GEOMETRY

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Statues, Michel Serres (translated by Randolph Burks)

Rome, Michel Serres (translated by Randolph Burks)
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GEOMETRY
The Third Book of Foundations

Michel Serres
Translated by Randolph Burks

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published in English 2017

Originally published in French as Les origines de la gomtrie: tiers livre des

fondations.

Michel Serres Editions Julliard, Paris, 1995

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English language translation Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017

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For Roberto Berardi
vi
CONTENTS

The origins of geometry ix

The universal: One of its first constructions x
The differences: Chaos in the history of science xv
Synthesis: The science of history xxxii

PART ONE CUSTOMS AND LAWS1

1 First in history: Anaximander 3

Spaces without exclusion: Juridical origins 3

2 First in the rite: The royal victim 37

Spaces of exclusion: Political origins 37

3 First in dialectic: The interlocutor 71

Spaces of exclusion: Discursive origins 71

4 The point at noon 93

PART TWO NATURE95

5 First in history: Thales 97

From the pyramid to the tetrahedron:
The optical origin 97
 From Diogenes to Thales: The ethical origin 114
From the sun to the earth: The astronomical
origin 130

6 First in philosophy: The ignorant slave boy 161

From Pythagoras to Zeno: The algorithmic
origin 161

7 First in logic: The element 177

The automatic origin and the return to sociopolitical
origins 177

PART THREE CONCLUSION191

8 The measurement of the earth: Herodotus 193

Notes 213

viiiContents
THE ORIGINS OF
GEOMETRY

Where and when does science appear? In China, Babylon, Egypt?

In the world and throughout history all cultures more or less have kept
accounts, known a few numbers, observed the movements of the heavens,
followed a calendar, tried to treat illnesses. A single one had the idea of
representing forms such as the square, the circle, the sphere and of
reasoning about them rigorously.
Where and when did this Geometry appear then? In Greece, exactly
twenty-six centuries ago.
Why? How? There are so few answers to these questions that many a
historian has spoken of a miracle to qualify such a rare event. What can
be said thats new about such extraordinary and unexpected beginnings?
Finding such hidden origins requires first reflecting on time; uncov-
ering the origins of Geometry requires showing where its space comes
from.
Lastly writing the beginning of the history of science obliges us to seek,
to start with, a science of history.
This book examines all these questions. It has taken thirty-five years for
its author to make their answers clear.
Michel Serres
THE UNIVERSAL:
ONE OF ITS FIRST
CONSTRUCTIONS

In a violent but just reaction against perverse ancient ideas preaching a

universal thats almost always reducible to an imperialistic and invading
domination, our discourses, for at least a half-century, have rumbled with
our differences.
Dominant, the social sciences during this period of time taught us not
only to love one another but to recognize and respect the rights of cultures,
genders, sexes, languages and customs, others. We must be grateful to them
for having opened up these varied multiplicities.
But by some perverse paradox, difference ends up imposing itself in
turn as a universal dogma that everywhere and always forbids speaking
forever and everywhere. Is it only the local that can be expressed globally?
This law without justice forgets geometry.

The respective dangers of the universal and of

differences
For knowing the differences, wanting to content ourselves with them and
not overstep boundaries didnt bring us peace: in the name of these same
differences twenty wars are flaring and raging today in singular localities of
the world, bringing as many misfortunes to men as the imperialist conflicts
generalized to the entire world brought to our youth.
We had thought wed die from totalization; here it is that we can perish
from splitting up. Everything happens as though violence was equitably
dividing up its ravages.
Might it be universal like geometry?
The universe
To the political, moral, and historical errors committed by the social or
human sciences regarding man, whether individual or collective, when
they ignore the exact sciences, and by both together when they forget the
humanities, a strange blindness is added about what has been happening
around us since the beginning of this same half-century.
While we were obediently repeating a dogma taken from sciences that
were soft enough for us to doubt their relevance, the harder sciences, our
law, communications were constructing a new universe.
Yokohama and San Francisco neighbor Paris today, whereas during
my childhood the village in which I was born was unaware of the
provincial capital, its neighbor. So while we were thinking universal
humanism we were living in separated paving blocks, whereas we cease-
lessly prophesy difference in becoming de facto citizens of the world,
delocalized, in constant connection with friends at enormous distances,
close via exchanges of every order: the local often lapses into the folklore
for sale to distracted tourists.
The community of mankind grows, linked together by habitat, fate, and
fraternity: touched several times, the limits of the objective world obligate
us to the solidarity of being embarked on the same boat, island, or vehicle
planet, seen at leisure in its entirety.
What new earth do we have to measure?1

The third time and the new map

With the formation of this universe, a third moment appears to thought,
one where the differences drawn on the globe or the map, those Harlequin
cloaks, mix by combining the ancient diverse paving blocks so as to strive
toward the white of Pierrots costume
a plane or volume of a geometry?

Dominating, invading
For attaining finite globality changes the old and constant question of
dominance.
In the past we feared the expansion of some local power or culture and
the conquests of its empire: so lets tally up that Egypt ruled for millennia,
Rome for centuries, England several decades, America a few years, how
many for Japan ? In those eras of diminishing returns the universal was
reduced to the invasion of global space by an ambitious and cruel locality:

THE UNIVERSAL: ONE OF ITS FIRST CONSTRUCTIONSxi

spaces with beautiful refined cultures vitrified by the implosion of the
bomb and made ugly through the multiplication of crude images.
But domination transforms as soon as we reach the physical limits of
the universe, a recent event that condemns us to peace under pain of a
complete and collective death, therefore to negotiations whose mixtures
and cross-breedings will free us from the uniformity imposed in the past
by the victory of one singular color over the others.
We have to think a new universal outside these outmoded dominances:
far from annulling them, white adds up and combines all the hues.
So we remember geometry.

The first construction of a universal

For the construction of a universal without war or dominance happened
several times already: this book gives a beloved example of this.
Indeed, the thought or language of mathematics didnt spread every-
where nor did it always endure due to the military, economic or cultural
power of the peoples who invented it, nor did it contribute, to my
knowledge, to spreading their customs across the whole world: pure
demonstration expands without one difference alone taking the place of
the others.
Conversely, without dominance, it shows the universal. Whatever the
linguistic, religious, economic or military differences that separate peoples
may be, rest assured that all of them, strong or weak, calculated, reason
and will demonstrate in the same way when its a question of measuring
the diagonal of the square.
Here, universality was, at least, and will still be for a long time the
exception to the ancient and recent orthodoxy of universal difference.
No critique, no culturalism will succeed in relativizing the evidentness or
necessity of geometry.

Measure and reason

When, in the midst of local violences, difference as dogma collapses, and
relativism arrives at the emptiness of nihilism through the generalization
of regional conflicts, measure and the reason that demonstrates it remain,
invariant and strong.
They unite without opposing, assemble us without organizing into
a hierarchy, teach that men, whether solitary or in groups, are not the
measure of all things. The metric of a new land, different from all the
places listed or named up till then, is objectively imposed on that former

xiiTHE UNIVERSAL: ONE OF ITS FIRST CONSTRUCTIONS

reference, exclusively human, whose relative and contradictory rule used
to rule.
What idealist arrogance in truth it is to think that we invent everything,
according to the color of our skin, the twistings of our tongues, and the
gesticulations of our institutions! No, were constrained to obey something
other than ourselves, to obey an obligation that our measures dont
dictate, inform, or show, to obey a demonstrated metric, a new universe,
completely different from all our differences. What a blow to collective and
cultural narcissisms!
Thinker of difference, from loving to measure yourself you delight in
perennial war and domination: you neglect geometry!

What difference constructed the universal?

And yet, here we have a local culture, as singular as any other in its particular-
ities, wedged between land and water, across several Ionian islands or shores,
that invented this universal one fine almost datable day despite or contrary
to its bronze weapons, its stony gods, its aristocratic pseudo-freedom, its
iron scorn for slaves and foreigners, the declensions of its languages and
the twistings of its olive trees this is an event in turn so contradictory,
improbable, and rare that it stops the entire life of a philosopher since, there,
the universal seems to have been born precisely from a difference.
Yet geometry cannot be said to be Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese,
or Hindu not because it wasnt born here or there, in some month or
other, but because its language and the thoughts it gives rise to dont refer,
either in meaning or in time, to any known land, whether of the Orient or
the Occident, northern or southern. A disquieting strangeness: geometry
then would go back to an origin, source or debut, to beginnings, without
being attached to any root or flowering from any stem?
Abandoning all assignable reference, what land then in other words
does geometry measure?

What does geometry measure?

For by its name and its title, it claims to measure an earth. Which one?
This differentiated small plot of land where the ancestors of a people
repose and that generations of pious peasants have plowed beneath the
mortuary effigy of their pagan gods? No, of course, even though it has
since been said that this geometry of land surveyors was only born from
constituting the boundaries of such plots, this geometry whose services we
can still hire today around the land registries.

THE UNIVERSAL: ONE OF ITS FIRST CONSTRUCTIONSxiii

 The planet-Earth whose global circumference Eratosthenes calculated
by the shadow of the sun? Again no, since we call the science that draws
and writes it instead: geography.

An earth without trace or mark

Said in Wolof or Tamilit makes no differenceby the peoples of the
world who reason with it, geometry writes a universal language that neither
engraves nor traces any mark on any medium since no figure shown on it
could correspond to the one it in truth measures and proves.
In order for no point or stylus, as sharp as youd like, to be able to cut or
incise into it, in order for no engraving or wrinkle to be preserved in it, a
more than adamantine hardness, infinite, and a more than aquatic, aerial or
ethereal softness, infinite as well, are required for this earth whose material
or special consistency causes the infinite of a maximal resistance and the
infinite of a minimum of light breath to become equal in it: therefore so
hard that it includes all possible hardware in the universe, therefore all the
applications of physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology so soft as well
that it makes understood all the software of the universe, languages, signs,
symbols, notes and musics.2
Without any possible furrow or sowing, so without any memory of any
sojourn, I was going to say without history, here then is the strange land,
the non-place where geometry was born, rootless.

New habitat, our archaism

The following book seeks to discover, to the eyes of the body and the
mind, this new earth, a white or transparent box that was constructed
starting from the field, the temple and the camp, slowly, from the spaces of
violence, of prayer, of lustering or cleaning, of work, of defense and habitat
to the page and the plane, the surface and volume, to all the varieties, the
sum-earth of the acts of men whose complete purity replaced, from the
Greeks on, the scalene plot of land and the oval planet, the vernacular local
or nomad global, whose idea we then lost.
Every single one of us has since inhabited the most immemorial of our
universes, built from the spaces and times of Geometry.
19581992

xivTHE UNIVERSAL: ONE OF ITS FIRST CONSTRUCTIONS

THE DIFFERENCES:
CHAOS IN THE HISTORY
OF SCIENCE

Several sciences, several histories

The history of the mathematical sciences transforms at the same time as
their invention is being pursued, and so profoundly sometimes that it
seems to change, more than its pace, its nature.
For this history sometimes seems to follow regular lines of expansion
or growth, spirals of repetitions or circles of invariance, and sometimes
to undergo abrupt falls, backward returns, ruptures through forgetting or
stabilities through long preservation Ten diverse models of stopping,
regression or progress, discrete or continuous, could be formed in such a
way that the meaning of their development is lost as soon as the complex
variety of these different flows, networks or ranges is observed.

We therefore have doubts about the meaning of the history of science:

must we seek, to start with, a science of history? Yes: this has held me up
for thirty-five years.
In addition, we cant conceive of any origin without some preliminary
philosophy of time nor, lastly, conceive the origins of the first geometry
without shedding light on those of the space it constructed.
This book therefore first and foremost answers these three questions. It
has required the authors entire life to make his answers clear.

The geometries
Lets start with the history of geometry: can we decide what this science
designates?
The measurement, ancient and modern, of the earth, arable or for
building, that of the cultivators and masons? The archaic figures of
Pythagorean arithmetic? Those of the Chios School? The Platonic forms
and ideas? The books of Euclids Elements? What remains of Archimedes
or Apollinius? The Cartesian representation? The descriptive working
drawings of the past century? The non-Euclidean reconstructions?
Leibnizs analysis situs, the topology of Euler, Riemann, and Poincar?
Hilberts formal proofs? Contemporary algebraic geometry? The plans of
the programmers of robotic movements ? The universal, seen from afar,
transforms, up close, into a jungle of sciences so different that the number
of histories to be related would be overabundant, all of them divergent and
rooted in forgotten pasts.

The universal and the differences

Convergent nevertheless? For the diagonal and the square, the triangle and
its elements for example return in each of said histories, no doubt inherited
from the earliest of the geometries. And the universal waits for us amid
this jungle of differences, in that strange and familiar theorem that demon-
strates the existence of a model for all geometry in Euclids geometry,
whose origin then I am rightly seeking.
Even though invariant it seems, these elements nonetheless never refer
to the same system of thought, so that its never a question of a stable
figure or, perhaps, of the same language. Most often, it happens that an
expert judges one of the geometries preceding his own and which he no
longer practices to be non- or pre-scientific: it doesnt enter into its history.
Consequently, each geometry projects its own history in return.
From where should we depart to rediscover the first one? From rigorous
proof?

Indeterminism, indetermination, chaos

So here is a principle of indeterminism or uncertainty, difficult to reduce:
either I know, within a well defined geometry, the position of an element,
figure or theorem, and I lose the speed of its long and particular motion,
from its first emergence to its truth of the moment, or I pinpoint its speed,
and I lose its position in the science from which it takes its meaning.
This indetermination has its limit in error, which the scientist forgets,
but which the historian must reconstruct as the truth of an era; the
historian is interested in dross, the scientist on the contrary is interested in
intuitions of genius without any impact on their epoch. Historical truth can
change to waste, this latter on the contrary can be reactivated as truth: if I
speak true regarding Anaximanders meaning, I might possibly speak false;

xviTHE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

if I speak true, I might speak false concerning Anaximanders meaning.
This indeterminism defines the history of science, not as a continuous
tradition, but as a discontinuous and rendable framework.
Might this history be contrary to the sciences it talks about?
Is this due to its exceptional situation in relation to the sciences
themselves as the contact site for historical time and abstraction? Can this
tangency be explored from the point of view of science, whose inventions
by themselves form a history?
Another indetermination: lets consider a mathematics at a given
moment so that each idea is expressed there at the same instant. For
example fibered, foliated, scattered, chaotic, compact spaces date from
the 1940s; from the 1950, categories; sets from the nineteenth century;
functions from the eighteenth; integration from the seventeenth; the
diagonal from the fifth century bc; addition from the first millennium, and
so on. The temporality proper to the system seems homogeneous, whereas
the temporality of its elements, indeterminate, rent, chaotic, seems aleatory
from the outside.
While the traditional history of science projects the always begun again
disruptions of the previous orders onto an irreversible line through new
combinations of reversible sequences, the contact site of the historicity
proper to the sciences and of history in the standard sense therefore
remains subject to contradiction or indeterminate: the tradition doesnt
account for this exceptional and paradoxical situation.
On balance, an element does not have the same situation or the
same weight or the same meaning in any system punctuating this
complex flow that we were naively calling history. Each system sets up
such a redistribution that this element, here at the beginning, becomes
an ordinary link in the chain there, even an abandoned bit of dross
elsewhere, dating from a forgotten world, elsewhere again precisely a
forgetfulness taken up again, reintegrated by generalization, become
active once again. Is it a question then of the same form or always of a
different one? In general, is the history of science continuous or discon-
tinuous? In both cases, what is its meaning? Consequently, how do we
trace back to the origin?
The evolution complicates to the point of being chaotic. Despite the
unpredictability every invention rightly boasts of, can this chaos be under-
stood and some law found in it? The diversity of the possible conceptions
of the history of science and perhaps of history in general will soon oblige
us to go back over the question of time and to consider all the preceding
indeterminations as linked by a systematic space that recreates all the
possible chronic varieties.

THE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCExvii

Greek traces of these problems
Did Plato already ask himself these questions? The Meno has a demon-
strative sequence concerning the diagonal of the square be reconstructed
by an ignorant, who is said to have recollected it. Thanks to the chain
of geometric reasons, communication is re-established with a forgotten
world. Beyond the signification of this anecdote in Platonism in the strict
sense, can it be taken seriously in the context of history? It brings several
times into play: a tear, first, in the tradition, then a continuity re-established
in such a way that the teacher and the ignorant live together in a new time
of circular sum, endlessly repeatable.
Would a more contemporary proof of the same theorem rediscover
the existence of an underlying archaic mathematics forgotten by Greek
measurement, and would it by means of a new priority dig up a covered-
over origin therefore making Platonic geometry appear as a trivial metric
model? For today we know how to decipher cuneiform tablets whose
sexagesimal calculations resemble in a surprising manner the algorithmic
procedures used by our computers; through our artificial practices, we
therefore recollect Babylon and its abstraction, buried, lost, or scorned by
that of the Greeks.

Algorithms
The situation of the Meno would then become reversed: the tradition-
alist who knows Pythagoras, is ignorant of the practice of algorithms
because he has forgotten it. But the current scientist, who knows these
procedures, precisely forgets the Pythagorean metric and its proof in the
ancient manner, and could in turn ask the ignorant to abandon as quickly
as possible the theorems of the tradition, the world that we formerly had
to recollect: tear up, he would say to him, the traditional continuity, and
this forgetfulness will lead you to a more distant origin, more profoundly
buried, to a world thats new and ancient at the same time, which you will
then remember.
The inventive discontinuity therefore plunges more deeply than
the continuity of the tradition: the idea of the algorithm preceded, in
the past, and follows, today, the metric theorem. Hilbert entered for
example into direct communication with Euclid, but current mathe-
matics presents the EuclidHilbert interval as obsolete in rending this
connection again.
So, several types of temporality are unfolded.

xviiiTHE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Historical or mathematical origins? Vectors
Another example: the triangle was considered by the dawn of the first Greek
geometry to be the simplest spatial figure after the point, segment, and
angle. Hence the traditional richness of its analysis, via ultra-elementary
triangulations, by means of bisectors, perpendicular heights, medians,
right bisectors thus the Timaeus triangulates the elements of the Earth
here is a new meaning for the term geometry, when the earth passes from
the small plot to the world. Hence again the Pythagorean theorem, among
the first expressions of metric space.
Supposing that Euclid and his predecessors had considered the triangle
to be half of a square, or better, half of a parallelogram, they might have
immediately been led to the structure of vector space. So here we are, again,
at the origin, where were taking up again another good piece of history:
the point, the segment, the angle, then the open trianglethree segments
with a common vertex, part of the parallelogramand not the closed
trilateral we incorrectly call the triangle; from which vector addition is
drawn, by components and resultant, which in return causes the in its turn
first-principle idea of the vector to rebound onto the segment and the idea
of the null vector onto the point, and so on: the structure of vector space is
little by little unveiled in a primary simplicity.
Are we traveling here a spiral time passing through an origin many
times? Coming after these elements, the questions of norm and scalar
product push the Pythagorean theorem far along the chain as a trivial
application. Hence this historical judgment: by proceeding in this way
we could have saved more than twenty centuries of superficial analysis of
space.
Everything happens as though we were forgetting the ordinary tradition
in order to situate ourselves upstream from the Greek origin. The metric
diagonal was historically lived as a drama of the irrational and certain
death for pure thought: we can think it as what could have been the first
step of a higher rationality than Euclids, so much more profound that
the former pure becomes mixed, impure, poorly analyzed. So the drama
changes camps: the Greek miracle becomes bad luck or a logical error; the
idea of vector space forces me to forget an entire history, seen from then on
as a blindness of clear thought.
Does the history of geometry then recount the modalities of
non-knowledge? A reversal manifests itself: suicide and shipwreck, the
diagonal ought to have occasioned a rebirth or a resurgence, caused a
higher and more profound geometry to be born, one whose very origin
would be read in the liminary scissiparity of the metric and the vectorial.

THE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCExix

 So here is another historical example of geometry as a living and
inventive movement.

Topology
Lets begin again: lets no longer base ourselves on vector space, but rather
on topological structures. We find ourselves led back to the origins here:
not to the logical or historical origin, but to the fundamental conditions for
the constitution of the forms of space. Through this back analysis geometry
discovers a new purity that owes nothing to measurement, anterior to it,
and again suspends twenty centuries of equivocal tradition, perceiving
them to be impure and confused, technological and applied, in brief
non-mathematical, absent and lacking.
It again reverses our vision of the origin by turning the miracle into a
scandal. How did the tradition manage to take root right in the middle
of the trunk, in a site thats miraculous because arbitrary? By chance and
accident the Greeks jumped onto a moving train at the moment when
everything had already been decided, when the concepts were a thousand
times overdetermined and, by miracle, designated a complex and mixed
ore as being pure.
Topology necessitates forgetting the tradition and remembering a
spatial constitution covered over by the equivocality of the Greek miracle,
suspends traditional language as ambiguous and practices liminary disso-
ciation of non-metric purity and measurement.
Once again, the entire history of this geometry amounts to the preser-
vation of an impurity, that is to say, of a certain type of non-mathematicity.

Old historian, young geometer

So every invention reacts all the way back to the origins: that Pascal redis-
covered Euclid, as is recounted, matters less, due to his linear and outdated
memory, than his reinvention of geometry starting from deeper priorities,
which were Apollonian and were to become Desarguian.
Often a young child, like him, the imaginative mathematician therefore
dialogues, in the Menos sense, with an old ignorant scientist, a tradition-
alist historian of his own science, in order to forget the normal heritage and
remember a preliminary non-known.

xxTHE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Invention and tradition
Thus all won ground illuminates and occults the history of science,
in aleatory rhythms: the current invention discovers precursors, while
forgetting former origins destined to become dross. Often in crisis, mathe-
matics is always in the process of resolving it.

These connections are tied and these adherences are cut at the luminous
point of invention, the living focus of mathematical historicity. Here the
mathematician never ceases suspending the tradition and returning to the
logical and constituting origin, or covering the latter over and reactivating
the tradition, never ceases cutting or connecting intersected durations.
Does the inventor control time and history? Does he invent the time of
his science as well as the time of the history were trying to take up again
after him? On a given form he reads the occulted past, the active present
and the possibilities, and applies an unpredictable future onto a past thats
always movable to the focal point of the new intuition. In a network system
whose every element ties anachronic diachronies, he cuts or reties freely.
Yes, divinely, invention makes history: what do my ancestors matter?
They will descend from me! But which of these mes or of these discoverers
am I to follow today? When I search for the origins of the first geometry,
what then must I remember and what can I forget among my historical and
mathematical knowledge?
The living evolution of mathematical purity implies an original attitude,
exceptionally free and productive, with regard to its history.
Not only does every promotion of a form reform its temporality, but
above all the ahistorical character of pure form makes it so that it evolves
in a time thats unpredictable, unforeseeable, determined, overdetermined,
irreversible and reversible, recurrent or finalized, connected or always torn
up, referring to one, two, ten origins, a time thats dead, forgotten, repeated,
accelerated in a lightning-fast manner
Can the history of these ahistorical idealities only be understood if a
complex, finely fibered, or foliated temporality is conceived?
So we will have to go over the question of time again.

Models
Skipping over the examples, can one try to reconstitute the complex and
crossed entanglement of the diverse temporal modes they present?
Four ideas: the history proper to mathematics can be connected and
discontinuous and be read in the direct or reverse direction. Hence four

THE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCExxi

types of models: direct and recurrent connected ones and direct and
recurrent non-connected ones. What states of affairs do these models
account for?

Traditional, the direct connected models would express the temporality of

deduction or of rigorous linked sequences well enough. Its impossible to
skip a link along this uninterrupted linear process; however you start, this
path cannot be missed. How does this form of temporality interest us here?
We have lost almost everything from our past: do we really know whether
the Greeks believed in their gods or not, how they obeyed their laws or steered
their ships ? For centuries historians havent much agreed about these
questions, barrels of the Danaides, sieves of the past; conversely, definitely
and by a lightning-fast short-circuit, we know without any risk of being
wrong what they were thinking when they devoted themselves to apagogic
proof. No equivalent in knowledge or historical information is known.
In sum, there is no real history except that of geometry, an almost
perfect means of communication, a limit case, exceptional and no doubt
paradoxical, for history in the ordinary sense. The more a knowledge goes
toward the pure and rigorous, the better its preserved and the more easily
it transmits its unchanging contents across time.
This continuous drawn path therefore can no longer be missed because
the information remains stable in totality, because communication doesnt
suffer interference or rupture except by falling into non-mathematicity. In
other words, mathematics is entirely transmitted or not at all. Recollection
in the Meno is a reconnection or a complete taking on by the inheriter, by
the one being taught, of a tradition thats not open to misinterpretation,
equivocations, or gaps.
Conversely, a common conception of history that would have this
connected model for support is an illusion of pure reason, stemming from
the exceptional or limit form of the tradition in the mathematical sense.
This model lastly expresses a form of continuous historicity, polarized in
an irreversible way by an end and forever abandoning its origin: the act of
birth or constitution starting from prehistoric archaisms would be a point
of no return here.

Stages or crises
The progressive extension of the mathematical field, the continued purifi-
cation of its concepts, the always strengthening power of its methods, the
forward movement toward a mathematicity conceived as horizon give us to
think an evolving form thats connected but punctuated with stages, steps,

xxiiTHE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

or crises, global reorganizations of a knowledge transmitted without any
loss, therefore incessantly accumulated.
This new path, once again, could no longer be missed because each
stage would reorganize an overly dispersed aggregate, would systematize
scattered elements. The path inflects because mathematization is no longer
made to focus on the atoms but on the distributive totality of the disciplines.
Each point of inflection is a point of inflation and of reconstruction.
Thus Euclid, Leibniz, Cauchy, etc., recuperate the totality of history in a
system thats totalizing, consistent and condensed, a system sometimes
accompanied by philosophy itself: Plato and the irrationals, Descartes and
algebraic geometry, Leibniz and infinitesimal calculus Husserl and the
crisis of foundations.
The starting model becomes more refined: less linear, it experiences
stages, intervals, united by moments of system, of global reorganization.
Any synchronic cross-section in the intervals reveals the preceding system
as well as new layers that arent part of it and arent integrable into it.
Endlessly needing to be redone, the Tower of Babel is reconstructed as
soon as the new promotions can no longer use the same language among
themselves or with the preceding system.
It is then necessary to reunify by means of a system, which is then
only a dictionary created for a new perfect communication. Working on
a common systematic base, Gergonne, Cauchy, Abel, Galois, Cantor, etc.,
go beyond it, creating a confusion of languages such that one could think
for a moment that mathematics might die from it and such that one is led
to reconstruct a new base that gathers the common etymology of their
languages, which therefore causes mathematicity to be reborn, and so on,
all the way to the next reunification. Thus Plato, Leibniz, their contempo-
raries created languages, new universal characteristics. The beginning and
middle of our century have experienced analogous situations.

Multiple origins
Mathematics therefore wasnt once and forever in the situation of origin.
The construction of a new language for a new perfect communication, the
constitution of new idealities, the taking on of the totality of the edifice lead
the scientist, at the time of great systematic enterprises, to take the whole
of the path traversed up again.
Questioning backwards, questioning the foundations, and the refined
analysis of original elements perceived retroactively as layered, stratified
ideas, as complex particular cases of elements that are even more original
still, are ordinary attitudes of the mathematician and not only of the historian.

THE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCExxiii

 We would never get to the end of repeating how many times questions
have returned about the real line, about zero, about whole numbers, about
equality, about the diagonal or the circle, and how many times the answers
to the questions reconstructed deeper foundations, not only for the
starting axioms, but in the very constitution of the idealities in question.
Everything happens as though it was necessary to combine the direct
movement of teleology and the inverse movement of recurrence into a
circular, or better, spiral diagram, as though the development of a theory
only drew its effectiveness from the endless iteration of passages through
the origin, itself reconsidered by means of the methods created in the
course of the extension, a feeding back of the development through the
source and of the source through the advance.
A giant with an origin name, Antaeus only regains his strength by
putting his foot back on the Earth, which geometry has always measured.
Here again, at least three times, is the Meno: through the combining of direct
progress and anamnesis; through the geometry example selected since
only mathematics furnishes the path of a lightning-fast and unequivocal
communication with the origin, which no other historical experience
can give any idea of; lastly through the endlessly possible iteration of the
process: a slave from the forgotten world remembers, in turn, a world twice
lost, and so on.
Laid bare at every great moment of reconstruction, the origin of
mathematics ceaselessly reappears, always other and perhaps the same.
No, returning backward doesnt only belong to the historian; its not
enough to say that every leap forward demands rewriting the legendary
review of what preceded or rectifying the entire perspective upstream with
what ought to have been thought; its not enough to say that the history of
mathematics should be dated as though by its Parian marble. A continuing
systematic restructuration, mathematical invention itself progresses and
returns at the same time, often.
Another example: Bourbakis Elements of the History of Mathematics is
the mirror-image portrait of the Elements of Mathematics, the projection
in a diachrony of what in fact happens in the system, the displaying in a
historical genesis of the systematic deduction. The discoveries of infini-
tesimal calculus, of group theory, set theory, category theory reverberate
globally in the entire edifice, propagate in a lightning-fast manner down to
its original bases, entirely as though the last thing constituted called into
question the entirety of the constitution. And once again, its not only a
question of logical or axiomatic conditions but above all of conditions of
constitution: at the dawn of infinitesimal calculus no one questioned the
true or the false or the legitimacy of the linked sequence, whose acquired

xxivTHE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

success caused them to be scorned, but rather mathematicity in its entirety
and its foundation on a world; everyone was talking about the Earththe
one from Geometry?and about fixed stars, and the comparative scale of
their sizes.
These backward movements, propagating vertically in the system starting
from these advances, show that there is a contemporary archaeology of
decisive advances; better yet, they show that a given advance is only decisive
when it lays bare originary archaisms at the very moment it is promoted.
Original, mathematical time makes its way towards its unforeseeable
horizon and its beginning. It follows from this practically that if I want to
study the historical, or logical, or gnoseological, or transcendental question
of the origin of mathematics, I can question Thales or Pythagoras in ancient
legend, Desargues or Descartes in recent history, as well as some contem-
porary mathematician in the living present. Any origin is the origin itself.
Present in the entire course of this history, it can be said to be percurrent.
The return to originary conditions is historical, logical or axiomatic,
transcendental or constitutive.

Tears
What precedes doesnt take an essential phenomenon into account. In
advancing, mathematics improves its rigor and purity; each moment is
more mathematical than the preceding one; at the limit, the successors
will judge the preceding one to be in truth non-mathematical, impure,
confused, indistinct, hardly rigorous. So the recurrent judgment becomes
judgment of application.
For us, Thales geometry reduces to a master masons metric. Desargues
no longer appears to us to be anything but an expert in cutting stones,
squinches, and stairs, Descartes an engineer, Monge an architect or
an expert in the excavations and embankments of civil engineering;
non-Euclidean geometries become the metrics of the physicist. As a joke,
mathematicians sometimes called them geographies, a term in which the
philosopher likes to find the Earth and the world.

A remarkable example: builders or architects never start to build without

placing chaises or batter boards, whose form marks out and measures the
small portion of earth to be organized. Here and there, at the perpendicular
corners of the edifice to be created, they beat small stakes, at least three,
linked by straight boards, horizontal and perpendicular to each other.
This apparatus thats on the site even before the foundation is dug is called
the chaise: a triple base or reference, in length, width and height, this old

THE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCExxv

French word, polished with use, reproduces, while hiding it, the scholarly
word cathedra, which must be heard here in the sense that geometry still
gives to the words dihedral and polyhedron.1
The axes of Cartesian coordinates therefore reproduce these chaises,
where no historian would be mistaken if language called them cathedrae. A
master of space, Descartes, a builder, transposes the actions of masons onto
the plane. He is preparing to build a cathedral. No, chaise or cathedra
here doesnt mean a bishops seat, rather the reference for every measure of
the edifice; but the bishops seat also evoked this function. The chaises are
the abstract foundation of the building. The reference axes, in Descartes,
fulfill the same conditions. Are these, in both cases, the origin and the
fundamental?
Is it the movement of purification that reduces mathematical memory
to technology? Is it a question of artifacts that become all the more artificial
the older the sedimentation? In this sense, everyone forgot them: who
today remembers this chaise? The Meno then would relate rather a break
and the discontinuity of mathematical time.
Continuity would therefore prevent us from seeing the stratifications
of the layers of different ages, the exasperated topography of forgotten
worlds.2

Percolator
It would be better then to conceive this history as a complex surface, made
up of chimneys of strong acceleration, cols of stoppage or equilibrium,
zones of stationary values, several tears At a given moment the system
constructed doesnt recuperate all the remainders of the ancient time: on the
contrary, it makes a choice, a selection in its recurrent movement. There are
ruptures of connection, definitively cut adherences: the system functions
like a filter; the advance toward purity or rigor eliminates fossils. The flux
passes and flows, with a current all the more transparent for discharging
finer and finer alluvia, for crossing the threshold of percolation.
As soon as Euclidean space gets plucked into topological space, metric
space, vector space, a group of displacements all that remains of it is the
trihedronthe chaise?of walls and ceiling that protects me in my house.
What a wonderful and luminous technique of archaeological research then
this filtering for purity is, a filtering achieved by the very movement of
mathematics progress! Every point along its course discovers evidence of
the origin carried up to there and abandoned through the contemporary
filteringyes, well-known evidence of prehistory: as in astronomy, you can
receive information from worlds that no longer exist.

xxviTHE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

 Here are two distinct archaeologies: proper to mathematical movement
as such, the first one never ceases reactivating its origins and deepening its
foundations, extricating the originary that wasnt mathematical and hence
becomes so: thus topology invades the upstream of the metric. The second
one consists in reading the prehistory in abandoned concepts that were
mathematical and no longer are. The old problem of the origin of geometry
finds its solution, endlessly readable, inside the mathematical process: I
mean by this that a cultural formation is only accessible as pre-mathe-
matical in and through the autochthonous process of the science.

