Il Covile. Minimal Theory of the Process of Abstraction

Preface.

This text is a necessarily incomplete exposition — called minimal because it avoids arbitrary explanations of unknown mechanisms and situations — of a process that has traversed us for millennia, and of concepts already formulated, some of them very ancient, a sign that the process was intuited from the beginning. Its aim is to give form, coherence, and explicit language to what has been seen and said by men who often devoted their entire lives to this reflection: certain of their formulations have been simply incorporated, in recognition of their precision. Some names may be mentioned: Lao Tze and Epicurus, ancient masters; and among the moderns, Karl Marx, Lewis Mumford, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Guy Debord, Ivan Illich, Jerry Mander, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Camatte. Some of the moderns elaborated contradictory theories, some even in support of the very process they claimed to oppose, but in the theoretical framework — increasingly obscured by a cloud of chatter and allusion — what counts are definitions, relations between concepts, and verifiable consequences, not biographies nor philology; only those conceptual structures coherent with the framework presented here are selected. Other names are not listed, though they wrote decisive words, either because they did not express themselves in books but in gestures, forms, or ways of living. ¶ It is also a diagnosis: it follows the genealogical thread of abstraction, which passes through religion, State, capital, and the technical system, in order to evaluate their direction and effects according to their own metrics. Some concepts appear before being clarified and must be followed in their development; others are deliberately concise, referring to notions already consolidated. The text contains no notes: however, associated with the minimal theory is an anthology of authorial passages — often containing the first formulations of the concepts discussed, with relative bibliography — which accompanies and illustrates each paragraph. ¶ The final Postilla does not intend to console, but, recognizing the gravity of the diagnosis, to point out the path — always present — of active acceptance.

Index Anthology

0. Abstraction.

Every act of thought implies abstraction: isolating and illuminating a feature of reality in order to understand it better, without, however, denying the whole from which it comes. This mental, or conceptual, abstraction is a vital instrument of knowledge: it allows us to invent concepts, classes, categories — such as the class of “containers,” to which the jug belongs — tools of thought, not substitutes for reality. ¶ Different is the abstraction with which this text is concerned. It begins when the concept replaces the thing, and the jug is no longer seen as a concrete jug — which can contain, refresh, pour, show itself off … — but only as a container. From then on, thought and perception no longer refer to the real, but to the image the concept has constructed. ¶ Thus begins a process — common to every vital function — of losing its own equilibrium. Every living form experiences dangerous imbalances: it defends itself, corrects itself, sometimes succeeds, sometimes not. When abstraction loses measure, it becomes a subtraction of human experience from sensible and relational reality: it transforms the lived into something separate, repeatable, combinable, implementable, and manageable as a technical object. It reduces the concrete to pure concept and replaces lived reality with representations and simulacra; it turns the jug into a mere container and man into a phantom, a vessel of linear and mechanical time; it severs sensory, emotional, and territorial bonds, depriving the individual of the enjoyment of presence and transferring it into always future hopes — redemption, the lendemains qui chantent. ¶ A leap occurs when this abstraction is no longer mere evanescence of the idea but produces reality. Money, the great straight road, the television set, the smartphone, and even the State are real abstractions; they act upon the imagination and the body, imposing their own order.

Index Anthology Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, Karl Marx, Jacques Camatte, Ivan Illich, Gianni Collu

0.1. Hrönir • Real abstraction.

An abstract idea that becomes concrete, real. Among the best known and most studied: value when it becomes money, coined or printed — a sense of tangible power carried in one's pocket: «If I can pay for six stallions, / are not their strengths mine?». But also television: we know it is not a mere household appliance because, as a medium of communication, it reshapes the sensory environment and the very structure of experience, generating an illusory feeling of unlimited cognitive possibilities. Abstractions take shape in objects, spaces, institutions, and behaviors, becoming material forces that organize experience.

Index Anthology Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Jerry Mander, Jaime Semprun

1. On the path of the day. Observed facts.

Proceeding in daylight, in the sole evidence of the common, a present emerges that contradicts the prevailing narrative: from the misery of the moderns to the loss of creativity, from generalized anxiety to increasing confinement. These are speaking symptoms that a majority cannot—or does not wish to—hear. ¶ Of the night, of the unknowable, we do not speak here, so as not to give form to shadows.

Index Anthology

1.1. Poverty of the ancients and wealth of the moderns — or the other way around? The other way around..

The prevailing narrative remains the counterfactual, historical one: poverty is archaic, wealth is modern. Yet anthropological research over the past fifty years tells a different story. Ancient and so-called “primitive” societies—each distinct, and none paradisiacal (the idea of a conflict-free, power-free, violence-free world is merely an ideological caricature of the noble savage)—were labeled “poor,” yet they embodied an economy of abundance: ample free time, non-commodified relationships, trust in life’s spontaneous reproduction, and vibrant creativity. In contrast, modern societies exhibit a supposed opulence that is, in fact, a radical form of deprivation—relational, existential, and experiential—driven by engineered scarcity, systemic competition, compulsive productivity, and the inability to pause.

Index Anthology Henry David Thoreau, Marshall Sahlins, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Juliet B. Schor, Jaime Semprun, D. Graeber & D. Wengrow

1.2. Evanescence of Immediacy and Loss of the Simple.

Immediacy — direct contact with others and with the sensible world — and the Simple — the elementary form of experience — are steadily weakening. Forms of existence once gratuitous and full of meaning — growing, learning, struggling, feeding, generating — are broken apart, mediated, reinterpreted within techno-productive logics. The process does not simplify: it reduces. The Simple is not what is small, but what gives itself in its immediate fullness: light on a wall, the coming-to-be and the passing-away. When the senses close — through distraction or saturation — the Simple appears uniform. The uniform wearies. Those who fall into boredom find nothing but monotony. Thus the Simple fades, and with it its quiet strength.

Index Anthology François-René Chateaubriand, Martin Heidegger, Jean Baudrillard, Ivan Illich, Jacques Camatte

1.3. Disappearance of creativity.

The cornerstone of human expression—the ability to create with our hands and our tongues—is gradually atrophying. Men and women have always lived through daily acts of creation: gestures, words, and objects that gave meaning to existence because they arose from an immediate, practical, and emotional relationship with the world, responding to everyday needs. Gathering berries and weaving a basket larger than one’s hands, carrying them elsewhere, crushing and eating them—simple gestures that gave the day its meaning and fullness. With the division of labor, entire aspects of life began to be delegated to certain members of the community, who became specialized in one domain, inevitably closing themselves off from others. With the advent of machines, the dispossession of creativity reached its peak. And with the ultimate machine—artificial intelligence—even the ability to create language and thought is on the verge of vanishing.

Index Anthology

1.4. Solitude and ecstasy of promiscuity.

Today we witness a new and paradoxical form of loneliness: solitude immersed in the crowd, sustained by constant proximity. Cities, transport systems, and public spaces are filled with bodies that do not touch, eyes that do not meet, voices that do not listen. In everyday gestures—eating, walking, waiting—a loneliness multiplies that is not isolation, but mutual absence within real presence: closeness without connection. Promiscuity, as mere physical aggregation—the crowd—does not generate relationship, but saturation: a kind of magnetic ecstasy without release, which intensifies loneliness rather than easing it

Index Anthology Edgar Allan Poe, Jean Baudrillard

1.5. Generalized anxiety and depression.

Anxiety and depression cease to be exceptional conditions and become cyclical polarities of ordinary existence in the performance society. Having become a company of himself, forced to maximize his survival as human capital, man feeds his anxiety through the obligation to constantly valorize himself: every aspect of life is subjected to market logics that demand one appear desirable, efficient, and competitive. Personal value is measured in real time through achievements, self-images, and narratives, generating chronic tension. Depression arises as the effect of devaluation: invisibility and defeat in competition plunge the individual into a subjective collapse, where psychic and symbolic bankruptcy coincide. The unstoppable expansion of psychotropic medication and the recourse to suicide, beginning even in preadolescence, are irrefutable evidence of this.

