make a living, which makes no sense (ne rime à rien). The birth of individualities amid
dispersion, as Marx said, of singularities in liberty, according to Nancy. The estate
façades still standing, because we conserve them, attest to the old absent ethos. Cracked
as they are by radiation and telecommunications. Businesses that they are by means of
interfacing.
We know all that by heart, sick of it, today. This slow retreat of domestic, neolithic
life, we know what does indeed have to be named, from here, the revolution of the spatio-
temporal regime of being-together. Not too difficult, doubtless, to show that Heidegger’s
Gestell is thought only, in return, through the conservation of an idea of service, which is
domestic. Which does not only, to a large extent, lead to the motif of his Dichtung
filtered through Hölderlin, but to the Dienst divided into three (the service of thinking,
war and work, as in Dumézil) deployed by the Rectorship Address. So we know how
much our melancholy for the domus is relative to its loss. Even Greek tragedy, that
enigma, must, we know, be decoded by means of the grid of de-domination, de-
domestication. The new law, that of the polis and its right. Themis goes beyond the
ancestral domestic regulation of the genos. But this historico-sociological account does
not acquit us of tragedy. Our distance, our anti-domestic violence, makes discernible
another scene in the tableau of the houses.
In this scene, the female servant with the heart of gold is impure. The service is
suspect, ironic. The common work is haunted by disaster. The respect is feigned, the
hospitality despotic, common sense obsessed by the banishing of the mad, its burial
within. Something remains untamed in the domination, and capable of interrupting the
cycles. The domestic monad is torn, full of stories and scenes, haunted by secrets. Acts of
violence stretch it to breaking point, inexplicable injustices, refused offers of affection,
lies, seductions accepted and unbearable, petty thefts, lusts. Freud makes us reread, via
Sophocles and Shakespeare, the tragedy of the Greek families in this penumbra of
madness. The generous purposiveness of the god-nature, dressed up by the philosophers
with the name of love, reconciliation, being-together as a whole, everyone in their place,
of which the domus is the wise figure, the awaited birth and the beautiful death, all this is
cracked by evil. An evil not even committed. An evil before evil, a pain both more
ancient and younger than the sufferings experienced. A pain always new. In the lowest
depths of the domus, rumour of anti-nature, threat of stasis, of sedition. Father, mother,
child, female servant with the heart of gold, niece, old man-servant, shepherd and
ploughman, gardener, cook, all the figures of wisdom, the corner of the park under the fig
tree, the little passage for whispering, the attic and its chests—everything is matter for
obscene crimes. Something in the domus did not want the bucolic.
Something does not want this recurrent inscription, and it isn’t me. But as to its place
in the domestic hegemony, there the ego does want its share in memory, to make and
remake its place in space-time and in the narrative. The son to become the dominus, in his
turn. The daughter, the domina. And the man-servant, of course, the master, here or
elsewhere. As long as it’s that, in other words the business and busyness of the ego, the
ambivalences, hesitations and contradictions, the little ruses and strategies, then domestic
nature remains untouched. It pursues its ends through intrigue, it can repair, it will repair.
It will inscribe that in its memory, an episode in caution, in conservation. But the rest?
What is not resolved in sacrifice, in offering, in being received? The prodigal, the
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