Portraits of Penelope, Ariadne, and Alexander

A new example. When paths, knots and labyrinths became mathematized
by the topology of graphs, then and only then did I understand the weaver
to be a pre-mathematical technician more ancient than the surveyor,
and the taut plumb line to be a metric modality of the same cord bent or
knotted in a hundred ways, and lastly what is reported of Gordium or of
Minos to be pre-scientific schemas more deeply buried than the myths of
builders.
No other archaeological technique would have been able to lead me
below traditional surveying. Yes, the shaky square drawn in the sand, the
hesitant and anexact graphe3 that Plato refused to see is perceptible and
purely mathematical at the same time. Whence it comes that Plato himself
forgot the world of the shaky graphe, anterior to intelligible metric, and
which twenty-five centuries after him we wind up remembering.
Furthermore, this mathematization of the anexact causes all graphism
in general to be discovered to be a pre-mathematical manipulation of
topological varieties.4 Mathematical invention leads me again to the origin.
By studying the dynamic of the flowing river, I understand the processes of
sedimentation and the existence of forgotten meanders.
I go directly from the poor tracing of the square in the sand to
topological varieties, abandoning the Euclidean meander: a lightning-fast
short-circuit with the origin. The situation resembles, once again, that of
astrophysics, where I expect from the future information issuing from
worlds already dead.

On the excess of information

We periodically hear uttered the fear that the accumulation of knowledge
leads as inevitably to barbary as its very absence; science ought to collapse
beneath its own productive proliferation. This amounts to believing that the

THE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCExxvii

advance in what we know recuperates the totality of previous knowledge:
through an accumulative process, the encyclopedia would snowball on
itself.
For mathematics at least, things dont happen like this because it filters
its heritage rather than taking it up in its entirety; better, it takes it up
by filtering it. Consequently, it shortens by augmenting, diminishes by
accumulating. Three volumes of calculation on Harmony by Mersenne
are rendered useless by a given theorem on the arithmetic triangle; three
theorems from the De Arte Combinatoria do away with a thousand
techniques of Lulls type; a given structure sums up a gallery of models.
Succeeding dispersal, synthesis annihilates it with a stroke of its pen.
Here is a word no one knew how to say and which, as soon as it is said,
stops the stupid and slow repetition. In the name of the divine speed of
intelligence, Galois demanded to jump with both feet over calculations. A
great invention annuls, does away with a field of knowledge just as much
as it promotes another: with its key, it closes an entire domain, which is
hardly understood after this invention except as the underworld where
the daughters of Danaus strove over their sieve, or Sisyphus endlessly
pushing his rock back up; this invention puts into short-circuit a corpus
that remains in history as a forgotten braid. By means of the series of these
shortcuts, the history of science can go straight; it communicates in a
lightning-fast manner with the origin.
Hence as well ruptures: stemming from worlds foreign, even having
disappeared, to the tradition, new information appears, come by the
shortest path. Archaeology by means of the greatest slope, geometry cease-
lessly abandons its meanders.

Filter
This situation defines the extreme boundaries of the filter: what the present
leaves and finds, what archaeology finds again and abandons, the entirety
of the same movement of birth or rebirth and death with no return.
That said, we must examine the filter inside these boundaries. Let
there be then two cross-sections: mathematical language A is anterior
to language B in the ordinary diachrony. It is almost always possible to
translate A into B; conversely, we cannot go from B into A. Euclidean space
can be translated into topological, metric, or vector language; conversely, in
the Euclidean repertoire, no term corresponds to topological manifold
A semi-conductor, this path is most often cut off because the intersection
of the two repertoires can be empty. And since the path is punctuated
with points of no return, the futility of a regressive archaeology that

xxviiiTHE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

would confine itself to reversing history, that would not take the original
movement of the science into account, can be measured. On the contrary,
designating deeper layers, this movement reinterprets in return surpassed
idealities or better, again defines a system of translations. Each synchronic
cross-section includes its conditions of translatability. The judgment of
recurrence doesnt go from topological space to Euclidean space; it goes
from the topological presuppositions of Euclidean space to the global
reinterpretation of Euclids corpus.
At the same time anterior and posterior to the preceding language,
the new one makes it explode, cuts it up, filters it, eliminates the impure,
retains from it only the gold of mathematicity. Each restructuration is
a kind of earthquake that can abruptly uncover archaic layers and bury
recent sediments, while revealing the slow movement of deep plates.
Once again, I dont communicate with the origin through the traditional
historical channel, but through the effort of invention and foundation
of mathematics itself. My regression doesnt follow the path of tradition,
endlessly out of circuit, but rather the vertical path of the mathematical art
of inventing: I reinterpret the historical tradition starting from this.
It therefore seems essential to rectify the connected or continuous
models, models which would remain valid in the exceptional cases where
there would still be a common repertoire. So it would be necessary to read
the final projection as a series of geological cross-sections whose final one
is always deeper, giving the preceding ones to be understood, but precisely
thereby designating their lack of interest, their superficial and problematic
character, their prehistoric and pre-mathematic nature.

History of science
From which a significant result comes: if there is no continuity between
the mathematical cross-sections since each one places the preceding one
in short-circuit, how much less continuity is there between cultural forma-
tions as such and the formations that are differentiated from the first ones
by the fact that they carry the truth away with them?
This incessant putting out of circuit accounts in depth for the principle of
indeterminism indicated above: either one returns through cultural forma-
tions and never encounters science as original and veracious movement, or
one returns through science itself and ceaselessly reinterprets the cultural
formations by always pushing the cultural as such further back into the
process of digging deeper.
By endlessly making its way toward mathematicity, mathematics makes
its way backwards toward the foundation of its prehistory.

THE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCExxix

Time
On balance, science tends to do away with the traditional characteristics
of the model of time: its directional, irreversible character, the arrow
and fletching of its vector, its continuous character, its forgettings and
mnemonic accumulation; through its iterated choice between a lightning-
fast communication and a putting out of circuit, it sometimes plays
Socrates game and sometimes that of the child slave. In a word, it invents
or masters a new temporality by constituting it from the scattered elements
of the former models bursting.
Its no longer a question of time or eternity, or of any tangency between
the two, but of the constitution of a historicity that reconstructs at leisure
its former characteristics: it will be necessary to speak about percolation.

Earth
Here is found the very old philosophical tradition according to which
the most rigorous of the examples of theoretical thought resides in the
contemplation of the earth and the universe. Everything happens as though
the models that philosophy constructs of science and science of history
imitated those that science creates of the world.
First of all, we have brought history into the domain of the ideal, or
better, universal model at the same time as into the domain of the universe.
Even though the objects in the sky seemed to our precursors to be as stable
and pure as the idealities of theoretical thought, we now know that rigor
and purity evolve, the way stars are born, grow old and die in their novas.
Theory is a history; purity follows a time, the way cosmogony now
accompanies cosmology: origin, evolution, disappearance. An astro-
physical revolution brings rigor to variance without variation of rigor, the
way in the past the Copernican Revolution had changed the references for
movement and thought.
Lastly, the sky is observed, the way the system of knowledge is. Here and
now, ten kinds of waves are giving pieces of information that are dispersed
in relation to the time of history; one informs about a recent event, another
about an episode thats earlier by so many millennia it has no meaning on
the historical scale. Its no longer eternity thats discovered here but the
confusion of anachronic trails. This sky of today, constituted presently with
relative eyes, this pure thought whose history never ceases to be taken up
again, these two systems, of the universe and of knowledge, put us simul-
taneously in almost immediate communication with circumstances whose
dates are dispersed in a thousand conceivable ways.

xxxTHE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

 Yet it is necessary to understand the site of contact between the living,
flowing present and this theoretical-concrete spectacle that rends, confuses
and complicates in an almost random way the temporal sequences, the
passage between my time and a kind of distributive pan-chrony. Are there
as many models of the history of science as there are of the universe?
The earth was long ago the originary soil where theoretical thought
was constituted by giving meaning to movement and rest. The totality of
the universe in evolution now gives its meaning to the multitude of times,
as well as to the relativity of my own. Anachronic and panchronic, the
universe again becomes philosophys paradigm, its real model, eminently
concrete, excellently abstract.
Kant described a history of science and found the Copernican
Revolution in that history to be an event to be repeated for the henceforth
rigorous metaphysics. Can one now write a science of history according to
mixed, complicated temporalities in search of their integration and to this
end practice a revolution without eponym through a return to the world
itself?

The living present

And again were living and thinking at the origin, in a new infancy of the
world, in the first birth of the universe.
As in every decisive and conditional moment of history, we have to take
up a new knowledge, discover an out-of-the-ordinary whose beginning
takes our culture back to its prehistory; what must be understood places us
in the closest proximity to forgotten archaisms.
Come back under the guise of contemporary mathematicians, astron-
omers, physicists, or chemists, Thales or Anaximander compel us to look
at the knowledge of history again.

THE DIFFERENCES: CHAOS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCExxxi

SYNTHESIS: THE
SCIENCE OF HISTORY

TIMES: Elements and problem

With the present hour, a watch indicates a state of affairs in the world
such as it took place and will be reproduced an endless number of times:
reversible or circular, this clock time of the planets or of classical rational
mechanics therefore turns and goes back over itself, so that every prediction
bears on the future, of course, but just as much on the past, indifferently.
With the divine office of the hours or the schedule of shift work,
religious or working groups live according to the rhythm of the time,
deprived of meaning, shown on the roundness of dials, the pages of
almanacs or displayed calendars: the social generalization of this form of
life or sensibility, repetitive, dates back in the West scarcely several decades.

Independent from it and from each other, there are two other times: that of
the second principle of thermodynamics, which we know carries the local
things of the world, as well as our bodies, this book and its readers, along
toward disorder and death: wearing out, wrinkles and fatigue quickly invade
the aging organism, and the stars become erased in the burst of their novas.
On the other hand, we ceaselessly admire new marvels, yes, the works of
the opposing time of evolutionary life and engenderment, us, the parents of
our beautiful children and sometimes the authors of unexpected thoughts:
death, where has your victory gone?
Transitory, the state of our knowledge represents us as torn, plunged in a
flow with three unrelated times, whose sweeping along we dont know how
to form into a whole. Contradictory among themselves, these three times
nevertheless bear everyones existence in that, punctual for appointments,
we observe the work of our profession and the collective holidays, are soon
going to die from exhaustion, but love, think, invent and reproduce?
Subjected thus to invariants, to erosion and repetitions, how does the
world go?
So if the time of the universe or of lives seems incomprehensible because
its elements, mixed, are loath to form a whole, how much does the time of
history, whose sum federates the chaos and the rules of the things of the
world, the multiple evolutions of the living, the exchanges between groups,
the unforeseeability of the works of the mind become inaccessibly
inextricable and complex! We admire the naivete of the philosophers who
in the past claimed to show the meaning of history and explain its laws.
Outside of all comprehension of history and time, how consequently do
we seek access to origins?
Must we in addition consider the paradox presupposed by origins to be
nothing, namely the paradox of a thing whose existence is effaced before
the very moment it begins, whose depth teaches us as much about it as the
inverse reasoning that claims that before Monsieur de Lapalisse was dead
he was still living?1

Mixture
The word temps [time] derives, if I dare say so, from one or the other of
two contradictory Greek verbs, one of which, [temno], signifies
to cut, from which we no doubt draw our measures and datings, and the
other, [teino], means to stretch, whose stretching out expresses the
continuous flow without tear well enough2
Grammarians have long fought over this difficult choice, whena
divine surprisean intuition from Emile Benveniste intervened, one of
whose lessons shows that compounds, complex, can paradoxically date
from a more archaic era and preserve more ancient traces than the simple
term itself.
For tempering, temperance, temperament, tempest, intemperate weather
[intemprie], temperature, all terms from the same family, together
designate a mixture whose idea precedes, associates, and federates the two
meaningschronological and meteorologicalof the word temps, single
in the Latin languages, and corresponding to two separate terms in the
Germanic languages: time or zeit and weather or wetter, languages that
have forgotten or willingly left this strong community.

An old peasant scene: every morning upon waking, before deciding what
work to start upon, the farmer examines or observes the sky and tries to
assess, predict, evaluate, weigh the intemperate weather that awaits him,
a problem that plunges his temperament, touch, sight, smell, memory,
into a formidably complicated mixture of wet and dry tempered together,
of cold and hot, allied, making up the temperature, of long and short,

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYxxxiii

of continuous and broken, whose present promise permits avoiding the
ravages of the tempest or definesfor plowing, sowing, grape harvest
or hay-timebeginning or ending, that favorable moment the Greek
language calls [kairos], from a verb that again signifies mixing.
Without having to become erudite or remember our rustic childhood,
we could already guess that meteorologys temps amounted to mixtures; but
chronologys temps?

Flowing
What are we really saying for example when we heedlessly claim that
time coule [flows]? With this verb we describe a flux or a river whose
fluid descends, from the source to the mouth, by a channel called, just as
heedlessly, a couloir because we want flowing to follow a channelization,3
rather like the Seine, well-behaved and rational, cultivated for millennia,
docilely descending between the smooth steep-sidedness of its banks as
it flows under the Mirabeau Bridge: let the night come, let the hour ring,
the days pass on, I remain.4 Fortunately, language has more memory than
poets.
For from what source does this verb couler descend? The Latin colare
in no way describes the laminar descent that would bring from Charenton,
after the confluence of the Marne, to and under the Mirabeau Bridge, all
the water of Paris to Rouen and the Channel, but a more complicated
process of passage by sieve or of filtering by strainer: on scorching summer
evenings the ancient Romans used to chill their wine by making it pass
through a colum of snow, a term that we ought to translate precisely with
couloir, sinceoh, peasant childhood, again!this very word, in French,
formerly designated the funnel with a bottom of woven cloth through
which we would filter the freshly milked milk: cheesecloth strewn with
obstacles, not a channel of facilitation.
Certain things traverse the sieve, others not [pas]: here we find not only
the meaning of the verb to flow but also that of to pass,5 whose unity, in
its course, is designated by the pas [step], when advance is positive, but that
in the contrary case, when it doesnt pass, we name, not far from negation,
with the pas of ne pas.6 The unity of the time that passes must be doubled
into this advancing course and this immobility frozen by some obstacle
stopping the progress. When the learned claim that the time of history is
moved by the dialectic, they are grandiloquently repeating that time passes
by declining the two nominal elements stemming from this same verb.
Time flows the way it passes: not all the water Apollinaire doesnt watch
under the Mirabeau Bridge will necessarily go to Rouen, and the water that

xxxivSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

goes into the Channel didnt necessarily pass under the Bridge of his loves
countercurrents impelled part of the flow to head back upstream; eddies
and turbulences seized another part under the bridge pier, randomly and
in a circle; evaporation transformed yet another part into vapor certain
elements pass while others go back up or are retained, and others lastly
are annulled. If he had observed the Seine flowing would he have seen
the exchanger of the three times clearly functioning, the three times we
just now prejudged to be incapable of being formed into a whole, but here
mixed: death, forgetfulness, new loves of the one who remains?
If the water sometimes remains stable and other times heads back the
way it came, does a memory pocket form following the arc? Yes, past time
returns, yes, loves return; no, neither forgetfulness nor time flows, just like
the Seine, rather they percolate.

Percolation
Flow [coulement] had forgotten this percolation that more faithfully trans-
lates the old Latin and the recent science.
Under high latitudes, the Amur, the Yukon, the Mackenzie and the
Ganges under low altitudes, furnish a broader image of it. In the immense
plain, fifty to a hundred separate or connected beds intersect one another,
entwined by multiple anastomoses; every channel there can form an
obstacle and every barrier a passage. It freezes this morning, and the course
doesnt flow or passes little, but toward midday the debacle shakes several
arms, some of which, too charged with sand, form dykes in some direction;
because the alluvia flow all along the riverbed, the flux of the river doesnt
flow; it passes here and there and there and here because it passes, doesnt
pass, in loading itself down with gravel and pieces of ice. Amid the chaos of
the sand and blocks, the flows connect and disconnect. Frozen in its legal
course, the Amur overflows, shuddering, by ten minor beds.
Like the Seine, for which this complexity is better perceived when
navigating its course and taking lots of trouble to descend the counter-
currents than when dreaming on top of a bridge, these rivers percolate
spectacularly, that is to say, pass in and through such a generalized
filtering.
Signifying physically and at the origin to percolate, the verb to flow
reduces, in the simple and laminar flux, to a particular case. What we took
to be the common and reasonable current amounts to a rarity. Under the
Mirabeau Bridge the Seine flows exceptionally; certain days pass on, others
return or remain, for which alone the hour rings; yes, our loves return,
sometimes, like these percolating waters.

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYxxxv

 In the same sense, time does not flow nor does it pass, but rather perco-
lates, that is to say, passes, remains or doesnt pass, like a liquid through a
sieve or a filter. So to remain faithful to the things themselves, we have to
remember the originary meanings of the verbs to pass or to flow, which
are in exact conformity with the originary meanings of the term temps. By
what strange ignorance did the philosophers and poets who best expressed
the fleeing vanishing of duration forget them? What filter had blocked their
languages memories?
Here then plainly are the words: yes, the temps of the tempered intem-
perate weather or of temperature flows, that is to say, passes, traverses,
sifts; so when all is said and done, time flows is translated term for term:
mixtures percolate.
A multiplicity of relations can attach or not a large number of objects
or states of affairs to each other: this is percolating time, that is to say,
real time, which can help us understand history. And what reason is
there, simplistic or terrible, to reduce such a complexity to a couloir or a
continuous line regularly linking one point to another successively? Who
tightens its bottlenecking narrow passage?

Solution
So time flows like the Seine, the Amur, the Yukon, and the Ganges, whose
courses advance, here, stop and return, there, go back up elsewhere, are
connected and cut off, here and there, mix everywhere, as announced by
the old agrarian roots, semi natural, of the word. Like these rivers, the
world and life percolate, and no doubt, our soul lastly, and history as well,
whose course is now being wonderfully drawn: an inaccessibly large multi-
plicity of elements maintain relations or not to each other.
Intertwined, this model of the time of history ought to seem more
probable and wise than the one that has us believe that history follows
entirely simple and easy laws, which we would no doubt know and control
by foreseeing their results, if such laws existed.

A mosaic and musical interlude

Better than it passing and flowing, music percolates. Always so wise in its
archaism but scientific enough to rejoin our advanced technologies, our
language calls Harlequins cloak mosaic, a cloak of pieces, designs, forms
and colors, diverse and separated, but whose hues and motif can step
across or not the boundaries between pieces, spread their invasion across
them, in such a way that this art, at the same time digital and continuous,

xxxviSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

expands or stretches without tearing and is cut up in the sense of fracture:
mixture is also precisely said as cutting.7 The term mosaic repeats, almost
homophonically, the word music, its root.
No, this latter doesnt flow along a couloir, but rather invades the spatial
volume with its sometimes linked, often dispersed bursting: connected and
disconnected fluxes making up the irresistible sweeping along, ritornellos
and da capo, stable holdings where the now flames.8
Here again we find the most ancient roots of the word time, ,
cutting into little facets, and , continuously stretching.

Swept along in a held or fractal flow of global and finely local intuitions,
a mosaicist and musician, the one who lives, thinks, invents, remembers,
dialogues, works, composes, produces this time or bathes in it.

Useless faculties
The duration, physical, in which the body and the world are immersed and
the duration whose soul flames and that vivifies the mind therefore flow
as mosaic or percolate as musicmixed, tiger-striped, blended, zebra-
striped, harlequin, composite, connected with a thousand flows that pass
and dont pass.
Why did cultures have to imagine words to say those absences or
nothings otherwise named me or us? Why did psychology have to invent
faculties, imagination or memory, unconscious or conscious, or worse yet,
a subject, that ghost of the pathological, that one absent from health? Why
did history aspire to comical laws?
Because all of them refused, like philosophy, to think mixture, because
they ignored the real flow of time, which on the contrary the objective
conservatory of our languages and peasant behavior remember, a memory
our sciences rediscover in their most recent advances.
But the world, the flows of every order, the life of organisms or of
environments, objects as well as inwardness, love in general, time
percolate, and the most entangled of all the mixtures, history, percolates
even more so.
Memory sleeps in the dead arms and abandoned meanders; memories
wake at the sudden returns of countercurrents; the contradiction
between being and non-being, unresolved for consciousness since it is
only what it is not and is not what it is, finds its solutionthe best of
the possible wordsin the mixtures and eddies, in the changes of phases
and times.
Time forms the paste or the material of these imaginary faculties.

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYxxxvii

Model of history
These entanglements mix at least the chronic elements among themselves,
irreversible and reversible, from just now, that our temporary knowledge
knows or distinguishes and others still no doubt that we intuit without
being able to clarify them.
What lastly can be more reasonable and more faithful to the real than to
say of history that it randomly unites and separates a large multiplicity of
states of affairs and that causes and effects exceptionally become enchained
in it under strictly restrictive conditions?
What we ordinarily call time and history boils down to an extremely
rare case of this general configuration: to an optimally built couloir, some
rational Seine, well-behaved under the Mirabeau Bridge. In fact, like the
Amur or the Yukon, history filters, leaves, retains, returns, forgets, loafs,
freezes, or seems to sleep amid the multiple interlacings, and suddenly,
without our being able to predict it, sweeps along with it a straight flow or
current, irresistible, almost permanent, as though immortal.
Which flow or current, how?

Threshold
It is to Pierre-Gilles de Gennes that we owe the beautiful theory of perco-
lation as random flowing in a random environment. Furthermore, in the
interlacing being considered, he defines a threshold below which nothing
passes or flows globally due to the number of connections produced being
too small, but above which, suddenly, the source rushes forth, thick,
abundant, continuous, because the local passages have increased to the
point of federating themselves.
Where should we place this threshold? A difficult question that,
however, we see being resolved every morning when the coffee filters in a
percolator: how do we cross from the state where nothing passes to the one
where a regular flux flows?
Can our diverse experiences of history be better expressed, where a
torrent sometimes takes the place of a long dryness?

Source
Have you, at some time, ever visited a source? The Viennes or the Garonnes,
the Danubes or the Yukons? Most often it consists of a collection basin,
natural like a bog or a hollow, otherwise artificial: a trough, tub, sink, basin
or reservoir that has been built.

xxxviiiSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

 Your surprise went all the way to outrage: an origin would contradic-
torily reduce to an end or a mouth?
Yes, certainly, since the basin in question collects or recruits countless
imperceptible trickles of water come from the mountain, from the neigh-
boring meadows or glaciers, an arborescence thats so fine, complex
and intertwined that it wouldnt give birth to a continuous flow without
precisely the existence of this collection basinwhich marks the threshold
of percolation, whose status and construction resolves the easy and naive
paradox of the origin.
Everything happens as though the source was a condition that only
functions as a first upstream by a contradiction in its own definition since
its placed or constructed as a final downstream. A boundary between these
two reigns, the origin inverses the laws of regime.
What then can be said about the origin of geometry?

PLACES: Gathering in the forests9

So before this origin occurs, on the banks of the Nile, of the Tigris, of the
Euphrates, of the Huang He, in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in China perhaps,
lands on which one counted or measured already, agriculture, during the
Neolithic, opened an entirely new universe whose forgetful successors we are.
But how did we start to cultivate the land? From what we are told
gathering preceded the homogeneous flow of the harvest by chance. Since
no written testimony remains of it, lets dream.
Even though we didnt know how to act, were we already demanding?
Did an attraction impel us to choose the best of the present and possible
fruit? Did we reject, through fear or disgust, some others on the contrary?
And, in order to eliminate them, did we separate the weeds, the good grain
from the chaff, the bad apple tree from the good fruit trees ? In this
sort of constricting passage, does everything begin, as it is written, with a
gesture of sorting, of exclusion or expulsion?
Suddenly, I believe this gesture to be decisive and rigorously radical.
The elimination, the total purge or tabula rasa of every species in a given
place first produces a clearing.

The clearing
Agriculture wasnt able to begin before the complete denudation of a
certain piece of land, a clean place in the inextricable tissue of vegetable or
forest mantle forming an interlacing set of percolating lives, linked to each
other or not, connected, disconnected.

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYxxxix

 Whether a field of battle or of ruins, here is first and foremost a place
where everything is pulled up or unlinked. Not only do the trunks fall, but
the deforestation eradicates the very roots from the soil; after the stone ax,
the plowshare destroys the expelled species down to their deepest rootlets:
a treatment thats literally radical. The obstacles and mutual-impediments
disappear at this threshold.
Before the birth of all cultivation it wasnt of course a question of
making the land fruitful through plowing, since the very intention of an
invention cannot appear before its invention, but of uprooting, doing away
with, banishing, destroying, of totally killing the plants in order to create
a clean site, to exclude everything that grows there; not only what we now
call weeds, everything; of inventing a clearing; cleaning via emptiness, that
inanity which, in the Greek language, at the origin signifies: purification or
whitening in the course of a sacrifice.

Sacrifices
Whether violent or ritual, frenetically handled, at the height of murderous
fury, a knife attacks everything: man, beast, Abel, the lamb, Cain, the first
fruits, animal, or plant Isaac, the scapegoat It kills; here it has become
a plowshare.
From human sacrifice, by substitution, the holocaust of species of
fauna and flora ensues; this word signifies that cremation does away
with everything. So, from the animal case, the origin of livestock
breeding is derived: it suffices to defer the execution of an animal for
a more supple variety to suddenly become adapted to domestication;
from the second case, which concerns the set of plants, the origin of
plowing follows.
Attacking therefore the earth itself, the cutthroat separates the space
of the temple, drawing first a closed line: the sacred within, the profane
outside. The term elimination signifies the expulsion of everything
beyond the limen or boundary. Thus the city is enclosed within its walls
and leaves the countryside outside: the plowshare founded the first Rome
when Romulus killed his twin at the bottom of the furrow. The same blade
serves to delimit space, to cut the earth and to slit the throat of his sacri-
ficed brother.
Why would this knife stop? Wildly, it continues, as though it exceeded
the skill of the sorcerers apprentices. Not only does it cut one continuous
and closed furrow, but two furrows, three, ten thousand, so that nothing
can oppose its furious movement, no grass, no root, nothing of what grows
there.

xlSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

 When this fury exhausts itself, everything is plowed, torn up into a fine
powder; harrowed; reduced to elements; unlinked: the Greek says analyzed.
A threshold which no longer has any obstacle, a white box.
The first work, this frenetic and generalized murder cuts up the temple
down to the atoms, carves the place up until it can no longer be cut up:
here already, in a way, is the point. In the Greek language again, temple
and atom precisely signify these two limits of every cutting, the one wide
and the other as thin as it is definitive: this is the field and the state of the
land inside.

Locus: Templum, pagus, hortus source-basin

Thus agriculture was born via a naked space, pillaged, devastated, sacked,
ravaged, hence appearing as a white domino. The religious act of the first
fury turned, by chance, into agricultural action.
Because, then, a happenstance or a grain occurred, that died there,
naturally.10
Elsewhere than in this new locus, a religious templum that suddenly
became the agrarian pagus, in the forests and across the savannahs, all the
species form an equilibrium whose balance, parsimonious and without large
deviations, permits accepting, rarely and sparingly, or rejecting, the most
often, this single sowingnothing passes, everything percolates beneath
the thresholdwhereas in this white place, null and in disequilibrium, the
first empty ecological niche, as improbable as it was unexpected, the grain
that, alone and the first, comes there and dies multiplies without hindrance
and, in exploding numerically, even quickly threatens the entire Earth with
its special population. Everything flows above the threshold.
A source has just appeared or been born: from this high basin, a womb
and virginal chora, a thick jet gushes, a unitary, parallel and abundant flow.
Of wheat, rice, millet, wild mustard A new time has just begun.

Two floods: Men or nature?

Was plowing immediately probable? We will never know. Did the indis-
pensable denudation happen all by itself on the shore of some river in
spate, whether sudden or foreseeable? Did a flood tear up everything
along its passage, trees, bushes, plants, mosses, roots, grains? Did it purify
everything? Did it make the cultual or cultural gesture naturally? Natural
violence or social and religious, who can say? Was agriculture born from
this encounter or this short-circuit on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, the
Euphrates, or the Huang He, fluviatile cradles of history?

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYxli

 In general, is culture born from an Alpheus River, with an originary
proper name, diverted by Hrakls, whose furies combined with his own
cleaned and purified everything via emptiness? Must we give the verb to
percolate in this case the exceptional meaning of flowing beyond every
limit? Does this flood result from the rare action of nature alone or from
the violent acts of a warrior and priest hero? Or from the strange addition
of these two acts?
Will we ever know whether the flood expresses human violence or that
of a transgression of climactic origin, or the sum of their phases?

Divergence, expulsion
An emptied square of ground from which the entire plant and forest mantle
has disappeared in effect produces an abrupt divergence from equilibrium
in the life of the flora interlaced around abouts.
Through this tear or rift passes the vertical proliferation of a given
single species, sown there by the winds of chance. Since no obstacle stands
before it, it crosses the percolation threshold; its flow begins. The problem
of origin therefore only requires for its solution the simple, elementary
operation of expulsion.
The oldest work of the human world, the invention of an empty local
space, its discovery beneath the waters or its constitution by the sweat,
blood and tears from faces, opens a tear in the tissue of the savannahs,
of the jungle or forests of the world, a rift, a gap, as though a welcoming
basin through which the exponential multiplication of the luckiest or best
adapted unity rushes.11 The previous equilibrium was woven from fine
differences, in intersected networks linking heterogeneous and complex
multiplicities, while in the local white box thus produced, homogeneity
appears, prolific, innumerable, source of a continuous and unitary flow.
The flood wasnt desired or expected nor was the plowing carried
out with an eye to irrigating or sowing; no, like every other invention,
agriculture didnt begin with its own intention or targeted finality: every-
thing happened or was undergone for the sake of cleaning and purification.
Men chased the living species out of a given site because a parasite always
expels all the others. Whence this catastrophic tear through which the
multitude of wheat, rice, millet could pass, depending on the climates,
chances and circumstances. Suddenly another flood rose up, that windfall:
stocks of unexpected food. The human parasite consequently multiplies via
this rift in the equilibrium and floods the world in turn.
Explosion against growth, history is no longer going to oppose anything
but multiplicities, homogeneous like flows, long like recited histories.

xliiSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

Agriculture is born from this base square whose rupture of equilibrium
achieved through expulsion constitutes a site of cleanliness [propret], the
originary foundation of all property. The first person who, having enclosed
a piece of land or a field, took it into his head to exclude everything in it
was the true founder of the following historical era.
Do we go about things any differently when we invent other objects
during the moments when, all at once, history bifurcates?

The Nile
Herodotus recounts the origin of geometry. In spate, the Nile overflows
and ravages the surrounding fields. Priests or experts, sages or agrimen-
sores, those they called the harpedonaptai redistribute the parcels whose
boundaries the floods have just erased to the peasants or owners. Is it a
question of giving an image of the originary unlimited in Anaximanders
sense? Does this indefinite express precisely a sacrificial crisis?
The traditional interpretation of this venerable text reflects the agrarian
culture of our grandparents. The Egyptians, they said, had taken as judges of
their boundary disputes those who knew how to obtain areas via operations
regarding lengths, via the cord, unit, measure, writing and prestige: these
are the harpedonaptai, the first geometers. Or those whose services could be
hired at the notary, at the canton capital, when the underhanded neighbor
moved, at night, the boundary stones and exceeded them. Lets not laugh
too quickly, and lets rather reconstruct the operations upstream anew.
Before the expert, the priest therefore made the gesture of expulsion, of
cutting out the templum. The farmer, later, will imitate him. The river and
its flood do not stand in the way of the combined or successive actions of
the religious man and the farmer but aid them in this affair, or even, better
than adjuvants, act in their place and in their stead sometimes. Through
the excess beyond the high water level, the river erases not only the bound-
aries but the entire population of living things that were growing in that
space or field. Everything is torn up from it, expelled; the space becomes
homogeneous, covered with silt, smooth, expurgated of the equilibriums
caused by the mutual-impediments.