Index Anthology Giorgio Cesarano & Gianni Collu

1.6. Control and surveillance.

Control is no longer external and occasional, but continuous: it invades every moment and penetrates every aspect of daily life. Every gesture, word, or movement can be tracked, measured, and recorded. Surveillance is no longer an exception, but a widespread practice, integrated into common technologies. ¶ In childhood and adolescence, constant intervention on every gesture, word, or conflict — even minimal, verbal, or merely gestural — prevents direct experience of relationships, the testing of limits, and the learning of how to manage one’s own strengths and weaknesses. Thus it becomes impossible to build a self capable of orienting itself in reality and of taking an active part in the community.

Index Anthology Alexis de Tocqueville, Juan Donoso Cortés

1.7. Shutting-in.

Existence unfolds in increasingly isolated and monitored spaces. The condition of the Hikikomori is not a marginal pathology: it appears as a destiny. More and more people live day after day, entire lives, in closed environments. ¶ Until a few decades ago, however, the condition of the majority of humanity was not urban: they lived outdoors, in contact with the earth, amid shared noises and smells, in Aristophanic Penía, the living and shared poverty that nourished the enjoyment of presence. The trees were close by, as were the wild animals, which constantly invaded the space of living and working. ¶ But urban life was also different: what a difference between a Neapolitan basement apartment, with its door open onto the street—from whose windows Liszt could still capture the notes of Fenesta vascia—and a sixteenth-floor apartment, accessible only by elevator. ¶ The shutting-in of children and young people, once the misfortune of a few (the sick or the wealthy) and now the majority, is then the foundation of the cognitive schism, which will be discussed later. ¶ How much life was missing from Giacomo Leopardi's childhood, who sees neither the scents nor colors of a rose garden, nor the swarming of winged and crawling creatures, but only decay and death, and describes the pollinating work of the bees as rape and violence? Or in that of Charles Baudelaire, who preferred the artificial smell of benzoin to the simple scent of roses and violets? ¶ What sterile perception prevented little Eugenio Montale from seeing that "barely visible splendor that spread over all things" that instead illuminated Martin Heidegger as a child while his bark boats sailed in the fountain of the school? The same splendor that enveloped Vincenzo Bugliani as a child in races with zucchini boats in the small millpond of Monte di Pasta, which seemed to him "heaven on earth." Montale must have observed them from afar, like Leopardi, as a recluse, and those xebecs that for little Martin "still easily reached their destination," he saw only shipwrecked "in the whirlpools of soapy water." ¶ Leopardi—and like him, other poets, though not all—does not grasp reality "more deeply": he sees it less. ¶ Walter Benjamin, raised in bourgeois Berlin interiors, develops a vision of history reminiscent of the Leopardian garden where bees and sun torture roses, and every life is slaughter: the Angel dragged by the wind of progress sees only ruins, not recognizing that along with those ruins there is life. The young soldier wounded in the war of capital who on leave will spend the best days of his life with his beloved, experiencing the eternal moments of presence, remains invisible to him. ¶ From the case of so-called feral children it appears that if language learning is missed within a critical window, it is difficult to recover. Thus, perhaps, those who lose in childhood the immediate communication with the simple—spontaneous games, uncontrolled adventures, quarrels and reconciliations that teach us to feel and measure others and the world—are unlikely to find its fullness later on. The missed opportunity leaves a mark: perception remains amputated, and powerful but split imaginations graft themselves onto this wound. ¶ Those poets understood less about the simplest and most beautiful things, but they possessed the genius to construct a distorted reality that still embodies the profound uncertainties of everyone, transforming them into a compensatory sense of election and refinement. ¶ Precisely for this reason, their vision supports the powerful myth of the need for redemption. Thus the salvific expectation becomes the Montalian passage, the Benjaminian time-now, and Leopardian nature a stepmother enemy to be fought. It is this promise of redemption, a constituent component of the abstraction process, that shapes the modern imagination: reality is not enough, it must be fought, overcome, conquered. ¶ Shutting-in, then, is not only physical, but a condition of the soul, which, educated not to trust what is, what is shown, what is touched, no longer knows how to walk the path of day and, becoming one of Heraclitus' sleepers, wraps itself in a private world.

Index Anthology Boris Vian

1.8. Decline of the living body.

It is now manifest that the civilizational process, above all in the West, has produced the decay of bodily capacities. ¶ Postural collapse: from upright shoulders to universal kyphosis; muscular atrophy: from spontaneous tonicity to flaccidity; strength is no longer needed, the exoskeleton is dreamed of; rigidity of facial expression: from expressive mobility to the screen-face, the smile extinguished; loss of motor grace: from fluid movements to mechanical gestures; metabolic dysregulation: the body, once conformed to scarcity, collapses in artificial abundance, oscillating between deficiency and excess; loss of balance and proprioception: from natural tightrope walker to the body stumbling on the uniform sidewalk; reduction of breath: from the full diaphragm that sustained physical activity, speech, song, to the short thoracic breath, companion of anxiety and immobility. ¶ The body becomes a functional residue, adapted to seat and screen, sustained by drugs and prostheses. Its degeneration is already commodity — diets, fitness, surgeries, supplements, respirators — in a market without limits. Health care is the core of the system’s narrative, with charity as its most enticing form: the industry of the sick body presenting itself as gift. ¶ Less noticed and studied, but no less worrying, is the substantial disappearance of singing and dancing, which for millennia have accompanied the lives of men and women. These were not skills, but forms of presence. People sang and danced everywhere: in groups or alone, young and old, in everyday gestures or in rites of passage—births, deaths, weddings, celebrations. These were shared and continuous practices that united work, nourishment, mourning, and celebration. In individual singing, presence revealed all its richness. Dance, even when only hinted at, signaled the vitality of the body. Today, these practices, or rather these joys, have disappeared from real life. They survive, disfigured, in the entertainment industry, among the many already absorbed — or destined to be absorbed — by combinatorial logic.

Index Anthology

1.9. Unlimited commodification • They have brought whores for Eleusis (E. Pound).

Every aspect of human experience—emotions, relationships, memories, identity—can now be isolated, evaluated, and transformed into merchandise. Even what was once unmarketable—poetry and stories, words, plant and animal varieties—now carries a price. Feelings become content; personal stories, packages to be sold; suffering, a media opportunity. ¶ Even the body is dismantled and reassembled: organs, oocytes, and uteruses are sold; reproductive capacity is rented, identity is purchased, and appearances at dinners are paid for. Nothing is off-limits anymore. Nothing is sacred. ¶ Human beings are no longer merely exposed to the market—they have become commodities: offered, displayed, monetized, updated.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Chuck Palahniuk

1.10. Plasticization of language.

The loss of connection with phenomena and with the world of life translates into the plasticization of language, where plastic words—merely connotative and devoid of definitional power (e.g., sexuality, development, communication, information, resources, partners, services, governance, sustainability, resilience, inclusion, competence, excellence)—are the bridgeheads of the Technical System in common language, which becomes colonized and disarticulated in its richness and semantic plasticity. This phenomenon is part of an ancient trend, already evident in the loss of immediacy in the oldest civilizational languages compared to the performative and ritual density of oral cultures. Parallel to semantic impoverishment, languages have undergone morphological degradation: the progressive disappearance of cases, the dual, and subtle verbal inflections, replaced by prepositions and auxiliary constructions, has made words more rigid and less capable of modulating nuances. Thus, what once bent and shaped itself into infinite variations is now reduced to standardized sequences, more transparent but also poorer. Contemporary plasticization only accelerates this trajectory, presenting every historical occurrence as natural in order to render it immune to criticism, and is consubstantial with the conversion of life into a laboratory, with all the consequences in terms of loss of immediacy and creativity that this entails.

