno writing during the same years as Antelme (1946-1947) will deduce as the “techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere whose shelter he can thrive” [6]. That the experience of the camp for Antelme ultimately meant that the “executioner can kill a man but cannot change him into something else”, must be placed in tension with the epochal transformation of a hellish experience of language at the service of the nihilistic service of equivalence that unveils its purest semblance at the camp [7]. The unitary reduction between the “socialized Man” and the “deportee” enters into a proper focus that Antelme was able to grasp with uttermost honesty: “…that there is no inherent difference between the “normal” system of man’s exploitation and that of the camps. That the camps are simply a shepherd image of the more or less hidden hell in which most people still live” [8]. At the risk of an overtly mannerist claim, it seems to me that the kernel of Antelme’s intellectual effort is to withdraw from the condition of hell that is condensed in the block of ice fixated in the ruinous material of language [9]. Memory, experience, friendship, truth, writing, the soul – these are all tools to chip against the brute reification of the glacial subjection at the price of ultimate solitude. Is there anything else worth a shot? In the last pages of L’espéce humaine, Antelme returns to the question of “freedom”, only to claim that “to be free” implies to “say no to everything” – and could we also refuse the language as it declines into flabbiness, equivalence, and its putrid decline, as overflowing mountain of trash that covers up the ongoing pain of the human species? [10].
Sure thing, the hölderlinean enduring and difficult task of the “free use of one’s own” appears here with some urgency as the requirement of traversing the attunement to pain. Antelme seems to have wanted to offer a negative theology to “forever starting anew”, in which the irreducible of human sayability is posited as the condition of the “only transcendence between beings” [11]. “To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority, and estrangement are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience; a prefix that for us designates distance and separation” [12]. Aren’t distance and separation two conditional criteria for grounding the irreducible? The habitation of the speaking being can harbor the contours of the unfathomable expression on the reverse of social tribulations, which is always the primal nomos of equivalence. Allowing the expansion of the irreducible as a the site of an ordinary accumulation of freedom preserves a sensible region for what takes place (“whatever happens” — and is not this taking place the opening of the non-site of the chorá?) in a language attuned to the relentless event that has forever touched us. This is already the site of the unimaginable beyond and away from the language of survival that permeates everything in both times of peace and of war.
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Notes
1. Marguerite Duras. El dolor (Alianza editorial, 2019 ), 71.
2. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 3.
3. Ibid., 289.
4.Ibid., 290.
5. Ibid., 135.
6. Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from the damaged life (Verso, 2020), 33
7. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 220.
8. Robert Antelme. “Poor Man – Proletarian – Deportee”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 22. Dionys Mascolo makes more or less the same claim in Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1987) when speaking about the stratification of species in the camps and the division of classes in society: “l’intuition aveuglante de tous les survivants est celle d’avoir fait quant à eux, sous une forme extrême, cette expérience: que l’organisation de la société en classes telle que nous la vivons est déjà une image de la division de cette société en espèces, comme dans les camps”, 87.
9. Robert Antelme. “Revenge?”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 15.
10. Robert Antelme. The Human Race (The Malboro Press, 1998), 291..
11. Robert Antelme. “The Smiling Angel: Rheims Cathedral”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Essays and Commentary (The Marlboro Press, 2003), 10.
12. Maurice Blanchot. “The Indestructible”, in The Infinite Conversation (University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
One of the most illuminating talks at a recent workshop at Kingston University (hosted by the Centre for Modern in Modern European Thought) on institution, legal philosophy, and political thought, was Michele Spanò’s archaeology of the institution of patrimony entitled “Patrimony and the Legal Institution of Subjectivity”. Spanò’s work for some of us has been of extreme importance in thinking about roman law, the historical school of the German legal tradition, as well as the work of Yan Thomas whom he has edited and translated for Quodlibet. Although Spanò’s lecture was based primary on notes and part of a larger project on the ‘invention of subjective rights’, it made a few transitions that thematized the legal infrastructure of property that will be perhaps fundamental to understand, and radically transform, the problem of political economy and the logic of the capital coding that Katharina Pistor has recently explored in our post-sovereign present (I have discussed some aspects of imperial coding of capital here). But it is in the invention of “patrimony” in Roman law, where for Spanò a new epochal conception between things, persons, and reality (-res) was established as a relational matrix that he termined, following the Italian legal philosopher Riccardo Orestano, a conception of law without a subject [1]. This infrastructure of a relation without a central subject of authority – a problem too complex to analyze in this simple side note – revises and displaces the more modernist-style discussion on natural law and positive law, but also intra-conceptual determinations such as the subjects and the impersonal, between rights and obligations, which are part of the long dure Roman-modern matrix of the patrimonial foundation. For me there were at least three important elements that derive from Michele Spanò’s work, which I will leave here for some future elaboration in upcoming writing project on the problem of patrimonial and civil as roman categories of modern juristic-political thought and the American context.