The genealogy of places

Here is the general genealogy for the theory of places: by excluding
the profane from the sacred, Jupiter, the god of the priests, cuts out the
templum; the god of violence and warriors, who must indeed be inter-
calated because he already plays the only god, Mars ravages and sacks

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYxliii

it, expels the enemies from it and with the arrival of the night draws the
campus there, where the co-hort foresees the hortus; the god of production
and agriculture, the last to arrive, Quirinus works the field, pagus, following
the two others, by doing away not only with the weeds but with every
species. The work, as we started to say, was perhaps already done, either
through purification and violence, the ancestors of labor, or through that
flood, which we can equally interpret as the exacerbated growth of human
or natural virulence.
For the locus, on balance, the pagus thus adds up the terminal sum of
the templum, the campus and the hortus: the field lastly results from the
temple and the camp; it will long remain the residence of a god and the
enclosure or bastion of entrenched resistance against any invader, in the
sequence of historical traditions: interlocking of meanings and things. But
this addition aligns homogeneous elements because in this same place,
whose name changes three times, all those whose names are in like manner
transformedpriest, soldier, and peasantdevote themselves to the same
action, exclusion, their appearance and name alone being renovated: first
called purification, then defense, finally hard work. Culture, in sum.
Internal, place only comes from this centrifugal operation of whitening:
stemming from the field, the stones construct the walls that surround the
restanques.12
Herodotus then didnt say without plausibility that the peasant received
his site from the first erosion of the river, then from the intervention of a
priest: violence, measure, and agrarian work from which geometry is born.

Exclusion and the excluded third or middle13

Here and there, white boxes or basins rend the plant mantle, above all in
the deltas and river mouths.
Language has been censored and blanked out by many similar rooms:
tabula rasa, we say of these places, without remembering that this expression
described the gesture of the writer erasing, razing from his tablet, expelling,
excluding every other trace before aligning the furrows of his own letters:
white, this page designates in our languages, from the same word as pagus,
the space, of wax or papyrus, where writing was born in the same way.

Denying, expelling even more and much better than its predecessors, our
geometry therefore follows: excluding by the excluded third or middle.
On the same land, named once again by geo-metry, or the same page,
renamed, as that of the writer, the operation of purification and giving
form climbs back to the farmer who flows back to the soldier who appeals

xlivSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

either to the priest, from the side of culture, or, on the natural riverbank,
to the flooding.
Three origins in three persons in a single gesture at the same instant
in the same locality: the temple, the camp and the field precede the page,
and then the pure space in which we devote ourselves to rigorous proofs,
themselves in the final analysis based on the principle of the excluded
middle or third.

This virginal space, already homogeneous and isotropic, therefore

measurable, becomes abstract because everything was subtracted or
eliminated from it, everything was uprooted or eradicated, yes, extracted.
With no more obstacles, everything passes there.

The ancient intelligible and modern physics

Its philosophys turn now: when he tries to define space or figure,
Plato speaks, again and always, in precisely apophatic terms, negative or
exclusive. Acting like the geometer, scribe, farmer, soldier or priest, his
upstream ancestors, the philosopher extirpates from there all that might
still dare to reappear: touch, color, the sensible, all the way to the limits,
precisely. He intelligently called this pure space intelligible, which above
was page, field, camp or temple.
Here, in culture, is a tear, a new basin, the chora of the Timaeus, the
fertile virginal womb, from which explodes the crazy proliferation of that
variety geometryinterminable discourse, immense narrativewhose
flow of results has never stopped increasing, all the way up to us, like the
continuous abundance of writing on the pages and walls, of wheat across
the fields, of war outside the entrenchments and of rites in the temples.
All these flows have, for a single and same reason, crossed the threshold
of percolation.

The seventeenth century repeats the same gesture in another site or in the
same one. At the opening of his Meditations, Descartes doubts, eliminates,
expels, banishes everything hyperbolically. The operation of exclusion
repeats. The thinking I chases away the parasites, and in prosopopoeia,
the most genius and evil of all, therefore expelling everything, absolutely
speaking, so as to discover itself faced with the world, with the white
expanse of our promised dominance: virgin wax. A tabula rasa or cleaned
place again, with a major religious tonality, both this tabula and this place
in the final analysis form a space we have to become the masters and
possessors of through thought.

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYxlv

 In the tear thus made, completely simple and easy chains of reason
pass infinitely; the clear and the unitary, the rational and the technological
multiply. The constitution of a smooth expanse bathed in light, no longer
like an ideality, but like an object of the world, forms such a significant
rupture in the cultural equilibrium that the proliferating multiplication
of a certain type of rational coherence is going to rush through the rift
of the gap. History bifurcates again no doubt: possession and mastery
begin here.
With each appearance of the white box, a growing bushing out of
simples replaces the former multiplicity of equilibrated complexes; repro-
duction explodes.

Thus major floods: the rivers; the sacrifices, the rites; the controlled
violence; the entrenched camps; the furrows, the rice, the wheat; the
number of humans; the lines of writing; the geometric chains; the form of
the intelligible; the rationalization of the world, the technicity.
Our history follows the white blanks from which these bifurcating
geysers shoot forth.14

Everything starting from nothing

Why does the question of the beginnings end in disappointing results?
Because at the origin we only find this white box or empty set. As is said,
everything there starts from zero. History, dated, from then on resembles
the numerical sequence.
Hence the question: how to produce this zero? The unequivocal answer:
through the total exclusion of everything in a given site, from which the
empty set results. Round like the opening of a channeling pipe.
Does history truly begin with this Deluge, as though the sum of the floods
from just now? Admire the image of Noah amid the ark of his animals, an
entire explosion of survival, every species of flora and fauna confused
together, an exuberant promise of every generation and descendant, united
in the integral of the ark right in the middle of the floods smooth box, amid
the white waters: the most beautiful of the ensigns for the theory of this
basin. And to further perfect it, as soon as the patriarch set foot on the still
wet land of primeval silt he planted vines, whose stocks will proliferate in
the expanse rendered homogeneous or desert.
An even more originary term, from the first verses of Genesis on: the
spirit of Godcreative seed, understanding and productive will, infinity
of Providence and provisions to comehovers over the waters, as though
during a first deluge, from which inevitably the creation ex nihilo was

xlviSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

bound to follow. Everything or the universe indeed comes from this first
inundation, from the primordial operation that does away with everything,
without ark or any other remainder.
So lets understand the meaning, now hardly mysterious at all, of this
creation starting from nothing, ex nihilo: nothing subsists in the beginning,
not even a tiny black point on the seed of a bean, the hilum, not even that
from which a blade of grass could grow; nothing after the flood, after the
crisis, nothing in the field, nothing in the intelligible space in which the
senses could be recognized, nothing after the test of doubt.

Likewise, elsewhere, the origin of the world occurs in the infinite flow
of atoms, cut up into pieces themselves indivisible, flowing through the
immense basin of the emptiness or of the purification and torn, here and
there, by the divergence in equilibrium caused by the inclination.
Or torn by the sudden big bang that laughs at the ordinary laws of
physics.

The lifting, at the limits, of the principle of

reason
The principle of reason, thus engendered, runs all along the flow of time,
now homogeneous after this source, from link to link, from upstream to
downstream or downstream to upstream; this principle becomes annulled
at the extreme limits, in the basins closest vicinity: so everything comes
from nothing; the totality of the flow rushes from its emptiness.
The fact that the nothing produces being becomes a result thats
practical and experimental just as much as it is theoretical, agricultural and
military, physical as well as geometric, rational and theological.
Here is the discourse of the radical origin, in sum, where every root
very logically disappears, a very improbable event and so bearing supera-
bundant information.

A portrait in each place

God, the patriarch and the priest, the soldier, the farmer and the breeder,
the writer, the geometer, the philosopher, the physicist, the logician each
prepare the superabundance of a source by installing a white box.
From this jewel-placethe universe under flood, the smooth landscape
of the deluge, the camp or city, the field and garden, the page, abstract
space, the intelligible world, the object conquered by technology
shoots an irrepressible jet.

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYxlvii

 Each of them produces a flow, a stock, a fecundity, a torrent of
abundance, a sequence of immortality that feeds those who are going to
proliferate from the bifurcation it announces.
How could history explain their production since each of them produces
a history?

From this primitive genealogy a fever of eradication is derived. I cant believe

that the animal that devastated a part of space knew in advance what the final
product of its action or its exigent exaction would be. With what aim did it
purify or clean? We dont know, just as it didnt know. This labor succeeded,
beyond expectations when it succeeded, for entirely different reasons than
its motives, in practice as well as in theory.
This sequence of source-places would be never-ending if it went from
local box to local box. But doesnt the logic of eradication necessarily lead
to a global without remainder? Are we approaching this threshold?
A question of philosophy: what should we do in the vicinity of this
border today?

TIMES AND PLACES: The white box or the basin

Simple and magnificent, the answer to the theoretical question of origin
holds in a word: by the creation of the basin Ive just described, eradi-
cated of all obstacle, virgin, open and naked, which therefore lets trickles
pass that werent flowing, which invents and discovers the white box of a
source.
Everything flows then; for, irrepressible and continuous, this flowing
wouldnt be able to begin below this threshold.

Before the source and around the flow

Before the origin, now marked out, in general time percolates below the
percolation threshold; this signifies that, here and there, a given flow passes
and that elsewhere it doesnt pass. Hence a fluctuating equilibrium, without
any continuous, regular, sizable, or homogeneous flow.
For this latter to be triggered, the creation of a collection basin is
required, and that suffices. This solution doesnt merely concern the birth
of geometry but also that of agriculture, of writing, of physics, of the
technological domination of the things of the world thus, in general,
history.
Before, after these basins or next to them and around the flows they
give rise to, in which time, monodromic and homogeneous, irrepressible,

xlviiiSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

oriented, flows in the usual sense of this word, everywhere else therefore
time and history percolate.
What then is the origin? The marking out and constitution of a basin,
plunged amid a general percolation, and the passage above the threshold
thus indicated.
How better to describe the source of a river?

Thinking all the interlocking

Impossible to think the origin of geometry or the history of science without
a general philosophy of time and its flow, without a science of history.
From its conception, the singular emergence of pure space takes its
place among other white beginnings, as though interlocked. Like a comet
appearing in the sky, the new light of mathematics trails behind it an
immense tail, almost as bright as it is, whose presence we dont quite forget
when we devote ourselves to hard and pure demonstration.
For the constriction at the level of the first basin, whose localization
suddenly channels a now rational flow, remains like a forgotten violence.
What terrible expulsion is still preserved in what we call, as though an
admission, the excluded middle?

Do we always remember the ferocious presuppositions of excellent reason?

Who among us hasnt felt at some time an almost religious or mystical
respect for the idealities of mathematics or something like a fear emanating
from its lofty figures, an inmost experience whose memory, reconstructed
here, explains to us how a knowledge, even the most abstract or independent
from the things of the world and society, can remain mixed with a remainder
of religious or sacrificial terror, of ecstasy, of attack and defense, of security,
of difficult work and fecundity, of miracles shooting out like fountains from
an old dryness, fossil adherences still attached to the origins
Yes, why do we always feel such terrible fears toward and through
theoretical knowledge? Or such joys?

Works and days, invention

Living immersed daily in an always formidably complex and miraculously
improbable time, one must have never worked, produced or written not
to know the appearance, the sudden shooting forth of a source, a source
no doubt produced by the secret connections of the hundred thousand
knotted or floating heads of hair of the flows of the awaiting that does and
doesnt pass.

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYxlix

 Whether subjected by the force of things or the power of men, whether
living intoxicated with God or the ideas of science, whether turning in the
round enclosure of the hours at the office, factory, or monastery, each of us
follows a time schedule, invariant, from vanishing youth to the great age
that comes quickly; rising early in the morning, without gap or pardon,
subjected, delivered, sometimes willingly, up to the rigorous rules of work
and vocation, how many days do we spend in a solitary and laborious plain
thats as though equilibrated, thats without direction or meaning, hesitant,
fluctuating, percolating, poorly connected, for how many mornings when
the vibrant descent of intuition suddenly flows, luminous, blessed, divine,
and torrential?
Unremitting work, in the course of ordinary time, digs ditches, dredges
canals, bridges conduits and bogs, connects an entire prior hydraulic work,
yes, slowly, patiently builds a basin but do we know when the rain will
come, like grace, without warning and when it wants, where it wants and
onto the head of which among us?
Invention enters into the complex time of this percolation and, with
hope, prepares there the white box, the threshold or collection site, for that
improbable moment, and which may never occur, when the waters of the
sky will burst, suddenly sweeping in the direction of the future.

Hope has no need for promise; it seeks no recompense, but comes from
the desert or the high sea. Lower, hope requires some support, quickly gets
winded and exhausted, or for lack of wood doesnt burn; it needs food and
finalities. Hope remains the fate of those who no longer have any hope.
Why does life continue to death? Why does it persist in beating,
shining, blazing? The answer from Hope: for nothing. Invention has no
hope; nothing in the world or life will ever be able to fill its well of hope.
It would have no answer for the fairy who, appearing, would ask it what
it desired. If the fairy truly promised to fulfill everything, hope would
answer: nothing, nothing out of all that you can offer me, for I no longer
have any hope.
But I tremble with hope, but I pass my days and nights only in hope. I
await. I await I dont know who, I dont know what, I dont know where, I
dont know when; I await the highly improbable moment when the thunder
of beauty will cause my paper to burn.
An inventive event, the origin takes place and occurs in the living
present.

lSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

REPETITIONS: Several origins of long durations
What beginnings must philosophy give an account of, it being understood
that the beginnings of matter and of light, of the universe and of life are
now subject to the reign of science?
The beginnings of science itself.

But first. Of the appearance of collective life: social, political, civil life;
under what conditions do we unite together to form a group? Here then,
among others, is the narrative of the origins of a more than ancient city,
terrestrial or eternal, Rome taken as a paradigm.
Romulus buried Remus in the ditch dug out to support the outer walls:
the City is founded on this assault. This foundation never ceases: Livys
first book endlessly repeats these murdersdismemberment, quartering,
stoning, burial alive of Romulus in turn in the swamp of Capra, of
the king of Alba in the middle of the horses, of Rhea Silvia the vestal
as though the collective resurged from its victims, an eater of flesh and
blood.

Much later, Rome falls, invaded by the Barbarians, sacked, after a more
than ancient reign. On the opposite shore of the Mediterranean Sea, in
Berber lands, Saint Augustine is building the Eternal City, the City of God,
no longer founded, for its part, on such sacrifices, but on the resurrection
of Christ. Antiquity ran toward death; the Christian era on the contrary
turns its back to it, as though time, suddenly reversed, was running in the
other direction, infinitely, toward an immortality.
After Rome, Statues placed death, once again, at the foundation no
longer merely of the City but of the constitution of things and of thought
themselves and not The Five Senses as the philosophies of the tradition did.
Chateaubriand calls Rome the city of tombs; what city couldnt be defined
in the same way since in the tomb lies the foundation of all our habitats,
physical, temporal, and spiritual, of all our habits too, of our clothes
[habits], of our habilities, of hand and of intelligence?
The second book therefore generalized the first one, concluding, like
it, about mourning. Contrary to every other living thing, we hominids are
born from death.
But another time is founded on the absence, the opening or forgetting of
a tomb; invention aims away from death: toward an immortality?

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYli

Founding, finding, discovering, inventing,
beginning
The act of founding hopes for a long guarantee: who would want what he
brings to light to disappear at the same instant? Do two kinds of discov-
eries exist, two ways of inventing, two families of finders? Look then, on
the one hand and everywhere, at the innumerable births of ephemeral
transits, stillborn glories: this, percolating, passes and doesnt pass; the rare
initiation of immortality, on the other.
The earthly and the eternal city arent founded, invented, discovered,
found, dont appear in the same way.
Its not a question of images or reveries. Everyday we invent something
deadly starting from death; for the glory, newspapers prefer to relate such
daily, fatal news, taken from ancient formulas: victories over victims and
vice versa, powers that pass on, gigantic pyramids destined to depart
memory, swallowed up, disintegrating into the sand.
These circumstances, whose blood glues the members of the collective
together and whose fascination guarantees publicity, understood as the
essence of the public, we love them madly.15 Historians strive, in this so
general case, to hopelessly plug up the thousand barrels of the Danaids,
whose staves are ceaselessly disjoined by the chaos of history and trans-
formed into filters or strainers.

Percolating, flowing
But sometimes, a miracle, one would think something immortal rises.
It appears, here or then, and will no longer cease; have we ever stopped
talking, sowing the land, ceased raising animals, writing, building cities,
living intoxicated with God, producing scientific theories, since we
discovered doing so?
Irresistible, certain inventions flow all by themselves and have no need
for memorialists to keep their memories awake because conversely these
inventions condition time, whose course, without them, would not be
maintained. Far from writing their history, we cannot write history without
them.
For without code or writing, without agriculture or city, without
prophetism or geometry, there can be no history: subjugated and deter-
mined by such unforgettable flows, it changes course and no doubt nature
every time one of them appears. Do we need to call such news universal,
news whose perpetuity federates and makes our collective and personal
bodies function?

liiSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

 Philosophy must give an account of the beginnings, of the founda-
tions of these long durations whose deep plates, like those of the Earth,
condition the multi-millennial evolutions of time itself and history.

In the form of a dream

Dream: might death then mark the error of our evil will? Between the
philosophers, whose history proceeded via the work of the negative, and
the Aztecs, whose human sacrifices ripped the heart out of some victim at
the top of a pyramid so that the sun might rise, what difference is there in
truth? They both believed that time is moved by death: does it really only
advance through destruction?
Stop the sacrifices, and the sun will pursue its course nonetheless. Stop
killing, and history will calmly continue ahead without the bloodbath.
What would happen if we no longer collaborated with the work of death?
And what if its necessity resided in our will? And what if it let go as soon
as we no longer helped it?
Truly, is this a dream? Five thousand years ago, unknown ancestors
handed plants and animals down to us. Today we eat mutton and bread,
wear clothes made of wool, drink wine from the vine through the precisely
immortal grace of their genius. We go around saying that they invented the
cultivation of a certain flora, the domestication of a certain fauna; we never
say that they invented an immortality.
Yet livestock breeding carried on, as well as cultivation, free of error and
free of help from any historian. Wheat never returned to its wild variety,
which we no longer know. Neither the lamb nor the pup ever ran to the
woods, come out of their mothers womb, forgetful of our lessons, but have
inhabited our houses from their birth for thousands of years. This work
remains unchanged even though we have lost our initial knowledge: we
have not since been able to domesticate any other species. We sometimes
know how to train an animal, but its descendant, if it has one, will escape
if it can, fly away or bolt as soon as it gets the chance. We train the animal
not its genome. Worse, we kill its genome; the animals in the zoo reproduce
poorly and rarely. As if the approach of the new men extinguished the
reproductive heat in them. What death lies in our groups for these animals
to be henceforth struck with sterility?
But our ancestors of forty centuries domesticated the species
forever. Did there exist a prodigious knowledge whose traces we have lost?
I dream then that this knowledge must have considered death to be nil,
whereas we absurdly want it to motivate life and history. This knowledge
without death and opposed to it nevertheless came down to us, silent, even

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYliii

mute, through agrarian practices. Four times forty generations of silent
and illiterate peasants, exploited to death and considered to be nothing,
persisted in preserving this heritage. The new upstarts are destroying the
peasantry today and erasing its silent knowledge. Where can we decipher
it now? In the desperate glance of the animals imprisoned beneath the
basement windows of silence?
Im dreaming: does there exist a knowledge outside of our knowledge
that our very science forbids and kills? Are we eradicating the peasantry
because it carried a knowledge of life inside it that laughs at ours and lets
it be known to be deadly?

No, Im not entirely dreaming. Four million years ago a few genius
ancestors handed down written signs to us in the east of the Mediterranean
Sea. We have never succeeded in destroying or burning them.
As little as the ox forgets its grass patch or as true culture loses good
wine, human time has never forgotten the letter or abandoned drawing. We
go around saying that these peoples invented a writing; we never say that
they invented an immortality. Yet wherever this path was opened the path
has never been lacking. No culture is known that first knew it and then lost
it. Those that dont have it never had it.
Our Mediterranean culture begins, absolutely, with the inaugural song
of a hero in search of immortality. One fine day, in the humble and
lightning-fast flash of exact intuition, he found it. He invented, fashioned,
modeled, calculated itIm not sure exactly. In fact, he wrote it. Its always
there, just as much as breeding and plowing.

In those days, I dont know why, the fertile crescent was seized with the
desire for immortality. The immense miracle was that it found immortality.
Here, in the incessant reproduction of faithful rams, in the softening of the
grape; there, in the linear engravings on the marble, whose sentences tell
of Gilgamesh, our first parent, who wanted to become immortal and who
succeeded in this senseless project.
The great-great -grandson of his Mediterranean quest, the writer still
dreams that he will remain immortal from writing. Was it because of a such
a prodigious knowledge that all of humanity was proud enough to want to
become the equal of God? Was it because of this success that it merited, it
is said, being punished by the water, save precisely the vine, the text, and
the remainder of the animals?

Somewhere in the world in those days claimed to precede the flood, the
bull that was to be sacrificed wasnt killed; perhaps pity was taken on it.

livSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

The proud beast returned the favor with a hundred generations and more
of silence and proximity. Who decided that day to abolish the death penalty
intended for the sacrificial species? Who thought to defer the blood,
indefinitely?
Who today will have the gentle thought of everywhere deferring the
blood of mankind? Who desires immortality? Who searches for it, who
leaves home, throwing everything into the fire, including his sandals,
knowledge and science, in order to try to discover it? The inventor without
hope?
Did the great wave of discoveries beyond death stop in Greece the day
of the miracle? We go around saying that our Greek ancestors invented
our geometry, our arithmetic calculation, and our rigors but never that
they invented an immortality. Yet they discovered, fashioned, and shaped
it; literally, they calculated and demonstrated it. Everywhere the path of
mathematicity was opened this path was never again lacking. Either it isnt
discovered, or it isnt lost. Its always there. This number, this triangle, the
reductio ad absurdum, rigorously invariant from the dawn of Thales or first
light of Anaximander, grew prodigiously in identity, as did the form, the
being, the rectitude, the presence, the bushing-out of cultivated plants, of
tamed animals or the crazy proliferation of codes.
The Greek miracle marks less a beginning than the moment when
a powerful, inventive, incredibly intelligent knowledge disappears, a
setting sun, in the Mediterranean flood. We no longer have anything
but monuments of it. Breeding, sowing, languages and their signs, pure
reasoning.

Why dont we invent long traditions any more? Why dont we incite
anything any more except revolutions that scarcely last a generation? Why
dont we discover any more this new knowledge that crosses the percolation
threshold of time? What then have we lost to let ourselves go with history,
that myth of death, without remembering the life that wells up, below?

Awakening
I am no longer dreaming, perhaps I havent dreamed. Here we are,
awakened masters of an incredible science, proud and barbarous possessors
of an intense power, and youre telling me about vegetables and cattle! Our
knowledge governs the global planet and global humanity and will soon
no longer leave any place outside of reason. We can cultivate deserts,
knock over rocks on the moon, translate signals from back-worlds, break
atoms, cure a thousand diseases, read the human genome and predict our

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYlv

descendants; therefore we too have also reinvented the question of immor-
tality: we direct the things and mankind, in their sum; we hold in our
hands, universally, existence and survival.
We are now accountable for a continuation whose lengthening formerly
seemed to us to be given, as though naturally, therefore global deciders
of death or of the perpetuation of the planet and all of the species, ours
among them.
We know and control their conditions. What never-ending flow will
shoot out from our decisions?

Balance sheet
This has only happened five or six times. Those who invented agriculture
and livestock breeding inaugurated a set of relations to the land and
life, sources of a multi-millennial river that the hominids, the flora and
the fauna themselves, never forgot, an lan vital thats indifferent to
history or better, dictates its law to it. Likewise, we dont remember how
language appeared among us formerly mute animals; on the other hand we
remember having invented writing and notice that the groups that adopted
it never managed to abandon it. So here are at least four inventions, prehis-
toric in the sense that they dont depend on history and on which, on the
contrary, history depends.
Not only does their power transcend the flow and erosion of time, it also
allows them to spread in a lightning-fast way in space, so as to attainor
almostthe universal.
From the moment someone spoke, a short-circuit was installed that went
around the world like lightning. Or this short-circuit happened obviously
if everyone spoke at the same time. If certain discoveries dont pass a year,
they likewise dont cross the smallest distance; but immortal discoveries
cross space, quickly sown everywhere with tumuli and dolmens.
These four foundations of immortality, universal foundationsdeath,
where is your victory?seem to laugh at history and philosophy, as
higher and stronger, as lower and deeper, as more irrepressible than them,
supposedly perennial, but transient, fleeting, rare, precarious.

The true immortality

Now, among these origins and their strange and terrible secrets, there is
one thats more mysterious if possible and that concerns us even more
precisely: that of monotheism. If the one God exists, eternal, it revealed
itself: where, how and when, under what circumstances? And if it doesnt

lviSYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY

exist we conceived it, and the same questions begin again without any
notable change.
This eternity indeed had to begin.

At the same time, less than a millennium before our era, and in about the
same places, amid the fertile crescent, it happened that we had the only
two thoughts that are really worth much: the preceding one, of God, and
this one: geometry.
Monotheism and the rigorous sciences, these two transcendent
universals, characterize our difference and condition its history.
Hence the search for these two origins, universal with regard to content,
but singular since on the first day it seems that they appeared in precise
places and that, since then, an unforgettable path has been marked out,
independent of us, in front of us. An immortal path?

Upstream then from one of these two sources, historic and at least roughly
datable, the little flows that percolated in an immense field of previous
origins must be followed: here they are.

SYNTHESIS: THE SCIENCE OF HISTORYlvii

lviii
PART ONE

CUSTOMS AND
LAWS
2
1 FIRST IN HISTORY:
ANAXIMANDER

Spaces without exclusion: Juridical

origins
In his commentary On Aristotles Physics 1.2, 184b15, Simplicius cites
Anaximander, according to Theophrastus, Opinions of the Physicists, fr. 2.

Anaximander said that the principlethat is to say, the elementof

beings is infinite and that its neither water nor any other of those that
are said to be the elements, but a certain other infinite nature, from which
all the heavens and the worlds in them are born: but that from which there
is, for the beings, generation is also how destruction takes place, according
to what must be; for they render justice and redress to one another for their
mutual injustice, according to the summons of Time, as he says in rather
poetic terms.

From justice to the earth

Local elements
Anaximanders contemporary, Thales claimed that water was the element,
origin or one principle of all things: from it, he wrote, everything was born,
is born or will be born.
The British Museum preserves a tablet from Babylon, dating from the
third millennium, on which what we would call a map appears under a
text engraved in cuneiform characters. But the doxography claims that
Anaximander was the first to have the audacity to inscribe the inhabited
Earth in such a diagram.
These two original maps are separated by the local and the global: the
one exalts the preponderant excellence of its own country by putting its
city and river, the Euphrates, in the central place, whereas the other models
the world in its whole, at least what the experts of the day knew about it.
Political, ethnocentric, promotional, the Babylonian drawing, whereas the
Greek map already virtually aims at the universe.
In common, the two representations show the round and annular shape
of the immense ocean that surrounds the globe. What Thales proclaims
about genesis in time, the two maps precisely schematize in space: at the
furthest boundaries water dominates.
But while the water from the Ocean bathes the earth all around, it reigns
as well in the middle of the inhabited earth, here is the Mediterranean; the
water of the rivers sometimes flows from one to the other, like the Nile,
whose source is fed from the aquatic ring and flows into the central lake.
Around, in the center and across as in the beginning and now, is water,
from which all things unitarily, but in their diversity, originate.
Space flows like time.

4GEOMETRY
Against Thales, Ionian physics subsequently claimed with Anaximenes
that air was at the origin; Heraclitus later opted for fire. Others, like
Empedocles, even later still, counted the four elementsair, fire, earth and
waterto be roots.
For all these theories, the principle reduces to something concrete and
local, as wide as you wish, drop, bubble, torch, or clod.

Generalization of the conflicts

Thus, if the origin is found to be in water, all things come from it and no
doubt return to it, so that the entire Earth, a fragile island encircled by the
oceanic ring, surrounded by it or plunged into it, torrential, streaming,
overflowing, awaits, in suspense, a shipwreck destiny.
On Anaximanders map, the Danube and the Guadalquivir invade the
bathed oikoumene, just like the Black and the Caspian Seas, the Azov Sea
and the Red Sea, the Tigris and the Persian GulfIm translating into
todays terms; it looks as though the Earth-island, in the process of being
born from the waters, is going to disappear at the same time beneath its
waves. Floods, inundations, underminings by erosion, debacle. For a thing
thats different to remain after having freed itself from it, the water would
have to withdraw in some way.
What force will make it retreat?
If the principle is fire, likewise the world risks quickly perishing in or
through the flames, even before being born or immediately after. Who has
seen a pyre or an inferno go out by itself save from the death of all the fuel
through the fire itself?

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER5

 Earth, water, and air would have, together or alone, the force to blow
out, drown or smother this torch-world.

Too wet, the first Earth; the second one too incandescent, both of them in
danger of either flood or torch, and rapidly uninhabitable through suffering
this irresistible injustice by which one element dominates, perseveres and
grows. Can the empire of water or of fire render redress to the air for
example or to the earth itself for their respective impudence or injustice?
Nothing new can appear under the brilliance of a single element, solar,
supposedly universal, but invading the expanse with its sole singularity.
Whence the composition, the bouquet, the concert, the inextinguishable
war, the frenzied dialectic or the natural contract of the four elementsair,
fire, earth, watertogether in Empedocles: despotic empire, union, accord,
federation, or internecine struggles? The physicist of Agrigentum foresaw,
precisely, the reciprocal or mixed laws of Hatred and Friendship, alliance
or vengeance, that answer this dramatic question.

The apeiron, in sum

Let all things under the heavens and in the multiple worlds in them
therefore render justice and redress for their mutual imperialism, and the
origin or the principle is immediately rectified, equitable.
For everyone understands that water must not dominate, under pain
of the world becoming diluted beneath the soft injustice of the clay of the
quagmires, and that fire must not spread, under the burning risk that all
things would explode under the scarlet iniquity of the torches; whether
through drowning or big bang, in both cases annihilation occurs, rapid,
immediate, lightning-fast. The world would likewise perish amid a war
declared by the four elements, and so quickly that time itself would
disappear, shortened down to nullity.
From water, only the aquatic ensues; from fire only blazes are lit
from the four material bodies, only the material can occur in every
case identity, redundancy, the dismal repetition of the same element cause
beings to lose plurality, just as temporality is erased from genesis.
Nothing new, neither living thing nor language, chances appearing any
longer.

Through its being, the being placed there prohibits the unexpected,
through the very force that causes it to occupy its own locality, exclusive.
Its reason for being, which causes it to be, blocks every other being in order
to appear in the there.

6GEOMETRY
 Thus the philosophy of being-there cares about violent occupation
and expulsion so as to spread injustice and vengeance.1 Its exasperated
abstraction conceals, in order to repeat it, the ancient nocturnal myth of the
golden bough in which an anxious shadow, armed with a saber in the foliage
of a tree, takes his place by killing and only gives it up to his murderer. The
woodpaths go toward this funerary crypt, a sinister Place de Grve.

This place, this there, this locality, invaded or defended, requires a definition
in order to be; there is no territory without borders, without edges there
is no there: islands terminated by water bathing its coastlines; a lake or
aqueous place fluctuating within the enclosureoften porousof its
banks; a sea or ocean, waves surrounded by the fractal cut of their shores; a
pyre or inferno, knots of flames vibrating through the floating waves of air;
air turbulence, fuzzy sets disturbing the margins of the neighboring fluids.

Under pain of injustice, the principle then must not know any border:
neither being nor there.
So in a plea for justice, Anaximander erases the edges of the place where
the woodpaths lead. Here the indefinite or the infinite is opened, so free and
fertile that every finite and definite comes from it.
From Anaximanders statement about justice and vengeance, his theory
of the origin and the principle can be deduced. Can every principle be
deduced from prosecution, conviction and punishment?2
Indefinite, the spirit hovers over the waters.

Local and generalization, again

That for space and this in time: when fire transforms the solid-earth into
liquid-water and this latter into fluid-air, or when conversely the absence of
heat and the cold cause them to return backwards along the same cycle of
evaporation and condensation, with each perceptible change an interme-
diate state arrives in which the substrate, limitless, can be said to be either
gaseous or liquid, water or air, one or the other, indifferently or indefinitely,
that is to say, each of the principles chosen by Thales or by Anaximenes
with a profoundness thats still unparalleled.
Between these fundamental and first states to which the Ionian compa-
triots both rightly reduced the beings of the universe, no one in the course
of such an experience can detect any border.
Once again, here is the apeiron and the origin of physics. Is it already
the space of phases or the first concept of the philosophy of mixture? Or
the impossibility of designating, in all justice, the first or the one that wins?

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER7

The apeiron, in sum
What in no case can this infinite, negatively expressed, be? Neither water,
nor air, nor fire, nor earth, nor some element of matter: therefore neither
principle nor material. No one can see it nor smell it, touch it nor hear it;
no sense allows us to apprehend it.
Everything happens almost as though it were not. In any case, it isnt
there; for if this were the case, it would be surrounded by a definition, edge
or border. Neither there nor elsewhere, therefore absent; consequently
present everywhere, since boundless.
This principle without borders, infinite, therefore designates not only
an immense and boundless space or time, quantitatively or metrically
speaking, but above all an open set without border, local and global,
indefinite, qualitatively or topologically unfurled, without fold, recess
or closure, the two first conditions or the two primordial baths of
geometric thought: here are the space-times of immersion at the origin
of mathematics.3

Immaterial, absent, imperceptible and qua intermediate explaining the

change even before the immense spaceimmersion of the metricor
the infinite time, before the topological open set, here first of all is the
abstract.