Index Anthology

1.11. Loss of enjoyment • Murdering Epicurus.

Especially in the West, the loss of enjoyment is already readable in the faces of passers-by: that fullness of relation with the living, the cosmos, others, and oneself. To enjoy means to integrate the spontaneity of being, welcoming both the predictable and the unforeseen, weaving together sensory experience, freedom, and continuity. ¶ This continuity, which requires attention and presence, is disturbed, interrupted, and diverted by the pervasive noise of media and devices, skewed by performative and representational anxieties, suppressed by widespread depression. Thus, experience detaches from the body, relation is reduced to an image, pleasure is bent to efficiency, joy to entertainment, while the necessary spontaneity is annihilated by control: enjoyment is absent.

Index Anthology

1.12. Metafact: the cognitive schism.

In light of the facts presented, a divergence can be observed. A minority—even in the “intellectual” world—sees them, though often tempted to ignore them. A growing, blind majority does not perceive their significance. The disproportion is verifiable: a sample of everyday conversations is enough to confirm it. It is not just one fact among many, but the very way in which facts are perceived or erased: a metafact.

Index Anthology Clint Eastwood

2. Remote stage of the abstraction process.

Anamnesis: the remote unfolding of the process and its earliest traces. Abstraction does not erupt suddenly into human history—it has deep roots, a prehistoric genesis. Already in the earliest stages of humanization, as symbolic capacities emerged and language took shape, a slow attempt began to escape the chaotic rhythm of nature and replace it with artificial structures of time and space. ¶ In this embryonic phase, the symbol—and with it, language, technical gestures, and dwelling—is not yet severed from the body or from reality, but begins to function as an instrument of symbolic domination. Time ceases to be experienced as an organic flow (seasons, pregnancies, lunar cycles) and becomes isomorphic, reducible to a codified sequence: calendar, hour, measurement. The same applies to space, which shifts from being a lived path to becoming homogeneous, isomorphic, an orderly grid—first in the village, then in the city. ¶ The domestication of nature thus begins primarily on a symbolic level, preceding any infrastructure or machine. The result is an incipient regularization of existence: a space-time grid that prepares the ground for the full activation of the process. This moment can be situated at the dawn of the Neolithic era, perhaps catalyzed by a real threat of extinction, which triggered latent human dispositions.

Index Anthology André Leroi-Gourhan

2.1. Human kind cannot bear very much reality (T.S. Eliot).

The rejection of reality—understood as excess, as an experience too intense and uncontrollable—appears to be ancient. Reality presents itself as urgency, as an unbearable pressure that human beings seek to deny, distance themselves from, or neutralize.

Index Anthology T.S. Eliot

2.1.1. Creating an imaginary world.

The inability to endure reality gives rise to imaginary worlds—private or collective—that replace or distort shared experience. The mind, retreating from the common and the sensible, constructs fragments of autonomous reality: incoherent or partial, yet self-sufficient in relation to the lived world.

Index Anthology Hērákleitos

2.1.1.1. Representation • Spectacle.

Content separated from experience is externalized as mythical or reconstructive narrative, ritual, or performance. Originally, representations mainly concerned the sacred, divinities, and imaginary figures; over time, they also became historical memory and self-representation of a people—wars, genealogies, deeds. With the formation of the modern individual, representation shifted toward personal experience, up to contemporary forms in which the daily and private exposure of oneself becomes spectacle—reality TV, social media—and everything that was directly experienced is distanced in a representation.

Index Anthology André Leroi-Gourhan, Guy Debord

2.1.2. Repression • Escamotage • Détournement.

The rejection of reality is realized through psychological operations that are profound, continuous, and universal. ¶ Repression is the first of these. It does not merely conceal content, but prevents its emergence: it cancels the trace before it even becomes thought. Pain, laceration, loss—what cannot be sustained or named—is excluded from consciousness, forming and nourishing a deposit that has been called the unconscious. ¶ Escamotage does not cancel, but withdraws from view, while remaining present to all. What is unbearable or disturbing is eluded, set aside, left at the margins. It is an acting “as if.” ¶ Détournement does not repress, but diverts. The flow of discourse or consciousness is imperceptibly shifted, moved away from what is unpleasant, through subtle techniques of dislocation. ¶ These three operations arise as mechanisms of psychic defense, but transform into operative instruments of domestication.

Index Anthology Jacques Camatte

2.2. Correcting creation • Aspirations for earthly redemption from “stepmotherly nature”.

The inability to endure reality as an unbearable excess generates, from the most remote times, the expectation of a radical change. This accompanies the birth of agriculture, the State, writing, and develops over time into the idea of detachment from nature and the construction of a remade Earth, freed from all evil. ¶ To transform is not in itself abstractive: every living being transforms, and the human impulse to transform is also natural. Different is the conviction that a radical detachment from nature is necessary—up to the dream of terrestrial immortality. This idea, not religious in itself, which we shall call redemptive in the sense clarified here, arises as a universal dream, present in variable forms and intensities in different cultures—among documented cases, those of the Guaraní in the Amazonian world. The idea reinforces itself when it reaches the creation of real abstractions: coined money, centralized State, writing, systematic accumulation. Thus a positive feedback loop is triggered which, under favorable conditions and with statistically variable outcomes, can evolve into an autonomous and self-expanding process. It is a verifiable and nearly universal history—India, China, Amerindian Empires...—but a response is also recorded: the attempt at confinement and opposition both by archaic, Eastern, Islamic religiosities and Orthodox Christianity, and by States. And it is equally verifiable how, in the West, with Judaism and Augustinianism, the process takes a further leap by entering the religion-State complex. ¶ The strength of the redemptive idea, assumed as a normative reference, is transmitted to other abstract ideas—its passages and concretizations: Universal Rights, Free Trade, Democracy, Socialism, Hierarchy, Equality, Property, Perpetual Peace and Bentham—which present themselves as great improvements, thus allowing the condemnation of any given social situation simply because it is given, without ever having to prove that the new will truly be better, and usually producing consequences opposite to those expected: the heterogenesis of ends. ¶ That aspiration is thus one of the main engines utilized by the process of abstraction: without the promise of redemption, it would not have its militant and visionary force of advancement and reproduction. All redemptive aspirations also have the effect of transforming time into pure waiting — for the Messiah, for the secret Master of the alchemists, for the proletariat, for the insurrection, for the now-time, for the time-to-come, for the chip.

