Human civilizations have occasionally been characterized as the outcomes of a permanent struggle between remembering and forgetting. If one takes such an image as a basis, positive cultural content and features would be like reefs rising out of the sea of forgetting, due to the sedimenting labor of repetition, tradition, and archiving. Should the sea currents change, these emergent reefs can become increasingly inundated, and traditional subjects, which only a short while ago were still considered to be up to date and contemporary, sink beneath the waterline.
In the following reflections, I proceed on the assumption, or better, from the observation, that, as far as the Western hemisphere is concerned, something like a reversal of the currents has taken place in contemporary culture. As a result, the balance of memory with regard to the recent past has dramatically shifted in the last few years. Hence, in the first place, I would like to refer to the synergies of triumphant consumerism with its imagery of the beautiful life and how this is further developed by neoliberal doctrines – which leads to the jettisoning of the greater part of our dark and disturbing memories. Secondly, we have more than one reason to assess the collapse of leftist traditions, a collapse that has given rise to the fear that they could sink forever into the capitalist Lethe before we even have the opportunity to map the sinking reef systems, which are to a large extent already submerged. Such “fear” is a symptom of conservative anxiety, not the commitment to a political standpoint.
You can glean the extent to which these reflections are justified from a remark by Alain Badiou, one of the last guardians of a now defunct radicalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the introduction to his remarkable book The Century, which appeared in 2005 and obviously speaks not of the century to come, but rather of the one that has just ended, he felt impelled to cite an aphorism by Natacha Michel, which runs: “The twentieth century has taken place.”1 This statement would be foolish or trivial if it did not represent the antithesis of another statement that is not explicitly referenced but is easy enough to figure out, the statement that, at bottom, the twentieth century never took place.2 With all of its battles and atrocities, it has faded into a mere phantom that can no longer be reconstructed from the present generation’s attitude toward life – and, it would seem that no other future looms than that of a stock of myths and a desolate disposal site for scenes of violence. Should something of its great motifs remain of significance for later ages, this is only because they will still serve, for some time, as a repository of materials for popular films with tragic settings. The twentieth century’s phantomization was carried out behind the backs of today’s generation, without our being able to point to a single event through which the gravity and passion of the past age was extinguished in us – neither the disaster of Chernobyl nor the fall of the Berlin Wall, neither the space station Mir’s controlled plunge back into the Earth’s atmosphere nor the sequencing of the human genome, neither the introduction of the euro nor the attack on the World Trade Center. No other event from recent times can be identified as the culprit either.
The infinitely banal statement “The twentieth century has taken place” can best be appreciated by relating it to Hegel’s dictum that the life of spirit is not “the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it.”3 Elevated to this level, Badiou’s thesis immediately leads to an overwhelming logical and human challenge: it requires thinkers to pause beneath the petrifying gaze of the Medusa and contemplate it as an icon of present-day being – a demand that corresponds to the spirit of a century in which philosophy’s basic emotion changed from wonder to horror. To be sure, even ancient wonder was never entirely free of dark emotions, and it must have already cost the ancients a certain amount of effort to adhere to the ontological dogma according to which all that exists is good. Only as tragic excess could a remark like that of Philoctetes – “How can I praise the gods when their ways are so evil?”4 – break through the universal imperative of positivity. However, only in recent modernity, more precisely in the philosophical witches’ Sabbath from the time between the world wars, and then more fully after 1945, could the thesis that being is anything but good, indeed that the good must be wrested from being, be explicitly stated by making a case for something that is fundamentally constituted “otherwise than being,” to recall Emmanuel Levinas’ post-ontological or meta-ontological figure of thought,5 whose claims reach further than we can explain at the moment, and whose implications may well exceed the discursive capability of contemporary philosophy. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hegel’s sublime sangfroid had been necessary to conceptualize a spirit that had the virtue of looking steadfastly at the sun and at death while engaged in its learning processes. Thinking at the beginning of the twenty-first century has lost the strength of this elevated indifference. We find ourselves compelled to return to La Rochefoucauld, in making the observation: We cannot look squarely at either death or the sun, or the twentieth century.6
With this in mind, let us take a closer look at the question that forms the title of this lecture. If the question is: “What happened in the twentieth century?,” then surely a historical account is not expected as an answer. We know from the start that no enumeration of the changes for good or for evil would tell us enough about what constituted the twentieth century in its dramatic and evolutionary substance. The difficulties in accounting for the era are rooted in more than just the fact that, in hindsight, this century manifests itself as a Medusean and extremist one, particularly in the violence unleashed during its first half. The key complications that hinder a reconstruction of the twentieth century are connected to the fact that this era, which is dubiously referred to as an “age of extremes,” was in truth even more an age of complexities. Looked at from our present situation, this way of characterizing the era seems to be self-evident. It would remain the most vacuous of all possible statements on the subject, if it did not derive a specific historical significance from the fact that the dominant discourses and actions of the epoch were engaged in a furious struggle against the emergence of complexity.
The formulation “reduction of complexity,” which has characterized a general aspect of the functioning of social systems since Luhmann, has a quite specific meaning for the twentieth century. It must be emphasized that the Medusean extremisms of that era all possessed the character of fundamentalisms of simplification – including even the fundamentalism of militancy and the myth of a “new beginning” through revolution, that bitter and proud attitude of a radical break with the given world. In the meantime, among Europeans, this attitude has lost its radiance, yet it continues to have a sporadic influence, particularly in the Maquis of latter-day leftist radicalism, down to the present day. Wherever manifestations of the extreme were encountered in the course of the twentieth century, there was always an uprising against complexity, that is, against the formal law of the real as conceived in contemporary terms. To be sure, this uprising was carried out entirely in the name of the real itself, of which all camps had formed extremely reductionist concepts.
Because a quasi-formal gigantomachy was embedded in the heart of the twentieth century as a duel between the logics of complexity and their polemical simplification, we must not be surprised when this age strikes us in retrospect as a century of confusion, as a time devoid of an overview and an era in which contingent standpoints were exaggerated. In this case, the main form of exaggeration consisted in the reduction of all things to an all-powerful ground or underlying factor (an observation already noted by the critic Carl Christian Bry in 1924, in his forgotten masterpiece Verkappte Religionen [Tr. – Religions in Disguise], without causing the followers of reductionist, extremist religions to question their beliefs).
