EASCISM AS A SEMANTICVOID INTO THEMETA-NARRATIVE OERATIONAL MODERNITYALESSANDRO SALUPPO

n p e main purpose of this essay is neither an analysis on the origins ofJi. fascist ideology nor an investigation on structure, practices, and cultural

self-representations of the fascist state, but a study on the pathogenesis andetiology of fascist existential ethos, which must be intended as a "temporaryepistemic and semantic void" into the meta-narrative of rational-modernity.I have defined this meta-narrative as a self-replicating generator of symboliccodes, norms, and values, which tend increasingly toward an integral techni-cization of life, by the enframing of bio-functions into a mathematical setof axioms. Furthermore, in this instrumental meta-narrative, I have pointedout the bio-political ability to continuously produce internal functions ofimmunization and repression of heterogeneous impulses,' and also to reintro-duce life-contingency into rigid systems of knowledge and into transcendentalforms of power. In this repressive action of immunization, suppression andnormativization is possible to frame the transition from "fascist existentialethos" to fascist totalitarian praxis or better the conversion of an epistemicand semantic void—symptom of existential malaise and resistance againstpractice of denaturation—into a totalitarian mechanism of normativizationand bio-repression that is characteristic of Fascism one-dimensionalbio-power.

Alessandro Saluppo is a ABD doctoral student in Modern European History at FordhamUniversity, New York. He has carried out research on political violence in twentieth-centuryEurope, fascism and right-wing extremist movements. He has also worked on political philo-sophy, biopolitics, and critical theory. Currently, he is working on political violence in Italyin the aftermath of the Great War.

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From the nineteenth century, instrumental knowledge, focusing on perso-nal identity, biological processes, time and space, and codes of daily life, hasefficiently controlled and technically manipulated discursive practices in orderto normativize and to "normalize" bio-functions within functional disciplinaryframeworks, and to anesthetize or pre-emptively repress heterogeneous andincommensurable insurgencies, perceived as pathological anomalies.The synthesis between episteme and techne, the systemic application of theLeibnizian project of mathesis universalis as calculation, and the moderndevelopment of productive forces, determined not only the progressive techni-cization of knowledge—perceived here as a continuous dialectic betweenprometheia and epimetheic^—but also a systemic arithmetization of life in theenframing of biological functions by computational, homogeneous, andproductive systems of algebraic laws. The triumph of technical instrumentalityand the increasing objectification of purposive rational action in technicalsystems'' have disclosed the instrumental and systemic attempt to dissolvebiotic heterogeneities in techne and, in turn, to neutralize anomalies and irre-gularities by the creation of an auto-generative, de-territorialized microphysicsof power over bodies. Indeed, the mechanological transition from passive toreflexive and active machines, the dissolution of the anthropomorphic bodyinto rational and computational axioms, the theoretical harmonization of thebody image with symmetrical and functional machinic models, and the conse-quent appearance of technical individuals in the form of machines defineintrinsically the meta-narrative of rational-modernity. Therefore, the epistemicand metaphysical paradigm of modernity ensues as: the instrumental technici-zation of life, the construction of mechanical and geometrical models of theliving body, the economic techno-utilization of the body-machine, the progres-sive rationahzation of the institutional-bureaucratic framework, and the rise ofa bio-political sovereignty by the institutionalization of the dichotomybetween normality and pathology.

The etiology of this aseptic bio-machinic paradigm has a binary pathogen-esis and it must be carefully researched in the context of seventeenth centurymechanistic and physical thought. Gahleian, Hobbesian, and Cartesian mechan-istic conception of nature and the transition from a feudal to a bourgeois world-view overshadowed the "quahtative philosophy" of antiquity and the Christianhumanitas of the middle age, by converting the division of artisanal work into auniform, repetitive, and structured act of production (Borkenau). Accordingly,the calculation of work in terms of purely quantitative mathematical modelscorresponded to the quantification of acts previously conceived as qualitative,and to a new conception of the body as a structured, homofunctional machine.

