addition to the foreign wars and the civil wars of the past, there are
internal wars that bring into conflict associations of humans and non-
humans whose number and threat were previously unknown.^28 The
State is no longer solely concerned with preparing for war abroad and
preventing civil war; it must also be on continuous alert for this other
war—which does not yet have a name, although it has always been
raging—by which a collective in the process of exploration opposes
anything that challenges its reason for being, that threatens it with an-
nihilation, and with which it must neverthelesscome to terms.
Depending on the strength of the power to follow up, a given collec-
tive will thus find itself integrated into two quite different regimes: it
will be defined either as a fortress under assault by barbarians, or else
as a collective surrounded by excluded entities that are on the path to-
ward appeal. In the first case, the enemies will have shifted into insig-
nificance, into inarticulateness, and will have becomebarbariansin
the etymological sense, producing inaudible gibberish; in the second
case, the enemies will be combated as future allies and will remain ca-
pable of worrying the entire collective with the mere thought of their
provisional exclusion. There are no barbarians other than those who
believe they have definitively found the words to define themselves.
Thelogosis not a clear and distinct speech that would be opposed to
the incomprehensible babblings of the others, but the speech impedi-
ment that is catching its breath, starting over—in other words,that is
seeking its words through a trial.
If we borrow Lévi-Strauss’s powerful definition and use the term
“barbarians” to designate those who believe that they are being as-
sailed by barbarians, conversely, we can call “civilized” those whose
collective is surrounded by enemies. In one case we have contam-
ination by barbarianism, in the other contamination bycivilization:
the barbarian sees barbarians everywhere, the civilized being sees civi-
lized beings everywhere. According to these two figures of speech,
the danger changes meaning: whereas (external) barbarians threaten
(internal) barbarians with destruction, (external) civilized beings
threaten (internal) civilized beings withnew requirements.We might
thus say about the power to follow up that it “defends civilization,”
provided that we no longer define civilization, as modernism did, by
a position on the ladder of progress (there is no more ladder, and
no more progress), but instead by thecivilitywith which a collective
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