Index Anthology pseudo Alighieri, pseudo Goethe

2.2.1. Immortality.

At the heart of the redemptive idea lies the hope for a possible terrestrial immortality. In the religious sphere—not to be confused with that of an otherworldly realm—this aspiration, although ubiquitous, assumes a doctrinally developed and operative character in Western history—Judaic and Augustinian. By "Augustinian" we mean both Catholicism—which even in periods of professed Thomism, such as the nineteenth century, did not substantially change its Augustinian praxis, then evolved into Jansenist rigorism—and the central branches of Protestantism, Lutheranism and Calvinism, which, by eliminating not only Thomism but also the anti-abstractive evangelical remnants—openness to the Simple, to children (whose expulsion from churches by Lutherans is an explicit symbol of the liquidation of the Jesuit legacy: “unless you become like children,” “let the little children come to me”), the critique of value and calculation—carry Augustinianism to its extreme consequences, privileging the ancient Old Testament model. The idea of otherworldly immortality remains within the realm of the unknowable, whereas that of terrestrial immortality, the promise of no tears or frustration, is incompatible with life, with given reality, which it prefers to nullify. ¶ Archaic cultures have always understood the danger of that aspiration and tried to restrain it. In the great Mesopotamian and Greek myths, the desire for eternal life is presented as madness, hybris: Gilgamesh seeks immortality and fails, Sisyphus and Tantalus are condemned to endless punishments for having tried to exceed the limit, Tithonus obtains eternal life but continues to age without end. Myth here functions as katéchon: it narrates the impulse in order to deactivate it. ¶ The Judaic world marks a decisive turning point. Death is no longer seen as natural, but as a consequence of sin. In Genesis, in Wisdom, and in early Christianity through Paul, death is the wage of guilt, entered into the world through the disobedience of the first man. Far from being accepted as a Heraclitean datum of creation, death thus becomes a theological scandal and a problem to be redeemed. With Augustine the idea becomes definitively rooted in the Western Christian tradition, is reinforced in Protestantism, becomes a matrix of thought and mental cage transforming into revolutionary hope, becomes weak messianism of waiting, until the technological myth of contemporary transhumanism. ¶ It is not only a matter of denying finitude, but of designing its overcoming: saving oneself from corruption, surviving time by extending it infinitely. Yet such a search for immortality betrays a profound misunderstanding of what eternity truly means. The reduction of vital time to a homogeneous and measurable dimension transforms what could be an authentic experience of the eternal—that fullness sometimes felt in moments of highest vital and relational intensity—into the mere expectation of a perpetuity perfectly described already in the myth of Sisyphus.

Index Anthology Jonathan Swift, A.E. van Vogt, Ivan Illich

2.2.1.1. From vital conflict to enmity • Eradicating “evil”.

Redemption creates enemies. Whatever causes the fall—evil, imperfection, or even mere obstacles to salvation—must be eliminated or neutralized, whether it be a plant, an animal, a human being, or an entire people.¶ The relationship with the other is no longer grounded in encounter, cooperation, or conflict as vital forms, but in an abstract order that demands a world purged of all negativity— a world in which even natural conflict is excluded as a living mode of relation. ¶ However, vital conflict, even violent—between predator and prey, between groups over territory, between individuals and communities over resources or for the will to prevail—is a natural activity, like the choice and reflection that accompanies it, which often opts for flight. It arises from concrete conditions and is exhausted in the achievement or failure of the objective, without superfetations such as honor, duty, etc. Redemptive enmity instead ontologizes the adversary: no longer this wolf that threatens the flock, but "the predator to be eradicated"; no longer this group that competes for the same resources or dominates, but "the people, the religion, the enemy class to be eliminated." The passage is from practical intelligence—which evaluates situations, calculates opportunities, acts according to necessity—to the abstract ideal that transforms every particular conflict into an ontological crusade.

This redemptive dimension, which cultivates enmity, underlies modern scientific restoration. It rests on an implicit and unresolved tension between two opposing interpretations of the idea of discovery: One is cognitive, rooted on the one hand in the exuberant and varied creativity of the medieval polytechnic, and on the other in the epistemological legacy of Greek thought, where scientific hypotheses guide discovery through theoretical models of real phenomena— an approach focused not on nature itself, but on the relationship between humans and nature; The other is pre-scientific, with obscure and ramified roots in the ruins of ancient empires. It conceives discovery as conquest—an archaic military term that implies the intrusion of the discoverer’s will into the being of the discovered, destroying its nature and reducing it to the image of the conqueror. ¶ This second interpretation gradually subordinated the first, undermining its meaning without explicit confrontation— despite the fact that discovery as conquest and discovery as cultivation, knowledge, and organic development stand at two radically opposed poles.

Index Anthology Jacques Camatte

2.2.2. Idea of power • Total control.

Perhaps due to a pre-Neolithic crisis (a species trauma, though this origin remains conjectural: a retrospective hypothesis to interpret the leap that occurred), humanity deepened its separation from nature: less and less an environment to inhabit, but difficulties to regulate. Thus were born instruments of symbolic control: division, measurement, surveillance. A new central power emerges as a prosthesis against the instability of living: offering itself as protection from uncertainty, it becomes internalized not only as necessity, but as the very constitution of separate identity. Every subsequent form of government will bear this ancestral imprint: an anxious search for an unattainable absolute security as a response to fear.

Index Anthology Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Cornelius Castoriadis

2.2.3. Egalité • Deletion of differences.

The growing hold of the movement of value—general equivalent, money—induces the birth of the idea of abstract equality among human beings, understood as the a priori negation of qualitative differences. Everything in man must also be made measurable. Direct relation, founded on concreteness and thus on the complex management of differences (management made of cooperation, complementarity, conflict, care) becomes suspect. Thus are laid the foundations for the revocation of individual and communal faculties in favor of a higher institution, sole regulator of action, which replaces relation with a hypothetical but fictitious absolute equivalence. Equality thus coincides with the equal subordination of all to the institution. In this way, individual responsibility no longer operates within relations with other humans and with the living organism, but exists only toward the State: the bond of proximity is broken in favor of a condition of estrangement in which in-difference prevails. ¶ The polar pair of concepts equality–difference, in cognitive and emotional development progressively dominated by the movement of value, undergoes the same fate as many others: peace–war, male–female, individuality-community, operative indifference–roles and division of labor, order–chaos. The two terms are dissociated (the opposite of yin–yang symbolism), hypostatized and moralized as good and evil, ignoring the necessity and natural presence—within their structural, temporal, quantitative, circumstantial limits—of the realities they intend to describe, as well as the epistemological impossibility of accessing the other's experience, supplanted by moral projection. It is a cognitive slippage with strong emotional consequences, importing the systematic denigration of everything insofar as it exists. Always on the basis of a rash judgment — yet one acts as if. Every perceived difference turns into an injustice to be eliminated; every cultural configuration that assumes and manages polarities becomes thus destructible, à merci. This slippage is a propulsive factor and permanent modus operandi of the abstraction process.

Index Anthology Aristophánēs, Karl Marx

2.2.4. Promethean shame.

Promethean shame arises from the comparison between human imperfection and the presumed perfection of technical creations. Man feels ashamed of his biological contingency when confronted with the intentional design of machines: ashamed of the stain of having been born rather than constructed.

Index Anthology Günther Anders, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Camatte

2.3. Anthropomorphosis: ideas that capture and become operational.

Some abstract ideas—divinity, the State, landed property, labor, capital, redemption—first acquire human form through symbolic representations: paintings, sculptures, linguistic allegories that endow them with a face, a name, and a body. They then seize real human beings, who cease to exist as autonomous subjects and become, as if possessed, living incarnations of the idea: the landowner who ruins himself in trying to preserve his inherited estate, the entrepreneur who lives solely for the enterprise, the missionary and the militant turning into machines of the idea of redemption, the dreamer who becomes an instrument of an ideal of primordial Hierarchy, the banker who makes of his financial activity a mandate for the world’s salvific transformation.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Fëdor Dostoevskij, Jacques Camatte

2.4. At the beginning of the process: abstractive drift vs. alternative patterns.

The Neolithic choice was neither inevitable nor universal. For millennia, the two options coexisted: sedentary societies that fell into abstractive drift alongside peoples who maintained organic forms of life. The latter, gradually eliminated through systematic genocide, survive in increasingly small numbers to this day. The following data document this almost at the origin of the bifurcation.