The “age of extremes” suggested by Eric Hobsbawm has never remained silent about itself.7 As an age of total chatter, it has already said everything there is to say about itself, and the opposite of that, too, and even this observation was made long ago, as one can gather from Karl Jaspers’ text on Man in the Modern Age, for instance, where analogous statements can be found passim. What the author describes in this book as the phenomenon of “the struggle with no fighting front”8 was able to recur a half century later in the case of leftists suffering from disappointed or delayed complexity, under the heading of a “new obscurity,”9 the only difference being that the source is no longer recognized. It would hence be a difficult if not futile undertaking, and would furthermore condemn us to a methodologically false approach, if we wanted to appeal to what was said and written about the epoch in order to learn what kind of a century we are dealing with. We would come face to face with the darkest of all hyperboles, as formulated from the standpoint of the murdered Jews, the exemplary victims of the century-long madness, viz. the definition of the twentieth century as the era of the great breakdown of civilization symbolized by names such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. Even if the whole truth about the Shoah were empirically brought to light and the sources of the extermination were fully grasped, one would have presumably understood only a small segment of the twentieth century’s global drama. Even less would be achieved if one wished to add that the supposedly “short twentieth century” reached from 1917 to 1991 and thus ran parallel with the history of the Soviet experiment. Its core process would have consisted in nothing other than the Titanic clash between liberalism and egalitarianism, in which the latter manifested itself as a two-headed monster, with a fascist and communist one. Hobsbawm’s theses can be read as an echo of another interpretation of the twentieth century (proposed by Ernst Nolte and modified by Dan Diner), according to which the century was shaped by its main conflict, the so-called Weltbürgerkrieg.10 The same author gives the lie to the title of his all-too-successful book when he explains in its crucial chapter why it was not so much the clamorous drama of the struggle between ideologies that decided the epoch’s outcome, but rather the quiet upheaval of all traditions that was triggered by the decline of an agrarian culture and the triumph of urbanization. However that may be, this suggestion sheds light on the situation at present, where in a highly industrialized country such as the Federal Republic of Germany only two percent of the population lives on and from farms, while even in a supposedly agro-centric nation such as France the corresponding numbers no longer exceed three to four percent.
If one looks back at the remaining overarching interpretations that were proposed either during the course of the twentieth century or in retrospect, it remains puzzling that in every case particular events, motifs, or features have been elevated into epochal images. No contemporary of the early twenty-first century can imagine themselves circa 1950 without feeling strange, a time when the term “atomic age” was uttered with a pronounced tremolo informed by the history of philosophy, convinced as they were that the essence of the epoch was finally in sight. One spoke in those days about the atom and fission with the same uneasy piety, indeed with the same ontological lasciviousness, with which one began to speak about the genome and its manipulation around the year 2000. Likewise, Arnold Gehlen’s suggestion around the middle of the century, that the present age was to be understood as the era of “crystallization,” is today remembered by only a few experts – although it was a brilliant insight that articulated a transformation of present social circumstances into the forms they would have in a pacified, postrevolutionary condition. Even such an eye-catching title as “sexual revolution” has largely faded from sight today (more precisely, it has fallen victim to anniversary-culture, as one can see from the journalistic campaigns for the fiftieth anniversary of the appearance of the Kinsey Report) – and the current slogan of the senior-citizen revolution is likely to suffer a similar fate. Only a few experts on the Third World still remember what the “age of decolonization” involved. For historically minded political theorists, the twentieth century may signify the era of the translatio imperii from the British to the Americans (in which the British retreat from their engagement in the Balkans and the Middle East in February 1947 can be considered a key date), while Europeans tend to have their twentieth century limited to the span from August 1914 to May 1, 2004 – in other words, to the complete cycle of Europe’s fracturing and the restoration of its integrity. This view, based on historical events, might have a dramaturgical plausibility going for it. In any case, it results in Europeans looking back on the lost century summa summarum, without knowing for sure whether, having experienced their own self-destruction, they have now found a more adequate conception of themselves and their role in the world.
To say a word in conclusion about so-called globalization, which monopolized all discourse about the present age at the close of the twentieth century: this term, insofar as it is used sensibly, is a synonym for the consolidation of the world into a great artificial system, which distances itself with increasing speed from twentieth-century problems that now already seem to be mere phantoms. We will have occasion to consider whether the current forgetting of the twentieth century does not lead to the fulfillment of the innermost intentions of that century itself.
The preceding reflections suggest that we shall not discover the core process of the twentieth century by referring to historical events, nor by drawing on intellectual history or the history of discourse. The essence of the epoch cannot become completely manifest in a single event, or in a sequence of events constituting a trend. Nor is it to be found in concentrated form in some absolutely privileged text, however eminent the philosophical and poetical writings of the century may have been. In retrospect, one cannot help but feel as though pretty much every historical expression of that age about itself evinces a certain bias. Everywhere one looks one has the impression that the actors were hypnotized by the programs and the witnesses were dazzled by the dramas. Hence Alain Badiou is right when he argues, in his aforementioned book The Century, that the passion of the twentieth century is sought in vain as long as one presumes to find it in ideologies, messianic programs, or phantasms: the predominant motif of the twentieth century is rather that terrifying passion du réel, which manifests itself in the action of the protagonists as the will to actualize the truth directly in the here and now.11
I am convinced that this view actually provides us with a fruitful approach to the complex of the twentieth century. Not only is the dignity of philosophy vindicated by it, with its insistence that the truth of concepts is always also at stake in the tumult of battle. In addition, with such a view, we claim to know that the real is always only given to us through the filter of variable formulations and that the way we grasp reality is blended with the latter into an amalgam. Basically, we are concerned here with a contemporary revival of the Platonic doctrine that the eternal gigantomachy over being is fought out in thought itself and nowhere else, and that only in this struggle can the grounding of reality come to light. This thesis is reflected in Nietzsche’s dictum on Greek tragedy, that the enchantment of these struggles consists in the fact that whoever sees them must also struggle with them himself.12 As in Badiou’s thesis, we find in the classics the insight that there is a convergence between understanding and struggle that is not easily avoided and may indeed be inescapable. According to Plato, to think means to take part in logical civil war, in which truth takes to the field against opinion. According to Nietzsche, to think even means to realize that the thinker himself is the battlefield on which the parties of the primal conflict between energies and forms collide. Even in Badiou’s effort to save radicalism, the ideal of a detached theory is rejected, by drawing on contemporary resources to show how a thoroughly polemical praxis is at work behind the façade of liberal pacifism that is dominant today.
In what follows, I would like to translate the thesis that the twentieth century was characterized by a “passion for the real” into a context that is informed by my own studies of the emergence of imponderous elements, atmospheric facts and immunitary systems – studies that have materialized primarily in the trilogy Spheres (Volume I, Bubbles, 2011; Volume II, Globes, 2014; Volume III, Foams, 2016), and in In the World Interior of Capitalism: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, 2014. The central theme of the spherological project is articulated in the observation that modernity can only be understood as the epoch of a struggle for a new definition of the meaning of reality. In contrast to the polemical ontologies that dominated twentieth-century discourse, I attempt to show that the main event of this age consisted in Western civilization’s breaking free from the dogmatism of gravity. That the twentieth century was primarily a matter of the passion du réel may well be a statement that turns out to be quite correct. However, that the actualization of the real primarily manifests itself in a passion for antigravity – only this additional observation will put us in position to understand the meaning and the progression of the clashes over the real on their own terms. The drama of the century only properly comes to light if we understand the obvious battles, both physical and discursive, as ways of expressing a widespread agony. I am speaking of the agony of the faith in gravity, which since the nineteenth century has manifested itself in ever-new convulsions, reactions, and fundamentalisms.