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Leading from this re-conceptualization of productive practices, the human bodystarted being interpreted as a system of fixed structures organized in invariantcausal chains, where any bodily function was directly determined by an innerarrangement of parts. From Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica to the eight-eenth century's sophisticated analogical automata and the application of biome-chanics to the animal-economy, bodily functions were increasingly introducedinto axiomatic, formal systems, marked by systematic physiological and biologi-cal taxonomies in which the organic dynamics of constituent parts were exclu-sively defined in terms of the machinic functions of the whole. This mechanicalvision of the human body endowed with a causal-deterministic structure, inwhich living organisms could be shown to act in accordance with empirical andrational norms of calculability, consistency, identity, and predictability, repre-sented the epistemological and metaphysical discourse that supported seven-teenth and eighteenth century physiological studies on the circulation of blood,the lymphatic system of vessels, and the microscopic structure of tissues, respira-tory functions and sensory fibers. In the nineteenth century, philosopher andphysicist applied to the human body the same practice of standardization andsimplification used for techno-mechanistic modeling and design. Discourses onthe system of mechanical representations on the body machine, labor power,and industrial productivism aimed to subjugate the human body to rationalpractices of standardization and uniformation of qualitative and "metric" char-acteristics in order to render the body a rigid, univocal, univalent, and inter-changeable object of production."* In this industrial semantic of technicization,the most important pathogenic process of body "objectification" resides pre-cisely in the technical transfer of body functions into a rational and theoreticalsystem of propositions, where the body is perceived as an integrated whole, cap-able of self-replicating with the functional rigidity of a machine and to mediatewith de-anthropomorphized and quantitative-instrumental laws of production.

This mechanical and technical "denaturation" of the human body wasperennially confronted with Vitalistic theories, which protested that life couldonly be explained by laws intrinsic to living organisms, and essentially differ-ent from those applied to inorganic life. In opposition to the mechanistic ideathat "order and existent are supposed to precede themselves or to precede thecreative act that constitute them" by reflecting an image of beings accordingto their static and immanent "degree, dimension, position and proportion"(Deleuze), Vitalism emphasized intuition, creativity, heterogeneity, differentia-tion, duration as continuous multiplicity and the creative living flux of life onmatter. In his treatise. Aspects of Vitalism, Georges Canguilhem describeshow mechanism and vitalism reflected two radically different theories of life.

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since "vitalism translated a permanent exigency of life within the living andmechanism translated a permanent attitude of the human towards life."^Contaminated with an existentialist intuition of politics,^ this vital principleof distrust toward the technological form of the body-machine, analogicthinking, and the power of technics over life, combined with the Bergsonianemphasis on the flux of experience, intuition, élan vital, the notion of life as"becoming" over being, and the emphasis on the holistic character of organ-ism over liberal atomism, would come to characterize the existential ethos ofthe first Fascism.

All vitalistic theories, from the pneumatic theory of Jean Baptiste VanHelmont to the entelechial and vitalistic hypothesis of Claude Bernard andHans Driesch, rejected systematically the mathematic rationalism of theEnlightenment and the Cartesian mechanist model of nature. In the Cartesianmetaphysics of rationality, the process of body objectification and the theoryof animal-machine are inseparable from the Cogito ergo sum with its ontologi-cal separation of body and soul. From the refutation of Aristotelian hylo-morphism and the scholastic doctrine of anima forma corporis, Descartessubdivided reality into res cogitans and res extensa, opening up the subjectand object/mind and body/thought and extension dichotomy. The imperiousprimacy of the Ego cogito, as the source of cognition and prime locus ofthought and representation, and the reduction of the body as extension or cor-poral substance, alone endowed with geometrical properties, determined onthe one hand a radical process of subjectivization, which subsequently broughtthe individual to objectify its own self in its relationship to a power of externalcontrol,' and on the other hand the tendency to dissolve physis in the absoluteEgo (modernity).^ In the Cartesian dualism, it emerges that the body repre-sents not only a mere physical object under the permanent horizon of Ego'scogitations and a geometrical extension for subjectivity, but also the intimateassociation of the absolute Ego with functions of domination, command, andorganization. This relation essentially implies the domination of nature; notonly as control, mediation, efficiency, rationality, predictability, but alsoas alienation, dehumanization, and abstract auto-assertion; the self asmedium of rationality and technicity^ This curious oxymoron, represented bythe dissolution of the "absolute" self into normative frameworks of rational-productivistic forms, generates the quintessentially modern dysfunction in therelationship between "bare life" {zoe) and a new sovereignty based on compu-tational and quantitative paradigms of knowledge. Therefore, in the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries, theorization of the absolute dominion ofthe self, quantitative, and mathematical modes of thinking, and the related