1. The relationality or nexus of the conception of the patrimony (a. every person has a patrimony, b. all patrimony belongs to a person, c. there is a relation between obligation and patrimony) is an early form of exchange value; in fact, it is the equivalent structure that designs the total apparatus of social reproduction and the passage from the polis to the domus (housing / domestication). In this sense, Roman law of patrimony is not about substance or morality, but about the circulation, organization, and exchange of metaphoric value codified. This ensemble appears very similar to what will later be Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony. If this is so, then hegemony is not about political “articulation”, but rather its “politics” is a mere veneer for a spectral patrimony. There is no patrimony without the work of hegemony, and the form of hegemony is a reduction of value that keeps it off from the autonomy of the political. In this light, it makes sense that even a Marxist political economist like former Vice-President of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera, understood statecraft as the development of and from “patrimonialism”, which entailed necessarily the devastation of the ecological life world [2]. The patrimonial form will ultimately transform the exteriority of the natural world into an object at the service of value.
2. Spanò offered a typology of patrimony in two phases: a. For whom is the patrimony (the personalist type), and b. For what (the functionalist type). In a certain sense, we are now in a term phase of legal adjudication: c. what are the costs and benefits of the management of a patrimony? This entails the logistics of ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter) into the very interiority of the legal rationality based on balancing and equity functions. For the paradigm of the cost & benefit equity the problem is no longer posed as a question of function or proprietary, but rather of thorough administration and optimization: to what extent can the risk and security of a patrimony can render X costs in relation to Y benefits of Z of the socialbody? Here the abstraction of the regulation of patrimony coincides fully with the domination of the social space into the juridical logistics. The distinction between private and public law spheres of the European legal traditions (ius commune and Common Law) collapses. As we have suggested in recent investigations, this collapse today is expressed on the rise of administrative law as a restituted Lex Regia.
3. Finally, the collapse implies a chiasmatic movement in the history of the archaeology of Western domination: Roman law and modern positivist law, subject and object, production of rationality and extraction of resources for production of life, the limitations of Roman Law on property and Canon Law on statutes and morality. If medieval canon law of the Church was quenched in the wells of Roman Law, then the question regarding the modern state (its presuppositions, its conditions, crisis, and collapse) amounts to the problem of institution of patrimony as a regulatory of principle of rationality and network of the legislation between spheres (legality, economic, political, rational, instrumental, etc). If there is something to be today against and beyond “hegemony” (no longer an index of politics or culture), then the problem of the patrimonial framework must be understood as a juridical-economic paradigm in which “politics” is incapable of responding to. On the contrary, it could well be that the crisis of politics is an effect of this complex archaeology that, for some of us, Spanò’s work has already started to grasp in light of the return of ‘principles’ for social maintenance.
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Notes
1. Riccardo Orestano. “Diritti soggettivi e diritti senza soggetto”, Jus: Rivista di Scienze Giuridiche, 2, 1960.
2. Alvaro García Linera. Geopolítica de la Amazonía: Poder hacendal-Patrimonial y acumulación capitalista (Vicepresidencia del Estado de Bolivia, 2013).
There is no question that Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro felice (2018) is a marvelous cinematic work insofar as it measures up against the epoch by radically questioning the principles that have upheld what we know as civilization. This slight adjustment is critical given that ideology, political economy, or subject oriented frameworks of analysis have become insufficient to deal with the crisis of civilization. As a matter of fact, they have become functional (mere deployments of technique, to put it in Willy Thayer’s vocabulary) to the infrastructure, and its specific philosophy of History that promotes the maintenance of Order after the liquidation of its legitimacy. I would like to clarify that I am understanding civilization in a twofold register: as a genetic process of human anthropology based on the matrix of “appropriation, distribution, and production” of the world (a techno-political grid popularized by Carl Schmitt); but also as the total realization of an economic or political theology, which we can directly link to the function of “credit” (and the process of abstract dialectic between credit and debt, as a ground of a new “faith”) that is deployed as the medium of the total sum of social relations that commands beings in the world. Civilization is the general matrix of a process of optimal rationalization of the events that take place in the world, making us potential reactionary agents of the time of its phenomenality.