The spherological approach is based on a hermeneutics of an antigravity or unburdened existence, which includes both destructive and constructive parts. While from the constructive perspective there is talk of the discovery of atmospheric facts and of concealed immuno-systemic realities, the general theory of antigravity and exoneration, with its destructive élan, is devoted to ideological fabrications, which since the days of the French Revolution shackled the human being to the galleys of modernity: the galleys of scarcity, need, lack of resources, violence, and transgression. At the core of all of these theories, which for the most part emerge as anthropologies, as economies, and as theories of a parsimonious nature, statements about the real, aka “nature” or “history,” can be found that limit the realm of human freedom to the reluctant gesture of submission to the law of the real. Wherever new realisms find their voice, human beings are declared to be vassals and media of superior realities – regardless of whether the latter are invoked in naturalistic, voluntaristic, economistic, vitalistic, drive-theoretical, or genetic idioms.
The following reflections aim to shed more light on precisely this condition of being a vassal and a medium in relation to a dominant real. They should put to the test Hegel’s dictum according to which philosophy is its own age conceived in thought.13
Allow me to include a warning with this allusion to Hegel. I have never made a secret of my view that Hegel’s dictum could indeed be valid from a perspective informed by ideal types. However, it is completely off the mark in empirical terms, since philosophy, as we have been familiar with it for nearly the last two hundred years both publicly and academically, has almost exclusively consisted of a most carefully organized flight from time. But the fact that each and every time flees from itself in a different way offers an involuntary contribution by philosophy to the characterization of its own respective age. The honor of philosophy as the current voice of truth has always only been preserved by the marginalized, who have been called, not without reason, “the dark writers of the bourgeoisie.”14
I intend to show that the breakthrough into the aforementioned passion du réel cannot be restricted to the twentieth century. To be sure, this passion reaches its peak in that age of contending realisms, but the dispositions that made such clashes possible and unavoidable date back to the French Revolution. Not only did the latter create the archetype of modern aggressive fundamentalism in the form of Jacobinism; not only did it introduce the schema of the unfinished revolution into the world, which since that time has remained influential as a matrix of radicalism; it has also fostered activist and materialist ontologies that have to be read as the true textbooks of a modern society oriented around labor and struggle. In another passage (and yet in the same place), I have suggested the somewhat dramatic term “apocalypse of the real” for this comprehensive caesura in the history of mentalities,15 in order to point out that more was involved in the radical transition to modernity than merely a generational shift in the flow of the old European metaphysical tradition. The real shift in the balance of the European conditions of thought was lucidly articulated by Nietzsche, who succeeded in condensing intellectual history, to say nothing of Europe’s onto-history, into the format of a telegram: “How the True World Finally Became a Fable.”16 By registering the implosion of the world hereafter, this dire text sums up the main logical event of its epoch. Whoever is interested in the long version of this dispatch can still find a magisterial and comprehensive reference point in Karl Löwith’s work From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, from 1941.17
The point of this event becomes apparent in the fact that the traditional relations between the esoteric and the exoteric were reversed in the course of the nineteenth century. As long as old Europe’s theologically tinged idealist metaphysics maintained its dominance, the main emphasis of all esotericism lay in the realization, to be kept secret at all costs, that there is no God and that there are no gods, and thus that all ideas of a higher world hereafter are pure fictions, castles built in the clouds, which are constructed out of anxiety, weakness, and longing. Until well into the nineteenth century, atheism, that life-threatening wisdom, disguised itself as the true occultism, while metaphysical theology was allowed to play the role of public opinion for more than a millennium and a half. But then the tide turns: what was a secret doctrine becomes common knowledge and public opinion, while, conversely, an alternative esotericism is constituted, emerging as empirical theology or as an ethnology of the world hereafter, in order to meet the requirements of a new realist, pragmatic zeitgeist – the concept of the unconscious could only begin its career in this neo-esoteric context. This concept, which became topical around 1800, signals that the world hereafter is nearby and that nature’s dark side begins right on the threshold of consciousness.
The young-realist break in nineteenth-century thought manifested itself in a torrent of literature that aimed to expose and that was devoted to the task of providing hitherto suppressed or concealed dimensions of reality with their rightful seats in the parliaments of knowledge.18 Such literature aspires to be actually scientific, but due to its performative features is simultaneously composed in a prophetic manner, insofar as it does not merely describe newly thematized realities in their exposed state (the will as foundation of the world, human labor, class struggle, flows of capital, natural selection, and the sexual libido). Rather, the realm of the real to come is also continually proclaimed, and the public is called upon to prepare itself for what is coming. This modern-realist speech act has both prophetic and apostolic features, combining the epistemological apocalypse of the real with a moral adventism that describes the realm of the real as nearly imminent, indeed as a regime that is already present in the depths. To indicate at this point the Medusean dynamic of the young-realist practice of exposure that only later became manifest, we should observe that where prophets and apostles take hold of the Word, martyrs of the real cannot be far behind, too – and we might as well also include the persecution of enemies of the real.
Such young-realist discourses are polemical – and indeed not only in the trivial sense that the best is always the enemy of the good. All of the new realisms understand themselves as figures in an evolutionary or revolutionary tableau in which they play an unavoidable exterministic role. To a certain degree, nineteenth-century evolutionism offered historicized versions of an ancient Eastern ontology of contending principles, which had not entirely faded away under the predominance of monotheism and lived on in the cryptic, dualistic undercurrents of Western metaphysics.19
In contrast to classical dualism, nineteenth-century young-realist ontologies of struggle do not conceive the conflicting or antagonistic factors as eternally symmetrical opponents facing off, but rather believe them to be their historical predecessors. An asymmetrical conception of the adversarial object as obstacle arises as a result, regardless of whether this is defined as the overarching term for relations, as a complex of ideas, or as social groups. No one understood this more clearly than the young Marx, who in a significant note on the essence of new activist critique declared that such critique did not want to contradict its object, but rather annihilate it.20 Exterminism, essential to the modus operandi of contentious twentieth-century radicalisms, is rooted in evolutionarily inclined conflictual ontologies, according to which the truth of the real must be effectively implemented against the status quo, which despite being current has already been superseded and is only a temporary semblance of the real. The predominance of the unreal, which still clings to power thanks to an illusory covering over and distortion of the real, is to be broken, so that the realm of the real may arrive.