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desire to fix nature in objective and universal rational systems of thought, thebody-machine equation finds its essential pathogenesis. Translated into socio-political terms the equation body = machine, and its normative power of mea-surement, corresponds to a systematic and static rationalization of the socialbios; "an intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatusof disciplinarity" (Foucault)'° and a relentless process of disenchantment,de-energization, and erosion of the magical in nature. This Weberian disen-chantment and social de-energetization are extremely important political phe-nomena, given that the ever-increasing rationalization and bureaucratizationof life generated these pathological morphogenetic processes that led in turnto the mystical re-sacralization of the natural body and its spatial and tem-poral dimensional extents." In the nineteenth century, in accordance withthe establishment of the general principle of conservation of energy, whichasserts that all the forces of nature (electricity, magnetism, heat, and mechani-cal work) are forms of a single universal energy, the human body was re-conceptualized as a thermodynamic machine, and its work as a metaphorof "physiochemical exchange." Social energetism, "human motor," muscularthermodynamics, Helmholtzianism, physiology of the labor, ergonomics, psy-chotechnics, and Taylorization configured the body as a system of economiesof force and a focal point for new techniques of production. In "The HumanMotor," Anson Rabinbach has correctly underlined that the translation ofthermodynamics laws into a program of social modernity repositioned thebody "in a field of forces capable of infinite transformation and conversionsimultaneously linking the cosmos to the body and to the productive order ofwork. This body mediated between the laws of nature and the laws of produc-tion. It dissolved the anthropomorphic body as a distinct entity and made theindustrial body subject to a sophisticated analytics of space and time."'^ Thedissolution of the anthropomorphic body, a new psychological language ofspace and time,'^ and the rise of a single productivist metaphysics determinedthe formation of new discursive practices and the transition from the repres-sive hypothesis to bio-power (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population). Thedisciplinary practices of social modernity and productivism provoked psychia-tric and bio-morphological anomalies such as a mechanistic state of deperso-nalization and "discourses of self-negation"; the suppression and limitation ofcenesthetic factors by impersonal systems of socialized discourses and collec-tive norms (Starobinski); pandemic mental fatigue and neurasthenic symptomsas products of the technical assimilation of the human organism to themachine; the mathematical and rational repression of "superfluous move-ments" and the creation of alienated conservative patterns of muscular