Instruments of control
• Rigidly codified agricultural calendars Sumerian tablets, Uruk III, 3000 BCE
• Geometrization of urban space Orthogonal grids in Mohenjo-Daro, 2500 BCE
• Defensive walls with separative function Jericho, 9000 BCE — 3m thick, 5m high
• Taxonomies of “useful–harmful” species Egyptian papyrus from Memphis, 2400 BCE — 37 harmful animals catalogued
• Surplus accumulation Granaries of Çatalhöyük, 6000 BCE — 12 tons capacity vs. 1.2 tons annual need

Alternative patterns
• Absence of time measurement San peoples of the Kalahari — activities regulated by light and seasons
• Circular camps without geometry Bushmen ethnography (!Kung)
• Environmental permeability Baka Pygmies — living spaces without physical or conceptual barriers
• Non-antagonistic relationships with the non-human Warlpiri — Earth as relational subject Nayaka — animals as “people”
• Non-competitive subsistence economies Hadza — immediate distribution, no accumulation Batek — rejection of storage

Documented facts
• Hyper-complexity and collapse (Çatalhöyük, 6000 BC: density 10,000 inhabitants/km² vs. documented bone epidemics)
• Ecological failure (Harappan cities, 1900 BC: layers of salinization in Mohenjo-Daro) .
• Adaptability in crisis (Aché peoples during the collapse of the Inca Empire: forest adaptation vs. monumental structures).
• Ritual endurance (Hopi vs. Chaco Canyon: flexible rain ceremonies vs. rigid irrigation).

Index Anthology André Leroi-Gourhan

2.4.1. Catastrophe and Foundational Violence • A Hypothesis.

At the root of the Neolithic leap lies perhaps a panic for survival. A hypothesis: a real, nearly universal threat—famine, predators, epidemics—of climatic, geological, or ecological origin is perceived as a threat of extinction and acts as a detonator for that inability to endure reality, linked to the particular reflexive aptitude of the species, which, under normal conditions, remains a latent pathological potential. The response is violence: an explosion of intraspecific conflict, the extermination of animals, weapons and techniques of warfare. To win, individuals are not enough: coordination, hierarchy, and command are needed. Thus the first megamachine is born, the embryo of technical and organizational power. Accumulations follow, to guarantee survival; measures and calendars come later, as a formalization of fear. But the wound has already been inflicted: man no longer trusts in tangible reality and is fascinated by the illusory power of the results of change. From here begins the mad challenge of detachment from nature, of making a world of one's own (mundus = clean, uncontaminated), totally controlled and sheltered from threats, enemies, predators, dangers. A repressed memory that continues to operate even when the threat is gone, continuing to develop the same ideas and aspirations, up to our present day ignoring the evidence of diminishing returns and the ultimate counterproductivity of that endeavor, even extending the folly to the redesign of the very biological foundations of humanity to abolish our symbiotic corporeality.

Index Anthology

3. The abstraction process: affine components, in movement and conflictual interweaving.

The process is neither linear nor monocentric: it arises from different and autonomous centers and components of irradiation, which spread in forms sometimes strongly conflictual. If the movement, the historical development, of capital has certainly been the most dynamic and often driving and dominant over the others, religion and the technical system are older. History records interruptions, partial blockages, regressions — as after the fall of the Roman Empire — but also resistances and deliberate attempts, not only from below, to delay or arrest it (such as China’s decision to block the military use of gunpowder), which allowed a revival of the Gemeinwesen and of vital processes. This prevents purely linear readings. It is a matter of force fields, of probability densities, not classical mechanics. ¶ A genealogical analysis can reveal long-term continuities without implying necessity: to identify an origin does not mean always to foresee an outcome. In medical science it is common practice to search for, and retrospectively find, early and remote signs of a disease — such as cancer or Alzheimer’s — not out of deterministic assumption that all pathologies are destined to develop, but because the immune system, lifestyle, and therapeutic intervention can slow, block, or eliminate them. So it is with the process of abstraction: describing its inherent tendency does not amount to declaring its inevitability. ¶ What has been said concerns the general movement of the process. Regarding the components and their strong but not always clear interactions, we must first of all distrust the 19th-century construct of a "dominant" factor (people, culture, species, style), a non-dialectical construct more misleading than useful; and at the same time, we must not let ourselves be captured by abstraction: the components are not just components, they are different realities. The well-known example of the "tools" found in a carpenter's toolbox is pertinent: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a ruler, a glue pot, the glue, nails, and screws. ¶ A concrete example of this interaction can shed some light on the complex relationship between capital and the technical system. ¶ Capital—to simplify and reduce—holds the money, but to convert it into value it must ally itself with technical knowledge, as happens in healthcare. Bankers and funds finance medical and pharmaceutical research; in turn, the guilds of healthcare workers and researchers, who belong to the technical system, seek to steer the flow of money towards their own projects, where ambition, vocation, and career are intermingled. ¶ The same dynamic can be observed in engineering and the applied sciences: each field attempts to "work on" the other, but the result is not a stable dominion. It is a network of feedback loops. ¶ In phases of capital's general crisis, science tends to offer it new horizons of motivation—"passionate" projects that reinforce faith in progress and the conquest of the possible: Mars, artificial life, the digital mind. ¶ Capital provides the promise of value, technique that of functioning; together, they keep the process in motion, even when the vital energy that had generated it has already been partially exhausted. ¶ Meanwhile, the deactivation (what is commonly called corruption) of the guilds continues, with the progressive replacement of internal relationships with monetary exchanges. Yet, the weakening of its own sub-components ends up strengthening the technical system as such.

Index Anthology Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Camatte

3.1. Religion.

Religion, in the sense relevant here, is part of the State-Religion Complex. It manifests in two principal historical modalities, observable across the Eurasian arc (with significant analogies in pre-Columbian civilizations). A constitutive religion: the original model, observable in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and later in republican and imperial Rome. In this form, religion is born already as a structure of legitimation of state power, geometrizing the cosmos to reflect the terrestrial hierarchical order. The divine pantheon is an extension of the royal court; ritual is a political act of maintaining order (Egyptian Ma’at, will of the Mesopotamian gods). It is abstractive by constitution, but of its abstractions it dreams fixity, permanence. A religion of capture: a model that establishes itself with the advent of movements with a strong anti-abstractive charge, such as Buddhism, early Christianity, and philosophical Taoism, which arose as critical reactions to State-religions (Brahmanism, Pharisaic Judaism, Confucianism). Their original nucleus—the emphasis on direct experience, the critique of value and fixity, openness to the Simple—constituted an existential threat to the Complex. Their subsequent institutionalization was a work of capture, systematization, and neutralization of this nucleus, transforming the path of liberation into an apparatus in the service of, or in tension with, state power. ¶ In both cases, institutional religion is founded on the abstract promise to restore or guarantee a lost or threatened order. Constitutive of the abstraction process itself, it is nevertheless autonomous and possesses its own project, not always compatible with the general movement of abstraction. ¶ Within religions, therefore, abstractive drives—which erupt in redemptive ones—and anti-abstractive nuclei can coexist in permanent tension: consequently, they present an ambivalent relationship with the process of abstraction, oscillating between the impulse to push or guide it and the attempt to contain it.

