6. On Transport

We can now better see what the figure of Europe is opposed to, or rather follows, that which precedes it and that it inverts and makes into a figure. What this (territorial) figure follows, that which reverses itself in it and retreats as the (re)territorialization of the universal, is that which precedes and underpins all forms of the universal, the universal prior to or beneath any figure, that is to say, upstream from any return to self: the universal as transport. It is the very concept of Romanity, or its “essence,” as it were.⁸⁹ Rome “invents” the universal—for Romanity is its very movement, as the generalization, expansion, and homogenization of areas—through the practice, the openings, the relationships, and the becoming-world of transportation. That is why the space that is properly Roman—its interior—is the sea: an expanse specifically for transport, a kind of place for “pure” transportation. Water is the moving element, the element of mobility. On water, everything moves, nothing stays in place. What water carries is always floating, drifting, flowing, and moving from place to place: anchors are what fixates things, and being fastened to the land—the land at the bottom, grounding the sea. Every ground, every foundation is terrestrial, by essence. The maritime element does not found anything; it merely carries: it transports and displaces.⁹⁰ The sea, determined as principal space (inside-space, principle-space, or center, which it is for the Roman world), prompts the thought of an original transport, which is to say, a thinking of the origin as transport, or even more so, of a transport of the origin.⁹¹ The supposedly primordial terrestrial or earthy element on the contrary calls for a thought of foundation, or of the grounding origin (the buried origin), the archi-origin: of the fatherland.

That is why the fairly conventional thesis according to which Rome did not invent anything (not mathematics, philosophy, history, or politics, which are Greek; nor monotheism or Christianity, which are Jewish),⁹² but transported everything (displacing, extending, generalizing, or constituting it as a world) is true only with the notable exception of the specifically Roman invention of Roman law.⁹³ It is not the idea of justice, of course, or trials, summoning procedures, judicial rulings, but the idea of rights and the law [droit], jus (for which there is strictly no Greek word), the judicial as such—because the judicial is the regulation of transactions and transfers,⁹⁴ of transportation and exchanges, or more exactly of exchanges that are mediated by transportation, or nonimmediate exchanges. Exchanges in an immediate neighborhood, involved only within the space of their proximity, could not care less about the judicial. The judicial touches them only when they are enclosed or in the grasp of a generality that the transitivity of different, separate, and remote spaces produces. The judicial shapes the compatibility and the translatability of spaces: and translation is another designation for transport. It is therefore as the law of transactions and transport that the judicial turns into the reflection of universality. The judicial is the abs-traction of the universal. The judicial tractably draws (extracts, abs-tracts) the universal from places, as their transitivity or mutual translatability. The abstract universal is judicial, even if the abstraction that is its tool is developed before the empire.⁹⁵

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It is relevant for the church as well as the empire that Romanity should be the space of transportation.

What is the empire? It is what happens when the republic no longer manages to govern the world. The republic is suitable for one country. The empire is the submission to a single domination and the same commanding structure of the near and the distant. The empire is the regulated unity of remote spaces—the authority of the imperator, the general in command of faraway armies, who comes home triumphantly. Imperare means to command as a master, but more strictly, to take measures and engage in preparations, or to force to produce, and thus to require a delivery or to requisition: imperare arma, obsides, frumentum, pecuniam.⁹⁶ Impero includes in and paro, parare. Parare means to prepare and to strive to obtain or procure, and thus to obtain with money or buy.⁹⁷ The imperator is also the supplier or furnisher. The emperor furnishes the world with the unity of its provisions and resources. It homogenizes the space of their transportation and unifies the rule of their transactions.⁹⁸

This is also true of the church, and first (but not only) because Christianity is the imperial religion.⁹⁹ The church is constitutively imperial—long before the emperor’s conversion. The church is necessarily built in the same space as the empire, that is, in the world as the Roman world. The church has been cohabiting with this world, one could say, since their simultaneous birth: here, I take very seriously the theological definition of the church as the assembly of disciples, since the event of the Last Supper. Not in order to give credit to its historical reality necessarily (though this is not excluded), but rather to think of its constitution.¹⁰⁰ Now, this legendary event takes place during the very formation of the empire. The birth of Christ bisects the dated span of the “reign” of Augustus, who instituted the imperial regime: the imperium of Augustus lasts from 23 B.C.E. to 14 C.E. Christ preaches and dies during the time of Tiberius, the “first” emperor in the legal sense. The constitution of the church and the empire are strictly contemporaneous.

But the actions of Paul, who mainly instituted it, mostly mark the native inscription of the church within Romanity, as the space of transport. Paul is a (proud) Roman citizen: he is, exactly in the imperial and universalist sense of the word, as a non-Roman Roman, a Roman from outside Rome or even Italy. He is a Roman of the judicial universal, eyeing the world in this way, and roaming through it accordingly. He is a traveling man of the sea—we know all that the church owes to these ceaseless crossings, from shore to shore: its constitution as universal church. Paul is the man who writes, “there is neither Jew nor Greek,” barbarian or Scythian (circumcised or uncircumcised, slave or free, man or woman), and he writes this four times;¹⁰¹ that is to say, he transcends the “national” (or at least the native), and moves toward the universal. Paul writes this in his letters. It has been said that the epistolary arts are one of Rome’s few literary inventions.¹⁰² Few or not—it matters little here: if this art stamps “literature” with a seal of Romanity, it is obviously because the letter or epistle is the literary genre of transportation, something written at a distance to be read at a distance, to be carried and conveyed all the way to the reader, and that discloses itself as an art (unlike oratory or dramatic arts) through this necessary portage. The fact that Paul’s writings are Epistles, which are carried from shore to shore so as to unify the communities that border the sea in the universality of their church, is the seal indelibly marking Paul’s actions and thought as pertaining to the Roman world, the network of (maritime) roads, voyages from port to port, and crossings.