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movements that caused epidemic locomotory disturbances, asthénie symp-toms, bodily mutilations and fatalities; the de-naturalization of the productiveact as a libidinal investment and the consequential insurgence of sexual mala-dies (Reich); and finally, depressive symptoms, alienation, spatio-temporaldisorientation, and suicide. Furthermore, while the first law of thermody-namics sustained that energy may be transformed from one form to another—assuming that the total amount of energy remains constant—the second lawof thermodynamics established the irreversible decline of energy and theincrease of entropy in any given (closed) system. The^« de siede's decadentculture tautologically associated the principle of energetic entropy with thenotions of degeneration, disorder, and decadence. Morel, Lombroso, andNordau's theories of retrograde evolution and deviation of the organism fromits original type influenced massively the decadent European imagery of thefin de siede, producing a palingenetic mythopoeia of decadence, and a parallelpolitical scheme of the energetic regeneration of the sacral social body. In this"energetist" genealogy of the modern individual as a de-sacralized and dis-eased object of production, it is possible to identify the fascist existential ethosas a political model based on a decadent and pathogenic Weltanschaaung.The subsequent shock of World War I generated successively a "schizophrenicmetaphysics of crisis," collective anxiety and a profound sense of decadence,and at the same time a neurotic surplus of energy (Dobhn and Simmel's dieNeigung zu exzessen).^^ In The elementary forms of religious life, EmileDurkheim sustained that "under the influence of some great collective shockin certain historical periods, social interactions become much more active [...]the result is the general effervescence that is characteristic of revolutionary orcreative epochs. The result of that heightened activity is a general stimulationof individual energies. People live differently and more intensely than in nor-mal times [...] and once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electri-city is generated from their closeness."'^ As a result, the etiological frame of thefascist ethos manifests its existential-political pathogenesis in the co-existence oftechnical repression of heterogeneity, a-functional and un-productive mode ofexistence, collective anxiety, and the neurotic and convulsionary collective ener-getism that emerged from the shock of the war. Therefore, I sustain in thispaper that the Fascist existential ethos represents a temporary epistemic andsemantic void in the meta-narrative of rational-modernity; an epistemic andsemantic void that escapes the flux of rational messages; hke an innate tendencyto rediscover an irrational "otherness" that negates the instrumental symbohccodes, norms, and discursive practices of everyday life; a void that resulted fromthe structural asynchrony'^ between discourses of the integral technicization of

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life and bio-aesthetic resistances against instrumental practices of denaturation(semantics of technicization), normativization, and disciplinary control onbodies, which tended to systematize and to control human life within quantifi-able and measurable set of functions. Nevertheless, from the permanence ofreactive mystical tendencies in society, which have incessantly pointed towardthe re-sacralization and re-energitization of the social body, a process of re-sacralization emerged earher and between the wars, which escaped the "seman-tic" realm of technical and instrumental knowledge, implying an anti-functionalmovement toward the Dionysiac, orgiastic, irrational, and ecstatic; this releaseof a collective energetic surplus emerged as a reaction to an acute collectivestress disorder. Thus, from the monotonous and neurotic character of themachine age, the dysfunctional relationship between sovereignty and "barelife," and the traumatic experience of the war, individuals transferred theirrepressed surpluses of mental and emotional energy to politics, demanding anew political aesthetic characterized by a vitalistic Weltanschauung, by anincessant and permanent mobilization and, above all, by an emotional cathexisbetween the Volk and its latent energy (Will). In modern techno-mechanisticcivilization and in the "industrial killing" of World War I, individuals experi-enced the most extreme alienation, mental fatigue, anxiety, and neurasthenicsymptoms. The ever-increasing technicization of life and the objectification ofthe body created the perspective within which the catastrophic fragmentationand "de-substantialization" of the breakdown of the community, and subse-quent genesis of false consciousness, were perceived (Kracauer). As a reactionto these socio-pathological conditions, fascism presented itself as a supra-temporal idealization of an heroic collective consciousness, creating a newpalingenetic and socio-regenerative system of belief, myths, rites, and symbolsimbued with youthful and irrational exuberance, a heroic ethos and an active/dynamic vision of existence capable to objectify unconscious forms of excita-tion, violence, excess, delirium, and dream that escaped from the functional,homogeneous, and instrumental semantic of the everyday hfe.'^ The creation ofa new dramatic liturgy and the formulation of an aesthetic political theologyemphasized the emotional experience of immediacy, promising to give back toalienated subjects that Kairo tic eventfulness^^ and ecstatic pathos that containedthe energeia and 5uva|aiç of the historical moment and the calling for a dynamicexistence in opposition to the secularized and deteriorated conditions of ordin-ary life. In this "Kairotic eventfulness," in which history belongs to the presentof consciousness and is therefore "entirely immanent in the act of its construc-tion,"'^ Fascism appeared as an "eternal festivity" (Brasillach), a secularizedreligion, a collective ritual of re-energetization and a reanimating orgy where