Index Anthology Jacques Camatte

3.2. State.

In its first form, the State arises through a separation of the community that generates a superior unit (pharaoh, lugal, king of kings, etc.) which represents its totality. This occurs at the very moment the movement of value is established as a process of valorization. Simultaneously, an anthropomorphosis of divinity and a divinomorphosis of the superior unit take place, and religion is established. ¶ It is the state-religion complex that gives rise to the technical system by gathering the "human material" and giving it an organizational discipline, an operational coherence that allows work on scales never before attempted—the first megamachine. ¶ Depending on the nature of the religion that composes it, this complex assumes a different role vis-à-vis the abstractive process, of whose destructive potential and existential threat it is often aware. In the case of non-redemptive religions, the religion-State complex attempts to direct and control the forces at the origin of the process, positioning itself as katéchon, a restraining power. In the presence of redemptive religions, the complex, when it does not directly promote the process, reduces its restraining role to a cushioning function, aimed at ensuring a more balanced development. ¶ A digression is necessary: effects that delay or temporarily block a negative process should not be judged with condescension as non-definitive—neither in medicine nor in historical reality—but as precious possibilities; delay, moreover, can open unforeseen opportunities. It should be added that conservative action, beyond theorizations, often implies the defense of a concrete and communal social life, threatened by more aggressive and totalizing forms of abstraction. ¶ Subsequently, a second form of the State imposes itself, determined by the continuation of the movement of value, a phenomenon that cannot be reduced exclusively to the economic sphere.

Index Anthology Jacques Camatte

3.2.1. City.

The city is the spatial embodiment of the state and of value: an enclosure that separates and organizes, geometrizes life, transforms the territory into a grid. The first cities were born as simultaneous devices of protection, power, and accumulation: mighty walls, central granaries, temples, barracks. ¶ From the outset, the city carries with it the implicit promise of immortality: to endure beyond bodies, beyond seasons, offering a second nature more stable than nature itself. ¶ It defines itself in opposition to the countryside: if not with open contempt for peasants, then always with forms of distancing that mark evolutionary, cultural, and moral superiority.

Index Anthology

3.2.1.1. Death of the city.

The city dies not from sudden collapse, but from the dissolution of its compact form: the explosion of boundaries, endless sprawl, the diffuse city. The center loses meaning; the urban dematerializes into digital flows (smart working, e-commerce, distributed surveillance). ¶ Its death coincides with the fulfillment of its purpose: the majority of humanity is now urbanized, the separation from the living is total. What the city promised—security, order, durability—is internalized and spreads everywhere: no longer visible walls, but invisible networks; no longer squares, but platforms.

Index Anthology

3.2.2. Death of the State.

For the State too, more than a death, it is a progressive functional dissolution: in its extreme development, the State is increasingly controlled by Capital and the Technical System, and emptied through the transfer of its functions and prerogatives to "autonomous" or supranational organizations. While laws, regulations, and control grow indefinitely, real political power dissolves.

Index Anthology

3.3. Private Property.

The idea of private property goes far beyond exclusive possession—which also exists in nature and is always concrete, limited, and circumstantial—and carries with it an often unrealistic idea of total separation of the object from its context of existence (the case of land ownership is emblematic) and the equally illusory idea of perpetuity: a translated form of immortality.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Costantinos Kavafis

3.3.1. From ownership to rental - Death of private property.

Ownership is superseded by its functional emptying. Possession becomes temporary management, conditional use, paid access. The object no longer belongs, but circulates in a closed system of controlled availability.

Index Anthology

3.4. Value.

Value is what allows us to compare the incomparable. Everything is quantified according to a single parameter. Value dissolves quality, context, and meaning, reducing being to a number.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Camatte

3.4.1. Use value • Exchange value.

The Marxian concept of use value has been shown, since the 1970s, not to be a natural property of commodified reality, but rather a construct akin to exchange value: they are complementary forms of the same logic of equivalence. Both operate a reduction of reality to a measurable function, separating it from living and qualitative relation.

Index Anthology Guy Debord, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Jean Baudrillard, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jacques Camatte, Robert Kurz

3.4.2. Commodity.

A commodity is anything that, extracted and abstracted from its natural context, can be sold and bought. Land, objects, animals, people, services, labor, ideas, rights, patents, either in whole or in part, for an unlimited or defined period of time. Everything can be sold.

Index Anthology Fredy Perlman, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Jaime Semprun, Marco Iannucci

3.4.3. Alienation.

A dynamic whereby what is one's own becomes foreign and often hostile. The products of human activity—objects, social relationships, organizational forms—become autonomous, posing as separate and dominant powers. What began as an extension of our abilities turns into dispossession: things take on the role of subjects, people become things. This reversal generates a figure hostile to its creator and a mechanism, often unconscious, that reverses the initial purpose, trapping men and women in a destiny they wanted to avoid.

Index Anthology Günther Anders, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Camatte

3.4.4. Excluded commodity • General equivalent.

In order to measure and compare all commodities, one of them must be removed from ordinary trade and elevated to a universal measure, a general equivalent. Thus gold becomes money precisely by ceasing to be a commodity among others: its exclusion transforms it into a representative of all possible commodities. ¶ This mechanism—exclusion that generates election—does not operate only in economics. Abstract concepts operate as general equivalents of thought: the “Man” of universal rights presupposes the exclusion of concrete men—women, slaves, barbarians, colonized peoples—and then sets himself up as their ideal representative.

Index Anthology Jacques Camatte

3.5. Money.

Money is the embodiment of value. It is a measure, a means of exchange, a reserve, power: the power to obtain anything that has become a commodity. It is mobile, neutral, impersonal and, in its initial form, has the infinite durability of gold: an abstraction that has become concrete, which you can carry in your pocket.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Alfred Sohn-Rethel

3.5.1. Loan • Credit • Debt • Insurance.

Credit anticipates future value, debt mortgages the future, insurance monetizes the fear of chance. Together, they extend the domain of value to the temporal dimension, creating the illusion of total control over the future.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Jacques Camatte

3.5.2. Immortality (sought in money).

Value promises permanence. It preserves, accumulates, and resists time. It projects the desire not to die. Harpagon dreams of lasting as long as his treasures; hoarding seeks immortality in gold.

Index Anthology Karl Marx

3.6. Capital.

Capital is value that increases in value: not a thing, but a social relationship in motion. Its logic is unlimited growth.

Index Anthology Jacques Camatte, Marco Iannucci

3.6.1. Crematistics.

The unlimited accumulation of wealth for its own sake, without any purpose, defines the logic of chrematistics. The end dissolves. Only growth matters. Excess is a virtue.

Index Anthology Aristotélēs

3.6.2. Surplus Value.

Surplus value is the part of production that exceeds the value returned to the worker and overhead costs, and which is absorbed by capital. It is the driving force behind accumulation.

Index Anthology Jean Vioulac, Stephen Smith

3.6.3. Autonomization • Automatic subject.

Capital becomes autonomous: it becomes an automatic subject. It is a self-sustaining movement, like a whirlwind with its own energy, mass, and direction.

Index Anthology Joseph de Maistre, Karl Marx, Ludwig Klages, André Leroi-Gourhan, Jacques Camatte, Jean Vioulac

3.6.4. The commodity of capital.

Under the dominance of capital, the commodity changes status: it no longer needs to last, but to circulate. Durability, which once increased value—though it persists in residual niches and practices—becomes an obstacle and is discouraged in various ways, including through regulations. Every object is designed to be superseded, forcing its obsolescence so as to continuously reactivate the cycle of capital.

