The Unpolitical by Cacciari Massimo; Carrera Alessandro; Verdicchio Massimo

Author:Cacciari, Massimo; Carrera, Alessandro; Verdicchio, Massimo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2009-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Catastrophes

Writing to Antonio Valdés, secretary of Charles V, on August 1, 1528, this is how Erasmus explained, against his detractors, the enterprise of the boundary mark (Termine): “One time the borders of fields were marked by a special sign; it was a stone protruding from the ground that hereditary laws prescribed to be irremovable. Hence Plato reports the saying: Don’t remove what you did not put up. . . . This boundary mark, as is written in the Roman Annals, was the only one that stood up to Jove.”1 Terminus is the God that sanctions boundaries; the feast day of Terminals celebrates their indestructibility. But already in Erasmus the invocation of Terminus sounds by now like a lament, peace complaint (Querela Pacis), abandoned and vagrant. Precisely the story of this abandonment, of this eradication, is what Carl Schmitt analyzes in Der Nomos der Erde.2 No divine presence guarantees anymore the power of borders. Everything is freely removable. In perfect agreement with Schmitt, Ernst Jünger speaks in An der Zeitmauer of the “geological restlessness” of the present world: “On the ancient earth, man no longer feels safe. He no longer trusts the classical elements . . . behind the invention of machines always more fast there is hidden an impulse to escape,” as if the ancient mother, now inhospitable, wanted to belch us out into a fifth element, in pure ether, with no surface, in which no Term could ever be fixed.3 Aristotle’s architect is a meteorologist with the purpose of tracing according to measurement the limits of the city, of expressing its nomos. We are meteorologists in the negative, and because of the impossibility of confiding in the Earth, we seek in that fifth element new, impossible dwellings.

This geological restlessness seems to be at the bottom of contemporary disastrology. It conceives our environment as risk, hazard (tyche), in perennial ambush, against whose irruptions, however, programmed responses are possible. An authentic technology of disaster can originate only from the complete abandonment of every trust on the earth.4 But in this abandon, no doubt, the guilt is revealed for having eradicated what we never placed. Meteorologists, we wait for signs of vengeance, of a punishment that we try in every way not to consider necessary. Speculations on boundaries in the exploitation of resources, on the effects of pollution, just as on the differences by now apparently ungovernable between the great areas of the planet, fall within the framework of such meteorology. The environment has become a hazard because this is how we wanted it.5 On the other hand, precisely because this hazard is the earth to the extent that we transformed it, it can in some ways belong to us, that is, we can anticipate it—program it, correspond to it. A science always more trained in anticipating and calculating disasters develops in complement with our always greater capacity to produce them.

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