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imaginations and dreams transcended the neurotic uneasiness of modernrational-instrumentality. Nevertheless, in this aesthetico-existential politicalexperience, the initial attempt to escape the mechanism of instrumental moder-nity was destined to fail since the existential ethos of fascism tended inevitablyto institutionalize itself and to surrender its "heterogeneous semantic" to inter-nal paradigms of functional immunization and repression embedded in thedisciplinary mechanisms of bio-modernity.'^^ The institutionalization—as a ten-dency to frame life in transcendental forms—of the fascist existential ethos,with its preservation of mystical and emotional ideologies, resulted in the dra-matic formation of a one-dimensional bio-power, ecstatically committed in thecreation of the new fascist man and in the totalitarian and systematic control ofbios and thanatos. From this transition, we can conclude that the fascist ethos,which theoretically and historically anticipates fascist totalitarian praxis, repre-sented an existential and vitalistic reaction against the integral technicization oflife and the concomitant reduction of existence into a set of mathematicalaxioms (from here intellectuals fascination with fascism). This collective resis-tance resulted in the insertion of a temporary epistemic and semantic void intothe meta-narrative of rational-modernity. Despite this "semantic void," internalmechanisms repressing heterogeneous, a-functional impulses have continued tonormativize life and to generate bio-political discourses, triggering tragic pro-cesses of the institutionalization of this existential malaise. The process of insti-tutionalization corresponded to the permanence of an integral pathologicalvision of society, which determined the formation of a totalitarian bio-powerthat took control of life, death, and biological processes in order to forge, bybrutal disciplinary mechanisms of regulation and repression, a succession ofincreasingly neurotic and de-humanized bio-apparata, which have only servedto radicalize further the instrumental-mechanic and functional systems that itannounced its intention to destroy.

Notes and References1. Against the hypothetical reduction of human identity to an algebraic for-

mula, George Bataille argued that "human activity is not entirely reduci-ble to processes of production and conservation, and consumption mustbe divided into two distinct parts. The first reducible part is representedby the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and thecontinuation of individuals' productive activity in a given society [...] thesecond part is represented by so-called un-productive expenditure: luxury,mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games,spectacles, arts, perverse sexuality." In "The psychological structure of

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fascism," Bataille transferred this dichotomy into a more sophisticateddialectic between homogeneous and heterogeneous forms of existence,where "homogeneity" signifies the commensurability of elements and theawareness of this commensurability: human relations are reduced to fixedrules based on the consciousness of the possible identity of delineable per-sons and situations. Production is the basis of homogeneity and "eachman is worth what he produces [...] he stops being an existent for him-self," and becomes a function arranged within measurable and quantifi-able limits of collective production, which "makes him an existent forsomething other than himself." The protection of homogeneity requires apolitical sovereignty, which must exercise a power of normativization anddisciplinary control on bodies "obliterating the various unruly forces andbringing them under the control of order." As a result "the most accom-plished and expressive forms of social homogeneity are the sciences andthe technologies," which epistemologically tend to systematize nature inmathematical formulas On the contrary. Bataille argued, heterogeneityindicates "elements that are impossible to assimilate" and "its exclusionfrom the homogeneous realm of consciousness formally recalls the exclu-sion of the elements described as unconscious, which censorship excludesfrom the conscious ego." Therefore, heterogeneity can be described as anincommensurable something other, whose unconscious forms includestates of excitation, violence, excess, delirium, sacredness, madness, and"the immense travail of recklessness, discharge and upheaval that consti-tutes life." All these heterogeneous forms result from un-productiveexpenditures and are characterized by an operation of loss and limitlessdegradation. Furthermore, Heterogeneous reality is "that of a force orshock [...] it presents itself as a charge passing from one object to anotherin a more or less abstract fashion, almost as if the change were takingplace not in the world of objects but only in the judgment of the subject."As a result, the body, the emotions, and the experience of life are irreduci-ble to instrumental rationality: it seems as if the cyclical emergence of het-erogeneous symptoms derives from a silent epistemic void that escapesthe flux of rational messages; like an innate tendency to rediscover an irra-tional "otherness" that negates the instrumental symbolic codes, norms,and discursive practices of everyday life. The implication is that if theseunconscious forms are brought out in a temporary deficit of the homoge-neous system to take on "conscious" political forms, fascism will resultincontestably as an archetypical and wicked expression of this heteroge-neous form of existence. See George BataiUe, "The notion of expenditure,"