In eliminating water, Anaximander has just changed to a different physics

rather than leaving it, it seems, and without our being able to say that he
enters metaphysics since this latter only occurs too late: does philosophy
as such occur?
What knowledge does he encounter? A pre-geometry, or what we would
have later named a pre-topology, but above all, before them, abstraction as
such.
What is always falsifiable through the integral of negations?
Abstraction. It engenders physics. Anaximander therefore forever marks
the explanation of the world with the most formal of thoughts possible:
mathematics.
The conditions for all abstract knowledge in general have just appeared
even before the topology of open sets or the geometry of pure and
boundless space is born, as well as a possible foundation for physics.

Abstract, is mathematics born from the demand for justice? An equation

says a contract of equity.
Here justice, although human, is decided in physical reality.

8GEOMETRY
From the campus to the tribunal
Local elements
Let water win out or fire me or you or some empire a given idea or
enterprise any being of this world and the singular winner paints
space with its color, and time immediately disappears in the stubbornness
or coagulation of redundancy. A particular there wins and maintains itself;
the being-there perpetuates its grip. By spreading, the same case or thing
vitrifies space and freezes duration.
So the thing is first this case: the reason for the accusation that attacks
and conquers or for the excuse backing the defense and the counter-attack.4
Prosecution and the law therefore precede the physical object, described
by the accusative. Has it been remarked with what rigor the grammatical
objectthe complement of our actions in general and of transitive verbs
is designated by a case whose name preciselyor unjustlyaccuses?5 Can it
be admitted more clearly that the thing, objective, takes its origin from the
case, violently interrogated? Before phenomenology can say that the object
appears, grammar made it appear in court, therefore traces back to law.
From the principle, abstract or drawn by Anaximander from outside the
material elements, we must therefore now trace back to the saying about
justice and vengeance, martial violence or the contract that calms it for a
moment.

Generalization of the conflicts

Time can only occur if the repetition of the identical stops. Freed from the
victorious and global extension of some being-there, formerly local, genesis
itself and disappearance, evolution, spring and its flower of youth, autumn
and the serene light of great age, birth, fructification, and destructive agony
can unfurl their productions.
But the reign of the same must be suspended: either the others then
work together toward orchestral mixture, or the other takes the place,
there, and exclusion begins or war; vengeance will no longer cease.
After Bergson, and like him, Heidegger described in the topological
terms of open or closed locality what Hegel affirmed in the dynamic
schemas of the other and the same, the latter occupying the inside of the
place, the former remaining outside its boundary. As a result, these modern
philosophies together repeat the obsessions of the Hellenic polytheism
from which Anaximander, Thales, and all the Ionian physicists extricated
themselves.

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER9

 For these paganisms, being-there has to be put to death, the being-there
that is there because it murdered the one whose place it took: time and
history ensue from the blood of sacrifices. On the top of their pyramids
the Aztecs, it is said, slit the throats of virgins so that the sun would rise;
plunged in the night, like the legendary Europeans fascinated by the
shadow with the golden bough, they believed, like them, that no dawn
would occur without this abominable crime. Killing opens up succession.
The necessity of the continuation of time justifies not only death as such,
but murders said to be legal as well. Issuing from this tear thats as close
as possible to being-there, time only advances through the work of the
negative: these regressive atrocities are said in such gallantly abstract terms!
These philosophies legitimate putting to death.

The apeiron, in sum

At the dawn of the era, new no doubt through its decision, Anaximander
speaks of that universal injustice, of the eternal return of vengeance and
its always dismal consequences. Does every being whatsoever of the world
give war or peace among themselves over this point of similar status? Do
they perpetuate the prosecution, or will they stop it? Do they retain the
sacrifices whose ritual permits enchaining traditional time to itself, or will
they decide to invent a new duration?
Everything, he says, stems from the summons of time: but before which
tribunal? Not only does a new time occur through justice, but this time
itself summons.
For us his successors, Anaximander, at the Greek dawn, inaugurates the
era from which our history begins. But no one can think the origin without
producing it and cannot do this without beginning a new duration. Which?
The first person to inaugurate a judicial session, the one called the
praetor, at the opening of the cases and things, announced in the language
of ancient Roman law stated in archaic Latin the three primordial verbs
of justice: do, dico, addico, I give, I say, I summon, the first performative
acts or statements of exchange, law, language, and philosophy. Economic
animals that we are, talkative and united by the judicial and social contract,
whatever language we may speak, are we aware of more fundamental
actions than those designated by these tria verba?
At the dawn of our era, the first written word says, in the Greek language,
or rather writes, with the first letters of the first alphabetic code discovered
at the same time in the same places, the verbs to say and to give as
well as the substantive summons. Without or beneath the appearances of
the objects of exchange, through or without the intermediary of that coin

10GEOMETRY
discovered precisely in the same places at the same time, certain beings give
or render justice and redress to one another for their reciprocal injustice.
Stemming from the infinite, like these beings, time, in which they are
immersed, summons before the tribunal where these sentences are rendered.
Thus says Anaximander, the proto-praetor, in terms that the doxogra-
phers, foolish but truthful without having wanted to be, call poetic, that is
to say, productive or even better, performative: on balance founding law,
whose origin we find here.6

Local and individual, again

Do we understand this mans effort toward the infinite, himself a being and
temporal, whose name designates, quite precisely, the title king [anax] in a
closed precinct [mandra], potentate of a site enclosed with boundaries and
borders, in other words, royal being-there?
Can we conceive a more beautiful, new, clemency than that of a thought
which abandons its own law (founded on its own strength) and which, in
opening its despotic boundaries, proclaims itself son, product, engendered
by the boundless apeiron and immersed in a time that summons to justice
in its stead? Can we finally imagine a local power that imposes restraint
upon itself, a being that no longer perseveres in its being, or someone who
abandons everything? Can we then understand that he opens a time since
he renounces the bleak repetition of the force of the self?
Do science, thought, civilization and history begin from the stepping
down, the withdrawal, the renunciation, the detachment of a king? So the
saying only holds here by a letter: do, dico, abdico, I give, I say, I abdicate. I
give: I say that I abdicate; I abdicate: I say that I give everything.
Because he is named the being-there par excellence and thinks the
converse of his title and name, Anaximander, anonymous, melts into the
infinity of things, space and time: since time alone shows an order, he
leaves it to say, do, render and give, to summon in his stead.
Magistrate, judge or praetor: must we name Anaximander in this way,
with a now common title? Or rather, immediately after the renunciation,
with time itself, inaugural in its perpetual present, and which, of itself,
gives, says and summons to justice?
This is the origin, since time itself starts from this renunciation by
Anaximander. And of course have we since then, heedlessly and without
always understanding them, repeated any other words than: I say, I give,
I summon?
Besides speaking like this, do we authentically do anything else? This is
the origin of history.

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER11

Local, again
Dico, I talk; my voice spreads through the surrounding air by impudently
occupying a volume thats larger than that of my organism, which is little;
thus the nightingale defends with music a niche that a dog holds by means
of its urine; should the others around me, offended, deafened, stay silent,
they will nevertheless have to answer me someday, and I in turn will
have to keep quiet for a just equilibrium of sounds and meaning to occur
through dialogue or contract.
I know, I hold the others in subjection to keep them away from
expertise; the division of science immediately creates this injustice.
Ignorant, my older brother, are you going to teach me your wisdom,
which I am strangely lacking? So when will those who think they know
nothing teach what they know to the very ones who think they know and
delude those around them into believing it through an unjust and old
impudence?
Do, I give; poor, the others no doubt receive: proud, the arrogant
euergetes sprinkles his niche again with his gilded excrement. Must the
poverty-stricken repay in turn, and the wealthy receive someday this
povertys inestimable goods for a justice to occur in the reciprocal exchange
of the economy? When will the poor decide to strike this not rare currency
they would have in abundance?
The violent time of language and silence, of movable goods and their
arbitrary rarity, of knowledge or inexpertise, that is to say, the entire
collective human history therefore summons us all to justice.
To morality?

Generalization
Do. Through finance, monopoly, or drugs, here a force rises thats second
to none, quickly exclusive.
Dico. Because he writes, speaks over the waves or appears in talkative
and mobile images on the television, a given individual holds an incon-
gruous space without any reasonable relation to his person; either:
there is only one Bible, one science, that have the force of their law, or
lastly: the concentration, the capitalization, the editorial monopoly of
the encyclopedia of knowledge condemns the inexpert to poverty and
hunger.
Addico. The West keeps its speech in colloquia or spreads it over the
waves, holds money in its banks or makes it run, volatile, along its own
networks, possesses knowledge in its laboratories and reserves for itself the

12GEOMETRY
right to only teach it to those among them who already know, safeguards
the law of its courts by force of arms: its cause is therefore good, just, noble,
democratic, and holy. It can therefore kill with impunity.
Thus goes not only its will, exclusive and without restraint, to power, not
only its desire to possess without restraint and without equal, but also its
unique power to know and to say.

The apeiron, in sum

Everyone speaks: hubbub, chaos, background noise? Dialectic? Social
contract? This remains undecidable, for unpredictably, without our being
able to say or foresee it, we pass from a given state to some other, without
exclusion, from conflicts to armistices, from peace to crises. Since only time
decides, the fact that it alone summons to justice founds the history we live
and the one that we know.
Have we lived, since Anaximander, history as the indefinite, innumerable
sum of reparations?
We have long known the demand of distributive justice, division
without exclusion, equilibrium of goods and gifts.
Let everyone, without exclusion, be able to attain knowledge and here is,
via justice and redress, the social contract of mutual education.
Let lastly all the beings of the world obtain the right of expression,
without exclusion, and here is the natural contract, inconceivable up until
yesterday morning.
Here we have returned to the age of Anaximander since were conceiving
a law for all the beings of the world, without exclusion, for we are no longer
separating what he melted together with a single gesture and which our
niggling weaknesses separated later, from Aristotle to our schools. The
apeiron opens the spaces and times of every contract.
Thus it founds law.

In sum: for the physical phases, the geometrical abstract, the judicial peace
or political democracy, all three together without distinction, the apeiron
must be imagined as a mixed body, before the excluded third.
Because without exclusion can translate it at a stroke, rigorously for
knowledge, justly for the law, and with goodness for morality.

In unfolding Anaximanders saying in this way, the first two moments of

my explication thus distinguish what he didnt distinguish, namely the
single foundation, dense and compact, without exclusion, of science and of
law, at the beginning of the time of our history.

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER13

 That very thing which attains this unitary foundation, from which the
foundation of geometry will bifurcate, must be called philosophy.
Has there existed since then in the West a single philosopher who didnt
try to find the common point from which he could think together two laws
[lois] and two truths: of the sciences and of law [droit]?7

The market place

Local elements
Beneath the same Ionian lights, not far from Miletus, Anaximanders
city, almost simultaneously, according to what Herodotus tells us, in the
kingdoms of Lydia and Phrygia, along the river Pactolus, whose sands
carry gold, during the legendary reigns of Midas or the shepherd Gyges,
with the name of the earth, curious ovoid coins began to circulate instead
of the ingots used in Babylon and Egypt, at first no doubt to compensate
crimes and theftsso that the ones and the others may render justice and
redress for their mutual injusticebut little by little, instead of barter, as a
means of payment: from what we know, wrote the historian, the Lydians
were the first to strike and use gold and silver coins in order to devote
themselves to retail.8
Payment is deduced from redress, therefore these exchanges are deduced
from injustice.
We dont know how to verify if Herodotuss affirmation is worthy of
our trust, or if, more ancient in China by half a millennium, currency
came from there via the Silk Road; a few legends in any caseincluding
the one told by Plato of the ring that makes invisible, just like that hand
whose absent presence Adam Smith claimed directs the market economy
behind the scenes, or the legend of the king who received from the gods
the unlucky fortune of changing everything he touched into goldrefer to
this authentic or false origin; but we can be led to believe it to be true by a
reason of homogeneity.
Should during a given epoch the non-syllabic alphabet with vowel
notation, a certain abstract science, the objective physics of the things of
the world, a reflection concerned with the foundation of law, an agnos-
ticism critical enough to discover a certain monotheism, lastly philosophy
appear at the same time, and we will immediately recognize one of those
rare moments in history, like the very one we are living in, in which the
restructurings concern the entire horizon of the thinkable and experience.
Far from us recognizing a remarkable and isolated invention in this, every-
thing transforms, as though the world in its whole were veering.

14GEOMETRY
 Along the Ionian coast, where geometry, writing and metallurgy
were born, such as we still practice them today, everything that has made
us live and think up to last week began almost at the same time: the
algebraic element of the general equivalent, money thus embarked on
the new history of this new world, bearing another but similar name for
equilibrium or equity, even deducible from this latter.

So certain beings of this world began to give to one another and to

account for themselves or render redress for their mutual debts. Hermes
follows from Mars. Identical to each other, abstract twice over, through
arithmetical counting and this new equivalence which resembled a justice,
these first coins, stamped, were melted it seems to the fineness of 4/5 pure
gold and 1/5 silver, an alloy whose color recalled yellow amber enough for
its contemporaries to call it electron.
Apart from the shade, what mysterious relation did this name maintain
with the word (elector) that for Empedocles designates fire and its
brightness? Succeeding violence and the contracts of law, did the new
social bond suddenly appear, as lightning-fast as Heraclituss principle, and
like it, constructive and destructive, in sum responsible for the rhythm
and tempo of the history it engendered or dismantled? We are indeed
comparing the extinguishment of a debt to that of a fire! Consequently, the
due date summoned to justice.
We are surprised above all at the fact that circulation from the origin
abandoned pure gold or silver coins. Mixture therefore imposed itself from
the first and consequently the apeiron or absence of all boundary between
the exclusive precious elements.
Greek language and philosophy recall this Anaximandrian concept
as soon as they meditate on the difference between mixis, a discrete
mixture of grains of rice lost among the grains of wheat, with solid
proximities and definite edges, and krasis, the continuous dilution of
wine and water, an innermost and fluid penetration, as though without
borders.
For what reason did an alloy appear to be necessary?

Generalization of the conflicts

Florins from Florence, bezants from Byzantium, ducats struck by the
reigning doge in Venice, all the way to the recent Napoleons, said gold
coins that circulated once and formerly also only contained precious metal
in the state of alloy, whose precise fineness the issuer, like a good author,
guaranteed with his seal, face, or signature.

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER15

 Yet it happens that their edge is adorned with cuts or serrations in close
vertical ranks to prevent users from trimming their corners or clipping
them. For some person receiving a given price at the end of a transaction
could scrape off a corner of the coin and offer it again for the same value,
keeping in his possession that minute part whose lightness, added to a
thousand similar erosions, assured him, by a kind of interest, a greedy
revenue from theft. Thus currency melted from hand to hand: the detailed
drawing stabilized it. The striking, notching, mark, or imprint, said to
be symbolic, representative or signing, no doubt play all these abstract
functions, akin to writing and preceding printing, but above all materially
prevent all plundering by sordid clipping: the engraved sign guarantees the
invariance of the sign-bearing thing and protects its integrity neither more
nor less than a kind of locked cover.
What would happen if, accessible, the gold in the mobile coin gave
itself to all comers? The value would vanish at the same time as the coins
material. What use then does alloy have? Once again, to protect. Losing
one body in another or the latter in the former, the rare in the common
and reciprocally. Although present, public, exhibited, in everyones hands,
the precious, irreversibly hidden, remains inaccessible to theft. If you pay
in florins or Napoleons, you render gold lost in a mixture: you give apeiron;
the recipient holds the desired metal but wont quite possess it: you both
handle the box without knowing how to or being able to open its lock.
Circulation can therefore speed up as soon as possession goes absent a bit.
Percolation, once again: because of this obstacle, money didnt flow; it
flows now.

Visible, invisible; absent, present; locked away, conspicuous, covered

beneath the indefinite; you will never deduct the smallest bit from this
gold without it being accompanied by this base metal. Has a more effective
putting in secret ever been found? However volatile its course may be, the
coin becomes the most stable of safes.
In comparison, the notion of the black box, however tightly its cover
may lock, seems naive and silly, because a container hides and defends a
content poorly as soon as the one is separated from the other.
The distinction already does half the work of opening up, and the desig-
nation on the part of the box itself of the precise place where the treasure
lies, there, almost finishes all the rest. Everything closed opens at a short
due date, and light quickly shines in an obscure recess.
The Latin origin of the term secret describes, without meaning to,
the naivete of the one who hides by setting apart, separating, subtracting,
removing the thing they thought put in a safe place in this way, but

16GEOMETRY
whichwhether exhibited or concealed, it doesnt matterby their very
gesture they designate as a pile of money to be stolen. The mixture or alloy
guards fortunes better, without secrets, boxes or darkness.
Lastly justice: neither vengeance nor violence will find their victim any
more. Tell Cain to hide no more: rather become mixed!

The apeiron, in sum

When the surrounding compost becomes impregnated with my body in
liquefaction, and conversely, my flesh with earth, the prowlers, bandits, or
scholars will not be able to discover my mummy in its sarcophagus.
The world, the things, men, the bodies of all types abound in alloys,
which defend themselves in this way from the hard thoughts, pure and
distinct, of analytic tactics and strategies.9
The soul unites with the body the way the gold in the louis does with
the less precious metals and get lost in each other down to the most
minuscule part; just as matter does in life, beauty in women or reason with
the universe. I know not what meaning vanishes into sensation, which gets
lost in turn, hard or soft, across meaning: appearance, mixed, sparkles with
gold louis, and phenomenology should only talk about mixture, therefore
about apeiron.
Brilliant to the eyes, dazzling, neighboring secrets remain highly
inaccessible, plunged boundless into the minuscule particles that contain
them without containing them.

As a general rule, the cunning of thieves wins out over the intelligence
of the police. Formerly effective, a first defense consisted in constantly
changing place. This is what the course of currency did at first, like Cain.
Here then the space of circulation opens twice since the apeiron erases
the bounds between the things of barter through the invention of the
general equivalent, hence its rapidity, then between the precious and base
metals, through alloys melted into coins, hence its stability. Here is the
origin of the economy, summing up the origins of alloys and currency.
Mixed or boundless, a space of violence, of law and of morality, a space
of phases, of metamorphoses, of the site and of the metric, of the abstract,
of contracts and of history, the apeiron becomes a space of circulation: it
thus crosses the percolation threshold.

Before chemistry became the scientific art of mixtures, the alloys of bodies
pure among themselvesgiving to one another justice and redress for their
mutual injusticeit was expressed in the incomprehensible language, for

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER17

those days as for today, of alchemy, whose secrets no doubt reside as well
in alliances of words and of meanings melted together. Alchemy made an
assessment of the techniques of forgery and the means to guard against it.
The one who would therefore invent the philosophers stone would be the one
who knows how to draw fine gold from these inextricable mixtures or change
everything he touches into gold, after the kingly mode of the legendary
Midas of those days. The one who gives himself the title of philosopher
must have found this holy stone when he announces distinction and purity,
analysis and separation: we ought to call him a triumphant alchemist.
The ordinary men that we have become, at least since Anaximander,
exchange among themselves, through a concern for justice, coins, and
words whose meaning shines forth and hides, mixed.

Summa pre-theologica
Alloyed with everything and everyone, a God lost in the universe, lost
amid the things and the men, humbly mixed with the earth of the animals,
plants, and stars when you created them, or with the flesh of the woman
when you were, in return, born from her virginal beauty, an infinite God
hidden but endlessly present in every tiny particle of idea or atom, evident,
inaccessible, a God whose Son our relations glorify or kill and whose Spirit
our aspirations lighten or fell, incarnated in the innermost part of myself
down to the hollows of my bones and to the last echo of my cried-out
words, I have lost you, my alloyed ally, even though you pour, like wine
into the absent springs of the ocean, youth into my life and your wisdom
into mine, love and intelligence by the winds, a rare and gentle goodness
in the mass of evil mixed like you with the world and with me; I have lost
you, Im lost in you, my sole secret, oh, fineness of being.

Templum
Local element
Repetition: all the places are always already taken; everyone comes too
late. To seize the held places, certain people then wage war, fight to acquire
them, kill to keep them, soon die, must at their death abandon them to
their murderers, and the vendetta begins again from generation to gener-
ation. Here is the old time from before Anaximander.
Every delimited terrain boils down to a fortified place: the there
produces the unjust and useless war waged by the being-there, a soldier or

18GEOMETRY
better, a lieu-tenant, tethered to the chain of vengeances and redresses, in
order to remain in place.10

Generalization of the conflicts

Dont look for a place; invent a new one. Leave the there, delimited by
its living hedge or its machicolations: the plot of land, the country inside
borders, the hearth of warmth and light, the island surrounded by water;
discover the entirely new. To abstract himself from the combats being-
there obligates him to, the finder innovates, leaves the world and discovers,
in this original elsewhere, an infinite space, precisely boundless, exactly
immaterial, spiritual: geometric?
Justice and peace spread across the infinite overabundance of the
indeterminable places of this prior space; its indefinite opening gives
generation to being by producing the infinite profusion and equivalence of
places. By it, with it and in it, I live appeased or think without weighing, in
the equanimity of conciliation and concord.
A fertile and unengendered love, the apeiron, infinite space and time,
ceaselessly engenders the sky and the earth, or better, the different skies
and the innumerable worlds, as well as all the living beings: it produces
the beings Anaximander speaks of, without distinction of status, inert or
living, things or cases, men or objects, technological or natural, hardware
or software, mystic or institutional, in the dense and compact ball of
beings, lacking all classes. We hold a thousand and one different discourses
on the subject of this rigorous dispersion, whereas at the Greek dawn as
during the age of the Natural Contract a single language speaks of every-
thing, therefore of us, the elements, violence, flowers and the gods, too.

Again, what should we call that certain other infinite nature, from which all
the heavens and the worlds in them are born if not the divine from which
the universe comes? Aristotle was the first to name it thus, not with the
proper name of the one God nor with the common name of a god from the
Pantheon, but with a substantivized adjective.
Indeed, Anaximander doesnt propose one of the individual figures
of polytheism for the non-definite apeiron, for such an individuality isnt
conceived as boundless: Zeuss power limits Poseidons; Athena is opposed
to Aphrodites schemes; he doesnt attain the God of monotheism either,
insofar as this latter remains a Person, but he is headed toward it, as
Xenophanes, the founder of the Eleatic school did.
Beyond individual boundaries, Anaximander therefore generalizes
the divine impersonally, spread everywhere without border, ubiquitous,

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER19

eternal, unengendered, generative space, time, power Aristotle
understood: matter; I think I understand: primitive chaos, universal noise,
fundamental background noise essentially physical and intuitable like
what fills the universe and which we perceive aesthetically, in both senses
of this adverb. Aetius and Cicero claimed Anaximander had and said this
last perception since they respectively write that the infinite heavens and
the innumerable worlds, in so far as they appear and disappear, were to his
eyes the way they sometimes are to ours, gods.
The infinite universe bears witness to the divine; it shines with it
or sings it through the epiphany, bright or nocturnal, of the boundless
firmament as well as through the changing beauty, spring-like or winter-
like, productive or destructive, of the world: various definite profiles of the
divine infinity.

We read in many places that the Pre-Socratic philosophers invented

physics because they abandoned religion. Surely not, at least because
they wanted to ignore distinctions, in particular the one between science
and religion. And nevertheless yes, since they most often criticized the
individual persons represented by the Greek or Ionian pantheon, Zeus,
Poseidon, Aphrodite, or Athena, so as to define, sometimes, a divine thats
coextensive with the infinite space of the heavens and worlds.
They have to be called Physicists because they abandoned the civil
religion, whose insistency deified the citys eponym, the royal function or
the legislators role, the valiant warrior or the fertile woman, because they
disdained what the social projects into the religious, whereas they kept or
invented a global religious, that divine thats immanent to the universe.
Universal?
Did they invent the hard sciences through abandoning a polytheism of
difference, the archaic equivalent of our social sciences?

Local elements, again

Among the thousand distinctions that our rational strength and philo-
sophical languor impose upon us, here are those whose divisions cause the
religious to war against each other, like every genus or species.
In the water Poseidon reigns, assisted by Amphitrite and forty-nine
Nereids, while Zeus governs the Olympian heights wielding lightning
bolt and fire, the terrible thunder, and subjugating the volcanoes. Each
divinity takes a department; the war that the elements were engaged in
earlier is translated into figures by a certain physicalist polytheism. The
conflicts between the gods and their mean-spirited, harassing cohabitation

20GEOMETRY
summarize everything that was said about water and earth, the flood and
the torches, the elements of matter, the geographical there and its multi-
colored maps.
The pantheon summarizes the first physical sciences: you might think
that a Thales of water was announcing or repeating Neptune and that the
Zeus of fire was supporting Heraclitus.

On the Acropolis, Athena reigns; on the island of Delos, Apollo dominates,

just like Aphrodite on Cythera or Cyprus, her islands Themis organizes
justice, Artemis hunting, Eros our loves
Each god takes a place: a patch of ground, village, acropolis, archipelago
or country then the familial, cultural, collective or judicial bonds of
persons, their affects and destiny
The pantheon summarizes the political maps, colored by conflicts and
contracts, plus all the social or human sciences, which will afterwards
describe less well bonds and passions, exchanges and acts, roles and
functions. Conversely the return of this polytheism is always tied to the
triumph of the social sciences.

The tribal or collective paganism which the sociologies or social sciences

will later make their object is distinguished fairly well then from the
physicalist paganism, immanent to the world or to nature, that the
historians of religion avidly liked at the end of the past century.
Did the Pre-Socratic philosophers abandon the first for a certain
secularity corresponding to the second? Hence far from abandoning
religion, might they have merely changed it so as to express it differently?

Not much time separates them from the appearance of the monotheisms,
less numerous than the polytheisms, and the first of which, personal,
was born in the fertile crescent from Abrahams posterity and the writer
prophets of Israel; for the second one, born with Christianity, the first
word, unwritten, of its credo will confess the pronoun ego, the new subject
of faith, itself entirely new; of the four more recent ones, which are defined
like the other two in relation to polytheism and almost against it, the
ones, Catholic or Orthodox, more anthropological, tend to absorb it,
domesticate it, naturalize it, include it, adapt or soften it, the others, Islamic
or Protestant, more logical, seek to exclude it with all their strength, and
sometimes risk by this very fact causing it to return.

The adjective, global and abstract, non-subjective, impersonal

monotheism of the apeiron integrates the divine and the universe:

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER21

because he abandons social and civic polytheism in order to adopt
a divine thats immanent to the world, Anaximander, among others,
invents Physics.
Moreover in mathematizing physics, didnt the renaissance West
reinvent it for a similar religious reason? For the entire seventeenth
century drifted toward the immanentism of Deus, sive natura. Only a
single and incarnated GodDeus, God, sive, that is to say, natura, that
very thing which is going to be born: Deus, sive natura, God, that is to say,
the Messiahcould snatch the laws of nature from the most powerful of
human legislators, who were formerly and still are divine by this very fact.
Spinoza leads to atheism through the intoxication of God and to physics
through religion. But, in those recent eras, our distinctions were already
making good progress.

Generalization of the conflicts

Before the beginning of this history, civil and social religion, tribal and
collective, ruled first. To Thales and Anaximenes, the first exploits: they
draw us away from Zeus and consorts to throw humanity face to face with
the object: here is water, there is air, while waiting for Heraclituss fire, freed
therefore from Zeuss thunder and Poseidons ludicrous trident.
Anaximander accomplished the second labor of Hercules in gener-
alizing these objects to the indefinite, in deifying this infinite: we can
henceforth conceive rational laws or a logos of the world.
The double doubt as regards polytheism, on the side of the social
sciences, first led by his peers on the physicalist side, then perfected by
him, in sum concerning all polytheism, that is to say, all distinction,
allows the All to appear, allows considering beings whatever they may
be, without exclusion, therefore allows arranging them under a single
law.
When it is rightly said that the Pre-Socratic philosophers talk about
beings without distinction, we should above all affirm that its not a
question here of an origin effect, but of a powerful work on the divisions
already there, and in particular on those of the polytheisms. In some
fashion Anaximander reveals God, certainly not the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, but the universal, without exclusion, global, unitary,
adjective, added-up divine of the philosophers and scientists.
Without this new monotheism whose one principle explains the world,
the various ideas remain idols: they will become so again, placed, as in
niches, in the intelligible heaven of Platos dialogues.

22GEOMETRY
The apeiron, in sum
Entirely different from a reign without division, after its victory in the
war of the giants, of Zeusan idol, fetish or totem of fire and of certain
villagesmonotheism doesnt generalize some triumph of injustice to time
and space, but conceives what precisely has neither place nor time.
Anaximanders apeiron is a pre-name of God.

At the same time in the Fertile Crescent, prophets and philosophers

were therefore destroying idols. We no longer understand either of them
because we adore false gods. Permanent and recurrent in the so-called
monotheist civilizations, polytheism, insistent today, again demands from
us the difficult duties of the sciences, of philosophy and of prophecy.
For in these days when the second millennium is drawing to a close,
a new universal is being announced, one adding up the refined local
distinctions of the sciences, the laws, the politics and the moralities, so
that it advances toward a religious we havent yet conceived of, whose
breadth bridges or will bridge all the others, whether unitary or dispersed,
collective, objective, subjective, that therefore binds or will bind the faith
of my innermost self, the infinite of the objects of the universe and the
collective or universal love of mankind, namely, the pertinent reasons of
the pathetic, of the aesthetic, of the physical, of technical action and of
charity. Like Anaximander, we never cease to live the origin of religion.
Its time suddenly flows in the present.

Hortus, pagus
Local elements
In the demanding paradise or garden of alpine pastures, when a wet
beginning of summer edges its way into the sharpness consecutive to a
glacial spring, at altitudes where old pink rhododendron rule by long
bushes and in the indistinct zones where the most respectful mountaineers
on the move leave the forest paths to soon reach the inert austerities of
snow and rock, he nonetheless crushes, under the green and perennial
grass, a hundred patches where blue columbine are composed and mixed
with anemones and purple gentians and periwinkles, mauve campanulas
and the almost black rampion bellflowers, saxifrages and quasi red azaleas,
yellow globeflowers, vanilla orchids, whitish astragali, Martagon lilies,
asters, and soldanellas yes, the bursting growth of the blossoming opens
and unfolds varieties that are chin, blended, tiger-striped, zebra-striped,

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER23

iridescent, many-colored, whose spangled polychromy exceeds the
exclusive resolution of the gaze.
Upon stopping, he loves to plunge his hands into this palette, hoping
to attain, by caresses and touch, the fragrant intoxication of multiplicities
whose tones astonish him: yellow, red, black, blue, and he itemizes the
fragrances: sweet, persistent, heady, musky, so as to in the end set about
naming: soldanella, aster, Martagon lily here he is returning to the dawn
of language, in the original Eden.

Generalization of the conflicts

There and farther on, nevertheless, on this south-facing slope, an immense
lake of blue suddenly reveals the exclusive solitude of the gentians, while
at the bend of the valley, the horizon reddens with the rhododendrons
monopoly. Here, the yellow expels and crosses out the black; there
the orchids eliminate the azalea: variety is erased; the homogeneous
prevails over the variegated. Logic, by wholes, is going to win out over the
hues.11
Supposing that the saxifrage is found alone or in the majority there, it
will invade the clearing this year, then the entire slope the next season, next
the big mountain, finally the Piedmont and the Queyras. How much time
would it take for it to occupy the entire planet? Quickly, even lightning-fast,
if the coalition of vanilla orchids and campanulas doesnt put any obstacles
in the way of its invasion. Hence the acute anxiety of every living thing:
what will happen then when the world is only rose, or when a single species
rules? Will we experience the end of time?
In other words, is time [temps] in league with the temperate multi-
plicity or alliance of things, with the well-tempered or spangled bouquet
of flowers? Does it moderate, temper, summon by some justice everyones
imperial pretensions?
Yes, every being tends toward being. If it is, it had the power to occur,
and if it remains, it retains the power of continuing. Every there, insofar as
it is there, swells: the local tends toward the global. Via engendering, every
life becomes generalized: this is the injustice of the humble columbine.
Who will limit its generic pride if not the identical arrogance of the astra-
galus or rather the mutuality of the flowers?
Therefore through its divisions and its flowerbeds, borders of boxwood
and classifications, every garden does justice. Conversely, the first injustice
in the garden paradise corresponded to the forward flight of a species
through the crack of the fall or of the swelling. From Eves womb, after this
sin, billions of imperious invaders of space and time flowed out, greedy,

24GEOMETRY
through their omni-presence, to take all the places and therefore to stop
the clock.
Amid that general mle of living things, might the valiant walker have
suddenly lost Eden?12

The apeiron, in sum

Does this orchestral meadow in which each colored corolla holds a singular
score, whose bursting polyphony lets us understand why mosaic claims the
same name as music, boil down to war, to the mutual exclusion of species
and individualities, to a strict algorithm of places taken and retaken, of
reciprocal vengeances?
Do the historiated varieties of flora draw geographical maps on the
slope identical to those that men of every culture in every era painted
on the terrestrial topography with the impure blood of their families and
enemies? During the flowering season, does the flowers reciprocal face to
face come from an irremediable war or from an armistice contract that
the species signed between each other? How do they give each other justice
and redress for their mutual injustice? By a peaceful symphony or by the
cacophonous fracas of the bouquets: paradise, hell? What happens in the
vicinity of the yellow and the blue, at the slender border that separates the
columbine from the azalea?