Index Anthology Giorgio Cesarano & Gianni Collu, Jacques Camatte

3.6.5. Immortality (sought in the capital).

The immortality once sought, in the era of the dominance of the idea of value, in the durability of gold, is transferred to the perpetuity of the circulation of capital.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Jacques Camatte

3.6.6. Death of capital.

As capital is dissolving the State and emptying the concept of value—which presupposes persistence and is therefore hostile to circulation—it dies slowly when it becomes less and less able to valorize itself. However, capital is not the process of abstraction: that process and its modus operandi continue, guided by the dynamic interaction between capital and the technical system. These forces modify each other through conflict and reciprocal transformation, in a complex and non-linear dance resembling an intricate paso doble, but where neither knows who leads. The technical system, with its logic of organization, automation, and substitution, increasingly shapes the trajectory of abstraction, extending its reach to the individual cells of the human being, while capital seeks to fuel its expansion by conquering for valorization every exchange, relationship, natural and human cooperation: from breastfeeding to preparing a family meal, from the play of bodies to the intimacy of an encounter, from a trek with friends to the parent-child relationship itself—in the M-C-M’ movement, everything must become wage labor. ¶ What is presented here is not a complete theory, but rather the observation of traces and symptoms, visible to those who look: in itself, the process is heading toward the extinction of the species that set it in motion. Unless an improbable reaction of the species itself occurs. Improbable—no signs are visible, except weak ones—but not impossible: the real mechanisms of generation and persistence of species are, after all, unknown. Sometimes reactions are generated by extreme situations, by the perception of real risks of extinction, as seems to have occurred in the transition to the Neolithic when humanity, perhaps facing a profound environmental crisis, carried out a transformation of its ways of life — dramatically accelerating the process of abstraction.

Index Anthology Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Camatte

3.7. Tlön • The technical system (organization, technology, science, medicine), i.e., the productive forces.

Another major component of the abstractive process, now in the foreground: organization that neutralizes subjectivity, machines that replace the human, science reduced to technical power, time transformed into an operational grid. ¶ Historical note. — Five thousand years ago, in the so-called Asiatic (or hydraulic) mode of production, the technical system, through its anthropomorphoses — engineers, architects, mathematicians, sculptors — proposed colossal tombs to mobilize the megamachine; four thousand years later, in the autumn of the Middle Ages, for the same purpose, it offered the cathedrals.

Index Anthology Simone Weil, Jacques Camatte

3.7.1. Organization • Bureaucracy.

Organization produces structures that neutralize subjectivity and standardize operations. Every activity is pigeonholed into abstract procedures, regulated by impersonal criteria. With bureaucracy, the organizational form becomes dominant. Organization aspires to unlimited growth that anticipates that of capital.

Index Anthology Amadeo Bordiga, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Camatte & Gianni Collu

3.7.2. Megamachine.

The megamachine is the integrated totality of men and instruments in a unified functional system. It is not a sum of machines, but a totality that encompasses bodies, rules, flows, and objectives. Every element is subordinated to it. ¶ Arising perhaps from the organization of great religious rites, it was created by the State in its first form, assembling "human material" and giving it an organizational discipline that allowed it to operate on a scale never before attempted: Taylorism does not originate with capital. To this invention we owe the fact that, five thousand years ago, war machines like the phalanx and engineering works were realized which, in terms of mass production techniques, standardization, and meticulous design, rival those of today. ¶ In the medieval period, the Benedictine monastery represents a particular form of its rebirth.

Index Anthology Lewis Mumford, Jaime Semprun

3.7.3. Abstract Time.

Experienced time is replaced by a measurable, homogeneous, cumulative temporality. Abstract time is not an experience, but an operational grid. Every event must fit into this uniform, featureless structure.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Jacques Camatte & Gianni Collu, Jacques Camatte

3.7.4. The machines.

Machines break down, repeat, automate, and render subjectivity superfluous. They replace human activities with their own operations. Automation is the completed form of technical abstraction, in which human beings become the terminals of a device that surpasses and dominates them, reversing the principle of the usefulness of technology into that of usefulness for technology.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Jean Baudrillard

3.7.5. Abstract Science.

Modern science no longer describes a reality to be inhabited, but constructs formalized models of functioning, creating an increasingly incomprehensible world. It separates itself from living labor to become the property of capital: the intellectual functions of production are concentrated against the workers, transforming themselves into a productive power independent of labor itself. ¶ The scientific object is reduced to quantities, laws, algorithms. The world becomes a laboratory and a mine to be exploited: research no longer seeks the essence of things, but their secret usability. Knowledge is converted into technical power, sharing the same quantitative logic as the mercantile economy. And the conversion of the whole of reality into a set of parameterized and controlled procedures ends up destroying science itself, turning it into mere proactive and thoughtless intervention.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Günther Anders, Alfred Sohn-Rethel

3.7.6. Prosthetics and therapy.

Prostheses, common in nature as operative aids, now tend to substitute every human faculty. What was once carried out directly by body and mind is replaced by tools and mediations. ¶ The current apex is the externalization of cognitive functions into artificial devices of statistical optimization, to which predictive power is attributed (AI). Thus the natural disposition and activity of therapeutics are autonomized into a system with its own logic, justified by distorted metrics and by that ancient inclination to prefer willing nothing rather than not willing, which directs cost–benefit calculation in a way increasingly functional to the system and not to human beings.

Index Anthology Marcus Valerius Martialis, Karl Marx, Günther Anders, Stefano Isola

3.7.7. Immortality (sought in the technical system).

Seeing the machine only as fixed capital is like seeing the jug as a mere container: something is lost, perhaps a great deal. The machine is indeed something available to capital for extracting surplus value, but it is part of the technical system. In its design, in its intrinsic logic of efficiency, repeatability, and automation, there lies an instance that cannot be reduced to valorization. By serving to produce other machines, it fuels a process of self-empowerment of the technical system itself, enabling and bringing closer the dream of the self-reproducing automaton—a figure of earthly immortality achievable through replacement: the logic of madness.

Index Anthology

4. Modus operandi of the process.

Regarding the abstraction process, which unfolds through the interwoven dynamics of its fundamental components – each endowed with its own degree of autonomization – it is useful to identify three central modalities, which can be recognized retrospectively: the ideal thrust of the redemptive engine, the mechanism of combinatorics, and the subsumption that fuels the whole.

Index Anthology

4.1. Redemptive engine.

The ground on which the process develops is prepared by the critique of the present state of things, founded on abstract ideas of redemptive origin, which also became a redemptive ethic, and then enacted in history by subjects and collective forces traversed by anthropomorphosis. It is the mechanism that has allowed imperialism to be presented as "civilization" and the destruction of communal practices as "progress." The phenomenon operates both in the long stretches of continuity and in periods of crisis (wars, revolutions, epidemics, famines). ¶ Alongside the historical critique of the present, there has sometimes been the pure fascination with redemption, even liberated from the messianic figure, becoming the "beyond," the process itself. This is the case with accelerationism, which proposes to deliberately intensify the process—automation, unlimited technical subsumption, dissolution of vital forms. It is the mechanism at its extreme: it no longer merely justifies destruction as progress, but actively pursues it as a means of salvation.