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in Visions of Excess. Selected writings (Minneapolis, 1985), p. 116-129;Ibid, "The psychological structure of fascism," New German Critique,No. 16 (Winter 1979), 64-79.

2. See Bernard Stiegler, Time and Technics. The Eault of Epimetheus, Vol. 1(Stanford, 1998).

3. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Reason andRationalization of Society, Vol. 1 (Beacon Press, 1985), p. 211.

4. In Empire (Cambridge, 2001), Toni Negri and Michael Hardt argued:"The anthropological metamorphoses of bodies are established throughthe common experience of labor and the new technologies that have con-stitutive effects and ontological implications. Tools are always functionedas human prostheses, integrated into our bodies through our labouringpractices as a kind of anthropological mutation both in individual termsand in terms of collective social life," p. 217. On this point see: Andre'Leroi Gourhan, Le geste et la parole: Vol 1, Tecnique et langage; Vol. 2Mémoire et rythmes (Paris, 1965), and Milieu et techniques (Paris, 1945).

5. George Canguilhelm, Knowledge of Life, Fordham University Press,p. 61-62.

6. For "existentialist intuition of politics," I have indicated Fascism's anti-theoretical and vitalistic Weltanschauung, characterized by the primacyof mythical thought within mass politics (Sorel), an heroic vision of exis-tence and the celebration of rite of action.

7. On this point see: Giorgio Agamben, "The politicization of life," in HomoSacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, 1998).

8. Leading from a systematic critique of various modes of "bourgeois thought"such as "Homeric epic," Bacon, Descartes, Kant, as well as counter-Enlightenment figures like Nietzsche and Sade, Adorno and Horkheimersuggested that the first manifestations of Enlightenment already revealedthe project of "domination of nature": "What men want to learn fromnature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. Thatis the only aim. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extin-guished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinkingthat is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive [...]power and knowledge are synonymous." See Theodore Adorno, MaxHorkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1944), p. 4.

9. In the "Critique of pure reason," Kant synthesized Descartes and Leibnizwith the Empiricism of Locke and Hume in order to produce a compre-hensive theory of the relationship between mind and world (transcendentalidealism). Kant argued that the world of "phenomena," we experience is

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shaped by the mind. Time, space, and causation did not belong to theworld in itself but they were concepts that were applied to the world bythe mind. These concepts were not learnt from experience, they wereknown a priori (prior to experience). Therefore, for Kant, the essential fea-tures of human experience were conceptual categories imposed on theworld by reason in order to render the world meaningful. In accordancewith Adorno and Horkheimer, Kant created a subject (a transcendentalego), who transcended the "real world" (history and nature) and containedwithin itself the Utopian idea of universahty, order, hierarchical supervi-sion, and administration of the transcendental and empirical world. InKant's rational gnoseology. Adorno and Horkheimer saw the connectionbetween modernity and administration, and the power of rational-modernbureaucracy to control individuals by the imposition of rules and socialnorms, which eclipsed the uniqueness and individuality of the subject. SeeTheodore Adomo, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York,1944) and Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York, 1947).