Who crosses, while respecting it, the border of the difference between the
alterities? Answer: love; apeiron, it doesnt know any hermetic boundary
and crosses them, like an angel.

Local, again: What the walker says

Here, where I am, in this taken place, I exist, but leave aside all claim to
hold this site and abandon it to the divine. I place myself in its hands.
There, in the innermost of the innermost, the divine subsists, insofar as it
is engendered, the only and incarnated son.
The infinite, the divine indefinitespace and time, powerengenders
and adds up all the beings of the world and each one of us, local, carnal,
singular, individual persons, all different: the smooth universality envel-
oping and sustaining, constituting the madly many-colored universality
of the beings.
Through the differentiation whose mle produces this harlequin floral
patch, the infinite becomes that in which justice occurs, recompense and
punishment confused together. Engendered by the infinite, incarnation then

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER25

suffers its passion of injustice, passing before all the tribunals of false or true
justice, innocent and sinful, condemned, saved, flogged, pierced, put on a
cross to redeem the sins of the world: generation takes place in and through
the divine infinite, on Christmas, but destruction takes place too, that of the
finite divine, dead on Good Friday, lastly the Sunday and Easter resurrection
of the Incarnated, whose contrasted, blessed and dolorous image I am.
Infinite space, the divine adds up these singular incarnations, generations
and destructions according to time, whose unpredictable order follows fault
or sin, injustice, surrender and redemption, reparation, salvation.
Real time summons to justice.

Where are you climbing to, intrepid walker? Where are you passing
through? Why not content yourself with your house and your there? For
what reason are you taking the path that leads to the useless and dangerous
summit from which youll inevitably come back down? Isnt crushing the
mountains patches of floral multiplicities with your shoes already your
injustice? What war are you waging on humble species that hardly bother
you? Are you too behaving like the columbine?
Whereupon he answers: I belong to the genus that flees forward,
whose parents left the garden of paradise through the crack of the fall so
as to invade the earth with their unjust swelling, irreversibly. And even
if I stopped in my first dwelling, breathing, drinking or weighing on my
sustentation would already consume or parasitize some being of the world.
I dont exist for free. To be wounds. Being wounds through the there.
And the there wounds through being.
Did a being ever exist for free, that is to say, full of grace? The incar-
nation, presence, there, is always paid for with some weight. Before the will,
sometimes wicked, or the project, often violent, existence and its mass of
flesh and space, its very physical being, already participate in pretentious
or excessive arrogances.
I exist, therefore I cost. Im incarnated, therefore I weigh. I weigh,
therefore I think. The French language has chosen to think starting from
the body and from its weight of flesh.13 I am, therefore I occupy local space
and I participate in the attractive vector. And I only think by the very fact
that I weigh. In every other case, I repeat, like a parrot. Therefore, like
being, thought itself unjustly causes violence, neither virginal nor angelic,
never without mass, cost or injustice.

Before the Incarnation, a Virginity could no doubt live full of gratuity,

of grace; before the Advent, during the era of the announced Word, she
received the Angel, it too without weight or there.

26GEOMETRY
 But after the birth, on Christmas, once a volume of heavy flesh is
acquired, it was necessary to pass before the tribunals for assessment and to
end up in violent death on the Cross for redemption: injustice and justice
rendered and given, to redeem or repair the iniquity of being-there.
And therefore, attentively, Ive tried my entire time to live independent
from all injustice, as though archangelic, to traverse life lightly, on the tips
of my toes, to make no noise around me or do any evil to anyone, to only
borrow places that were free before me, to never deliver combat for any
reason whatsoever, to give more than I received but I was or lived in
such a way that my life, insofar as it merely burned, or in such a way that
my being, insofar as it occupied a place, necessarily took at least the place
of a possible being or consumed the food from which another living thing
could have taken sustenance.
I therefore count merely living or being as an injustice since my being
and my life, as little as I want it to be so, nevertheless parasitize space,
time, energy and some other living things, my hosts. Being-in-the-world is
assessed as: the first takes from the latter more than it gives back; existence is
equivalent to the price of this discrepancy. Im not rigorously symbiotic.
Existence is an exception that, as this latter word indicates, unjustly
captures more than it gives back. So we must pay for the place and
reimburse duration, put back into the world the force that my organism
borrowed and, through the mixture of my own atoms with those of
the universe, give back fuel and nourishment to all those I nourished
or clothed myself from, lastly give up all this remainder and return to
symbiosis, discharge the discrepancy or debt of my residual parasitism.
That I cede therefore becomes naturally just, or that I work, suffer and
die, because an equation imposes itself, equalization, equality or equity,
whose equilibrium requires paying for my life with this return to nothing,
requires paying back this marvelous miracle with its vanishing, its point
of intense light with the hole of a dark well, the immense breadth of the
conquered field of consciousness and acquired experience with a long
and dark involution, presence with forgetfulness, its brightness with dark
shadow, my surprise taking with a gracious gift, the insolence of being with
emptiness and cession, the violence of the living thing shooting up thickly
and highly, rare, a time, with the peace of sleep, eternal.
Every son of man, from birth, immediately starts on his Passion.

Generalization of the conflicts

This law of pulsation flows from justice, although so often irregular that no
one knows how to read, foresee or predict it, a law which shows the fall of

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER27

leaves and empires repaying equity for their invasion of space and history,
as well as the world delivered over to war or to the summer giving up, in
compensation, its place and the future months to another world, devoted
to autumn and peace Is it possible, at the limit, that a duration, added
up as though a general integral, might become the final and just sanction
for every existence?
For if this word signifies a divergence from equilibrium, does the set of
such divergences converge lastly toward a total balance, for a balance that
adds up all that existed, the final equity at the end of time?
An electroencephalogram where the myriads of fluctuations and
waves become flat again, a terminal thermodynamic equivalence of every
difference by the billions, is the final judgment defined, in measure and
rigor, as the end of the world? And since we know to define this end
exactly in this way, as the extinction of every Maxwells demon, isnt
time, of itself, the judge? according to the summons of Time says
Anaximander.
Do we finally understand why we call these little promoter-accountants
of every difference demons? Because they carry divergence, existence
and injustice at the same time: Satans innumerable and minuscule small
change, the impudent prince of this world!

The apeiron, in sum

Physics, thermodynamics, the theory of the parasite and of the living thing,
the probable principle of a universal constant of violence lead us to think a
natural law founded on a global conception of time.
If the erasure of all difference sounds the end of all evolution, this
general equalization or final equilibrium will let us see the equality, the
equivalence as well or equation of every balance pan, the cessation of every
iniquity, that is to say, equity, at the exact second when the end of times
arrives.
Therefore the end of times, blended, many-colored, constellated, mixed
like the mosaic of Harlequins tunic, is exactly equivalent to the advent
of the reign of justice, as though the most exact scientific rationalism
wasnt saying anything other than the demand or hope for justice and
the theological eschatology of the tradition. Are we in sight of universal
synopsis here?
I no longer understand that everything ends without justice.
If a general constant existsand it exists, since without it we wouldnt
be able to weigh or think anythingthen the law is just as natural as
equilibrium and its divergence are laws of nature.

28GEOMETRY
No origin is decided except at the opening of a new global time; here it
is, conceived, decided, promoted in its whole, its laws, its dynamism and
completion.
Is it beginning now? From the start of a new mountain climb?

Nature, technology, society

Local elements
Lets speak then about the very first thought of our historical era written
in alphabetic code, starting from the present, that is to say, at the end of
this trimillennial fragment that separates us from Anaximander. Here
it is.
When the blacksmith struck the hot iron on the anvil or when the
farmer, accompanied by a pair of oxen, cut through the ground with a
turning plowshare, both were intervening in objects, humus or metal, in
such a way that outside the hot and sonorous forge, silence and coolness
continued to reign elsewhere, or in such a way that around the field where
the wheat was excluding the other species of flora with the force of its law,
behind the hedge enclosing the square of wheat, nature, multiple and free,
was growing.
Sledgehammer or plow, their tools therefore worked on the objective,
locally delimited and distinct from the laboring body: a practical capacity
pointed toward a precise place whose edge was being cut out by this super-
sharp point.

Generalization of the conflicts

Transforming the things of the world through work assumed this separation
of active subjects, artisans or artists, and worked objects, crystals exactly
cut by the work. When the Industrial Revolution came, whose motor
effectiveness multiplied the machines using fire and combined them into
tremendously aggressive systems, this face to face couple subsisted all
the more so because science and technology, theoretically and practically
objective, came to clearly supplement the manual skills, formerly practi-
cally blind, of the active subjects.
So the burning project of intervention became generalized through
focusing from then on less on solidsearth, stones or metals, precise and
rigorousthan on fluidswater and air, whose expansion when heated
scatters everywhere unpredictably, becoming exactly universalized; for
liquids and gases respect bounds less than solids, closer to the apeiron than

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER29

them; without knowing it, we decided to change the world or to renew the
face of the Earth, including the atmosphere and seas.
And it was done.

The apeiron, in sum

It then happened that our interventionist actions succeeded beyond the
expectations we had for said project so that the global world reacted, of
itself, to the actions of our new tools, world-objects produced by human
know-how in order to attain the dimensions of the planet and whose
global effectiveness attained it in its totality. Formerly in one direction
the hammer on the iron that only responded, silent and passive, with its
cherry-red glowing and the vibrating and quasi musical resonance from
which Pythagoras drew his scale, the subject-object relation was doubled,
in return, with an unexpected response on the part of the second term of
the relation as soon as the flows of our effectivenesses reached its whole set.
Consequently, the world lost its mute status of being the objective
set of passive objects of appropriation so as to again become what it had
never stopped being, the universal hotel or host for inert things, for living
species and ours in particular, thinking, active, suddenly knowledgeable
and strong enough to speak equal to equal with it. And it responded to us
like a quasi-subject.
We became, at the same time, objects among others, and these latter
became subjects, neither more nor less than us. All beings became equalized
in an identical status, as in the originary times when Anaximander wrote for
the first time in alphabetic code. Returned to the origin, we no longer see
any difference between a peace among men and a contract between flowers.
We, the former subjects, consequently lose the pointed clearness of our
projects, the distinct clarity of our reason, the pride in our effectiveness,
suddenly put into doubt. Of course, the climb to the global integrates the
world, but also the group that works on it, workers, industrialists, techni-
cians, scientists, garbage collectors all mixed together, whose heads no longer
know who directs the work project of transforming things and no longer
master the acquired mastery. A blind movement impels us from behind
without our being able to make out or decide where it comes from or where
its leading us. The massification of the subjects of intervention obligate them,
in group, become objects, to conduct themselves as politicians according to
laws vaguer than those to which science habituated them.

Who then gives justice and redress for a mutual injustice? Certainly the
objects to each other, like the mountain flowers; the subjects to each other

30GEOMETRY
as well, like policemen and robbers; lastly the first ones give the second
ones their forces and powers. But what do the parasitic subjects give back
to the objects?
The classical distinction, started by the sciences and canonized by
philosophy, therefore escaped Anaximanders law for several millennia, as
well as todays so similar law, and the summons of Time. Here the subjects,
formerly unjust, finally give themselves up to them.
The physical sciences and the associated technologies therefore now
converge into a law [droit], new, and into the social or human sciences, which
set about studying the very ones who were studying: from being subjects, we
became little by little objects, at the same time that the world, from being the
set of objects, became subject. The exclusions fell, the apeiron, once again,
became set up. The law became natural again, reciprocally.
A historical re-equilibration is occurring in our relation to the world,
a justice required, from the dawn of our history, by Anaximander. The
immense parenthesis of three millennia is closing, in which the objects
suffered from their separation from men-subjects whose narcissism made
them believe they were from a different species, foreign, divine, discon-
tented, exceptional, denying, and wicked.

The diverse paths from the local to the global form, by themselves, a
Moebius strip along which we can no longer decide where nor who the
subjects or the objects are, a band on which the apeiron can, invisibly, be
seen: the distinction itself has lost its relevance.
We become the objects of the sciences at the same time as we improve
our subject status; the entire world becomes subject at the same time as
it integrates objects. We will never again be able to intervene in what one
can begin to call the universe without doing so in the human species; we
will never again decide about the latter without the former being affected.
Physics grows toward politics and the law [droit], which steer toward
physics. Convergent laws [lois] endlessly link nature and society.
A same Moebius strip, in which an other or the same apeiron is
remarked and hidden, links knowledge. Law [droit] dominates and rules
all the sciences at the same time as its founded on them, depends or ensues
from them, taking on again its natural status.
In again becoming, in equality, subjects or objects, all the beings of the
world, once again, therefore give each other, mutually, justice and redress
for their reciprocal injustice. During the reign of the ancient Necessity,
objects had unjustly crushed the subjects, an iniquity the latter avenged
themselves for by unjustly mastering the world during the modern era
which is drawing to a close.

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER31

 An equity hence occurs, lets say de jure, in the fact that can once again
be said to be natural.

This new knowledge breaks with recent philosophy, which issued from the
medieval Scholasticism of Descartes, founded on the subject-object distinction.
On the contrary, it finds itself at ease with the Anaximandrian statement.
Just as our final word announces the end of the parasitical relation of
subjects to objects, the first word of our philosophical languages says, in
Greek, that men and things, without reciprocal exclusion, submit to the
same laws.
These laws all ensue from the Natural Contract. This is the origin of the
global or that of the sum.

With or without exclusion?

Deduced from what philosophers will later call the problem of evil,
therefore desired and called for by the universal ordeal of misfortune, the
very first of the philosophical ideas appearing at the origin of our era, the
apeiron, the infinite, the borderless indefinite, comes to erase all boundaries
in the visible hope of appeasing the injustice ruling everywherein space,
through the dense network of separations and always, in time, through the
eternal return of mutual prosecution.

Therefore a mixture without border or exclusion is already at stake: as well

as the space of phases, of the abstract, of the pure and infinite expanse of
geometry, of the open sets of topology, for the elements of the earth, on the
first day; as well as violence and the law, the peace of contracts, on the day
of the field of Mars and the tribunal, Tuesday [Mardi]; as well as commerce
and exchange, the free space of circulations, of currency cast in alloy, in
the marketplace, for the commodity price lists [mercuriales], lets say then
Wednesday [Mercredi]; as well as the one divine, beyond the divisions
elementary, local or functionalthat the false gods make in their temples
on Thursday [Jeudi] or Jupiters day; as well as the time of death and of the
end of times, during which just equilibrium or the origin itself appears in
the most humble pagus through the theory of duration, on Holy Friday; as
well as the practical fusion subject-object or society-nature, during the day
of the Sabbath, during which work stops.
This is how to translate, seven timesfor this is the Sunday of the resur-
rection on which Anaximanders statement returnsas though during the
course of an origin week, the nonetheless one apeiron.

32GEOMETRY
 The universal set of space-times of immersion, from which, like a horn
of plenty, the spaces of science will emerge in the course of time.

Do evil and misfortune then come conversely from bounds, from belonging
itself, enclosed by such bounds, whose lethal passion casts out the excluded?
Yes, for from borders that are hardware, material or spatial, temporal,
ethnic, technological, mental or software, cultural, linguistic, religious,
financial, political, social and from them alone, wars are declared,
because from enclosures and from them alone verdicts of expulsion are
reached.
Does peace descend from the apeiron, divine?

Yet, through law and every contract in the world, peace cannot in its turn
occur except according to distinctions, precise and rigorous, that for their
part, like every reason in the world, cannot do without the law of the
excluded third or middle.
Is violence born from chaos or mle, from the indistinction or
indefinite of sacrificial crises, that is to say therefore from the apeiron,
demoniacal?

Just as the indefinite undecidably conceals these two opposed values,

violence and peace, a definition of bounds and borders, that is to say,
a definition of definition, implies them in the same way: for without
definition there would be no violent exclusion and no excluded third or
middle; so without border there would be no reason and no war; but there
would also be no contract, no armistice, no peaceful life.
And how do we define an end [fin], since definition itself seeks and
presupposes it?
The solution consists in breaking the bound while preserving it. Thus
our belongingnesses mix: by birth and language I belong to Gascony in
France; by training to the Greco-Latin languages; by archaic culture and in
my rediscovered carnal night to the Ibero-Celtics wandering in the forest
of trees and raised stones; by artistic language to the French classical age;
by learned theology to Catholic Christianity; by ancestral religion to the
Cathars, eradicated as well by a genocide; by professional activity to the
universities of the old and the new world; for bodily entertainment to
alpinism or rugby; by taste to Quebec; by pathos to Africa; by fascination to
Asia; by ideal to the third world; do you really want the still open number
of teams whose jerseys I wear and will defend?
Yes, like any other, I am a Harlequin, whose cloak, like a bouquet among
the alpine pastures, is fringed with an intersection of belongingnesses. So

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER33

the drawing of a singular blazon, including competence and capacities,
follows a fractal curve linking points that are almost completely different
from those through which other armorial bearings pass or will pass. Thus
the growth toward the universal accentuates singularity; reciprocally, the
latter, honestly taken up, assures the climb to universality, always with a
fractal outline.
Like alpine meadows during springtime, so variegated that bounds
exist, but so numerous that the eye gets lost and the desire for violence loses
its way, clothing, tattoos, the skin, the flesh, the genome are therefore
mixed with so many belongingnesses that their intersection draws and
depicts a concrete land, multiple, hybrid, exquisite Your soul is thus a
select landscape.
Violence loses its way through the forest of this mosaic whose
labyrinth describes every self. A victim of sacrifices for generations,
the bull, terrified, hid itself behind the Labyrinth whose obstacles the
abominable Ariadne cleared before Theseus the killer; her thread allows
the hero to cross the percolation threshold so as to go where no one ever
went. Herodotus again with reason recounts that, in order to replace the
pharaohan implacable tyranta few small Egyptian leaders, living
in peace with each other, one fine day invented, so as to thus render
redress to each other, in real time, for their mutual injustice, the labyrinth
as the form of their relations: they lost the bound that was separating
them: their powers became mixed. Thus love is learned and requires
lots of time in order to travel without end, or better still, become lost
in another.

Indefinite mixture cannot be thought except by preserving and dissolving

the bounds, at the bound, itself boundless, of the continuous and the
discontinuous.

Can one dream that between men and groups, the stable lands and
nations marked on the bloody armorial map, the fluid languages and
nomad cultures, exchangeable reason and volatile currency, which,
whether traveling or sedentary, maintain fixed or mobile borders between
themselves, the final bound would draw a Moebius strip along which no
one would ever know, in justice and in truth, whether he thinks and lives
on this side of the Pyrenees or on the other?

What in fact do the beings of the world do when they render redress to
each other for their reciprocal injustice? Do they open again a state of war
in order to avenge themselves, or do they sign a peace contract in order to

34GEOMETRY
reimburse the damages of violence? The one or the other, the one and the
other, the one after the other or both at the same time, indefinitely. This
depends on time and meaning.
Each of Anaximanders Ancient Greek words cited signifies at the
same time two opposites without bound, exclusion or border: vengeance,
certainly, but restitution and handing over, non-law or law, violence and
contract, war or peace, offense and respect, injustice or justice in other
words, designates precisely the violent opening in which the law appears,
the mixed indistinct, the apeiron, from which later the classified will
emerge thanks to the excluded middle or third.
The imbecilic commentator with reason calls the archaic vocabulary,
in equilibrium, poetic, that is to say, productive, whose words will soon
give birth to significations that are local, precise, opposed, cut out, defined,
which we can only understand today as distributed across each day of
the origin week, ideas or concepts of the sciences, of law, of exchange, of
theology, of technologies, of philosophy
The original speech has this in common with the origin principle:
infinite or non-definite, its logos makes the generation and destruction
of ideas possible, ideas as local and contradictory as little gods in their
elementary departments: it therefore ceaselessly opens its time.

Doing what he says while saying it, Anaximander simultaneously talks

about crime and tribunal, before the order summoned by time.
And, in saying or doing this, he starts a new time; this doesnt mean
that hes situated at the origin like a little flag stuck on a fixed, decided
or drawn chronic line, but rather that he himself decides, at leisure, in
his own living present, starting from the undecidable apeiron, a round-
about-point or crossroads that is everywhere and always transportable.14
A bifurcation is born, which diverges in the closest proximity to this
rotunda.

Now
Same boundless ball, the present of the beings opens the borderless passage
from the era of war to that of peace, from the state of discord to a state of
law; or of course conversely, from the peaceful to the unleashed.
A round-point without peras, every present can be said as apeiron,
in-finite. So here it is at the origin or at the principle, at the element, at
the root.
In the beginning is the beginning of law or that of vengeance. When
does it take place or time?

FIRST IN HISTORY: ANAXIMANDER35

 During Anaximanders era certainly, but also here and now, in the
immediate present of our lives, in presence of the existences of all the
things of the world.

In this very minuteeveryday, common, a dismal and solemn round point,

a ball rolling for everyone commonlyis therefore hiddenordinary,
nondescript, dull and banal, a strange, rare and precious treasurethe
beginning of peace or the abominable return of slaughter, if we want or
desire it and therefore the origin of all things, including the law and the
economy, geometry
The Edenic origin, Anaximandrian, ceaselessly between our hands, in
everyones presence, therefore emerges from our living present, in which
the great week of origin is involuted as a sparkling diamond point: in
truth, I tell you, at that very instant when the former life dies, you enter
Paradise
the space of geometry?

36GEOMETRY
2 FIRST IN THE RITE:
THE ROYAL VICTIM

Spaces of exclusion: Political origins

Above, space in general or the indefinite apeiron was constituted. Contrary
to its opening, defined space, founded on it, is supplied with borders (finis
signifies bound), therefore with a center: here now is its beginning.
We had ended by hearing the divine statement on the subject of the
victim, excluded by unjust men and welcomed in the just sky of Paradise.
This voice is going to be amplified.

From nature to culture

A privileged class in the service of royal power, charged by it to keep a
record of the economy and to prepare political decisions through astro-
nomical and calendrical computuses, the caste of the Babylonian scribes
produced and preserved a mythical-style astronomy: were they observing
the planet Venus or adoring the goddess Ishtar or Astarte? Who could
decide? Written up in lists on tables in the form of a base 6 arithmetic, it
lacked a spatial system of representation.
Such a quick appraisal resembles the one we could form of Egyptian
pre-geometry before Thales: priests or scholars, this caste or class was
constituted by the harpedonaptai; the Akhmin or Rhind Papyri give us to
read arithmetical headings of formulas without any ideality of space.
Starting or not from these legacies, Greece promoted pure mathematical
forms. A reason must be given for these new things.
The Agora and the cosmos
For example, Greece invented the circle at the same time for its parlia-
mentary uses and in cosmological systems.
In Myth and Thought among the Greeks, Jean-Pierre Vernant seeks and
finds the relations between these first rigorous models of the world and some
given revolution disrupting the political organization and social history:
he who spoke to the group stood in the center, like an Earth or a Sun, and
his listeners surrounded him; each in turn listened, then took the floor and
spoke, thus realizing the famous isonomy or democratic equality of rights.
If this newly conquered liberty conditioned the emergence of celestial
geometry, must it be concluded from this that the real world reproduces
the representations of the collective? Do the things themselves truly come
down to political practices?
From which an event would come that was even more marvelous than
the miracle of abstract science that occurred in Greece: because it united
itself in a circle, would some given egalitarian group found or imitate the
world in its turning?
Naturalizing social phenomena makes one believe in their inevita-
bility, a lie whose intention and gesture is matched by the socialization of
natural phenomena. The myths themselves no doubt recount these two
movements.

Where to put the beginning?

A historical divide intervenes less, says the author cited, between the
Babylonian accounts and the first Ionian theorems than between the
models proposed by archaic Greece itself, in the case in point by the poems
of Homer and Hesiodfor the tyranny never stops, from Babylonia to
the Theogonyand the science, already accomplished, of Anaximander of
Miletus.
On one side myth, religion, or ideology saturate the texts; on the other,
the new schemas demonstrate an intelligible and rational knowledge deter-
mined by the new liberty.
Does this divide exist?

Return to the map of the earth

The models preceding the Ionian physicists in effect present the Earth
as a semi-flat disk surrounded by the river Ocean without origin or end,
confluent into itself. An inverted bowl, the bronze sky is supported by its

38GEOMETRY
circumference. Fixed and stable, the Earth is poised in turn on an immense
jar ending in a narrow neck through which the roots of the world go. Inside
this solid the wind eddies in disorder in a space thats neither oriented nor
orientable, where high and low, right and left are confused.
Bowls, vases, or jars, made from bronze or clay, ordinarily collect and
preserve, in the cellar, the fruits of the earth and, lower still, the bodies
of the dead: thats a list of very common technologies compiled by the
ethnologies; this is now what religion shows: a universe with levels, where
the gods live at the top, the mortals in the middle and the infernal and
subterranean divinities at the bottom. The universe is filled with these
differences.

Along comes Anaximanders system. The earth, a truncated column, in the

middle of the cosmos, doesnt fall, because in effect there is no cause that
can pull it or make it shake in some precise or particular direction.
This principle of indifference, or of undecidable differences, that is to say,
already, of reason, and even of sufficient reason, at least negatively taken,
manifestly organizes a universe, a new space, non-mythic, but geometric,
including symmetry and reversibility of spatial relations, therefore the idea
of the sphere, the laws of the circle, the relationships of the center to the
circumference, and to be done with religious conceptions, the complete
disappearance of a hierarchy with levels.
This then is a radical divide.

No divide
New and grandiose, this rational model of astronomy, in addition and
for the first time, accounts for diurnal motion and the inclination of the
ecliptic: we will observe the latter by means of the gnomon on the sundial
in the second part of this book.
But the newness doesnt owe anything to the characteristics noted
above, in such a way that, with a futile effort like a sword stroke in the
water, Jean-Pierre Vernant cuts into the continuous. We can decide it
through proof.
If, with the bowl, the disk or the jar, the archaic model presents techno-
logical characteristics, Anaximanders contains just as many: a cylinder or
disk, his truncated column has a non-negligible thickness. In Homer and
Hesiod, the earths nearly flat disk could also be defined as a truncated
column. On the other hand, bowls, jars and columns, technological objects
certainly, embody solids with circular sections, volumes of revolution,
symmetrical with respect to their axes.

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM39

 Far from exclusively characterizing the Milesian model, symmetry, the
reversible character of relationships in space, circularity are common to
both systems.
The above diagram shows it.
The model said to be archaic draws a construction whose profile remains
constant or invariable when the person looking at it turns in a circle around it:
these are volumes of revolution, produced, if you like, by the potters turning.

40GEOMETRY
 Plan view, its vertical projection only shows concentric circles, whose
center marks the trace on the horizontal plane of the axis of revolution,
standing straight.

Lets now consider Anaximanders scientific model. Lets make a plane

orthogonal to the truncated columns axis go through the center of the
world. Lets project, point by point, the entire model onto it. This projection
will be formed uniquely of concentric circles whose centers mark the trace
of the axis of revolution.
So there exists a plane for which the two systems are projected in the
same way.
Thus the same model of the world appears, but for the projection. Said
divide then depends solely on the point of view of the person considering
these models. Looking without moving he notices the differences; moving
and changing site they vanish and identity appears.

Lets calculate these differences: the diagram of the system said to be archaic
shows a simple infinity of planes orthogonal to the axis of revolution,
planes for which the projection is formed of concentric circles. But,
because the cylinder makes it a not totally spherical system, the projection
of Anaximanders system only holds for a single one of these planes. The
diagram shows an equivalence that can be differentiated, in number, from
a simple infinity to unity.
The supposed divide thus reduces to a change of site: the characteristics
retained in order to separate a scientific system from another archaic
one on the contrary unite them: a complex system of circles in both
cases, operators of symmetry and reversibility almost as numerous but
distributed differently, a common projection.
The hierarchy with levels remains.

Space, in general
Concerning point of view, the criteria for differentiation proposed by the
author whose hypotheses Im examining do not define the geometry, but
a quite singular and impoverished geometry. Philosophers and historians
would like science to only present a homogeneous, symmetrical, reversible,
and orientable space; myth would be unaware of this space and recount
different ones.
The blames on science, the blames on myth.
Anaximanders universe inclines the axis of the cylinder over the axis of
the sphere, and the axis of the first torus over that of the second, so that it

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM41

only really possesses the symmetry that the projection of just now brings
to light. But the ancient universe possesses the same symmetry along the
principal axis, and as many times as you like; curiously, it shows rather
more symmetry and homogeneity.
It combines in fact, and luxuriously, all the old ways of treating circu-
larity: first the simply circular flat disk but also the trunk of the cylinder
since it isnt infinitely thin, then the river Oceans concentric ring; in
addition, the translation of a circle on to an axis, the column; next a bowl
or a demisphere, that is to say, a set of circles; finally, and to a more complex
degree, a family of circles in translation on a common axis and all tangent
to a curve, the profile of the jar. In passing, we notice a nice non-metric
definition: far from remaining at an equal distance from a center, the
Ocean flows into itself with an invariant movement having an identically
conserved curvature; the circle is better or more profoundly defined than
by measurement.
Why, on the other hand, do we let ourselves be misled by the lexicon of
technology since today we still say barreled space, ball or paving stone?1 Or
by the common vocabulary of a tradition born in Miletus, passing through
Euclid and dead before Hilbert? Do we only talk about myth or ethnology
through ignorance of geometry?
What lastly should we say about the brilliant idea of a conditional
spacewell-placed at the base of the things or the worldwe might call
pre-metric and surely pre-Euclidean, without measure or orientation,
conceived as the roots of ordinary space? We now know these topologies
anterior to the Euclidean metric, where precisely top and bottom, left and
right are confused. Can we conceive the jar with roots as a Klein bottle or a
sphere equipped with cross-caps? Yes, at the roots of the metric, there is a
topological space added to the first one. Have Plato and Euclid forgotten it?

Hearing the terms opening, gaping, tear and enclosure, the lettered expert
cries myth or religion, and the philosopher cries phenomenology! But they
speak to the worker of space about a fundamental phenomenon, differently
profound than the homogeneous, the orientable, the symmetrical, or the
metricized, buried beneath the principle of reason, beneath the stability of
ordinary space, in the condition or question of knowing what this usual
space rests on, what its roots and supports are, non-static but rational.
Yes, the chaotic space buried in the jar only seems irrational to those who
believe in the exclusivity of Euclidean space. Are we nearing the apeiron?
There is no bound, no border, says Xenophanes; no top, no bottom,
no right or left, says Hesiod. Did Moebius add something to this? Did
Riemann, Klein or Moebius then write about religion? And what if whats

42GEOMETRY
prejudged to be mythical abounded more in science than what we call
by this latter name? And what if the famous geometry that appeared in
Miletus, through Thales and Anaximander, amounted to an impover-
ishment no longer putting anything before our eyes but the Euclidean
skeleton?
Bare hypotheses no doubt; but the authentically scientific status of what
is only dressed in a different mode remains true, all the way to the demon-
strable. All things being equal, the story of Thales, his sun, his shadow and
pyramid, should be called myth. Certainly Diogenes and Plutarch only give
it as a tale, but Thales theorem is hidden and shows itself there as well.

Political space: After the circle, its center

So the cosmos with levels or the hierarchical system remains. The gods have
the bowl; the mortals, at the level of the bowl, wander on the rings flatness;
in the hole subterranean demons wander in the pot. For Anaximander
there is no partition, no apartment in which to lodge all this personnel.
He expels the gods from a place without floor or ceiling. Without cellar or
attic, the cosmos loses its fascinating quality of being a phenomenological
habitat or haunted house frightening children. Wherever you might be,
even at the antipodes, equivalence through symmetry or the universal of
indifference reigns. The divide remains; it must be explained.
It would date from an extraordinary disruption of social practices.
The Greek city-state emerges between Hesiod and Anaximander. Putting
business affairs in common in the public agora, a place situated in the
center of private habitats, presupposes a desacralization, a rationalization of
political life. The logos appears as a communitarian discourse of equal fellow
citizens, from which it immediately arose as reason. Torn from the secrecy
of the owners and privileged classes, from the accountants and the priests of
a king, the affairs of the city-state pass to the publicity of the public.
The discussions in the agora burst forth from a circular assembly: we
have seen that he who declaims stands in the middle; around the circum-
ference are the receivers in positions of equality. At the end of his discourse
the speaker in the center moves to the edge, and he who wants to speak
goes from the edge to the center: freedom of movement and expression,
they say.

