communicable way. Make culture. Not think according to the welcome of what comes
about, singularly. To pre-vent it, rather. To success is to process.^1 Improve performances.
It’s a domestication, if you will, but with no domus. A physics with no god-nature. An
economy in which everything is taken, nothing received. And so necessarily, an illiteracy.
The respect and lack of respect of severe and serene reading of the text, of writing with
regard to language, this vast and still unexplored house, the indispensable comings and
goings in the maze of its inhabited, always deserted rooms—the big monad doesn’t give a
damn about all this. It just goes and builds. Promotion. That’s what it demands of
humans. In the name of ‘communicative action’, ‘conversation’ and the relegation of
philosophy, in the name of performativity, we are begged to think useful. Useful for the
composition of the megalopolis. I’m amazed that this consensualist demand can still
nowadays be picked up as though it emanated from the idea of the Enlightenment.
Whereas it results from the complexification of material ensembles, say the ingenious.
There was still some domus in the metropolis, polis-métèr, city mother, mater and
patrimony. The metropolis refers only to a size which exceeds the domestic scale.
Filiation and concern for the past are not its forte. It is not a city but an urbs. An urbs
become its own orbs. We were hoping for a cosmopolitès, there is no need for a
megapolitès. We need ingenious people. As many monads as the enormous
megalopolitan memory will allow must be combined. Its electrical circuits contain a
power of which humans have no need and no idea stored energy, and potential capacity.
With the ancient idea of dynamis, the world was schematized like a nature, and nature
like a domus. Domestic events in a unique, sensitive finality. As for the megalopolis, it
conceives scenarios of cosmic exile by assembling particles.
Baudelaire, Benjamin, Adorno. How to inhabit the megalopolis? By bearing witness to
the impossible work, by citing the lost domus. Only the quality of suffering counts as
bearing witness. Including, of course, the suffering due to language. We inhabit the
megalopolis only to the extent that we declare it uninhabitable. Otherwise, we are just
lodged there. In the closure of time paid off (security), await the catastrophe of the
instant, wrote Benjamin. In the inevitable transformation of works into cultural
commodities, keep up a searing witness to the impossibility of the work, wrote Adorno.
To inhabit the uninhabitable is the condition of the ghetto. The ghetto is the impossibility
of the domus. Thought is not in the ghetto. Every work to which prodigal thought
resolves itself secretes the wall of its ghetto, serves to neutralize thought. It can only
leave its trace upon the brick. Making media graffiti, ultimate prodigality, last homage to
the lost frugality.
What domesticity regulated—savagery—it demanded. It had to have its off-stage
within itself. The stories it tells speak only of that, of the seditio smouldering up at its
heart. Solitude is seditio. Love is seditio. All love is criminal. It has no concern for the
regulation of services, places, moments. And the solitude of the adolescent in the domus
is seditious because in the suspense of its melancholy it bears the whole order of nature
and culture. In the secrecy of his bedroom, he inscribes upon nothing, on the intimate
surface of his diary, the idea of another house, of the vanity of any house. Like Orwell’s
Winston, he inscribes the drama of his incapacity before the law. Like Kafka. And lovers
do not even have anything to tell. They are committed to deixis: this, now, yesterday,
you. Committed to presence, deprived of representation. But the domus made legends and
representations out of these silences and these inscriptions. In place of which the
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