Aside from all the Christian and religious imaginary, Lazzaro felice is a theological film, but only insofar as it takes the irruption of the mythical remnant very seriously. There is something to be said here – and I think the film stresses this in several parts of the story – between religion and theology, dogma and the spiritual (anima), and the sacred and the commandment solicited by faith (pistis). In other words, Lazzaro felice enacts a destruction of a political theology by insisting on the civilizatory decline towards reproduction of as mere life of survival; a life that is delegated to the abstract faith of credit. In this sense, it is no mistake that Lazzaro’s homicide takes place in a bank and executed by the community of believers (capital, in the end, has already been incarnated; it is the Subject). The laboratory where this takes place is the metropolis, which as I have argued elsewhere is the site of devastation and optimization life in our epoch, which unifies world and life putting distance into crisis, in a suspense of the experiential [1]. The consumption of the new political theology of unreserved equivalence between humans and objects is what Rohrwacher interrupts through the fable of the beatitude of Lazzaro as a life to come in the threshold of the highest phase of the metropolitan stagnation. I will limit my commentary here to three nodes that allow the Lazzaro felice to expand this critique of civilization and the principle of the “civil society”, a notion that we will return to.
First, there is the fable, a capsule of an ancient gnostic wisdom. The fable is what can radically alter evil by tipping its objective realism into a real of the imagination against the grammar of order. Avoiding the order of narration based to account for the history of progress and developmentalism from the rural to the civilization of the metropolis, Rohrwacher’s strategy resorts to the ancient craft of the fable. This is fundamental for a number of reasons. First of all, because the fable allows to withdrawal from pure counter-narrative of historical development and its justifications that allow for the interruption of the time of development, while offering a possibility of an otherwise transformation of the world. This is the gnostic texture of the fable that Hans Blumenberg identified in this form, since obscuring of the distinction between humans and animals relaxes the burden of proof of the absolutism of reality as predicated in the matter of facts [2]. It through fables that something escapes, because there is always an image that escapes the narration of the events of this world. But the fable also offered something else: the beginning of myth as the site of legitimation for foundations of social relations. This is why, as T.J. Clark has reminded recently, Hegel associated the fable with the origin of master and slave dialectic, as a new form of domination of world once the world’s enchantment and mystery was dissolved: “In the slave, prose begins” [3].
The end of a paractical poetics? Perhaps. This means that the price to be paid to enter into the prose of “civilization” is to assimilate the unfathomable and invisible contours of the world into the polemos of storytelling; to be a subject of a story, and as a result, of historical transition. This is what civilization mobilizes through the fable as its posited legitimacy. It is in the fable where the abyss that separates us from the world becomes animated, ordered, and narrated in order for the apparatus of production to commence. It seems to me that Alice Rohrwacher goes to arcanum of civilization when she treats the fable of the wolf, which has functioned to legitimize the passage from the state of nature to the modern concept of the civil in Hobbes’s theory of the state. We should remember the brief fable in Lazzaro felice:
“Let me tell you the story of the wolf. A very old wolf had become decrepit, he could hunt wild animals anymore. So, he was excluded from the pack…and the old wolf went to houses, to steal animals, checks and sheep. He was hungry. The villagers tried to kill him in every way possible, but they didn’t succeed…as if he were invisible.”
It is a remarkable fable that inverts the political fiction of the wolf in Hobbes; mainly: a man is an arrant wolf to another man (homo homini lupus), which justifies the exodus from the state of nature as the “miserable condition of civil war” between men. The stakes are clear: by repressing civil war (stasis), civil society emerges as a divided but unified body under a sovereign principle of authority [2]. The wolf is first established as creature of fear and depredation in order to allow for the principle of civilization to emergence as uncontested and necessary. The fable of the wolf is the protofigure that guards the history of perimeters of civilization as a way to pacify and repress the latency of civil war. Rohrwacher, against the Hobbes political fable, gives us a fable of the wolf that not only is uncapable of waging life as war, but that it enacts full refusal and desertion to be hunted; that is, to be invisible, which ultimately entails a life not outside of a politics of hunting and the secondary pacification by which the end of hunting mutates to the enclosure of domestication [4].