The centered space

The Odyssey describes the military aristocracy thus during the archaic
period, in which the circle, quite precisely, seems to characterize the model

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM43

of the world anterior to the social and political disruption. Even in Vernant
the divide doesnt exist, since the (social) model of the model (of the world)
is discovered before the date this divide forms. But that is of no matter.
Here are two schemas for the practices of the city-state: the first, hierar-
chical, shows the king at the summit, dominating the dominant class,
crushing the subjected people. Egalitarian, by center and circumference,
the relations of the second unfold in identity, symmetry, and reversibility.
Hence the divide reappears: on the one hand, the vertical sociological
schema and the cosmology with levels; on the other, the circular schema
and Anaximanders spherical cosmology.
Lets reduce it again demonstratively.
Like the first one, the second diagram lets us see self-evidently that
the same schema is at stake, sociopolitical now, but for the point of view.
One can even write the simple law of transformation from the first to the
second: it suffices for the one considering it to move by a quarter turn.
Just as the ancient cosmos and the Milesian one were projected onto the
same network of concentric circles, just as the law that transforms the one
into the other could be said, so the hierarchical society and the isonomic
city-state reduce to two very close representations of the same political
phenomenon, centralized.
The military aristocracy therefore practiced putting in common: the
warriors of Ithaca formed a dominant class like the citizens of said
democracy, equal among themselves, but superior to all the rest of the

King
Privileged class

People

Ground
Line

Center

Aristocracy

Slaves

44GEOMETRY
city-state. Under the scribes or the harpedonaptai, the people are no
different, there, from the slaves, here, around or outside the closed circum-
ference of the privileged, the free men of Athens.
If you put yourself in a circle in order to better admire its center, you
precisely turn your back to those who, excluded, remain outside.
The diagram shows the central point as the trace, on the plane of the
second projection, of the vertical axis along which power is assessed in the
first one. Living at the center or above, being excluded outside or being
subjected below, these are one and the same thing. Herodotus doesnt
hesitate to call power center and center power. A hierarchical form neither
stronger nor weaker than the vertical scale, the circumference centralizes
in order to order to raise or, instead of putting down, excludes.
The Stalinists called this hypocritical thing democratic centralism.

Social exclusion
Are we unaware then that concentrations of capital, power, energy, decision,
knowledge and education produce as many forms of exclusion?
Opposed to democracy, centralization by itself recreates aristocracy.
The point of view, this quarter turn of lie and hypocrisy, shows and
conceals it. We who have lived in the posterity of the spherical world
know that our predecessors had a lot of trouble moving the center from
the Earth to the sun. Would they have spoken of revolution regarding
Copernicuss gesture if it werent a question of hierarchy? Holding to the
center and the concentrations all around it permits remaining with the
king and priests in charge, even if the positions temporarily change from
an outside point to the pole and conversely. While in truth the universe
anarchically scatters.
For science as for society, hierarchy endures: do you claim that such-
and-such, displaced from the summit to the center is no longer god or king
or father? Eppure, he is.
A cosmos with levels and rings, the same political world, always
founded on the same exclusion.

Distance and belonging

Around the rim of the circumference, all points are equivalent through the
distance to the center, which the confluence of the river Ocean says very
well. Whether the pole becomes an axis or a point of this axis or its trace
doesnt change anything. Height is translated into distance, and whether
vertical or horizontal, oriented however you like, distance remains the

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM45

essential thing. Never absolute, equality refers to a chosen referential and is
defined in relation to it. In symmetry, the face to face elements are related
to the axis or the center: this relation alone produces the equivalence. A
legislation of equality, the isonomy thought by the circle is betrayed by this
very thing, since all things are only equivalent there through reference to
a pole, to the point of an axis, therefore through the homogeneous distri-
bution of distances to the one or the other.
Sometimes defined by optimum or maximum, the circumference in
addition draws an excellent schema of aristocracy. Power residing in the
center, the best assemble according to the best form around the focus: an
optimal curve of listening and vision for those ranged along its orbit and
who turn their backs to those who are not and which defines a point of
diffusion, an inside and an outside, marvelously expressive comparatives,
a belonging and its ostracizing, a set of inside-equal-superiors and the
complement of those who, outside, wandering in the vague space, remain
excluded.

Reference
Whether group or cosmos, the world preserves its levels, the acme
being found at the center, thats all. We were misled by a stereotyped
appearance.
In all generality, a hierarchical system remains a reference model.
Rational explanation is given for all these places, points or phenomena by
referring them to one element, privileged thereby: pole, summit, point,
line or plane, what does it matter? This element orders, commands and
pronounces the law. Power and reason are transferred there. So, this
transport, this relation is the logos.2 Hence the irresistible call for our
cultural reason, no doubt born during those times on the shores of a
divine sea, to think that only a reference system is rational. If reason equals
relation, referring is equivalent to reasoning.
Hence the lived gesture: the one who is speaking transports himself to
the center, the way he formerly mounted the summit or the altar. Hence
the call, come from the animal depths of evolutionary times: only a hierar-
chical system seems rational, transferring power and legislation from some
set to one of its elements, privileged thereby. As long as the logos, speech,
is equivalent to relation, transfer or reference, tra-duction to a place and
reduction to it, induction to a place or deduction from it, the cosmos-order
or the society-order boils down to the orders one gives or receives. And the
system, whether theoretical or social, returns to hierarchy: reason bears the
sacred or the arche.

46GEOMETRY
Beginning, command
There is no arche except in the archaic. Science, arriving on the scene,
preserves it, brings it to and imposes it on our reason, blinded. We havent
left that originary soil in which the knowledges and community terrors are
rooted. The beginning expressed by the term archaism is found again in
the command of the word hierarchy.
Can, conversely and in general, an anarchical system be conceived,
without reference or border, deprived of privileged place or referential, and
yet rational? Yes, assuredly: it suffices to trace back to the multiple varia-
tions of beginning in Anaximanders indefinite.
Things begin when the arche precisely goes absent, and command
appears when they claim to begin.

The model of the world by the same Anaximander nevertheless doesnt

separate reason from the old mastery or from the archaic hierarchies. How
could it have if even our science doesnt seem to have done so yet? The
relation of domination, height, contempt, rigor and weight is reduced here
to the relation of distance; the relation of forces here is transformed into
the notion of relation, in geometric representation, in sight, theoretical,
in measurable relation, rational, sayable, in discourse. Hierarchy remains
inside reason, but since height, power or king are no longer spoken of, it
becomes transparent inside reason, so invisible that no one has seen it, that
no one thwarts this intelligent Greek ruse.
As soon as hierarchy is translated as reference one can finally prove as
reason and show as theoretical vision to every reasonable animal that it is
reasonable to transfer the autonomy that they owe to the hazards of their
existence to the element of reference, like the world to its earth or to its sun,
like a variety of homogeneous space to its pole or any site in a system to its
legislative center. So, we naturalize the one who holds power, ineradicable
from his place like the earth or the sun, unavoidable because without roots
and endlessly stable; better yet we theorize him.
Neither man nor group, he becomes an object, invariant like a column
without foundations; no, this is no longer an object, but rather a geometric
ideality, an object thats abstract like a cylinder or a point, transparent
like the former, nonexistent like the latter: reason, reference and relation,
global transport to the geometric ideality, which doesnt exist. The trap
has been closed for three millennia. The hierarchy remains transparent
in translucent reason; they become identical to each other; an admirable
trick, power lies in knowledge, the way the invisible lies in what allows
seeing.

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM47

The theoretical scene of vision
The essential thing for the whole affair, as shown by the diagrams, remains
the law of projective transformation, that quarter turn that makes us
believe in democracy, even though the privileged warmly surround the
king, one of their own, or everyone each other by permutation, and exclude
the slaves that work for them.
Standing and observing, face-on, these standing objects, no one sees
the world or society the way they would be seen in flying over and from
on high.
Supreme cleverness: seen precisely from on high, the schema gives the
one who draws it a position above the king, that of the mind. So trace
this model by Anaximander in the sand, and you will see the things from
outside the world; you think the universe outside of it. You intellectually
enjoy even more than a superior point of view: the practice of this drawing
is a proof of the existence of another world. The diagram on its own puts
you inside and betrays your site.
Reason, analyze, theorize, and you forget your slavery and your real
burdens. Deceptive, geometry makes everything be seen from this blind
point we are meditating on.
And on which perhaps our violence accumulates.

Theory and appearance

Thus the Babylonians, it is said, had at their disposal tables, rubrics of
numbers and results ordered any old way, knew how to foresee, but
couldnt see.
In practice, the tables are sufficient; you can go directly and without
any model from observations to the point in the sea or the date of eclipses.
Moreover, models are always false. So the tables are sufficient. In Babylon,
the magi saw the celestial bodies, not the system: they didnt have any
theory at their disposal, that is to say, a grid in order to see.
The Greeks invented, and here perhaps is the divide, theory: in other
words, the stage of vision. In Plutarch or in Diogenes, another inaugural
lesson will stage Thales in the theater of seeing, in the shadow of the
Pyramids. They invented representing.
First, with the pyramid, a system with levels, the reduced model, then
a planar graph. Representation, this is the very miracle: admiring, from a
focal point, the spectacle-world or theater. Lets sit in a circle around the
stage.
Hence the conditional questions: what to see, who sees, from what site?

48GEOMETRY
Comic deception
Legendary, the cleverness, the shrewdness of the Greeks impelled them to
invent a ruse of reason, the ruse-mathematics. They give us systems and
schemas to see that are so distinguished from each other that, taking their
word for it, we align them along a linear evolution, whether interrupted or
continuous.
Aristophanes or some other stage director must be bursting with
laughter in their graves from seeing us try to understand! They take a bowl
and a jar out from of their horn of plenty, let us see them, like poor farmers
pots, then they put these objects back into the horn, and lastly suddenly
take the same ones out again so that, from our place, we see a column and
a sphere. They turned the object, the illusionists! Better, they made us turn
around them and it. The entire theater turns by a quarter turn. They even
allowed themselves the luxury of telling us cyclic history.
The circle that matters defines the double diagram or traces the
succession of points of view around the stable thing. This cycle, or history
itself, produces the projection.
The Greeks production is projection. And the optimization of a
projecting site: the fly-over from on high or from outside the world.

Centered space: Religious and geometric

Brothers and twins to the point you cant tell them apart, Homer, Hesiod,
and Anaximander arent opposed as poets and scientist.
Sciences share in myth is nearly the same as myths share in science. The
characteristics retained here to filter one scientific system from another
system that wouldnt be have scarcely any effectiveness except to unite
them, except to betray the idea of science created by the very person who
filters it.
How many times has this phenomena been reproduced in history?
Exactly as many times as this filtering has taken place, or as someone situated
at the same time outside science and myth, in the place of the god he threw
out, has separated with his saber or balanced with his beam the two spaces
in question. In fact, who can ever leave some intersection of these two sets?

The fact remains that the equivalence is verified beyond all expectation.
On the one hand and for each diagram, the models are identical but for
the point of view: therefore there are only representations, and the divide
doesnt take place since the variation of the site suffices to recreate the
invariant.

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM49

 But lastly the two diagrams are the same, for uniting a triple-level profile
and symmetrical vertical axis with a plane having concentric circles. The
same variation of the site suffices in the two cases, group and cosmos, to
recreate the invariant. The same operations, inside and outside, correspond
to the sets, analogous.
Hence the half verification by mathematics itself. Half, that is to say,
in the non-reversible direction from science to representations. This
must be completed in the other direction, which goes, to be brief, from
myth to science. The copula must therefore be proven twice for this space,
geometric and religious: by a geometrical verification, as above; by the
history of religion, as follows.

Templum
The distinction of the homogeneous and the heterogeneous, of the
continuous and the discontinuous, dominate the descriptions of space and
time in Mircea Eliade for example. Profane, space is isotropic; sacred, it
isnt, he says. In addition, profane time flows continuously, but sacred time
presents ruptures. As a result geometry, cut off from sacralization, posits
an undifferentiated space.
But this isnt tenable, for there are as many scientific spaces as you
please, orientable or not, centered or metric, chaotic or regular, only some
of which are homogeneous. To say the converse amounts to underesti-
mating geometry, to forcing it into impoverished reductions. Thus formal
thought knows the spaces said to be mythic or cultural.
The same thing goes for time: continuous history, profane, would be the
only possible scientific one; every interrupted time would recount a sacred
history. The irony of things and their reversal is to be savored. In order
to topple the spatial hierarchy and attain political equality, an epistemo-
logical or temporal divide is instituted, a division whose gesture remains
a hierophany.3
To liberate space from gods, they become reinstalled in time.

The same luminous confusion traverses Eliades discourse regarding sacred

spaces, defined sometimes by profile: mountain, pyramid or vertical
ziggurat, open like a chimney in the direction of the sky, squeezed or
mobilized around the universal axis, a pillar of the sky, a Jacobs ladder, a
cathedral spire, therefore directed from the bottom to the top and rooted
in a subterranean infra-world
or sometimes as a planar variety, closed and defined by connected
borders: the temple that excludes the profane boundless thats centered

50GEOMETRY
around the fixed point, the umbilicus or pole of the world, the place of
places, Mecca, Benares, Rome, Jerusalem, hearth, holy of holies, altar, knot;
a temple therefore drawn by bounds and middle.
Here again is the same space. Either with levels, hierarchical due to the
pillar of the world, or homeomorphic with a circle whose umbilical point
traces the axis on a plane. A faithful description of sacred spaces exactly
implies the two very diagrams to which we have been compelled by the
nascent Greekness.
Geometric thought penetrates myth; reciprocally, the discourse of myth
invades geometry. The centered space, in Anaximanders style, can be said
to be as religious as the universe with levels that precedes it in time; and
both of them are geometric. So the history of religion confirms the propo-
sition in the other direction. Low-high or pole-edges, both boil down to a
reference, better, to the same referent.

Axis mundi

Holy mountain

Ziggurat
pyramid

Omphalos

Remaining silent about the gods isnt enough to chase them out.
Plan view, sacred space increases in holiness as one penetrates it, holy,
holy of holies, altar, ark: initiation toward the omphalos or the center of
the world. This planar penetration simply projects the climb up the holy
mountain, along the pyramid, up Jacobs ladder, or measured along the
axis of the world.

The same diagram then holds for the models of the cosmos, the political
or social representations of the collective and the religious spaces of our
temples: a vision of the world that must be taken literally as vision and

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM51

as world? If this is true it would surprise us greatly if traces of said vision
didnt exist in the spatial universe of geometry, the forms fit together, on
the one side, being found in formality, on the other.

The plane and the elevation of the city and the

house
Sometimes these forms are constructed. The representations become
artificial objects: ziggurats, pyramids, temples, palaces, houses. From
which we can hazard the hypothesis that turned objects such as bowls,
jars, or amphoras are caught in a familiar discourse, already pedagogic and
popularizing. By describing a vertical form, symmetrical around an axis
of revolution, they teach the peasant, the artisan, the merchant, the same
universe that priests, town-planners, or architects had already formed in
the monumental. Does this didactic literature in turn reproduce the very
space of cities? The jar says the house, which says the temple, which says
the world. We never cease going back over the genealogy of places: cosmos,
polis, agora, temple, habitat

Was the plane of these forms and spaces hidden first? Was an elevation
blinded next? Why dont you see the plane when the profile is given to you,
and why cant you make out the profile when you have been made to see
the plane? Who is deceived and who deceives, history as such or history
such as it is written?
Hence the new diagram, but always invariant, that can be formed from
masonry. So common as to be useless: an architects blueprint. Whether
its a question of a temple or of a private house, elevation restores the axis,
the columns around the hearth or focus, the higher opening by which the
fire reaches the sky. The worlds axis marks with its point the omphalos
on the plane, the local focus around which the lines are organized. These
lines henceforth have the forms we want, round, elliptical, square, rectan-
gular, following special constraints, the final diagram attaining a kind of
universality.
When the town-planner takes the place of the architect, the proof will
begin again. Can it be thought to be universal?

Polis and pagus: Plato, Laws V 745 and 771

Whether a city or an island, utopia, entirely spatial, also constructs
another world: that of monumental construction, measured by string
and compass, an architectural painting, a possible world, prepared,

52GEOMETRY
projected. A city-planners plan or blueprint, Utopia masters space through
representation.
Conversely, because they project possible spaces, the architect and city-
planner practice utopian trades. Everything that precedes, diagrams and
representations, thus leads to that white box preceding the pure topos of
geometry by little.
The cosmic plan, in Homer-Hesiod and Anaximander, the political
plan, by the traditional tyrant and isonomic reform, the religious plan, by
axis mundi and omphalos, do they prepare, three times, Hippodamoss and
Platos plans?

Ancient science as the set of tables and the new

science as processing the possibles
Utopia signifies space. But it remains an end without means. Its poor
reputation as an unrealizable project will last as long as the ineffectiveness
of the technologies. Geometry perhaps came from the technologies of
construction, from the architect, the mason, the stone-cutter; here it gives
them back everything it had taken from them. Hence its blockage in space,
due to the loss of the means to execute according to time. The technologies
needed time so much that history, conversely, can be understood fairly well
through technological innovation.
So when they fail and when duration is prolonged, the project, endlessly
torn up from its means, precedes them so much that they never catch up
to it. Perfect realization, miraculous, remains in space, namely in utopia.
From which come the philosophies of history that point toward a place,
outside time, at the end of history, like always delayed ideals, calling for
patience, work, the accumulation of intermediary stages. You might think
Platonisms, modulo time.
We have just overturned the old order of things. Exponential innovation
causes means to shower down. We had projects, ideas, a space; we didnt
have mediations toward them. This constraint dominated, produced our
cultures, exposed in them the impossibility of catching up, the deferring
or obligation to defer, the suspension of desire, the indefinite wait and
struggle: it imposed realism and condemned utopia. An ancient culture
that dies from the overturning.
Now, whatever the end may be or almost that we are proposing, we
possess in overabundance the means to realize it, even in the short term.
The remains of the old culture join forces to blind us to this evident fact
and no longer reign except through the old necessity of delays, deferrings
and suspensions. We are overproducing means so much that the ends are

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM53

lacking instead. We are suffering from the inverse delay to utopia due to
the abduction of the new means to those ancient ends for which the means
were lacking. Dream boldly, on the contrary, the ways of access are already
ready. The delay of cultural and political powers with regard to the tools put
in place places us in danger.
For the first time in history, the possible is in advance of the real: the
possible henceforth draws us, while the real blocked us. In Leibnizian
terms, we have just passed from the created world, or from its pre-estab-
lished tables, to the divine understanding whose computer multiplies,
through tabulation, the possible scenarios.

The Earth and the ideal city

Lets return to the ancient utopia and its spatial nature. All spaces are
mastered there, metricized by numbers. It is indeed a matter of applied
geometry. And so Plato, planning his ideal city, departs from this. Built
in the center of the country, it is centered around the fire of Hestia. The
legislator divides it into twelve, the number of tribes and lunar months.
The question of the city assumes that the question of the fields has been
resolved: the pagus and the polis were next to each other in those days. So
let the land be divided, in effect: into how many parts? 5040.

Interesting, 5040 equals 7 factorial: 7! = 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.

Or: 5040 = (4 3) (6 2) (7 5) = 12 12 (7 5).
Now 7 + 5 = 12.

Here then is the product of all the ways of writing twelve. Divisible by the first
seven integers, its divisible by certain of their products; divisible by 4 and by
2, by 3 and by 6, by 2 and by 5, by 2 and by 6, therefore by the first integers.
Plato visibly sought this since he remarks the absence of the divisor
eleven; it suffices, he says, to form (5040 2) = 5038 to find it again. Lets
note the convenience of the global number for duodecimal divisions.
It remains to divide the land. The first rule, by portion and proportion:
for fertile land, a small plot; large on the contrary if its lacking in fertility.
The quality of the soil being taken as a coefficient or weight, the arm of the
beam of justice lengthened or shortened. The dividing is done the same
as weighing on a balance. Since production varies with the quality of the
soil, homogeneous equality would be unjust. Distributing then amounts to
proportioning, to weighing. Balance is better than fractionAristotle will
say pretty much the same thing in the fifth chapter of the Nicomachean
Ethics.

54GEOMETRY
 Hence the question: where to place the fulcrum of this beam? There already
is a center, to my knowledge, at the common altar of the temple of Hestia.
But precisely through distance in relation to it, space loses its homogeneity
a second time. As the plot gets closer to it, its value grows; as it gets farther
away, it loses all the more. The portions then must be balanced, and in order
to do so, they must be divided in two. If one part lies in the vicinity of the pole,
the second one will become all the more distant from the city walls, outside
the walls. Or, through hesitation about the meaning of the text: if one part is
close to the city, the other will be sent to the ends of the country. This amounts
to the same thing. Conversely, if the first part moves away from the city, the
second one will get all the closer. This amounts to putting the balance either
at the edges of the city, if one understands the first hypothesis, a doubtful one,
or on a circular, concentric and external ring, if one understands the second
one, probable. This ring then draws the geometrical site of the fixed points for
the division, the fulcrums for the balance, to bring about distributive justice.
Hence the confirmation of our thesis: spaceevery polar systemis
hierarchical, since from the first project of egalitarian reform by distrib-
utive justice, the division of the lands, the fixed point had to be moved, had
to be multiplied, had to be placed on the circles very circumference. Very
tentatively, this is the equivalent of a Copernican Revolution. The archaic
form of the utopia, pagus plus polis, or city adding up the fields, remains
stable: a center, edges.
It repeats the map of the oikoumene, engraved on a shield.

The universal and difference

Many cultures therefore build habitats, temples or cities, their economic,
social and political space in relation to what they project of cosmic and
religious space, where the axis of the world or umbilicus varies little, just
like the circle and the reversibility of time. Yet a single culture among them
promoted geometry and a mathematical model of the universe. Necessary
like so many others, the explanation isnt sufficient. The Greeks are no
exception, but here, they are the exception. All cultures have produced
forms, a single one has represented formal idealities.
We know the forms, in series that are reputed to be different (but in
accordance with what criterion are they different?) and parallel, in which
the homology is general. Which series, first, originary and determining,
becomes the reference? Religion, myth, the law, the political organi-
zation ? The question amounts to demanding, under the transparent
guise of reason, a reference element, an axis, a center, a king, a god,
command or beginning, a point with an infinity of parallel series.

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM55

 No, we are inside, and the law, the only law, is the parallelism. There is
no privileged element or arche.
Reason demands that there be no reason.
Anaximander had said it: everything holds by the principle of indif-
ference or the principle of reason taken negatively. Is reason defined by
indifference toward all difference? Must we precisely call universe that which
holds by this principle without principality?
Hence defined space ceaselessly refers to the indefinite.

The invariant of the profiles

It remains to seek what varies among all these profiles: verticality,
the horizontal plane Perspective, whether turning or circular, like
history for the Greeks, at least during this epoch, follows the law of
representation. The axis and the center, on the other hand, privileged
elements, vary in their nature but not in privilege. Hierarchical, all the
systems thus represented contain an arche: earth, sun, king, father,
hearth, ark, omphalos of the world, under as many names. The content
of the system varies: cosmos, political practices, habitat, city, different
religious behaviors Yet the system is stable across the variation of the
content.
Again, when an invariant exists, whatever the system may be, the system
resides rather in the invariant, in the stable form. And the stable invariant,
in the picture, is precisely reference.
Every referred system, by essence, is hierarchical, as well as every
decision to relate each element of a set to one or some privileged elements,
central. Analogy, the homology of everything, is the logos itself: speech,
discourse, certainly, but above all relation to.
Whether its a question of the world or of religion, of politics, of the
house of language, knowledge, view, theory the essential lies in
relation. Take any set of stars, gods, individuals, streets, rocks, words,
sites, abstractions, and it can only become a rational system if its bound
by a reference. The rational is prisoner of the referred. Reason is frozen
in hierarchy. Every rational construction, foundation, formation, every
system, from its nascent state, is warped by the archy.
This is the Greek lie, which Western culture has believed ever since,
without really being aware of it, is reason itself, in its first institution, its
function, its utility, its mastery. One is always surprised that force and
reason are tied together. Here is the inaugural moment when the knot
weaves its interlacing. And we see nothing there: reason hasnt taken
on the purple and gold clothes of force, rather hierarchy takes on the

56GEOMETRY
transparency, the diaphaneity of reason. Caught by the inside, as soon as
we reason, we give power to a center.
Must philosophy speak in a vague space, wandering forever on the
chaotic sea, running and flying like the god Hermes? Does a reason
without reference exist, an enormous rumbling from outside, a real freed
from representations, a voice of the universe, of matter, of the crowd,
a voice of the conditions for listening, a voice of voices? Has the center
disappeared, an island swallowed up by the innumerable sea? Is the real
rational? Pose the question then to Anaximanders apeiron.
But the enormous benefit of said union resides in the fact that a unitary
space was then formed: the Greeks inhabited it and, since their decision,
we have made it our abode.

Hestia and the episteme

But again, what does the verb to know signify? In spite of a few
difficulties, for [epistamai] the root [ephistemi] can
be accepted: setting, placing upon, sitting on or next to, coming near,
being held in suspense, above, halting, stopping. For the Greek language,
thinking, knowing, presupposes this low and sure base. Aristotle: reason
thinks and knows through repose and stopping; through the calming of the
soul after natural agitation a subject is engendered, prudent and knowing.
So the Greek word for science says station or static; the thinking peace
comes from the base and foundation. Pascal will say, as though in echo:
he who stops causes the getting carried away of others to be noticed, like
a fixed point. The episteme, knowledge or science, requires a stable place
where the subject stops, in repose. And the logos relates or transports to
this station or this habitat.

We will rediscover, generalized, these singular results of statics in the

naturalist genesis of place in regards to the first Elements of Euclid; they
evoke, more distantly, memories of the general results obtained in Statues,
the second book of Foundations, for the anthropology of the sciences.
Does epistemology then study the fixed point, the place of reference or
repose, even before the time when the quarrel of the sun and the earth was
burning, when the new theories of knowledge were changing anchorage
points? It needed to have a point, a support, a Copernican Revolution, a
sun, a finally determining reason, a first chain link fixed to a nail, a ground,
proto-foundations, an infrastructure to assure an axis and hold itself
near it. The philosophers sought this priority at every possible opportunity,
the primitive place of the first knowledge.

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM57

 Or: does this centered space find its condition in Anaximanders
apeiron, like the definite in the indefinite?

Black myth and white knowledge?

Once again, clear knowledge is interlaced with obscure myth. Hestia,
a woman, occupies the center of this static constellation of the Greek
dictionary: as commonly used, this proper name signifies the fixed point,
the quietude of repose, the hearth, the woman who weaves, next to the
fire, like Penelope, the loom, the upright of the loom, then the ships
mast, which stays maximally fixed in the great commotion of storms, the
colonnade, the axis of the world. We had no need for all these diagrams;
the common lexicon was sufficient. Myth and geometry converge and
agree with language. The episteme, knowledge, comes to Hestias hearth,
the ultimate reference.
I see the epistemologist well enough dressed as a priest of this constel-
lation of Hestia, a chaste Vestal who keeps the fire and sweeps the ashes in
order to toss them outside, into the exterior of the circular temple, through
the door the Romans called stercorary, since cleanliness demands gestures
of purification or exclusion.
Does there exist for him an ideal, institutional, religious, social, or
political place, a transcendental ground that founds knowledge? And
when he finds this place, he inhabits it and can no longer deceive or be
deceived, without further error, infallible, a supreme judge and inviolable
critic, located at the fulcrum of every balance. He who has discovered
this place feasts with the gods and talks to them as their equal. This is the
place or space of classical science, the science that the Greeks discovered
or founded.
An adult, does science still have need of assurance and quietude?
Autological, will it scorn foundations?
Knowledge lives with Hestia, in Anaximanders cosmos, and runs in the
company of Hermes, outside the hearth, through Anaximanders apeiron.

The tragic scene: The victim, in the center, in the

kings place
We have up to now described the center without defining or filling it: what
is it and who reigns there?
The Latin language formerly called a poem whose fragments of verse
came from borrowing from diverse authors satire or cento [centon]. But
before designating such a mixture of selected pieces, the Latin cento

58GEOMETRY
designated a patched-up piece of cloth, a scrap of composite fabric, like the
cloak of Harlequin, a comedic personage in the center of the stage. This
French word [centon], whose obsolescence distresses me, refers, like its
Latin equivalent, to the Greek kentron, the center, which exactly translates
cento, the poem with pieces taken from diverse sources and the patched-up
cloak, the one playing the role of the image of the other.
But first, kentron designates the goad with which the plowman formerly
spurred on the pair of oxen at the plow, the weapon in the bees belly or at
the scorpions rear, but also a whip with nails, an instrument of torture. The
same word designates the tool of punishment and he who undergoes or
merits it, the victim. The royal apex of the political form therefore ends up
receiving the poor wretch, condemned to the stirrup leathers or the lethal
goad, at the same time as it lets its place be seen.
Ketron then shows the center of the circle, the sharp point or singularity,
situated in its middle.

Language speaks in several voices and recounts without me the global

chain of constitution. Here is the cloak, a patched-up cento, here is the king
or emperor of the Moon, first admired at the center of the theater stage,
then becoming the publics laughing stock or its whipping boy. There lastly
is what Harlequin is carrying in the center of his center, in the heart of all
the folds of his clothes: what he is, one and several.
For the central point can be defined as the indivisible intersection of
the directions and the surrounding worlds and the many-colored union of
all these elements. Thus all by itself the word says the one and the multiple
at the same time, the one through the patent spatial meaning, the central
intersection, and the other, union, through hidden linguistic roots; both,
lastly, appear in geometry.
As though it accompanied the history of science, language recounts that
the center of the circle or of a closed curve in general, that pure ideality,
far from designating at the outset the calm reference place where people
debate in serene democratic equality, or rather the place from which the
king dictates the equality of the aristocrats and the exclusion of a forgotten
population, describes the trace left by the goad, the stimulation under a
distinct stilusthe common root of these words, stigma, is soon going to
signify the point in Euclidthe nail or the whip of the one being thrashed,
the torture site and the place of the ridiculed king, in the middle of the
circle formed by those responsible for the lynching.4
Traversed with semi-straight arrows, feathered vectors, the victim,
thrust there, pierced, flagellated, royal or poor, lies behind or beneath the
transparency of this pure concept of the center, whose clearness hides,

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM59

better than a screen, these residues of early archaic formation: do you see,
again, a similar scene on the point, stigma, the same sharp point for similar
stigmata? In the center lies the cento, covered over with and composed of
pieces.
In this singularity at the punctual and almost absent limit, the entire
world is gathered and comes into contact, is juxtaposed, often, or merged,
sometimes. In the center lies the subject, thrown under these pieces, the
receiver of information and pain.
The speculative bedazzlement before the circles center conceals the
anthropology of geometry. Shadow lengthens in the vicinity of this light
whose serene concept closes the wound of the tragic. Is reference identified
with a singularity of this exclusion, like kingship with sacrifice and the
origin with death?
Invading the entire rim of the circle, exclusion approaches the center
and occupies it: now it is in the middle, excellently.
Is this how defined space is distinguished from the indefinite?

Campus: Excursus outside the Greek area

In a Latin and civil translation of the whole affair, certain pages (211218)
of Rome, the First Book of Foundations, permit intercalating here a martial
and political campus amid this human genealogy of centered places, whose
interlocking slid from the cosmos to the agora, from the templum to the
pagus, from the polis to utopia, from the theater to science and episte-
mology, all the way to the sacrificial site, without ever leaving the laws of
exclusion.
Recall the fable by Aesop that was recounted to the people on strike or
in retreat on the Sacred Mount by some patrician located in their middle,
just like the stomach in the center of the members in the story itself and
like the summit of the mountain for the topography. He explained the
relations of harmony, then of revolt, between this central site and the other
surrounding points, while of course concealing the relations of domination.
In this discourse, history and the supposed origins are annulled so as
to always repeat the same one-multiple schema: the set, located on the
circumference, works for the center, conspires and revolts against it, settles
down so as to return to harmony, therefore takes it to be a tyrant, the one
responsible, the victim, exchanger, parasite or profiteer Whatever these
variations might be, the center remains invariant and defines the same
position, the one that sees all the points from its site and that they see from
theirs: hence you see, in your turn, for the first time no doubt, like me, the
word division in its divergent optical expression!

60GEOMETRY
 This multiple-one star, constitutive of the centered space, draws the
schema of putting to victimary death, of the sacrificial king, of represen-
tation in general, of power, of reference and the concept.
Might a social set theory, a political arithmetic then give an account of
the genesis of our abstract knowledge, the way they could thus be read in
this common episode from sciences prehistory? Or conversely, are social
processes thus explained by an operational method: to understand, does
the mathematical model remain the best? Whether about sets or arith-
metic, is this model valid at the same time for the body, members and
stomach, and the social body? The first hypothesis is false since Rome
never discovered what the Hellenes invented. The second one amounts
to the theory of models that are so convenient we change them every day.
So notice that we have crossed several times from nature to culture or
from the practices of the one to those of the other, the Northwest Passage.
And what if mathematics was born from this mixed place, social and global
at the same time, the reason why it applies universally?

Outside the Mediterranean

In addition to the Latins or the Babylonians, what did the civilizations know
that were cut off from all exchange, for example the Olmecs, the Aztecs,
the Maya, in the middle of an America so uncontaminated that it can serve
much better as a crucial experiment than the tribes of central Italy?
Refined computus techniques, in base 20 and using zero, a triple
calendar, religious, solar and Venusian, put into phase by the calculation
of a kind of epact, a circular conception of time that didnt fail in the
estimation of a large year, a good knowledge, still bound to totemism, of
local flora and fauna, a medicine, a pharmacopoeia, both estimable, quite
refined musical instruments
can you truly cite a single culture without explanations or obser-
vations of the cycles of the sky, without intervention in the sick body or
utilization of plants or sometimes animals with an eye to treatments, a
human group, finally, without dance or rhythmic sounds? Which lacks
individuals, whose name alone changes when one turns around the world,
who treat, predict, take samples from plants, sing, observe the stars,
cadence the epochs, pray, and sometimes counsel kings?
What does the thought said to be savage know? Rhythms, numbers,
dates, time-counters, animals and the floral order, songs and counterpoints,
sickness, death What do the cultures know that precede, in our area,
the sudden explosion of Greek science? This almost invariant core that the
anthropologist rediscovers in collectives cut off from all outside influence.