10. Cited in Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, 2000),p. 23. On this point see: Michel Foucault, "Naissance de la biopolitique,"in Dis et écrits, 3: 818-825. A valid introduction to Foucault's notion ofbiopolitics, see Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, eds., Michel Foucault:Beyond Structuraism and Hermeneutics {Chicago, 1992), p. 133-142.

11. See primarily Max Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1968)and The Sociology of Religion (Boston, 1964).

12. Anson Rabinbach, The Human motor. Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins ofModernity, p. 87.

13. See Stephen Kem, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge,1983); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York, 1981)and the groundbreaking Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimen-sion and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, 1983).

14. Neurologists have proved that under conditions of prolonged and intensestress the sympathetic nervous system, acting via splanchnic nerves to theadrenal medulla, stimulates the release of adrenaline.

15. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York,1995), p. 213.

16. The paradigm of "asynchrony" centres the differences of pace andrhythms between different social systems or institutional domains.

17. Emiho Gentile, II culto del Littorio (Roma-Bari 1993).18. In the thinking of early Christianity and its historical consciousness, the

meaning of Kairos moved from its Aristotelian ethical character

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("phronesis") and its rhetorical-linguistic forms, to a deeper and propheticeschatological "substance" (Paul). Kairos, as fulfilled moment of creation,"the moment of time approaching us as fate and decision"—opposed tothe timeless Logos, (and later to Lutheran transcendentalism)—announces, in its "fullness" and "resoluteness," the right time, whenthe eternal breaks into the temporal and that a new beginning can takeplace. This new KaxaßoA,ii (Katabole), under the chiliastic forms of a newTTÎcTTiç, in which Kairos (the right time) "actualize" the most authenticmoment of vision, and in which the meaning of "revelation" assumes anew historical consciousness, breaks through the structures of human exis-tence, disclosing itself anew for knowledge and action. Whether, forChristian Faith, the appearing of Jesus as the Christ is the absolute andunique Kairos, in its general sense—for the philosopher of history—Kairos represents an "historical" turning point," the moment whichoccurs the coming of a new "revelation" "on the soil of a secularized andemptied autonomous culture" (Tillich). Kairos as KaiaßoAf) and"moment of authentic vision" is always grounded in a time of tension andconflict, a time of "crisis," which implies that the course of events poses afundamental question, which calls for an unconditioned and resolute deci-sion. In this ecstatic time, the consciousness of the crises take a living his-torical form, and the Being, grasped by its fate and destiny, suspends theethical (the universal) in order to faithfully and intensely live the "newRevelation"—the moment of ecstatic vision (Augenblick). Paul Tillichhas written some illuminating passages: "the believer stands in nature,taking upon oneself the inevitable reality; not to flee from it; either intothe world of ideal forms or into the related world of super-nature, but tomake decisions in concrete reality. Here the subject has no possibility ofan absolute position. It cannot go out of the sphere of decision. Everypart of its nature is affected by these contradictions. Fate and freedomreach into the act of knowledge and make it a historical deed (historyexists where there is decision): the Kairos determines the Logos, PaulTillich, The interpretation of history, part one translated by N. A. Rasetzki;parts two, three and four translated by Elsa L. Talmey, (New York,C. Scribner's Sons; London, C. Scribner's Sons, Ltd., 1936), p. 34.

19. Giovanni Gentile, "L'esperienza pura" in Opere filosofiche (Garzanti,1991).

20. Leading from an analysis of Hobbes' concept of sovereignty, RobertoEsposito has written: "In order to save itself, life needs to step out fromitself and constitute a transcendental point from which it receives orders

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and shelter. It is in the interval or doubling of life with respect to itselfthat the move from nature to artifice is to be positioned. It has the sameend of self-preservation as nature, but in order to actualize it, it needs totear itself from nature, by following a strategy that it is opposed to it.Only by negating itself can nature asserts its own will to live. Preservationproceeds through the suspension and alienation of that which needs to beprotected. Therefore, the political state cannot be seen as the continuationand reinforcement of nature, but rather as its negative converse," Biopoli-tics and Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 58.

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