With these remarks, we have mainly been outlining the situation of Young Hegelian thought, which was the broadest manifestation of the invasion of the real. It heralded the triumph of realisms as a public and political fact, despite every attempt at neo-idealist restoration. This triumph led to the flowering of “critical theory,” which flourished from 1831 to 1969 (if we choose the dates of Hegel’s and Adorno’s deaths, respectively, as parameters). A deeper analysis of the older sources of this movement would be well-advised to start with Lenin’s reference to the “Three Sources and Three Component Parts” of the Marxist worldview, where explicit reference is made to eighteenth-century French materialism.21
What Lenin did not mention, or did not know, is that the paradigmatic thinker embodying this tendency was the Marquis de Sade, who portrays the advent of the real as a criminal realm-to-come. De Sade is the occult genius of modern radicalism, because he was the first to demonstrate how nineteenth- and twentieth-century activists would envision their union with the operative principle of reality. For de Sade – as for Spinoza – nature takes on the function of an omnipresent active substance. If the task of modern thought is to develop substance as subject; if, consequently, nature must become human in order to completely come into its own and to realize its ultimate possibilities, then, conversely, the human being must completely become nature, too. Or, to put it better, the human being, as an agent of nature, must settle into a mediumistic relation with nature. In modernity, nature summons its own apostolate. This turn to a mediumistic or apostolic naturalism would perhaps not be cause for further concern had de Sade not defined the essence of nature as that of an absolute criminal. (In contrast, German Romantics developed a completely different version of mediumistic naturalism, according to which nature is a healer that communicates through salutogenic media – a motif that led to scandal in the case of Franz Anton Mesmer but was popularized by Wolfart and Carus.) Yet because, for him, nature as such is the embodiment of a principle of criminal indifference and pure arbitrariness in the pursuit of desire, which can be actualized as soon as one sheds the inhibiting effect of religion, human beings will only be able to naturalize themselves successfully, or develop into media of absolute criminality, if they transforms themselves into sovereign criminals – and even more, if they take up the criminal apostolate, so as to simultaneously proclaim with each act of their life the gospel of primal criminality. It is not enough to commit crimes, we must also actively become teachers of crime – and indeed, as Dolmancé, the hero of Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795),22 explains, this must initially happen within secret societies, but then also in a constitutional republic. Criminal prophetism is articulated in modernity’s first naturalist manifesto: Frenchmen, Some More Effort If You Wish To Become Republicans.23 This singular pamphlet, which must be read alongside the great texts of the French Revolution as excessive libertinism’s declaration of human rights, heralds not only the emancipation of criminal initiative, but for the first time also defines the essence of specifically modern reaction: reaction is now seen to be at work everywhere the powers of the religious ancien régime establish contrived impediments to the free operation of the natural principle in individuals. This entails nothing less than the claim that the natural subject in need of real emancipation can only come into its own against an obsolete moral background, and thus can be freed for the consummation of its current desire. The essence of subjectivity is here interpreted as something only to be actualized by a specific disinhibition, in other words, by removing the inner ancien régime and its repressive authority.
It could be argued that de Sade, two generations before Bakunin, was the true discoverer of the superego, insofar as he successfully revealed the true identity of prohibition, namely as the rule of priests over authentic nature. At the same time, he was the father of radicalism, because he formulated the categorical imperative of every revolt, the psycho-political sublation of the ancien régime. Every radical has since been able to affirm the maxim: you may do what you want, provided that what you want actualizes a drive of nature, the great criminal. Realism now means nothing more than the submissive correspondence of the intellect to an order of things outside of us; it implies the activation of the real as an ongoing intensification of causes that aim to produce new effects. Uncommitted crimes wait for their perpetrators – just as still incomplete revolutions wait for their activists. What the twentieth century recognized as “grand politics” [großen Politik] – the term goes back to Nietzsche – thus continually assumes the form of the “good crime” on a grand scale, with Lenin and Stalin no less than Hitler and Mao Zedong. The realist is the agent, medium, and apostle of a power that only achieves what is called “free expression” after its disinhibition. The revolutionary is the good criminal.
Is it still necessary to say that with de Sade, modern expressivism also begins in an aesthetic regard, with the real itself defined as the continual transition of powers into their expression? The schema of power and expression, incidentally, is also easily transferred to so-called “history,” which refers to its media as though they were nature at work. Political activists, however, believe that history is not so much a criminal as it is a surgeon, who amputates the diseased tissue of the past.
The key point in this brief philosophical portrait of the divine Marquis is to see that the structure of modern radicalism is only understandable if we begin with him. Young-realist authors since Marx have assured us that to be radical means to understand things from their roots – but the roots are sought in a fundamentally dynamic realm that is constructed from the bottom up, which is indicative of the Sadean paradigm. Because roots are to be thought of as basal powers, to be radical means to join with the powers at the base of relations in order to move them toward newer, freer, more uninhibited forms of expression, regardless of whether they manifest themselves as crimes, revolts, revolutions, works of art, or acts of free love.
The vegetative metaphor of the root, incidentally, is obviously connected to the architectonic metaphor of the fundament or basis. Just as true radicalism sets new expressive action to work from the roots, so true fundamentalism wants to revolutionize or restore the basis, in order to move things in the superstructure around. Radicalism and fundamentalism are synonyms, insofar as both seek to form an alliance with the lower depths, regardless of whether these are thought to be powers or values. Both rest on the assumption that what is below has more reality than what is above. Both are derived from the same ontology, insofar as they are bound to a metaphysics of gravitation, according to which substantial, weighty, and serious things strive downwards to form the soil from which everything else must be yielded.
I will show that this ontological fundamentalism, which is inherent in all forms of modern realism and their radical crescendos, rests on a mistaken conception of the real that is certainly understandable, but nonetheless objectionable, and I will also show why this is the case. In the nineteenth century, when Marx taught that all critique begins with the critique of religion, his thesis implied that it was enough to identify religion as a superstructural phenomenon, so that critique could focus on the base of the relations of production. The work of critique entails eradicating things by reducing them to a deeper ground and really resolving them. Only in rare moments does Marx deviate from this reductive praxis and suggest the possibility of a redemptive critique, when he characterizes religion as the heart of a heartless world. This line of thought is in fact not critical but dogmatic, since its arguments rest on an inadequate ontology of the basal.
Critique can only really begin at all as a critique of gravitation – but this presupposes that thinking renounce its dogmatic opportunism vis-à-vis the real as basal power from below and freely shift to the midpoint between weighty tendencies and antigravity ones.