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM61

 The thing in the world the most equally divided, does there exist a
true exact pre-science, always and everywhere present, but for a few
variations? We can doubtless define its content, arithmetic, astronomical,
biological and medical, computational and rhythmic Rigorous and
formal, rare, might our knowledge have gained its momentum starting
from a permanent base, social and natural at the same time, a de facto or
first universal, toward the universal de jure?
As though our origin connected two universes.

Pure or metric space and the excluded third

From the cosmos, from the templum, from the campus and the polis, from
the stage and the royal throne, we have lastly arrived at the final represen-
tation, that of the page on which the proof is written.

Renan called the origin of geometry a miracle for the best reasons in the
world. For the construction of geometrical idealities or the beginning of
proof were highly improbable events: its unique rarity gives proof of this!
Neither Jeans nor Borel, not long ago, were reluctant to call physical events
with very low probability miracles.
To demonstrate this, we have two groups of sources: the mathe-
matical corpus itself first, such as its found in Euclids Elements and
other treatises or fragments; the doxography of the scattered stories, on
the other hand, in Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, or Athenaeus, that of
Aristotle or other commentators such as Proclus or Simplicius. These
two series of texts are written in two different idioms, common or
technical.
Yet, posing the question of the Greek beginning of geometry precisely
obliges us to ask how they went from one language to another, from the
language reputed to be natural and its alphabetical notation to the rigorous
and systematic language of numbers, measurements, axioms and rigorous
reasonings, written or noted in equations and figures.
These two languages themselves, without any relation to each other,
each speak of this history in their own way: stories or legends on the one
hand, equations and formulas on the other. Here are two parallel lines that
meet just as little as geometers and historians do.
Does the origin flee ahead, inaccessible, uncatchable?

From the white box that appeared on the shores of the rivers formerly,
found again in the tragic scene and its victim, in the acts that define the
temple, city, or camp, descend purge and expulsion, continuously.

62GEOMETRY
 We will in addition see that in the agora, two interlocutors, implacable
adversaries, find themselves compelled, in order for dialogue to remain
possible, to turn together against the same third and exclude him: be quiet,
dont make any noise, go back underground or leave. A curious diagonal
of the entirely pureit was believedsquare, and which reveals itself to
be agonal.5 Invariant, the operation of expulsion associates all the spaces
whose construction precedes that of the last space, the space of the first
geometry.
Beneath the Pyramids, buried mummies hide. The Thales of the
theorem intervenes around the three tombs, of the same form and different
dimension, and imitating one another. The pure space of geometry, that
of the group of similarities, that saw, it is said, the light of day that day,
doesnt say that a hidden royal dead man lies under the mimetic operator,
concretely built and theoretically represented. On high are seen the sun of
Ra and, for the dazzling epiphany, the solar light coming into the ideality
of the volume assuring its diaphaneity, but at the bottom, beneath the
tombstone, is hidden the incestuous and sacred cadaver, set apart, in a
black box with insurmountable walls.
When the old Egyptian priest in the Timaeus compares the new science
of the Greeks, children, to the knowledge whitened by the time of his own
culture, old, he evokes, in order to compare them, floods, conflagrations,
the fire of the sky, catastrophes. Mythical or real in space and time, this
story says that the unleashing of the elements conceals the origin.
Is the priest in possession of the secret of this violence?

A Rosetta Stone
Lets again draw these parallel lines that dont meet. Composed in natural
language, the stories, legends and doxographies speak of the corpus of the
geometers and arithmeticians, written, for its part, in coded figures or in
mathematical symbols, the way naive travelers would talk about a foreign
land. How reciprocally does the landscape speak to these visitors?
Can these two sets of texts be linked, these two languages be glued back
together? Lets imagine a Rosetta Stone where several legends are written
on one face, and where, on another, a theorem appears. Here no language
is unknown or undecipherable, as during the time of Champollion; we
know how to read both of them, but the question concerns the edge thats
common to the two faces, concerns their common border.

Lets read the face with the legends: someone who conceived some new
solution sacrificed an ox or a bull; the famous problem of doubling the

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM63

cube was posed regarding the stone of an altar in Delos; Thales at the
Pyramids measured the royal and sacred tombs
Digression: if the word legend precisely denounces the very thing it
announces so that no one believes whats related under its title, the fact
remains that it also designates the little cartouche deposited at the bottom
of maps for example and meant to decipher the strange scattered signs
on their space. Yes, to our informed eyes, the origins thus said remain
legendary; we no longer believe in them or almost, but jam-packed with
meaning and signs, the stories that relate them abound in legends, in the
second sense, that permit us to read them.

Legends and histories

The establishment of a rigorous proof precisely separates the Greeks from
their possible predecessors, the Egyptians or the Babylonians. The first proof
that we knew, the apagogic proof, concluded about the irrationality of 2.
Regarding it then, legends once more, taken from Euclid, Elements,
Book X, first scholium: the Pythagorean who for the first time proved said
irrationality, Hippasus of Metapontum, divulged its secret, even though
the sect had taken an oath to say nothing about it; maybe he was excluded
or expelled from the group; in any case it seems certain that he died in a
shipwreck. The anonymous scholiast continues: the authors of this legend
wanted to speak through allegory. Everything that is irrational and deprived
of form must remain hidden; thats what they wanted to say. Should some
soul want to penetrate this secret region and leave it open, it will then be
swept away into the sea of becoming, it will drown in its relentless currents.
From legends and allegories lets now return to history. The scholia,
commentaries, narratives or philosophical texts, on the one hand, the
theorems of geometry, on the other, announce an important event, the
famous crisis of the irrationals. Mathematics, nearest its origin, was close
to dying from this, and Platonism had to be overhauled. If logos designates
proportion, relation or measure, then the irrational, or alogon, forbids
measuring; if it signifies discourse, alogon is opposed to all speech. So,
exactitude collapses and condemns reason to silence.
Hippasus of Metapontum, or another, dies from this crisis says the
legend and its allegorical covering over in the scholium of the Elements.
Parmenides, the father, dies in turn from the same crisis; this is the philo-
sophical sacrifice perpetrated by Plato. But again, history gets involved in
it: in the dialogue that bears his name, Plato shows us Theaetetus dying,
returning from the battle of Corinth, Theaetetus, precisely the founder of
the theory of the irrationals such as it is taken up again in Book X of Euclid.

64GEOMETRY
 The crisis takes place on a triply tragic stage, on which the legendary
death of Hippasus, Platos philosophical parricide of Parmenides and the
historical end of Theaetetus are represented. A crisis in three moments, a
victim in three narratives.
On the other side of the stone, on the other face, we find the crisis and
the possible death of mathematics itself.

The Apagogic proof

So we are given the proof to be explained, as though it were a question
of a text written in the first language, the proofno doubt the oldest in
historythat Aristotle calls reduction to the absurd; lets write it first in its
own language.

Given a square with a side AB = b, whose diagonal is AC = a. We want to

measure AC in relation to AB.
Supposing this measure to be possible, the two lengths are mutually
commensurable.
We write then AC/AB = a/b. Lets reduce a/b to its simplest expression.
Then, the integers a and b are mutually prime.
Now, by the Pythagorean theorem: a2 = 2b2. Therefore a2 is even, therefore a is
even. And if a and b are mutually prime, b is an odd number.
If a is even, we can posit: a = 2c. Hence a2 = 4c2. Hence 2b2 = 4c2, that is
to say, b2 = 2c2. So b is an even number.
An intolerable situation: the number b is even and odd at the same time,
which is impossible.

Therefore, it is impossible to measure the diagonal in relation to the side. They

are mutually incommensurable.
If logos signifies proportion, here a/b or 2, the alogon designates the
incommensurable; if it signifies discourse or speech, you can say nothing
about the diagonal, and 2, unsayable, incalculable, is irrational.
Can b be said to be even or odd? Its undecidable.
Or, a number exists that, totally different, can not be said to be either
even or odd.
Far from deconstructing geometry, said undecidability on the contrary
immediately reconstructs a new one, generalized from the preceding one.

Can the notions used in the course of the proof be read on the two faces of
the new Rosetta Stone?

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM65

Other and same: Three triangles
1. For two lengths, what does being commensurable together mean? That
they have common aliquot parts. There exists, or one can make, a ruler,
divided into units, with respect to which these two lengths will in turn be
able to be divided into parts.
In other words, the lengths are other when alone to alone, face to face,
but the same, disregarding the differences, in respect to a third term, the
unit of measure taken as reference or ruler. The triangular situation, inter-
esting and well-known, of mimetism: two differences, locally irreducible,
are reduced to similarity by an external point of view.
It is fortunate or necessary here that the term measure [mesure] has
kept in the tradition at least two meanings, that of geometry and that
of non-excessiveness [non-dmesure], of non-violence and peace. These
two senses cover over a similar situation and an identical operation. To
the violent crisis introduced by Callicles in the Gorgias, Socrates opposes
the famous remark: you neglect geometry, as if demonstrative measure
knew how to win out over the rage shown by violent excess. As predicted,
violence follows from mimetism.
The Statesmans Royal Weaver knows a supreme knowledge, the
superior measure that dominates the irrational passions; thus there exists
a third measure whose power reduces the opposition of the rational and
the irrational, or a new language whose knowledge expresses at the same
time the old language and the silence into which the contradiction and
undecidability drive it.

2. A new triangle in which the same and the other are found again:
for two numbers, what does being mutually prime mean? That they are
radically different, without common divisors, apart from the unit. Here the
first triangular situation returns: total alterity, save considering the unit,
identical for everyone.

3. Still the same triangle but finally visible and drawn: invariant across the
variation of the coefficients of the squares, therefore across the variation of
forms constructed on the hypotenuse and the two sides, the Pythagorean
theorem allows measuring in the space of similarities, where things can
be of the same form and of an other size, which is repeated by the other
fundamental and originary theorem, the one by Thales. In other words,
the two great fundamental theorems, at the origin of the very first of
the geometries, expresssomething clearly understood by the theory of

66GEOMETRY
mimetism in its languagethat, in a triangle, under certain conditions, the
other is the same and the same the other.

An elementary and fundamental form, this triangle thus allows building

and rebuilding, after every contradiction, undecidability or deconstruction,
the entire space of models and imitations, the space of the Same and of the
Other, as can be read in the Timaeus.
Universally triangulated, the cosmos is therefore filled, not as the
heavens later with the exclusive glory of the one God for the peace of
Christians of good will, but with rivalry, with the violence and excess of
mankind, with their alterity or their resemblance, lastly with the Kings
measure.
Here, at bottom, is why there will be no physics: the social sciences
hold the world. Everything happens as though Platonism, the philosophy
of mimesis, caused the elementary geometrical schemas and the anthropo-
logical ones outlined by Ren Girard to correspond point for point.
For the same reason, these latter visibly constitute the geometric
idealities and the process of demonstration. Just like religion, geometry
vitrifies violence.

Mimesis
What, now, is the even and the odd? The French and English words for
example translate the Greek words well. Even and pair signify equal,
smooth, flat: same; thus the even becomes my equal;6 odd, impair, signifies
bizarre, missing its match, additional, left over, unequal, in a word, other
to make a blunder [un impair] Saying the absurdity that a number
is even and odd at the same time amounts then to saying as well that it is
same and other at the same time, in mimetic language.
Apagogic proof, rigorous and first in history, therefore concludes about
mimesis. It says that its reducible to the absurd. All the originary elements,
in numbers (even, odd or prime), as in forms (triangle and diagonal), for
schemas and for the procedures of proof, reduce to the dynamic behaviors
of this mimesis. Even the two first theorems.
From mimesis to sacrifices we return to history, myth, legend to
the history of science He who invented these methods sacrificed an
ox, says the legendary text; Hippasus divulged this and died because of
it; the crisis of the irrationals kills Pythagorean arithmetic and the first
Platonism

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM67

Quick passage to the tribunal
A little judicial interlude: this proof via the absurd, the first one that can
be said to conclude, unfolds as a contradictory process where, before
judgment, some thing belongs at once and at the same time to some set
and to its complement: it is necessary to decide. The adjective apagogic
precisely comes from a legal word: to arrest a criminal, to pay a fine
But here, the deciding authority escapes us: number imposes its law
on us. Here is the passage from crisis to critique, understood as judgment
issued by a tribunal, and from this critique to a criterion thats neither
subjective nor collective. Or again, the obligatory passage, that of the
Northwest, between the social sciences, exclusively critical, and the
objective criteria of the sciences said to be hard.

Construction and non-deconstruction

Yet this was said more then two millennia ago: why play a game that has
already been decided?
For, second act, it remains as plain as a thousand suns that if the diagonal
or 2 are incommensurable or irrational, they remain constructible on the
square, that their geometrical mode of existence is no different from that
of the side. Even the Menos little slave boy, ignorant, is going to know how
and be able to construct it. Even children know how to play with the top
that the Republic deconstructs as stable and mobile at the same time. How
does it happen then that reason takes facts that the most ignorant can
establish and construct and proves them to be irrational? There must be a
reason for this irrationality itself.
In other words, we are proving the absurdity of the irrational. We bring
it to the undecidable.
Yet, it exists; we can do nothing about it. Or as the other will say: and
yet it turns, the way a top turns, even if we prove, via impregnable reasons,
that it is undecidably both mobile and fixed.7 Thats the way it is. Therefore,
the theory that precedes and founds the proof must be transformed. The
obstacle commands more than reason does. What becomes absurd is not
what we have proven to be undecidable, but the theory that has conditioned
our proof. Here is the very ordinary and humble movement of science: let
science reach an objective dead end of this type, and it will immediately
transform its presuppositions.
Translated into common language: mimesis is reducible to contradiction
or to the undecidable. Yet it exists; we can do nothing about it. It can
always be proved that you can neither talk nor walk or that Achilles will

68GEOMETRY
never catch up to the tortoise. Yet we talk, we walk; the fleet-footed athlete
quickly passes the slow animal. Thats how it is. Therefore the theory must
be objectively transformed, and all the philosophy that precedes must not
be arrogantly reputed to be antiquated.

Hence history: Theodorus continues along Hippasuss legendary path and

multiplies the proofs of irrationality all the way up to 17. So there are
many of these absurdities; we even know that there are many more of them,
to speak the common language, than rational relationships. Consequently,
Theaetetus takes up again the archaic Pythagoreanism and gives a general
theory that founds, in a new reason, the facts of irrationality. Euclid will be
able to write Book X of the Elements.
The crisis stops; mathematics finds an order again; Theaetetus dies; the
end of this story, technical in the language of system, historical in common
language, the one that recounts the Battle of Corinth. Plato overhauls his
philosophy: in the course of the famous, although symbolic, parricide,
father Parmenides is sacrificed on the altar of the principle of contradiction,
for the Same must be Other, in a certain fashion, or non-being must be.
So, a new Royalty finds itself founded. The Royal Weaver combines
rational proportions and the irrationals into an ordered network, once
past the crisis, with the return of time over itself, after the technology of
the dichotomy, founded on the square, on the iteration of the diagonal.
Society is finally in order. The dialogue that recounts all this isnt entitled
the Geometer, but the Statesman.

Interface
Thus constructed, the Rosetta Stone can now be read on all its faces, in the
language of legend, in that of history, of mathematics, of philosophy. Its
message passes from language to language. A sacrificial crisis is at stake.
A series of deaths accompanies its translations into the languages being
considered. Following these sacrifices order reappears: in mathematics, in
philosophy, in history, in political society.
Ren Girards schema allows us to show the interface of these languages,
their link, their reattachment. For it isnt enough to recount; the operators
of this movement must also be made to appear. Now these latter, all
constructed on the SameOther couplet, are discovered, in their rigor,
deployed in the very first geometric proof.

Just as the square, as we shall see, equipped with its diagonal appears as
the schema of the complete intersubjective relation, bringing about the

FIRST IN THE RITE: THE ROYAL VICTIM69

formationamong others?of ideality as such, so the triangle and rigorous
proof appear, through manipulation of all the operators of mimesis, in its
internal dynamic. The origin of geometry then emerges from a sacrificial
history, and the two parallel lines are now connected, point for point, as
though they covered each other over. Legend, myth, history, philosophy,
pure science lastly show the common borders over which a unitary schema
builds bridges.

Should Metapontum the geometer, whose name means that he crosses the
sea, from now on be called Pontifex?8 His violent shipwreck in the storm,
Theaetetuss death pangs due to the violence of warrior combat, the
parricide perpetrated on Parmenides, are these the same ritual murders?
Was the altar of Delos constructed on the stone on which we have
read these diverse origins, before having doubled it in order to invent the
greatest theorem of Antiquity?

Like every science and every knowledge in general, geometry begins by

taking root in the problem of Evil.
In the course of our knowledge we continually forget it: but it always
comes back and, at certain times, stronger than ever.
Thus today, we are tragically passing through the origin again.

70GEOMETRY
3 FIRST IN DIALECTIC:
THE INTERLOCUTOR

Spaces of exclusion: Discursive

origins
Speaking: The square with monsters
In the museum of Rhodes you will see a vase from the good era on the
side of which youll find painted two men, who, above the equator, seem
to be conversing amiably, calmly seated on stools, themselves supported
by the swollen middle; on the southern side each seat conceals a monster
crouched under the belly of the vase and in the belly of each speaker no
doubt: hidden, invisible, ready to bite, to cry out, to kill, they show an
animal violence at the foundation of dialogue.
So you think youre exchanging a few words between just the two of
you, but two beasts, below, are added to this couple. On both sides of the
diagonal of the new square thus formed forces are on the watch that pure
reasoning, and first and foremost communication, must exclude in order
to exist.

Return to the page

Communication possesses technologies of transport, storage, facilitation,
or multiplication of the message, recorded tapes, printing, telephone
One of the simplest, richest, and most ancient of such technologies,
writing, allows storing, transporting, and multiplying information; before
broaching questions of style, of the arrangement of the narrative or
argumentation, it consists in a drawing, ideogram, or conventional graphe.
 Written communication links together two persons well versed in the
same graphism, trained to code or decode a meaning by means of the same
key. A written message only passes if the receiver possesses the key to the
drawing.
A subsidiary condition requires that at transmission the scribe should
execute it as best as possible. What does this mean? That it is composed
of essential characteristics, laden with meaning: normalized letters, good
formation of their sequences, of the words and their series, governed by
rules of morphology and syntax; but also accidental characteristics, devoid
of signification, which depend on the clumsiness or skill, the culture,
passion, illness of the one doing the writing: shakiness, failed drawings,
spelling errors
The first condition presupposes orthography; the second one a type
of calligram that preserves form over accident. Logicians and philoso-
phers are interested in form, rarely in cacography, the pathology of the
communication channel; the invention of printing for example, besides
the multiplication of messages, above all assured the everyday benefit of
a regular and standardized written form: there is no longer any need to
become an epigraphist to read it. Graphology is the false science attached
to the psychological motives of calligraphy or cacography: can we talk
purely about these impurities?
Spoken languages as well experience a pathology of communication:
in squabbles, you hear stutterings, mispronunciations, regional accents,
dysphonias, and cacophonies. Thus every technique of communication
entails background or waterfall noise, jamming, interference [parasites],
interruptions, hysteresis, diverse interceptions.
Just like the parasite, the background noise never ceases.

A third man in the dialogues?

Lets consider, under the name parasite, the set of these jamming phenomena
that obstruct the passage of messages. Writing or speaking consists in
risking meaningful forms along channels that have constant interference:
cacography and cacophony make noise.
In dialogue and correspondence, where the source becomes reception
and reciprocally, the cacographer and the epigraphist, the cacophonist
and the sharp or benevolent ear agree to exchange their reciprocal roles in
such a way that they can be considered to be fighting in concert against a
common enemy: that parasite whose noise risks interrupting them.
Dialogue is transformed then into a game practiced by two inter-
locutors, joined together against the jamming and confusion, lets say

72GEOMETRY
against an individual determined to break their communication. Far from
opposing each other, as in dialectic, they on the contrary side with each
other in the same camp, linked through interest, because they fight in
common against the noise, the third between them.
Violence having returned, the combat changes souls.
A two-person dialogue posits this third and seeks to exclude him;
successful communication then presupposes this excluded third: a third
man or a demon, a prosopopoeia of noise, always cries out between us.
This is the triangle.
Socrates maieutic method for example joins respondent and questioner
together in the work of giving birth. The two interlocutors play in the
same camp, fight in concert to let the truth emerge or with the goal of an
agreement, for the success of the communication. They battle together
against the jamming, that demon or third man. The combat doesnt always
succeed: in the minor dialogues, victory often remains in the hands of the
powers of noise; in others, the fight blazes and shows the power of this third.
But since the two combatants have agreed to dialogue, this very
agreement, whose content in addition presupposes at least an intersection
of linguistic repertoires, leads us to similarly posit a fourth man, its proso-
popoeia. The square appears.

The shakinesses of the drawing: Communication

and abstraction
Lets write the signs of mathematics. A given symbol is drawn by means of
chalk on a board for instance. A sequence of formulas can present several
occurrences of some sign or other. Mathematicians are agreed in recognizing
the same in these varied occurrences. Yet each one differs from the other due
to the handwriting:1 the shakinesses of the mark, misfires of movement
The logician consequently reasons not about the concrete graphe drawn on
the board here and now but about the class of objects of the same form: the
graphes in question merely evoke the abstract being of the symbol, recog-
nizable by the homothety (here then already is Thales theorem?) or rather
in the homeomorphy (topology in writing already?) of these graphes. This
recognition presupposes that the form is distinguished from the cacography.
Mathematicians see no difficulty in this, and the discussion seems pointless
to them because they are agreed about this act of recognition of the same
form, invariant across the variation of the handwriting that evokes it.
But where the scientist gets impatient, the philosopher wonders how
things would be with this question if there were no mathematics and the
historian wonders how things were before there was any.

FIRST IN DIALECTIC: THE INTERLOCUTOR73

 For no graphic mark resembles any other, so that if one searches in
writing for which part is form and which part cacography, noise often wins
out.

Entendre, in the two senses2

The effort to eliminate this cacography or noise therefore at the same
time conditions the apprehension of the abstract form, understanding or
comprehending, and the success of communication, hearing. Thus, a single
and same act recognizes an abstract being across the occurrences of its
concrete appearances and produces an agreement about this recognition.
Mathematicians get impatient and are surprised that this problem is
posed anew because they think in a collective that has long triumphed
over noise. For them the world of us and the world of the abstract merge
because the subject of abstract mathematics is this us, founding a city of
communication maximally purged of noise, neighboring the city of music;
here are two cities that are quasi universal, across space and across time,
almost transposable or almost invariant, among all things and all men.
For formalization, in general, carries out a double process by which
one passes from concrete modes of thinking to an abstract form or forms,
but which, in addition, optimally eliminates interference. Even better: in
heading toward an increasingly pure mathematicity, the history of this
science purges it of this jamming increasingly better. Mathematics never
ceases constructing quasi perfect communication, that of the excluded
third, on the exclusion of a demon thats been almost definitively exorcised.
If mathematics didnt exist the exorcism would have to be repeated.
To understand the question, can we bracket the unavoidable fact of the
historical existence of mathematics?

Discursive origins
Under similar circumstances, Plato precisely makes the recognition of the
abstract form and the success of the dialogue coincide. When I say bed, Im
not talking about such and such a bed, mine, yours, this one or that one,
Im evoking the idea of bed; when I draw a square or diagonal in the sand,
Im not talking about this irregular or anexact graphe, rather Im evoking,
through it, the ideal form of the diagonal or the square: I eliminate the
empirical.
Furthermore, precisely what makes this bed mine prevents you from
understanding bed since what makes the other bed yours refers more to
you than to the bed. Goodbye to the subject. In recognizing the style of

74GEOMETRY
the drawer in a given shakiness of the drawn square, we talk about his
genius and not about this form. So goodbye to every personal subject. Do
you want to have a successful dialogue? Then dont talk any more about
yourself. With regard to the world and astronomy without eyes, we will
again find this exclusion of every subject which constituted the Hellenic
genius. Noise? You or me. Beasts? Me and you.

Thus the elimination of what conceals form, cacography, jamming and

noise, thus the exclusion of every subject, make possible a science for
the Universal for us and, in rigor and in truth, in the Universal in itself.
Mathematics came from identifying the one with the other.

The differences, again

The first effort to make communication succeed in dialogue renders form
independent of its empirical or personal realizations.
Jamming and noise, any parasitethe third of formceaselessly
intervene so as to bring the first dialogues to aporia. The dialectical method
gets its source in the same regions as the mathematical method.
Excluding the empirical consists in planing down the differences,
the plurality of others that cover over the same: the first movement of
formalization. In this sense, the reasonings of modern logicians regarding
the symbol resemble the Platonic discussion about the geometrical form
drawn in the sand: the lines shakiness must be eliminated, the strokes
randomness, the gestures misstep, the set of encounters that makes it so
that no graphe has strictly the same form as any other.

Likewise, the perceived thing is endlessly distinguishable: a different word

would be necessary for every circle, symbol, tree or pigeon; and again for
yesterday, today and tomorrow; and again depending on whether the one
perceiving, you or me, is irritated, suffering from jaundice, and so on ad
infinitum. At the extreme consequence of empiricism meaning becomes
totally submerged in noise, the communication space becomes granular,
like the space in which neither Achilles nor the arrow reaches their goal;
dialogue becomes condemned to cacophony. The empirical only makes
noise.
So the first of the third men, the empiricist, must be excluded; this is
the strongest of our demons, since it suffices to open our eyes and ears to
see that he controls our world. In order for dialogue to succeed, our eyes
must be closed and our ears must be plugged to the song and beauty of the
Sirens. With the same movement we eliminate hearing and noise, vision

FIRST IN DIALECTIC: THE INTERLOCUTOR75

and the faulty drawing, the subject itself; by the same stroke we conceive
form and we understand each other.
The Greek miracle of mathematics therefore had to be born at the same
time as a philosophy of dialogue and through dialogue.
The link in Platonism between a dialectical methodin the sense of
communicationand a progressive purification of abstract idealities in
the style of geometry is not an accident of the history of ideas, nor is it an
episode in the voluntary decisions of the philosopher.
In this sense, the minor Socratic dialogues precede mathematics the
way, it is said, measuring a square plot of wheat did in the Nile Valley.
But exclusion joins the farmer and the philosopher, both of whom chase
out the interfering parasites.3

The opposing thesis: On discussion, the parasite

and the contract
Certain Anglo-Saxon authors like to praise the early Milesian collectives for
having achieved argued debates whose mutual critique produced, according
to them, geometry. One might almost think we were in an analytic
philosophy department! If the ancient Greeks had had the genius to invent
that science then they must have lived and thought like we do! By describing
their own world, these historians assure its publicity at the same time.
Hold on: is the collective constituted by this free, lively and agreed upon
debate, or is it born on the contrary from natural objects or the idealities
of geometry itself? Is consensus born from necessity or necessity from
consensus? In one case, the solution to the problem of the origin would
therefore presuppose it to be already resolved. What relation does social
and contractual debate maintain with the thing itself, exterior to it? That is
the question, which in itself debate itself could not settle.

An enterprise succeeds when it launches a mimetism. In the Greece of the

fifth century, as in the Paris of the Enlightenment or Vienna in 1900, certain
people, at every opportunity, ran to science as others ran to painting in
Renaissance Venice or Florence, or to war under Napoleon, or to the stock
market and fortune today. Explaining the sudden success of geometry and
physics, there or elsewhere, at this or that date, by another motivation, the
lure of gain, interest in utility, the love of power seems pointless, for it
would then be necessary to explain where this latest attraction came from,
and so on.
Whether its a question of fashion, struggle, glory, strategy, money
or culture, its never anything but a question of winning out incomparably

76GEOMETRY
over others. Pythagoras distinguished, it is said, three kinds of life, devoted
respectively to honors, riches, and contemplative knowledge, and just like
Plato and others, he gave the latter the first rank. By giving it the supreme
honors, he inverted the ranking. Do you seek first place in geometry? Then
your life, even geometrical and contemplative as well, is only devoted to
these honors. Do you love open debate? Do you delight then so much in
being right?
You think you must win out over all the others: you neglect geometry.
Socrates lectures Gorgias, who leads the violent life of the strong and turns
it into theory, by bringing him back to geometric equality: for, he says, it
reigns all-powerful among the gods as among men. Isnt that winning out
even more and even over everyone definitively? What an ignoble paradox
to place equality at the summit of every hierarchy, divine and human!
Come on, the life of contemplation, in claiming to be ranked first, confesses
its quality of being an ordinary life, drugged with imitation and empty
victories over others.

Mimetism, again
Lets no longer cheat by yielding to the self-publicity of the abstract life. So
this mimetism remains, a fundamental social passion from which come
power and glory, wealth and honors, intelligence, discoveries and force,
equally. Geometric equality, all-powerful among the gods of polytheism as
among men, is achieved here in and through mimetism, whose very word
repeats two equal things. It remains to fill it with a variable content: money,
honors, force, finery, or trinkets
Let a small group of women and men, or children, devote themselves
to a gesture and reach, here or there, this morning or at the origin of
time, quantitatively, some critical mass, and like a motor it will launch an
irresistible mimetic impetus: this applies to feathers for hats just as much
as to murder, and to some given charlatanism just as much as to geometry;
thus to debate or discussion.

The set and the subsets

So assume the movements of a school of fish heading west in parallel;
suddenly the mass undulates like a sail in the wind, folds and sets off for the
south. The change begins with a little subgroup, alone involved. So its one
of three things: either the set continues its path and the deviants realign
themselves or, conversely, they depart in their own direction and become
separated from their colleagues; or the entire group follows the direction

FIRST IN DIALECTIC: THE INTERLOCUTOR77

of the declination introduced by the different ones. Differential changes no
doubt continuously trouble a thousand little subgroups that are more or
less lucky in their directive relation to the totality of the school.
Humanity has been heading in the same direction as the scientists for
only forty years. For how long? But how did the subgroup itself begin? Can
we explain how and why it suddenly gave itself over to the same accorded
gestures, so different from the common customs of the set?

The law of mimetism applies universally, and the singular thing it

propagates depends on randomly dispersed circumstances. Thus the
burden of explication doesnt focus on uniformity: if a group marches in
step, battles with sword or saber, dresses in blue, speaks the same language,
drinks beer or believes in the divinity of beavers, its only a question here
of the same behavior or rather of the behavior of the same. Likewise for
discussion, which takes up the primitive mimetism, the originary contract,
again at different costs than hand to hand combat.
This inevitable lining up proves to be productive and destructive at the
same time since it builds empires and brings them down by dividing them
against themselves; the logic of mimetism remains ambiguous, unpre-
dictable, like that of language, long recognized as the best and the worst
of things.4
So Im willing to accept that discussion created geometry, reserving the
right to say that it has at the same time produced, across the exacerbated
rivalries of the Greek schools, charlatans of the worst kind, sophistry,
rhetorical and dialectical cleverness, the ferocious injustices of the most
famous trials of Anaxagoras and Socrates; therefore error and death.

The parasite
Why? Because a parasite is immediately associated with every discussion:
objective noise, a beast among us, an unpleasant and often invisible
character, inevitable perhaps, and who lives off us. The parasite is to
communication what the exploiter is to production. They dont produce
or communicate but do paradoxically govern the system they prevent,
no doubt because they place obstacles to it. The French verb contrler [to
control] expresses this state of affairs marvelously: to occupy a counter-
productive or counter-communicative role in order to manage the set of
communicative and productive roles and networks.5 Do we really imagine
that its the leader whos the enemy?
Consequently, we can hold the practice of discussion responsible, as well,
for the death of geometry in Greece during Procluss time. The parasitical

78GEOMETRY
heaviness of the commentary finished it off. In other words, the logic of the
parasite functions just as ambiguously as the logic of mimetism.
Wisdom and perhaps philosophy thus must be defined as the set of
advice and practical conduct whose effect allows us to resist the mimetic
impetus.
To avoid the certain evils of jealousy and crime, certain people preferred
to withdraw from the beneficial works or effects of production and
communication, therefore from debate.
One can make out why, three millennia after the origin, and since it has
impelled the general fate of humanity for forty years, science still seems the
best and the worst of things at the same time; and why the question of its
relations with wisdom is always posed.

The tribunal, again

How did the first physicists of Ionia, on the contrary, break the exclusively
political or judicial discussion of that time to hold a different discourse
about water and the objective principle of things, parasitically intercepting
the flows of communication and thus deserving, as is seen in the doxog-
raphy, to stand before the tribunals?
They broke the common social contract and the exclusive political law.
We find The Natural Contract again and the pages (pp. 6376) it devotes
to the relationships between the sciences and the law, concerning the trials
against Zeno and Anaxagoras.