Index Anthology

4.2. Combinatorics.

A term originating in mathematics. In this case, combinatory refers to the mechanism through which every aspect of life—practices, knowledge, gestures, emotions, relationships—is broken down into minimal, separate, simplified units and made available for infinite reorganization, a combinatory calculation. Each element loses its roots, its proper meaning, its original location: it becomes a mobile, adaptable, interchangeable module. ¶ In the course of a centuries-long movement, everything is progressively broken down and recombined. The goal is operational compatibility: what matters is that everything is modular, flexible, ready to interface. Combinatorics is abstraction at work in everyday life. ¶ Reality then appears as a technical repertoire of interchangeable possibilities: sexuality, language, care, learning, imagining—everything can be combined. ¶ This logic also affects common language: on a linguistic level, plastic words operate like Lego bricks, converting common language into a combinatory game devoid of meaning but manageable by machines.

Index Anthology Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Camatte

4.3. Increasingly profound subsumption of labor.

Capital initially appropriates pre-existing work situations — the craftsman who becomes a wage earner in the manufactory while retaining his way of working and therefore command over execution — which remain formally unchanged but are subordinated to the capitalist logic: it is an effective but partial domination, improperly called “formal subsumption.” Capital grows, reproducing itself on an ever-expanding scale; it subsumes communal and human relations, transforming them into monetary mediations, but it cannot subsume activity itself nor natural processes — a capacity proper to the technical system. ¶ Subsequently, labour is technically reorganized according to criteria of productivity and economy; the combinatorics of functions deepens, know-how is separated from the worker and made an autonomous force in the hands of capital. ¶ The worker becomes partial; his knowledge, gradually transformed and absorbed into the technical system, becomes external, opposing him as a power that dominates him. ¶ The process is continuous: every activity — from human operation to the biological — is gradually subsumed into the technical system at the demand of capitalist logic. The dream of capital is unlimited expansion and, by financing and corrupting, it pursues it by promoting everything that enables or promises to increase its valorization; in this process it feeds the technical system, which historically preceded it and whose dream is the unlimited substitution of all that is given — what is human and natural.

Index Anthology Karl Marx

4.3.1. Extension of subsumption to leisure time, society, the body.

The dominance of capital deepens when the logic of valorization extends beyond working time, colonizing the whole of existence: leisure time, social life, communication, language, and the body. Time is restructured: leisure time becomes consumption time, and consumption itself is made a productive function. Digital technologies, automation, and widespread control accelerate the process: mental and emotional faculties, attention, speech, and relationships are incorporated into the technical system and put to work. It is no longer just manual labor that becomes available, but the expressive and sensitive power of the individual. The body, shaped by efficiency and standardized health, is in turn put to value. Thus, the distinction between production and life dissolves: the whole of society becomes a terrain of valorization, the proletarian condition is generalized to the entire population, and technology begins to subjugate all life.

Index Anthology Jacques Camatte & Gianni Collu, Jacques Camatte, Giorgio Cesarano & Gianni Collu, Jean Baudrillard

5. Results and goals of the process.

The outcome towards which the process is tending: the gradual replacement of the human community, of man himself and of nature with abstract and disembodied systems. Not a deliberate project, but the inherent logic of a movement that is proceeding towards the self-destruction of the species that generated it.

Index Anthology Ludwig Klages, Jean Baudrillard

5.1. Suppression and substitution of community • Material community.

The Gemeinwesen is broken apart and replaced. Capital becomes the material community: every aspect of subsistence turns into a commodity, accessible only through money. Bread, milk, clothing, care, even water — all require monetary mediation.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Jacques Camatte & Gianni Collu, Jacques Camatte, Marco Iannucci

5.1.1. Gemeinwesen.

The community (Gemeinwesen) is the environment that nourishes human beings: a network of living relationships that binds human beings to each other, to the earth, to animals, to natural cycles, to nourishment, to care, to language, to the rhythms of life. It is not an ideal to be restored, but an elementary reality that has made human life possible for tens of thousands of years. Historical and anthropological evidence demonstrates its concrete, never utopian, variety. Abstraction gradually erases the very possibility of “being-with”: the loss of community is also a loss of shared presence, of certainty about one's position. Thus, the reality of earthly happiness—which, for Epicurus, is based on friendship, an elementary, lasting, and reciprocal form of relationship—vanishes. ¶ It vanishes, but is not vanished: the Gemeinwesen is the being-in-common of man, a dimension that is part of his nature; an experiential, corporeal, tactile, mental, empathetic dimension. As it is lost, madness increases. Lost completely: extinction.

Index Anthology Karl Marx, Jacques Camatte

5.1.2. The great organic and cosmic community.

The community includes nature, humanity, living reality, and the cosmos. It is now increasingly clear that humans themselves are symbiotic aggregates, not just the microbiota: right down to the heart of their eukaryotic cells. But it is impossible to draw precise boundaries in this living continuum: where does the individual end and the environment begin? The very idea of an autonomous individual contradicts our symbiotic constitution. It knows no separation between subject and environment, between human and non-human.

Index Anthology Pëtr Kropotkin, Marco Iannucci

5.2. Suppression and substitution of man.

Human beings are becoming increasingly obsolete. Subjectivity is converted into an operational node, the body into an interface, identity into a profile. The individual becomes a functional residue, “an antiquated device for multiplying capital,” destined to be discarded. Capital, having become an automatic subject, no longer limits itself to exploitation: it aims to replace. The functionalization of humans is only the first phase. This is followed by declared obsolescence—in which millions of lives are deemed “no longer necessary”—and planned replacement through automation, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering. ¶ It is no longer just alienation, but erasure. It is a technical deactivation, presented as an improvement (as is the case with the progressive replacement of vital functions by automated tools).

Index Anthology Gustav Janouch, Armand Robin, Amadeo Bordiga, Roberto Pecchioli

5.3. Suppression and substitution of nature.

Nature is degraded to a resource, environment to a technical object. It no longer has any meaning in itself, but only an instrumental function: living reality is replaced by artificial environments and mineralized: reduced to inert material, asphalted, concreted, transformed into an open-pit quarry.

Index Anthology Ludwig Klages

Postilla.

Let us not forget that all time is blessed, including our own, the time we have been given to live. Ivan Illich (oral tradition)

Death is nothing to us, for when we are present, it is not, and when it is present, we are no longer.. Epicuro (Letter to Menoeceus)

Thus, death never wins: death is not a fact of life. And as long as there is breath, there is presence and joy. As in any vital process, even one compromised by illness, the organism maintains fundamental life functions. The tumor does not generate a tumorous heart; it exploits the healthy one. It does not create its own circulatory system; it parasitizes the existing one: it can destroy it, but not replace it. Until the very end, life, however exhausted, continues to be life. So it is with the Gemeinwesen, being-in-common, which is constitutive of the human being: its — possible — complete substitution would mark the extinction of the species. ¶ Jacques Camatte called his house and the land he tended, where he welcomed family and friends, «Le domaine de la certitude». Certainty too, adherence to eternity, does not die. It is the sensation of having lost it that disorients us. ¶ A diagnosis compatible with stage IV cancer — even while knowing the possibility, very faint but real, of a reversal — obliges the diagnostician, if they must communicate it, to situate the probable outcome within the certain outcome of every form of life, individual and collective, including their own. And to indicate the path of acceptance as a real and present possibility of conscious and active serenity. Acceptance is at once a loss — of every redemptive illusion and thus of the trap that ensnares us — and a gain: the restoration of access to naturalness; and it is, in itself, already a hint, a beginning, and a support for the hoped-for — improbable, for only weak signs are visible, such as cognitive schism and the unforeseen resistance during the pandemic, yet not impossible — reaction of the species.