If the wolf stands for the invisible it is because it occupies the excess of total legibility of a new civil order, that is, of a world administered by technique of order. The wolf is a prefiguration of the invisible that is improper to every life (and thus to all biopolitical domestication proper to civilization) in the passage from the organic community of the living to the civilizatory topos of the metropolis. The wolf condenses the instructive character in every life; that is, what cannot be reduced to the fiction or the depredatory total war of the civilization nor the fiction of the community lacking an open relation to the world. This fable, then, is not just what unveils the fictional grounds of the legitimacy of civilization (its “black magic” under the light of rationality and control) but also what reprepares another community. A community in which what we have in common is not an attribute, a substance, or an identity, but an irreducible ethical relation in which civil war cannot equate total hostility and what establishes an absolute difference between life and the “principle of the civil” that formalized the aspiration of isonomic equality:
“The immemorial bad reputation of the wolf (wolf bashing) informs us about one of the oldest tricks of civilization. This consists of bearing the weight of predation on what is heterogeneous to it. To be able to say that man is a wolf of man, the wolf must first have been disguised as a “predator.” We do not mean that the wolf is gardener of daisy flowers, we mean that he behaves neither as a tyrant nor as a bloodthirsty animal, and even less as an individualist (the famous “lone wolf”). In fact, the wolf may have taught communism to humans. The cub that opens its eyes among humans recognizes them as part of its clan. Two lessons: 1) friendship ignores categories; 2) the common is the place where we open our eyes to the world. What the human, for his part, has “taught” to the wolf – like an angry father yelling at his son “I’ll teach you!” – is the servility of the good puppy and the good cop”. [5].
The end of the film comes full circle with the only condition of finding a way out, producing a break in the infrastructure of the domestication, opening a path within and against the metropolis. It is almost as if the film, like in life, was a preparation for the moment of exodus and retreat. In fact, the wolf deserts the metropolis passing through and beyond the highway in plain rush hour. According to Alice Rohrwacher, the wolf leaving the city and not being seen was a reinforcement of the invisible ethical dimension that is proper to every life (an ethos, which in the old Pindaric sense that refers not only our character, but also, and more fundamentally to our abode and habits that are world-forming), and that is devastated by the anthropological crisis of the species in the wake of the process of civilization [6]. However, the wolf exit from the metropolis is not an abandonment of the world in the manner of a monastic communitarian retreat; but rather the pursuit of liberating an encounter with the events of the world foreclosed by topological circulation of credit that amounts to borrowed life without destiny.
Now to the question that signals an instance of construens in what follows the desertion: what about happiness? It is here, it seems to me, where the beatitude of Lazzaro could be thought as an ethical form of life – as preparation to learn to how live a life against the abstract processes of domestication – that exceeds the two hegemonic paradigms of happiness offered by Western civilization: on the one hand, happiness understood as an equilibrium operative to virtue (aretē); or, on the other, the community of salvation as a compensatory effect for the structural gap of the fallen subject, original sin (felix culpa). One could clearly see that politics at the level of civilization could now be defined as the instrument that manages the production of happiness as a temporal exception in life, but never a defining form of our character.
The wolf that is Lazzaro’s form of life – at a posthistorical threshold that dissolves the anthropological divide man and animal – offers us a third possibility: happiness understood as the refusal to partake in the promises of civilization in order to attune oneself to an errancy of life that allows itself to be hunted by an experiential imbuing of the world. Happy Lazzaro? Yes, but never a Sisyphus who is incapable of experiencing the vanishing horizon between earth and sky in infinite divisibility of the world. The wolf unleashed traverses a geography against domestication, revoking the phantasy of home (the oikos). I will let the last words be made by some fellow-travelers contemporary American thinkers: “Civilisation, or more precisely civil society, with all its transformative hostility was mobilized in the service of extinction, of disappearance. Fuck a home in this world, if you think you have one.” [7].
Infrapolitical Reflections 