There is good reason to believe that the issue of antigravity in modernity is not built on sand – if a metaphor referring to the ground is not out of place here. The following considerations will show that uplifting forces have seen dramatic gains in enthusiasm and become more wide-ranging over the course of recent social evolution, far beyond the illusory religious ascension to heaven. I believe this can be demonstrated by inquiring into the dynamic of antigravity that belongs to the real, as it manifested itself in the course of the technological modification of the world. I thus take up Nietzsche’s formulation of the transvaluation of all values (leaving aside the conflict over values) in order to deploy it in an event that I consider to be the real novum of the twentieth century: I mean the construction of the Western system for easing life [Lebensentlastung] on the basis of an extensive tax regime and a civilization of mass comfort founded on fossil fuels. We only gain a clear view of these phenomena when we obtain enough distance from the rachitic dogmas of leftist radicalism. We must brace ourselves for an inversion of radicalism – for a change of direction toward the airy, the rootless, and the atmospheric. Whoever would like to get to the bottom of things today must fly into the air. It remains to be shown that light, quasi-immaterial objects, although opposed to all “soils,” are more elementary than the fictions of gravity that enthralled the twentieth century’s passions du réel. Since I still have to gather my thoughts here into a general theory of antigravity, I will present the outlines of an interpretation of technology as an agency of relief. I will then supplement the anthropological theory of relief with a post-Marxist theory of enrichment.
Anyone inquiring into the general premises of relief in the age of its technological intensification would do well to consult the early French socialists, specifically Saint-Simon and his school, whose publications – their journal was not named Le Globe for nothing – are the starting point for an explicit politics of pampering from a genretheoretical perspective. The formula of the era of relief, still valid to this day in theory and practice, originates with Saint-Simonism; it states that with the rise of major industries in the eighteenth century, the time has come to end the “exploitation of man by man” and to replace it with man’s methodical exploitation of the Earth. In the present context, we can acknowledge this statement’s epochal significance: the human race, represented by its avant-garde (the industriel class), is thereby identified as the beneficiary of a comprehensive relief movement – or, in the terminology of the time, as the subject of an emancipation. Its goal was expressed in the secular-evangelical gospel of the resurrection of the flesh during one’s lifetime.
Such a thing was only conceivable provided that the typical distribution of weight in agro-imperial class societies, namely the relief and release of the ruling few through the exploitation of the serving many, could be revised thanks to the relief of all classes through a new universal servant: the Earth of resources, taken over using large-scale technology. What the Saint-Simonian keyword “exploitation” means, in processological terms, could only be articulated once the philosophical anthropology of the twentieth century had developed a sufficiently abstract concept of relief, particularly in the wake of Arnold Gehlen’s efforts.24 When the cultural sciences were able to employ this concept, it became possible to formulate general statements about the evolutionary direction of advanced technological social complexes that are substantially more practical, in systemic and psychological terms, than the palpably naive nineteenth-century theses on emancipation and progress. If we trace both the phenomenon and the concept of relief back to Saint-Simonian exploitation, it becomes evident that the effect in question, relief via technology, cannot be achieved for the majority without a shift of exploitation to a new bottom.
Against this background, it can be argued that all narratives about changes in the human condition are narratives about the changing exploitation of energy sources – or descriptions of metabolic regimes.25 This claim is not only an entire dimension more universal than Marx and Engels’ dogma that all history is the history of class struggles; it also reflects the empirical results far more accurately. Its generality extends further because it encompasses both natural and human energies (“labor power”); it is closer to the facts because it rejects the bad historicism of the doctrine that all states of human culture are connected in a single evolutionary sequence of conflicts. Futhermore, it does not distort the existing data despite its high level of abstraction. Such a distortion can be found in the polemogenic didacticism of The Communist Manifesto, which passed over the comparably rare phenomenon of open class struggles – at the risk of ascribing a significance to the slave and peasant revolts of earlier history (along with their desperate, undirected, and often vandalistic tendencies) that was supposed to be exemplary for the struggles of wage earners to achieve redistribution.
The story of the exploitation of energy sources reaches its current hot spot as soon as it approaches the complex event known in both older and newer social history as the “Industrial Revolution”26 – a misnomer, we now know, as this too was by no means a “radical change” in which above and below switch positions; rather, it heralded the manufacture of products using mechanical substitutes for human movements. The key to the transition from human labor to machine labor (and to new human–machine cooperations) lies in the coupling of power systems with executive systems. Such couplings had usually remained latent in the age of physical labor, insofar as the worker him- or herself, as a biological energy converter, embodied the unity of the power system and the executive system. However, once crucial innovations were implemented in mechanical power systems, these couplings were able to be explicitly elaborated.
Thus begins the epic of motors: with their construction, a new generation of heroic agents stepped onto the stage of civilization, a generation whose appearance radically changed the energetic rules of the game for conventional cultures. Since the advent of motors, even physical and philosophical principles such as force, energy, expression, action, and freedom have taken on radically new meanings. Although these forces are normally tamed ones, bourgeois mythology has never completely lost sight of their unbound, potentially disastrous side, describing it in terms of the pre-Olympian race of violent Titanic deities. Hence the profound fascination with exploding machines, and indeed with explosions in general.
Ever since neo-Titans appeared in the midst of modern life, nations have changed into immigration countries for machinery. In a sense, a motor is a headless energy subject that was created because we are interested in using its power. However, it only possesses the impulsive attributes of the agent [Täter], and is not burdened by reflection. As a beheaded subject, the motor does not move from theory to practice, but from standstill to operation. In motors, that which disinhibits human subjects who are about to take action is triggered by the starting mechanism. Motors are perfect slaves, since we need not worry about complications, such as a concern with human rights, if we make them work around the clock. They do not listen to abolitionist preachers who have a dream: the dream of a not-too-distant day when motors and their owners have the same rights, and the children of humans and machines play with one another.
To integrate motors systematically as cultural agents requires fuels of a very different nature than the food that sustained human manual laborers and beasts of burden in the agro-imperial world. This is why the most dramatic sections in the epic of motors are the cantos on energy. We could even ask whether the formulation of the abstract, homogenous energy principle – energy sans phrase – by modern physics is not merely the scientific reflex of the principle of motorization, whereby the vague coupling of nutrition and organism was replaced by the precise relation between fuel and machinery. In the grand narrative of the procedures and stages of energy source exploitation, the transfer of power from the organism opens what could very well turn out to be a permanent final chapter.
As we know, modernity’s grand narrative of relief begins with an account of the massive invasion by the first generation of mechanical slaves, which from the eighteenth century onwards came into use as “steam engines” in the burgeoning industrial landscapes of northwestern Europe. Mythological associations were readily apparent in regard to these new agents, as their operating principle – the expansion pressure of trapped steam – immediately recalls the Titans of Greek theogony, who were condemned to subterranean bondage. Since steam is initially caused by the combustion of coal (it was only with twentieth-century thermonuclear power plants that a completely new agent was introduced), this fossil fuel had to become the nascent Industrial Age’s heroic bearer of energy. It is one of the numerous “dialectics” of modernity that coal, a powerful pampering agent, usually had to be extracted through the inferno-like labors of underground mining. Thus the miners of the coal-hungry nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could be presented as living proof of the Marxist thesis that the wage–labor contract was merely the legal mask of a new slavery. From the later nineteenth century on, petroleum and natural gases (also relieving and pampering agents of the highest order) joined Promethean coal as additional fossil carriers of energy. Their extraction required overcoming obstacles to development that were different than those encountered in underground mining. Occasionally, the process of acquiring them exhibited what could be called a natural accommodation, as if nature itself wished to make a contribution of its own to ending the agriculturally defined age of scarcity and its reflection in ontologies of lack and varieties of misery.
