question and calls itself into question in all possible ways and from all possible angles (capitalism, progress, technics, democracy, atheism, enjoyment, domination, etc.). This broad designation of ‘the West’ – so broad that it has largely been deterritorialized across the surface of the earth and even beyond – continues to be primarily identified with certain territories. Europe is of course the first, even if it is flanked by its enormous American outgrowth. This term is not an error: there was indeed, long ago, a tremor in the West, the first extension of which was Mediterranean. One should not imagine this tremor as having initiated a destiny, or a teleology of whatever nature one might imagine. But there is no doubt that it initiated a sequence that contained within it, in its genetic ingeniousness, a distinctive feature: the mastery of time. Where other civilizations envelop time in a permanence, this civilization sought to master succession. A culture of duration – and then of progression – is different in nature from a culture of permanence. When a Roman poet – Horace – declares that he has edified a monument more durable than bronze, one should understand these words as stressing the edification and the elaboration of the work. Workings are what count in the work; the enterprise prevails in the monument.
The enterprise: this term can be seen as emblematic of an important, if not essential, trait of the West. This trait makes its full-fledged appearance in Rome. Rome has all the traits of an enterprise: it bestows upon itself a project that is its own production, as well as its export or its extension. It manages this project steadily across an entire set of conjoined registers: an original city that forms itself as an autarchy, such that it in fact becomes a sort of civil religion, unknown even to the Greeks, and an identity that is more moral (based on virtue) than territorial or familial; the elaboration of the first system of law conceived as a complete edifice in continuous construction; the development, unprecedented in its quasi-systematicity, of a set of techniques (urban, military, agricultural, mechanical), many of which will take centuries to be discovered; finally, an expansion that is equally unprecedented, since it destroys few other cities (Carthage above all) but incorporates a great number of them, allowing them to subsist in the shadow of its force and its law. It is Rome that invents the model of empire in a sense that Europe will often seek to take up: the autocratic domination of a diverse set of popular, cultural, and religious unities.
Rome doesn’t only revive the Athenian concept of autonomy: it entirely detaches it from local and popular identity, and opens it to an enterprise that for the first time merits, on its own scale, the name ‘globalization’. (One could add, if one wanted to spend some time on this point, a comparison with the Chinese Empire, which, broadly speaking, in roughly the same period, unified a great expanse of territory according to a completely different dynamic, which one could refer to as a hoarding rather than an enterprise.)
As we know, Rome collapsed. It is not by chance that Europe has kept alive the memory of this fall, which at the time seemed astonishing. Rome collapsed beneath its own weight: beneath the weight of its own incapacity to locate the sense of its enterprise. As we know, torment and dread (both philosophical and religious) were already stirring, starting two centuries before the Common Era. When Constantine sought to revive the Empire by devoting it to Christianity, it was already too late.
4
Because Christianity, this shoot growing out of a Jewish base, came about, in essence, as an attempt to respond to the turmoil of Rome. I believe that a clear sign of this is given by the attitude of the emerging Judeo-Christianity to wealth. We know all about this, but we do not spend enough time asking what it means. The critique of wealth had been initiated by philosophy and by Judaism, which is significant. But what appeared with Rome, in what one might think of as a much more decisive manner, is the substitution of a wealth that I would name that of use for a wealth that I would call one of glory. By the former, I mean a wealth that is employed in relational transactions (commerce, construction, etc.); by the latter, a wealth accumulated for the glory of its bearer – for example, the gold and the adornments of a pharaoh, or the gold that covers the biblical ark. I use the word ‘glory’ in order to evoke that which this notion retains of the sacred. I use the word ‘use’ to distance myself somewhat from a too simple opposition between use value and exchange value. What is important to grasp is this: Rome (in truth preceded by others such as Byblos, Tyre, Athens, Carthage, etc.) was the site of a mutation of technics, domination, and wealth – a mutation that determines the slow gestation of the West.
Christianity is at once the product, the symptom, and the intensification of this mutation. It is the product because it merges within itself the great aspirations that had been at work for centuries in the disappearance of sacred worlds: the Greek autonomy of a logos, the Jewish alliance with a wholly other, the forces originating from the entire eastern Mediterranean, from Egypt, and from the Etruscans. What develops there is a powerful catalyst from which emerges a new culture of mastery and enterprise, project and emancipation. Christianity is a double symptom of this: on the one hand, it transfers power outside of the world, situating glory and accomplishment in another kingdom (thus effectively slitting the throat of the terrestrial kingdom), and on the other hand, by inviting man to renew himself, it opens him to a liberty that is no longer that of status, but activity: the new man is a task to undertake. In this sense, Christianity at once diverts and galvanizes the energetic, achievement-oriented drive that the Roman mutation bore.
This does not immediately produce all of its effects, which require detours as long as those that preceded the Roman Empire. But when the mutation that initiates modern Europe begins, we already find the threefold characteristic of technique, domination, and wealth that will henceforth be at the heart of a heightened complexity of Christianity, which has at once installed itself as terrestrial power and, by this very fact, finds that it is obligated to call itself into question and to displace itself (if not to deconstruct itself) – just as it is always in the process of doing.
I will return below to this complexity. For the moment, I will conclude with the birth of what, in six or seven centuries, has become the West. (I will bypass here the part played in this history by Islam, which was initially a notable participant in this enterprise, before turning away from it and towards another history.)
Towards the fourteenth century, the sequence that is proper to the Western enterprise gets fully underway: technics, domination, and wealth arise from a single principle, one based on setting in motion and expanding. What we call capitalism represents the systematic development of this principle, for which one might propose the name investment. To ‘invest’ is to surround, to envelop (to ‘vest’) a specific object in order to appropriate it. Technics invests a specific operation (that of transporting, piercing, etc.); domination invests the exercise of control (of people, goods, techniques); wealth – considered here as tending completely towards that of use – invests the growth of its own capacity to invest (thanks to and for the purpose of every kind of technics and domination).
Almost a century ago, during the Second World War, Valéry was able to write:
Europe is coming to the end of an incredible, brilliant, and deplorable career, bequeathing to the world [. . .] the dark present of positive Science and the sad example of a wealth that nowhere before has taken such complete precedence over customs, traditions, and every possible thing.3
By ‘positive science’, Valéry means, as he says elsewhere, science as ‘power – that is, formula or recipe for action’, in other words what has come to be known as ‘techno-science’, which it suffices to call ‘technics’. As for wealth, Valéry is neither a social Christian nor a communist, which makes his judgement all the more striking. All that remains is to note the convergence of science and wealth, which he does elsewhere: ‘The power of action has conquered the domain of knowledge [. . .] along with its practical equivalent of wealth, and all the unstable properties of the latter.’4
We can hardly do more than add the following, which was not yet clearly visible for Valéry. One of the unstable properties of wealth lies in the way it transforms: on the one