The primal scene for this accommodation of human demand by natural resources took place in 1859 in Pennsylvania, when the first oil well was uncovered near Titusville, and with it the New World’s first great oil field, in a very shallow layer hardly more than twenty meters below ground. The image of the eruptive oil well, known among experts as a “gusher,” has since become an archetype of not merely the American Dream, but the modern way of life as such,27 which was made possible by easily accessible energies. The petroleum bath is baptism for contemporary human beings – and Hollywood would not be the central issuing facility of our popular myths had it not shown one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, James Dean, bathing in his own oil well as the star of Giant (1955). The steadily growing influx of energy from fossil stores, which for the moment remain unexhausted, not only enabled constant “growth” – positive feedbacks between work, science, technology, and consumption over more than a quarter of a century – together with implications that we have described as the psychosemantic modification of populations due to prolonged relieving and pampering effects; it also involved an abrupt change of meaning for such venerable categories of Old European ontology as being, reality, and freedom.
The concept of the real has now come to include the constructivist connotation that things could always be different (something of which only artists, as guardians of the sense of possibility, were previously aware). This stands in contrast to the traditional conception of the real, in which references to reality were always infused with the pathos of not possibly being any other way. As a result, the concept demanded submission to the power of finitude, harshness, and lack. In the past, a phrase like “crop failure,” for instance, was loaded with the admonitory severity of the classical doctrine of the real. In its own way, such a phrase reminds us that the ruler of this world can only be death – supported by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, his tried-and-true entourage.
In today’s world, which is characterized by the basic experience of surplus energy, the ancient and medieval dogma of resignation is no longer valid; there are now new degrees of freedom whose effects extend to the level of existential moods [Stimmungen]. Small wonder, then, that Catholic theology, which essentially thinks in premodern and miserabilist terms, has completely forfeited its connection to present-day facts – even more than Calvinist and Lutheran doctrines, which at least take a semi-modern approach. Accordingly, the concept of freedom also had to shed its conventional connotations over the last hundred years. It sounds new dimensions of meaning on its harmonic series, especially the definition of freedom as the right to unlimited mobility and festive squandering of energy.28 The two former prerogatives of lords, namely gratuitous freedom of movement and whimsical spending, are thus democratically generalized at the expense of a subservient nature – this is only true, of course, where the climactic conditions of the great greenhouse are already in force. Because modernity as a whole only takes shape against a background whose primary hue is abundance, its denizens are struck by the constant dissolutions of boundaries. They can and must acknowledge that their lives now occur in a time without normality. They pay for their thrownness into the world of excess by feeling that the horizon is drifting.
The sore point in the reprogramming of existential moods in modernity thus concerns the experience of de-scarcification, encountered early on by the inhabitants of the crystal palace – something that they have hardly ever acknowledged sufficiently. The sense of reality among people in the agro-imperial age was attuned to the scarcity of goods and resources, because it was based on the experience that their labor, embodied in onerous farming, was just enough to establish precarious islands of human artificiality in nature. This was already addressed in the ancient theories of ages, which bear resigned witness to the fact that even great empires crumble, and the most arrogant towers are leveled by inexorable nature within a few generations. Agrarian conservatism expressed its ecological-moral conclusions with a categorical ban on wastefulness. Because the product of labor could not usually be increased, only augmented by looting, at best people in the ancient world were always clearly aware that what they value, that which they generated, was a limited, relatively constant factor that had to be protected at all costs. Under these conditions, the squanderer must have been considered insane. Hence the narcissistic profligacies of noble lords could only be considered acts of hubris – and their later reinterpretation as “culture” could not yet be foreseen.
These views ceased to be relevant when, with the breakthrough into the fossil-fueled style of culture a little more than two centuries ago, a sinister liberalism appeared on the scene and resolutely began to overturn previous standards. While wastefulness had traditionally been the ultimate sin against subsistence, as it jeopardized the always scarce supply of the resources necessary for survival, the age of fossil energy saw a thoroughgoing change in the meaning of wastefulness: we can now calmly term it our first civic duty. It is not that supplies of goods and energies have become infinite overnight, but the fact that the limits of the possible are constantly deferred further and further, which gives the “meaning of being” a fundamentally altered complexion. Now only Stoics still carefully take inventory. Ordinary Epicureans in the great comfortable greenhouse assume that the “inventory” is something that can be infinitely increased. Within a few generations, the collective willingness to consume more was able to ascend to the level of a systemic premise: mass frivolity is the psychosemantic agent of consumerism. Its blossoming indicates that recklessness has assumed fundamental importance. The ban on wastefulness has been replaced by a ban on frugality, expressed in perpetual appeals to encourage domestic demand. Modern civilization is based less on “humanity’s emergence from its self-incurred unproductiveness”29 than on the constant influx of an unearned profusion of energy into the space of entrepreneurship and experience.
In a genealogy of the motif of wastefulness, we would have to note how the verdict of tradition on the luxurious, leisurely, and superfluous was rooted in theological values. On the conventional monotheistic view, everything superfluous could only be displeasing to God and nature – as if they were also taking inventory.30 It is remarkable that even the proto-liberal Adam Smith, as willing as he is to sing the praises of luxury-stimulated markets, clings to a markedly negative conception of wastefulness – which is why his treatise on The Wealth of Nations is pervaded by the refrain that wastefulness is a submission to the “passion for present enjoyment.”31 It is a habit of “unproductive hands” – priests, aristocrats, and soldiers – who, due to a long-entrenched arrogance, subscribe to the belief that they are called upon to waste the riches generated by the productive majority.
Marx likewise remains bound to the agro-imperial age’s conception of wastefulness when, following in Smith’s footsteps, he adheres to the distinction between the working and wasting classes, albeit with the nuance that it is capitalists, much more than feudal “parasites,” who now occupy the role of malign squanderers. At least he agrees with Smith in conceding that new economic methods have brought a surplus product into the world that surpasses the narrow surplus ranges of agrarian times. The author of Capital stylizes his bourgeois as a vulgarized aristocrat whose greed and baseness know no bounds. This portrait of the capitalist as a pensioner ignores the fact that the capitalist system also introduced the new phenomenon of the “working rich,” who balance out “present enjoyment” with the creation of value. Nor does it take into account that in the modern welfare and redistribution state, unproductiveness switches from the tip of society to the base – leading to the virtually unprecedented phenomenon of the parasitic poor. While in the agro-imperial world, it could normally be assumed that the impoverished were an exploited productive class, the paupers of the crystal palace – bearing the title of the unemployed – live more or less outside the sphere of value creation (and supporting them is less a matter of demanding “justice” than of national and human solidarity).32 Their functionaries, however, cannot refrain from claiming that they are exploited individuals who are lawfully entitled to compensation because of their hardships.
So, even if liberals and Marxists alike undertook far-reaching attempts in the nineteenth century to interpret the phenomenon of industrial society, the event of fossil energetics was not perceived in either system, let alone conceptually thought through. By making dogmatically inflated labor value the most important of all explanations for wealth, the dominant ideologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained chronically incapable of understanding that industrially extracted and utilized coal was not a “raw material” like any other, but rather the first great agent of relief. It was thanks to this universal “worker of nature” [Naturarbeiters] (for which alchemists searched in vain for centuries) that the principle of abundance found its way into the greenhouse of civilization.
Yet even if the pressure of new evidence compels us to understand fossil energy carriers and the three generations of motors spawned by them – steam engines, combustion engines, and electric motors – as the primary agents of relief in modernity, even if we go so far as to welcome, in them, the genius benignus of a civilization beyond lack and muscular slavery, we cannot ignore the signs that the inevitable shift of exploitation in the fossil energy age has created a new proletariat whose suffering enables the relaxed conditions in the palace of affluence. The main emphasis of current exploitation has shifted to livestock, which is produced and used in massive quantities by industrialized farming. On this subject, statistics are more informative than sentimental arguments: according to the German government’s 2003 Animal Welfare Report, almost 400 million chickens were slaughtered in 2002, along with 31 million turkeys and nearly 14 million ducks; of large mammals, 44.3 million pigs, 4.3 million cows and 2.1 million sheep and goats. Analogous figures can be assumed in most market societies, not forgetting that the national statistics must be augmented by vast quantities of imports. Animal proteins constitute the largest legal drug market. The monstrous scale of the figures exceeds any affective judgment – nor do analogies to the martial holocausts of the National Socialists, the Bolshevists, and the Maoists fully reflect the unfathomable routines in the production and use of animal carcasses (I shall refrain from addressing the moral and metaphysical implications of comparing large-scale cases of human and animal exterminism). If we consider that intensive livestock farming rests on the agrochemically enabled, explosive growth of animal feed production, it becomes evident that the flooding of markets with the meat of these animal bio-converters is a consequence of the oil floods unleashed in the twentieth century. “Ultimately we live on coal and petroleum – now that these have been transformed into edible products through industrial farming.”33 Under these conditions, one can predict that, in the coming century, an internationalized animal rights movement, already almost fully developed, will emphasize the unbreakable connection between human rights and animal suffering, which will lead to a growing unease among the populations of the great greenhouse.34 This movement could end up being vanguard of a progressive development that redefines non-urban ways of life.
Thus, if we are to name the axis around which the revaluation of all values in our developed comfortable civilization revolves, the only possible answer is the principle of abundance. Current abundance, which always wants to be experienced within the horizon of reinforcements and dissolutions of boundaries, will undoubtedly remain the decisive hallmark of future conditions, even if the fossilenergy cycle comes to an end a hundred years from now, or slightly thereafter. In broad terms, it is already clear which energy sources will enable a post-fossil era: primarily a spectrum of solar technologies and regenerative fuels. At the start of the twenty-first century, however, the details of the shape this will take are still undecided. We can only be sure that the new system – some simply call it the coming “global solar economy” – will have to move beyond the compulsions and pathologies of current fossil-resource policy.35
The solar system inevitably poses a revaluation of the revaluation of all values – and, as the turn toward current solar energy is putting an end to the frenzied consumption of past solar energy, we could speak of a partial return to the “old values”; for all old values were derived from the imperative of managing energy that could be renewed over the yearly cycle. Hence their deep connection to the categories of stability, necessity, and lack. At the dawn of the second revaluation, a civilizing weather condition on a worldwide scale will emerge that will quite likely display post-liberal qualities – inaugurating a hybrid synthesis of technological avant-gardism and eco-conservative moderation. (In terms of political color symbolism: black-green, which it would be a grave mistake to only interpret as a “restoration.”)36 The conditions for the ebullient expressionism of wastefulness in current mass culture will increasingly disappear.
Insofar as the expectations created by the principle of abundance in the industrial era remain in force, technological research will have to devote itself first and foremost to finding sources for an alternative wastefulness. Future experiences of abundance will inevitably see a shift of emphasis toward immaterial streams, as ecosystemic factors preclude a constant “growth” in the material domain. There will presumably be a dramatic reduction of material flow – and thus a revitalization of regional economies. Under such conditions, the time will come for the as yet premature talk of a “global information or knowledge society” to prove its validity. The decisive abundances will then be perceived primarily in the almost immaterial realm of data streams. They alone will authentically possess the quality of globality.
At this point we can only vaguely predict how post-fossility will remold the present concepts of entrepreneurship and freedom of expression. It seems probable that from the vantage point of future “soft” solar technologies, the romanticism of explosion – or, more generally speaking, the psychological, aesthetic, and political derivatives of the sudden release of energy – will be judged in retrospect as the expressive world of a mass-culturally globalized energy fascism. This is a reflex of the helpless vitalism that springs from the poverty of perspectives in the fossil energy-based world system. Against this background, we understand why the cultural scene in the crystal palace betrays a profound disorientation – beyond the aforementioned convergence of boredom and entertainment. The cheerful mass-cultural nihilism of the consumer scene is no less clueless and without future than the high-cultural nihilism of affluent private persons who assemble art collections to attain personal significance. For the time being, “high” and “low” will follow the maxim “Après nous le solaire.”
After the end of the fossil-energetic regime, there may de facto be what geopoliticians of the present have referred to as a shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific space. This turn would primarily bring about a change from the rhythm of explosions to that of regenerations. The Pacific style would have to develop the cultural derivatives of transition to the techno-solar energy regime. Whether this will simultaneously fulfill expectations regarding worldwide peace processes, the even distribution of planetary wealth, and the end of global apartheid remains to be seen.
Looking back on the question of what happened in the twentieth century from our present vantage point, it is apparent that in a number of ways this era represents a time of fulfillment. Badiou has rightly emphasized the extent to which this century broke with the prophetic habits of the previous one. It is the century of triumphant impatience, which is capable of anything but waiting a while longer for things to mature gradually in their own time. It is the century of immediate implementation, in which the martial law of taking action replaces patience, delay, and hope. Contra Ernst Bloch, we should now recognize that the twentieth century never knew a principle of hope, but only ever a principle of immediacy [Sofort], which consisted of two cooperating factors, the principle of impatience and the principle of getting something for free [das Prinzip Gratis].
The unleashing of impatience is one of the social-psychological mysteries of the twentieth century. Without it, neither the realist excesses of the first half nor the second half’s mass-cultural forms of recreation can be understood. Epochal impatience dates back to the diffusion of new motorized powers into the propulsive tendencies of human action. Power can become an omnipresent theme in the twentieth century because this was when its technological organs formed their new alliance with available energies.
Thus in order to do justice to yesterday’s aspirations for the twentieth century as an age of seriousness, we must recognize its resolute actualism and review the reasons why the age of anticipation transitioned to an age of deeds. This cannot be accomplished, as we have already indicated, if we limit our analysis to the span from 1914 to the present. Even to extend our inquiry to motifs dating back to the age of the French Revolution, as we have already done, remains inadequate. The real dynamic of the twentieth century cannot be explained merely by the emergence of radicalism, in which new subjects or agents wanted to make themselves into the media of nature or of history to come. Instead, we must return to the era of Renaissance arts and Baroque universal magic, in order to trace there the crucial lines of power whose triumphant manifestation becomes evident in the twentieth century.
The reference to magic of the early modern era is no accident, since anyone who would like to track present-day culture’s dynamic actualism, with its explosiveness, impatience, instant gratification, and smug dissatisfaction, must focus their attention on the crystallization phase of a new mental structure that extends from the sixteenth into the twenty-first century. I am referring here to a reversal in which the formulation and formatting of human desire shifts from a religious to a secular object. From the sixteenth century on (including a few preludes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the summum bonum, which generally shows desire the way, is translated from the striving for resolution into the search for ease [Erleichterung]. With this change of emphasis, immanent conditions assume the function of the highest good. This leads to immense interest in so-called natural magic, which initially seems to mean nothing more than providing the human being with a way to escape from the prisons of old necessity. (On a deeper level, we should here note that it also leads to the discovery of the first depth psychology and to a symbolic technique of self-birth.37) Consequently, human life in the modern age can take on the form of a treasure hunt. Treasure is imagined to be the means for the universal easing of life, and only needs to be found for this to immediately happen.
We must once again visualize the paradoxical course of this search. It is hard not to notice an effect that could be called irony: scarcely had the modern era’s magia naturalis taken shape as the epistemological matrix of research into means for the easing of life before it devolved into an endless task whose enormous difficulties belied the imagined result of the search. This is obvious from the vast resources that Baroque thought and experimentation invested in so-called alchemy, particularly the art of making gold, today forgotten and considered to be absurd. This branch of alchemy, undoubtedly its most fascinating offshoot, is based on the grandiose pre-capitalist dream in which the quintessence of value or the substance of treasure could be directly produced. If this were true, whoever mastered the production of gold would be able to conduct the treasure hunt as though it were a scientifically controlled manufacturing process. Such an alchemist would be freed from external fortune and would have found the source of wealth. The dominant motif of fairy tales in the modern world here emerges in crystalline purity: from now on, it will always be a matter of working in order to never have to work again. In the new regime, all effort has merely a preliminary character; the meaning of all exertion is to be found in striving for effortless homeostasis. We are patient one more time, so that after the great discovery we will never have to be patient again. Europe’s deepest dream is the unemployment that results from affluence.
I am suggesting that we recognize the realization [Wahrmachung] of the alchemical dream as the main event of the twentieth century. We have seen that it is characteristic of this age’s style that realizations cannot occur without bringing the dream’s latent horrors to the light of day. The irony of realization [Verwirklichung] is connected to the irony of the search. From the beginning, the search for wealth was unmistakably inherent in the conflation of working and searching. As soon as the search itself took on the form of organized work it also transformed the concept of wealth as such, and from the figure of treasure there gradually emerged that of capital, which tested the acuity of economists, as well as critics of political economy, from the late eighteenth century onwards. The treasure hunt became less meaningful as economists increasingly took over the topic. The concept of treasure was only then able to eke out a dreary existence on the fringes of both the capitalist and socialist imaginary, under the amazing and envy-arousing heading of the capitalist’s or oligarch’s private fortune. The last character-mask of treasure was the deplorable Count of Monte Cristo, who as treasure-finder was a figure from the past, but as avenger was entirely a man of the future.
I will conclude these reflections by observing that a general economy, still longed for by contemporary thought, even after Bataille and after the work of ecologists and deep ecologists, will not avoid returning to the much-maligned concept of treasure. Of course, the right lessons must be drawn from alchemy’s fate. It is no longer a matter of searching for the treasure-function, the sudden and magical easing of life, by fetishizing gold. Under present-day conditions, this would amount to the suggestion that we operate as counterfeiters or try our luck in the casino and on the stock market. In light of historical experience, we must remain resolute in understanding that there would be no capitalism, no widespread affluence, no welfare state, and no trace of anything that constitutes the modus vivendi of the current Western system of comforts without the intervention of the most immense of all treasures (as we have already discussed). Yet the treasure assimilated by capitalism was neither found in pirates’ chests nor in alchemists’ cabinets, but was found in terrestrial real estate. This treasure, even if it is occasionally called “black gold,” is not part of the monetary aspect of the economic process, but belongs to labor (I am referring to the Marxist dual opposition of capital and labor). However, it also does not play any role in the ordinary concept of the laborer, since the latter is not a person but the pure carrier of energy. The new concept of treasure to be incorporated into post-Marxist terminology thus requires an explicit concept that would allow us to express the fact that it belongs to the sphere of labor in an essentially different way than the former so-called proletariat or some other form of wagedependency. Active treasure, which is what we are here referring to, coal and petroleum (other forms of biosynthesis, too, later), embodies the principle of getting something for free in a typically modern way. This is because such a principle is suited for rapid combustion and for producing immediate effects, in stark contrast to its predecessor – the Earth as bearer of slow growth. Active treasure is the actual agent of the principle of immediacy.
The agent in question here, which can neither be capital nor labor, signifies nothing less than nature understood in post-conventional and post-metaphysical terms – and indeed in its twofold differentiation as a source of fossil fuels and as laboratory for organic syntheses. Hence, the name we are looking for can only be worker of nature. The anticipated general economy will only be able to be elaborated in the form of a tripolar theory that is applied to the juncture of labor, capital, and worker of nature. Since Nietzsche, and once again since Bataille, we know that the sun has always played the role of the first profligate. For now, it is the greatest embodiment of the virtue of generosity, which forms the absolute counter-principle to capitalism’s principle of acquisition. A post-capitalist form of the world and a corresponding ethics can only proceed from a new interpretation of the sun. Of course, current capitalist intellectuals are clueless when it comes to an agent like the sun, because – even after the ecological caesura – they are still completely in the habit of absolutizing the interaction of capital and labor and continue to ignore the contribution of the third side, that of the worker of nature. For the moment, let us content ourselves by concluding that the golden age of such ignorance is coming to an end.
If the twentieth century aimed to realize the dreams of the modern age, without having interpreted these dreams correctly, then we can say that the twenty-first century must begin with a new interpretation of dreams. Such interpretation will require examining how humanity pursues the treasure hunt that is the sine qua non for expressing what being-in-the-world means for us.