WRITING: The Egyptian page

Aristotle writes that Egypt was the cradle of mathematics; Democritus
readily puts his rigorous proofs above the art of the harpedonaptai; the
Timaeus has Solon dialogue with an old Egyptian priest; Herodotus
recounts Sesostriss agrarian divisions and the importation of geometry
into Greece; Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch report that Thales measured
the Great Pyramid En bloc, this corpus of sources of the Greek miracle
shows at least a concordance: the putting of Greece and Egypt into relation.
Already perennial in Antiquity, a traditional discussion, up to our time,
taken up again in Montucla and Bailly in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries when the hieroglyphs were deciphered, opposes these two birth-
places. Was geometry born in the valley of the Nile or along the shores of
the Ionian Sea. Divide or legacy?
This amounts to reasoning along the unitary thread of monodromic
time: a thing happens at this point, either before or after. Along a linear

FIRST IN DIALECTIC: THE INTERLOCUTOR79

model, there is no middle; it is necessary to decide, there as in the texts:
either Democritus or Herodotus. If the one is right, the other is mistaken.
A dualism of the false and the true, of the faithful and the unfaithful. The
single line of history then divides the authentic and the erroneous.
This amounts to neglecting the massive lesson of the sources, their
concordance, and the very thing its a question of, geometry.
Was it born from a transport by sea, in the dialogue between the Greeks
and the Egyptians and amid their relations? But first, which geometry?
That of Thales. What is it in practice? Not in the ideas it presupposes but
in the activity that posits it. First, a graphic art of drawing, then a language
that talks about this traced drawing, present or absent.
This is not only true of archaic geometry but also of Descartes for
example. When he invents algebraic geometry, he discovers a particularly
faithful language for expressing visible varieties in formulas. He speaks of
drawing, better than Euclid or Thales, but like them. His plane imitates the
Egyptian desert where light wrote.
Here then is a schematism and a language, a graphism and the organon
that designates it, shows it and demonstrates based on it: a language speaks
about a graphe.

The demonstratives
Whether meditating or demonstrating, Plato doesnt operate any differ-
ently. He ceaselessly uses the demonstrative: Im not talking about this
square, this diagonal, that very thing you just traced in the sand with
the end of a stick or drew in any other way, but about the set of graphes
with the same form: the drawings of the family participate in a single
discourse.
Im not talking about this, but in particular about this. A pertinent
discourse designates the singleton and its complement in the set being
considered: it and what is not it, the others which arent the same.
Socrates, as we will see when we read the Meno, questions the slave with
these demonstratives. Is this space square? Are the four lines here equal?
Do these lines traverse it? He says: a space of this type, this side, this new
figure, a surface like this one, starting from here, from this corner which
remains empty
Its a matter here, note it well, of the origin of knowledge, since where
the ignorant slave draws his knowledge from is being sought. If geometry
is the example for the question, its definitely a matter, at least laterally, of
the origin of geometry. Both in its problematic content and in its linguistic
form.

80GEOMETRY
 But this latter demonstrates by accumulating demonstratives. The thing
is there, shown, demonstrable. Faithful, language adapts, in the closest
proximity of its object. It discourses about a drawing. And the question
remains: how to speak adequately about a traced line?

Reproductions
What now on the subject of the graphic arts in Egypt? A few building
reproductions remain for us, like the building from el-Amarna, in which
plan, elevation, and section are mixed, without the mastery of what we
call perspective. Furthermore, the scale varies in it. But the Gurab papyrus
shows a reproduction of the same type in its perfection. The plan of a naos
is drawn in black ink on an exactly orthonormal red quadrilateral. Besides
the precision of the linear drawing, the Cartesian-style system of reference
holds the attention: visibly, the architect and builder knew geometry, if by
this is understood an exact technique for scale drawing, an art of repro-
duction. The topographical maps, even crude, that have come down to us
confirm this feeling.
This proves Herodotus and the old stories of the harpedonaptai right:
the Nile Valley mastered the metric. So the Greeks were able to import
everything that in geometry falls under measurement. Or under repro-
duction. Does geometry reduce to a strategy of measuring?
If geometry is a metric we are brought back to the traditional questions
which have for three centuries or more obstructed the discussion about
its origin. The confusion of the pure abstract and the metric makes any
passage from precise measurements to the purity of the abstract impos-
sible. From the exact to the rigorous the path never ends, for mathematics
has nothing to do with exactitude; physics and the applied sciences are
exact or inexact; mathematics is anexact.
If the Egyptians had transmitted to the Greeks strategies of measurement,
as refined as you could wish, they would instead have stopped them on the
path of mathematics by launching them on the infinite road of approxi-
mation. Along this endless path historians tried to locate, in nature or in
art, perfect forms: that of the circle, of the cone, etc. Whether they find
them or not has no importance to the matter. Geometry, in the Greek
sense, that is to say, the true sense, has no need for their presence: as is
said, it reasons rigorously about just any drawing. Necessarily, not precisely.
The positivism or Cartesianism of graph paper hides the right solution
from us. The harpedonaptai engender Monge for example, not Theaetetus
or Eudoxus or the Platonic School. From exact measurement to pure
reasoning the road was cut off by the Mediterranean Sea, or better, by an

FIRST IN DIALECTIC: THE INTERLOCUTOR81

anexactly infinite distance. The road remains so, whatever the pedagogues
who think theyre opening access to mathematics to children with cubes
and matchsticks may believe.
So Thales didnt measure the Great Pyramid directly, but in its repro-
duction, its shadow, its projection on the desert plane or the drawing of
its edge. Plato likewise draws a diagram in the sand and shows thisthis
corner and this linebefore demonstrating.
There, the sun writes the monuments hieroglyph on the desert; here,
the stick marks the diagonal. Thales and Socrates talk about a drawing. We
are returning to our premises.

Translation
Treating the corpus of sources as an undivided set does show a concordance:
the encounter of the GreeksDemocritus, Solon, Thales with the
Egyptians. The sages cross the Mediterranean. The texts recount the
circumstances and contacts of some given Greek traveler, a scientist, with
some given Egyptian priest. But these singulars conceal a collective.
In fact, one culture encounters another one, one system finds another
one, one means of signing collides with another one, the most opposite.
Everyone dialogues, each in his own language. It is necessary to translate.
Well have to call this translation geometry.

Lets make things more precise. Egyptians and Greeks spoke to each other
about science: about the ancient science and the new one, about the one
that time has whitened, about the one which is budding so presently that
the archaic one judges all Greeks to be children. A traditional science
lies across the Nile Valley, an entire memorized knowledge, sleeping on
papyrus. A set of stored acquired knowledge, written down information,
its value doesnt matter for the moment, rather its form or presentation; at
minimum: a graphic system.
Already entirely in the plan of the naos or the map of gold mines,
the Egyptian system of representation masters reproduction, assembles
directly objective emblems. Hence its abundance, opposed to the numeric
reduction of alphabets.
In passing, the comparison of the two codes resolves, from the origin, the
old and always being reborn question of the overabundance of knowledge:
overwhelmed by an innumerable stock, we invent, almost immediately, the
means to control it.
Hieroglyphs exhibit the object, show it. The hieratic and demotic
cursives bury it. Here is the bird, the ox, the vase and the house. Instead of

82GEOMETRY
transmitting objects, as it seems established used to be done, the graphic
reproduction of these objects, their faithful diagram, is transmitted.
The legend of Thales, passing from Khufu to the prismatic hieroglyph,
through reproduction or planar projection, marks an important stage in
the evolution of the means of communication.
The drawing of the vase designates it and moreover communicates its
form and size. Through the alphabetic writing of the four letters of the
word vase, the graphe loses the size and form of the object, so that its
necessary to find a new language to communicate this information, to say
the relation between the outline in the sand and the standing tomb, the
relation between the hieroglyph and the object represented, a manifest and
silent relation in the logographic drawing. The Egyptian system closes off
this relation, which cannot be said in its own graphism, entirely fated to
show it to the eye.

Just as the rigor of a system cant be assessed in its native language, so the
faithfulness to the thing cannot be assessed in the native language of a
system constructed to exhibit this thing of itself. Thales theorem precisely
designates what the written word says: the class of similar forms of all sizes.
The sign systems we are examining are the ones that are the most different
among those that the Fertile Crescent or the eastern Mediterranean had
put in place. The Greeks discovered this enormous gap upon their disem-
barkation from their trip. Representative, pictographic, the hieroglyph
shows a drawing or a reproduction: proto-geometric, in this sense, and also
in that the known evolution of ideograms shows a tendency to eliminate
detail, to purify itself into a diagram. Each drawing represents a word, that
is to say, a thing, at least at the origin. At least from what someone who
doesnt decipher sees, a Greek for example.
Image, intuition, realism.

Alphabet
The first writing with alphabetic notation, Greek writing is the opposite of
this system. The Phoenicians brought their writing, still consonantary, into
the commercial trading posts scattered around the perimeter of the Greek
world. Were crossing the sea once more. From the Semitic systems to the
new one, vowel notes appeared, which subsequently were to spread and
remain more or less stable in the form of the alphabet, felicitously named
to designate its Greek origin, and improving, as though in return, certain
Semitic notations. The alphabet no longer reproduces the object, this object
here shown by language, but analyzes the phonic flow into elements.

FIRST IN DIALECTIC: THE INTERLOCUTOR83

 The logogram draws the word or the thing. The logosyllabic system
becomes syllabic and cuts up the word, now spoken; it soon becomes
consonantary, then a true alphabet, where the syllables are divided into
letters. Consequently, the drawing on the beach, tablet or parchment
analyzes something entirely different from the object its supposed to
designate. Its a sign of sign of sign. And this simplified system functions
exactly like a proto-algebra.
Discourse, convention, formalism.

In passing again, in our time the first system is catching up to the second
one through dynamic pictography. As though in another origin, we should
expect that knowledge and its transmission will find themselves drastically
changed by this.

Source
Solon and Thales arrive in Egypt: a quasi algebraic system enters into short
circuit with a proto-geometric system. A discourse encounters an image.
A formalism discovers a form. A convention comes into contact with an
intuition. How to alphabetize a hieroglyph? By discoursing on a drawing.
How to analyze, dichotomize this sign that designates a diagram?
What is geometry? Yes, the discourse on a drawing.
Of what must we give an account? Of the emergence of the abstract. Not
of the exact metric, but of the pure. Examine what happens in the concord-
ances short circuit, in the heat of the encounter said by the corpus. Here is a
sign system thats faithful to the objects but which cannot assess this fidelity
of itself. Repetitive, consequently, and dead, since incapable of thematizing
itself. There, opposite it, is a sign system that designates signs. Lets assess
this gap: the two systems are together like a language and a metalanguage.
The one describes things-words, the other analyzes signs-words.
Whatever translation we may imagine between the two systems, the prefix
meta remains as a residue. The encounter produced abstraction.
That which was to be proved.

In the closest proximity to a stony faithfulness that cannot turn toward

itself, convention discovers itself to be conventional; it takes note of its
formalism; it emerges as abstraction. But remains fascinated by faithfulness,
its opposite, gets up and sets out to try to catch up to it.
What must we explain? Abstraction as gap in relation to the object.
The difference between the two systems explains it, and their encounter
produces it. Logos becomes relation, unity becomes element.

84GEOMETRY
The reference, through controlled mediations, of this analyzing system
to hieroglyphic diagrams in addition explains the interesting birth of the
interminable discourse of mathematics, of its grand narrative.
For where can we find the source of the flow engendered there, endlessly
continued all the way to us, without known border? In this short-circuit or
this concordance, which has just produced the abstract.

Crossbreeding
The diagram system indeed groups more information for the gaze. Limited,
the Greek system perhaps causes the opposite effect. Is there really more
information in the plan, diagram, or hieroglyph than in the linear sequence
of letters, especially if the drawing of these latter is only formed to the sole
end of distinguishing them from each other as points or lines? Does the eye
receive more information than the ear? It requires, as we know, hundreds
of lines to define a television image, cut up into slices, like Democrituss
cylinder or cone, the inventor at the same time of the first infinitesimal
calculus and elementary atomism.
Poor and abstract, linear and conventional, the alphabetic system thus
encounters a system thats rich and object-oriented, planar and intuitive.
The final result of a fundamental dichotomy, the former system starts to
dichotomize again as soon as it finds a field in which to relaunch its own
functioning. The Greek system analyzes: this is the motor. A poverty finds
an expedient and sets off on a trip to seek a fortune which of itself isnt
recognized to be such. Discourse endlessly unwinds the diagram. Triangle,
diagonal and square the figures conceal a thousand horns of plenty from
which unceasingly flow infinite combinations of an abstract alphabet that
doesnt know how to nor can catch up to them. As though one wanted to fill
an interval with points. The alphabet runs toward the hieroglyph; discourse
tries to catch up to intuition; the formal departs towards the real or the
abstract towards the concrete, as the arrow flies to the target. From the
foundation of mathematics, a certain formal Zeno had described Achilles
immobile in full sprint.
Incapable of intuition, the Greek system can only represent it as a
horizon, as every alphabet or algebra would do: hence its fascination with
demonstratives, with Egypt and geometric figures. Platos philosophy, the
sight model, the idolatry of the idea, the sun, the stereometric solids, are
constructed on the darkest lack of the sign system.
Therefore on the Egyptian encounter, where each system rids the other
of its defects: the one, proto-geometric, with an algorithmic horizon, finds
the other whose proto-algebra has precisely geometrical form as its ideal:

FIRST IN DIALECTIC: THE INTERLOCUTOR85

each gives the other as a never-ending task the very thing it doesnt know
how to do. This crossbreeding drives the obstacles away so as to pass the
percolation threshold: everything flows starting from this source or this
confluence.
The voyages of Thales, Solon and others, the dialogue with the old priest
whose knowledge was whitened by time, build this crossing where every
obstacle, excluded, disappears for the long term.

Never-ending flow
Something starts thats never going to end: interminable, the line of signs
will not fill the monstration of the thing, just as it will require the infinity
of an irrational sequence to (not) describe this finite diagonal, there, drawn
before our eyes.
The difference and the contact between the two systems of writing
produces abstraction at the same time as a perpetual motion: a double
source, but single, of science and the history of science; there is no science
without this irresistible flow.
History as history is not born with writing, as the historians say, but in
the Mediterranean concordance between two systems of signs, the realist
one and the conventional one, the intuitive one and the formalist one, by
the double crossbreeding of the Semitic one and the Indo-European one,
each bringing, for the marriage, its practice and its horizon, the ideal of
the one finding before it the blind technique of the other and reciprocally.
Do the philosophical quarrels and solutions also ensue from this?
Wasnt every science known today born from the crossing of these two
cultures, Semite and Indo-European? As Christianity was?

The drawing of the sign

Now remove all measure. The letters dont merely, as with the Morse
alphabet, reduce to points and lines. They also draw openings, closings,
intermediary lines, knots, edges, graphes in general. Here already is
topology.6
We have seen the geometer preceded by the weaving artisan; by the
cursive scribe as well?

Return to exclusion
The antecedent of the principle of the excluded middle or third appeared
in the practice of successful dialogue: an agreement, minimal, is reached

86GEOMETRY
regarding the expulsion; from this we can trace back to the previ-
ously described antecedents. Rigorous, transparent, dazzling, does the first
apagogic proof conceal with its brilliance what precedes it, the way light
blinds the shadow even more surely than the latter veils the former?
Havent we said that the adjective apagogic originally belonged to the
vocabulary of the law?
Contradictory in its terms and the interests it opposes, doesnt a trial,
at the end of which a jury decides between the two in-stances facing each
other, constitute a dialogue thats more and even better canonized?7 Doesnt
the court open a space of decision? The procedures very form has as its goal
to transform an anterior opposition able to put into play terrible forces,
that is to say, life itself, into terms to be solemnly debated: the judicial
institution changes the things into cases and accusations. Consequently,
the exclusion of a third term translates the exclusion of a man or of a body,
of a condemned culprit, of a victim.
From geometry, visible and shining at the head of a comet, were tracing
back, link by link, to the structure of language and to the structure of the
actions of law and justice, announced from the Anaximandrian origin.
But these latter actions dont take place without duly canonized social
representation: there is no court without theater.

New genealogy of interlocking places

What then is a tragedywhose representation and acts in turn display a
contradictory situation in which choice seems impossible between some
given action and its opposite but which ends up cutting this impos-
sible to untie knot in which most often life and death are at stakeif
not the precondition, the antecedent or the origin of the trial, therefore,
upstream, of the contradictory and resolved dialogue, finally, of demon-
strable proof?
But again, if tragedy translates in our languages the old Greek term
which signifies the scapegoat or ram, how can we not see that upstream
from tragedy ritual sacrifice took place, the mortal exclusion and expulsion
of an animal victim that was one day substituted during a public exhibition
for a man who was in the past really sacrificed and put in the center of
society?
From the religious rite or the sacred tangent to murderous violence
proceeds the tragic, which alleviates it in representation, from which
descends, as we see for example in Corneilles Horace, the judicial rite or
theater, and their debates so well mastered that the dialogue controlled by
experts and the best of proofs will use them.

FIRST IN DIALECTIC: THE INTERLOCUTOR87

From law to nature, from nomos to phusis
Toward the end of the last century, a few philosophers of nature wanted to
apply the same schema as well to physical experiments by canonizing what
they called the crucial experiment: a decisive manipulation that would
have allowed deciding, as in a trial, between two contradictory hypotheses,
exclusive of each other. No laboratory, alas, ever produced any positive
verification, so they had to reduce the requirement to the converse one of
falsification. Here again we know how to exclude better than to include.
Thus I am reminded of a memorable session in 1864 in the grand
amphitheater of the Sorbonne, where Pasteur, then at the height of his
glory, experimented in public to thwart spontaneous generation, whose
theory he was combating. Nothing was lacking to this pomp: neither the
experiment said to be crucial with the swan neck vessels, nor the abstractly
contradictory reasoning and taken all the way to the reduction to the
absurd, nor the trial proceedings solemnly brought to suit and finally
decided by a jury, nor the tragedy publicly represented, nor the excluded
third, the true, the real and living Pouchet himself in the case at hand, an
expelled victim, nor lastly the evocation of God.
In such a formal festival, the entire genealogy of scientific rationality
can be read and understood at the same time, from the savage rite to the
judicial assembly and from the tragic to the experimental, the excluded
third playing the role of invariant, the same as here. But in addition,
physical objects intervened in order to decide.
A criterion in effect allows decision. In order to rediscover the tracks
of this requirement of an excluded third, we have just traced back from
geometry to linguistics or the dialectic, then toward the judicial, the artistic
and the theatrical, the religious lastly and ritual.
While a common invariant joins or orders them into genealogy, these
terrains are not homogeneous to each other: the latter ones come under
the jurisdiction of the social sciences, anthropology, law, aesthetics and
sociology whereas at stake evidently are language and pure reason
and finally, now, the world as such.

How is it possible that behaviors that are strictly human, whose stable
anthropological foundation descends all the way down to the foundations of
the collectives, are linked to the most logically refined requirements of language,
of demonstration and, when all is said and done, to faithfulness to the real?
What profound reason is revealed in the most archaic acts of social
rituals, or conversely, what in the final analysis remains of the anciently
tragic in the most recent performances of science?

88GEOMETRY
Thus and poorly formulated, these questions set too much store by an
evolutionary history whose development deludes us into believing that
ritual marks the origin at the beginning, and demonstrative refinement
marks the end, always contemporary with the one who conceives it;
nothing could be more seductive than this deceptive spectacle of the
comet, appearing in the sky, dragging along the image of a shadow whose
ancientness precedes the new light.
Yet two millennia if not more separate us from apagogic proof and
merely several lustra from the Pasteurian session or formal bullfight;
indissociably, everything that we take to be a process remains, constantly
and diversely, divine, human, social, legal and rigorous all together over
the course of all time; we remain just as much archaic today as we were
advanced in luminous proof the day before yesterday. Time doesnt
always and necessarily flow from ignorance to knowledge and from
shadow to illumination; it hesitates and percolates from the one side to
the other. Its better to consider the thickness of constitution en bloc and
all at once.

So lets leave the celestial lights and put our feet on the Earth: the smooth
area of sand where the demonstrator draws the triangle, square or diagonal,
the surface where the shadows of the Egyptian Pyramids are going to
advance before Thales eyes, the dented meadow whose precise measuring
will restore the fiscal reduction to the fellah Herodotus is going to tell us
about; we will soon make these descend into another earth, thick, with
successive layers, so deep it plunges beneath the slow plates responsible for
its high mountains and quakes, toward a burning and viscous magma, the
motor of its evolutionary life and witness of our creativity.
Geometry measures this Earth.8
Lets prepare this integral.

Comprehending
Is it in and through a complete looping and its entire movement that we
comprehend and dominate the things of the world?
Is it through this mystery, one thats unfathomable, religious really,
political, judicial, theatrical, lastly technological and natural all at once and
without a crack, that the rational occurs? A single and same gesture leads
us, with a same dynamic, to reason rigorously, to transform with exactness,
precision and fidelity the things said to be physical, to decide with moder-
ation and justice, to take pity on the tragic manecce homoto accept the
coming of the divine.

FIRST IN DIALECTIC: THE INTERLOCUTOR89

 The rational integrates this gesture and falls into criminal or derisory
corporatism when a single element is lacking to its sum.
Why declare it to be miraculous that the world is comprehensible?
Inevitable and oblique, the sole miracle, incomprehension, came from
breaking up, chopping up, analyzing a thickness whose mixture demands,
to be understood, the synthesis meant by the verb to comprehend.

It also came from our narcissistic conception of time, whose arrogance

impels us to think that we think better this day than earlier, and recently
than long ago, whereas the site of thought or comprehension adds up or
accumulates all the times of percolation.
Remember geometry! This call by Socrates would signify the fact that
rigorous proof, that the contemplated abstract idealities presuppose
listening in the dialogue and a tolerant forbearance in relating to the other,
an exact assessment of the justice surpassed by precision [justesse], as well
as the continued purification of these categories in relation to the tragic
and ritual base that supports them, in terror and pity. In its purity, the
space of geometry implies an interlocking of these catharses repeated here:
religious, judicial, theatrical, linguistic The immediate sum of these
acts is called reason; the irrational, conversely, cuts up and separates this
compact sum into its elements. What could be more unreasonable than
religion without rigor, justice deprived of exactitude or precision without
pity?

On place, in general
We never cease returning to the same place, called the temple by religion,
the cutting out of which opposes the sacred to the profane expanse of
chaotic wandering, to that stage that in the theater we hidein front
with the curtainbehindwith the scenery, andat the edgeswith the
wings and the box seats, to that closed space of the court whose solemnity
astounds the most hardened of hearts a chorus, tribunal or stage for
representation, a place opposed to the non-place, a civilized city opposed
to its suburb [banlieue] or banishment place [lieu de ban], that is to say,
exclusion place in sum a well-defined spot where the well-formed rule
prohibits putting two different things in or on the same spot utopia, pure
space finally, and pure because neither mixture nor time, which for their
part admit two opposed or contradictory things into the same place, take
place there a space of decision, a fundamental, transcendental place,
which we visited earlier under other avatars, such as the camp from which
the allied soldiers exclude every enemy, the field or pagus from which the

90GEOMETRY
wheat expels the weeds the page of writing from which the opinion of
some pressure group chases out every citation by the one who only thinks
in truth we have just brought to light a final series of white boxes or
basins from which time rushes forth and flows long.
We connected upstream, in the temple, and downstream, in the spaces
of geometry, the genealogical lines followed by this book: more natural
when these lines linked the temple to the entrenched camp, the latter to
the cultivated garden and field, this pagus to the page and to pure space;
more technological, the next series, whose genealogy will link the space
of the sky and that of sight, that is, the space of the world to itself; more
cultural, the preceding sequence of these white boxes, also issuing from
the same temple and passing through the theater, the court, and the agora
where resolved discussions shoot out; but cultural, the first and the second
sequences, as much as you please, since war cannot do without a law,
agriculture without a cadaster or the Pyramids without the laws of Egypt;
but natural, the second one, just as much, since it requires a preliminary
space on which to set up its exclusive rules. The collective is only formed
through and in its objects; the objects are only constituted for such in and
through the collective.

The elementary loop formed by these sequences of white boxes, one that
is symmetrical in relation to an axis that, in traversing this loop, invariably
passes through the temple and abstract space, as though this axis separated
the nature of the field of battle or wheat from the culture of the theater
or the courtroom, surrounds this book by drawing a strand, whether
connected or not, of the general science of history, following the time of
percolation: you might think it Hermes caduceus!

The originary space of Geometry is born as the sum or synthesis of these

places from which we will finally understand the constitutive global Earth
in its rational universality and inhabitability.
How did the measuring of this Earth happen? Did it first travel these
double-routed loops? Did it succeed in weaving, through diverse transverse
or intersecting connections, all kinds of other pathsin the Greek and
rigorous sense of methodsfrom the field to the court or from the garden
to the agora, from nature to culture? Once all these routes open, forming
something like the knot of an interchange, the percolation threshold
suddenly occurs, and therefore the source and therefore the flood of the
endless discourse of that grand narrative we call geometry.

FIRST IN DIALECTIC: THE INTERLOCUTOR91

92
4 THE POINT AT NOON

Origins, persons and first inventions depend on diverse conceptions of

time.

If one traces back the common time of the historians, the annals deliver
up the names, fabricated or apocryphal, of inaugural heroes: Anaximander,
above, or, below, Thales and Plato open the series of geometrical inventions,
more or less datable. In the monuments or texts, at the sources, the
historian of science discovers these figures and studies their productions,
whether real or supposed: indefinite space, a definite model of the world
for the first one, two famous theorems for the others.

If time boils down to the evolution of life or of the body, here is

the Child, the title at the head of the series. The human youngster, in
relation to biological life, plays the first allegorical role, attributed to the
eponymous ancestors by the annals. These two genealogies sometimes
model themselves on each other, in such a way that, doubly scorned, a
certain primitive accumulates the images of an unrefined ancient and a
naive new.
Should one now follow only the chronology of the schooling of the
mind or of intellectual education, the Ignorant will in turn appear as first.
Formerly we used to travel in the lands of savage tribes to persuade
ourselves of a triple superiority: in history, evolution and science, by
deciding that time flows from an imbecilic primitivity to a finality occupied
by ourselves, just as we long ago used to draw a space centered around
ourselves as well.
Should time lastly be reduced to that of the familial, tribal, social or
collective organization, the archaic Slave will be situated at the bottom of
the ladder to be climbed.
The Meno stages these three persons in a single person, whenold,
educated and a table companion of the powerfulSocrates questions an
Ignorant Young Slave, a trismegistic image of the origin. This originary
trinity of child, naive innocence and the zero level of every hierarchy was
summed up for the evolution of scientific reason in the eighteenth century
by an abstract tabula rasamemory without any memories, empty under-
standing, a statue before every sensation.
We will trace back there anew below, as above we had, during the course
of a long path toward the upstream of the judicial and sociopolitical consti-
tutions, encountered the royal and victimary place, located in the center,
single for two persons.

Lets lastly suppose that time boils down to the simple and strict logic
whose sequence links cause and consequence, or to the rudimentary
constitution of a knowledge, and the note at the head of the series will
be called, below, the Element, the one that Euclid in his book calls a
root, in the exact sense of the radical origin, just as the element bore the
title of Interlocutor or Scribe, above, in the time of the constitution and
functioning of language.

Each singular mode of time: historical, biological, religious, judicial, social,

political, gnoseological, even transcendental, flows back toward its source
or its antecedent, toward an allegory or a prosopopoeia of the origin. For
each sequence its first term, diversely qualified.
Why would the term designated by history, or any other, benefit from
more plausibility than the others?
Must the entire network be summed up to increase the probability of
the true?

This proliferation of geneses and origins forced us, at the beginning, to

rethink the flow or percolation of time and the science of history.
It leads us now to name the sources and distribute them: the ones,
above, in the field of social customs and the laws of politics or of the law, a
sphere the Greeks called NOMOS, and which we call social sciences; and
the others, below, throughout that nature for the hard sciences, from which
the ancient physicists borrowed their name: PHUSIS. Are laws [lois] found
in a universe of non-law [non- droit]?

To finish, this proliferation will enjoin us to separate or to stitch together

these diverse multiplicities of time, origins, and personages as well as the
lands of our habitat.

94GEOMETRY
PART TWO

NATURE
96
5 FIRST IN HISTORY:
THALES

From the pyramid to the

tetrahedron: The optical origin
Diogenes Laertius: Hieronymus says that Thales measured the pyramids
by their shadows, taking the observation at the time of day when our own
shadow is equal to our height. Lives, Doctrines, and the Sayings of Famous
Philosophers (Thales I.27).

Plutarch: he liked your way of measuring the pyramid by merely

placing your stick at the boundary of the shadow cast by the pyramid,
the tangent rays of the sun engendering two triangles, you showed that
the relation of the first shadow to the second one was also the relation of
the pyramid to the stick. But you were also accused of not liking kings
(The Dinner of the Seven Wise Men 147a)

These texts stage Thales theorem, the schema of which compares a first
triangle formed by a pyramid, the shadow it cast on the sand and the
tangential ray of sun, with a second one, constituted for its part by any
body accessible in its height, by the shadow it casts again and by a similar
luminous ray: both right-angled, with equal angles, they are homothetic
here.
Hieronymus reports a particular case with isosceles triangles and
Plutarch the general case. It depends on the time of day: the first can only
be observed at a single moment.
With two graphes of the famous theorem, do these sources describe
a certain application of it or on the contrary, its origin: what we were
calling the Greek miracle, the emergence of an abstract form and abstract
reasoning against the background of a previous practice or perception,
optical alignment and measuring of bodies?
Will we ever know how to read these narratives, whether authentic or
mythical? Here are a few legends for them.

The ruse of origin

So given the pyramid and its shadow: the latter accessible, for I can directly
measure that dark half of the funerary monument; inaccessible, on the
contrary, is the height of the tomb or that of the Sun.
Auguste Comte: We must regard the impossibility of determining,
by directly measuring them, most of the sizes that we want to know
to be sufficiently verified. It is this general fact that necessitates the
formation of mathematical science For, renouncing the immediate
measurement of sizes in almost every case, the human mind had to
try to determine them indirectly, and this is how it was led to the
creation of mathematics.1 Geometry results from a ruse, from a detour,
whose indirect route allows access to what goes beyond an immediate
practice. It consists here in constructing a reduction of the pyramid:
just any vertical object, our body for example. In fact, Thales discovers
the module or reduced model. To attain the inaccessible pyramid, he
invents scale.
Hence again Auguste Comte: This is how, for example, Aristarchus
of Samos estimated the relative distance of the Sun and the Moon to the
Earth, by taking measurements on a triangle constructed as exactly as
possible so as to be similar to the right triangle formed by the three celestial
bodies at the instant when the Moon is in quadrature and when in order
to define the triangle it consequently sufficed to observe the angle with the
Earth.2 Like Thales, Aristarchus builds a reduced model of some astro-
nomical situation. Measuring the inaccessible consists in reproducing or
imitating it in the accessible.
Observe the case of ships at sea: commenting on the twenty-sixth
proposition of Book I of Euclids Elements, Proclus writes: In his History
of Geometry, Eudemus has this theorem go back to Thales; for he says that
from the way this latter is reported to have determined the distance of
vessels at sea he must necessarily have used it.3 In his Gomtrie grecque
(p. 90), Tannery reconstructs the measuring technique taking inspiration
from the famous fluminis variatio of the Roman agricultural surveyor
Marcus Iunius Nipsus.4
In any case, its a question of transposing a situation with unapproachable
stations into the near by miniaturizing it.

98GEOMETRY
What is application?
Accessible, inaccessible, what does this mean? Near, distant; tangible,
untouchable. Direct or immediate, measuring requires operations of appli-
cation in the sense where a metric falls under an applied science, but above
all in the sense of touching.
This unit or that ruler is applied to the thing to be measured: put over
the thing, it touches it, as much as is necessary; immediate or direct,
measuring is possible or impossible insofar as this placing is or isnt
possible. Thus, the inaccessible becomes that untouchable toward which
I cant transport the ruler or that to which the unit cannot be applied.
Passing from practice to theory, shrewdness imagines a substitute for those
lengths my body cant reach: the pyramid, the sun, the ship on the horizon,
the other side of the river.
Mathematics would descend from the circuitous routes of these ruses.

Touching or seeing: The origin in our senses?

This amounts to underestimating the reach of practical activities or
restricting them to our hands. For in the end these circuitous routes
consist in passing from touch to sight, from measuring by placing to
sighting. Here theorizing is equivalent to seeing, which is said by the
Greek language. Sight is a tactility without contact. Descartes, who knew
what measurement is, described the gaze of the blind man at the distant
but tactile end of his stick. The gaze sometimes reaches this inaccessible.
Hence the measurement by sight of the sun and the moon, of the ship and
the pyramid.
Thales discovers the precise virtues of the gaze and learnedly organizes
a scene of light, optical representation. Not being able to transport a ruler,
he relates lines of sight or lets the light project them without him. The
pragmatic Comte thinks with his two hands without understanding the
contemplative Thales, whose eyes do nothing but let the things themselves
become lined up. Nothing is so exact as a lining up of landmarks.
To my knowledge, even for accessible objects, only sight assures me that
the ruler is applied onto them. Measuring or lining up: the eye alone bears
witness to this covering over. Thales eye brings the visible to the tangible.
Measuring is relating. Yes, but the relation presupposes a transport: of
the ruler, of the point of view, of the things covered over by a lining up.
Within the accessible, transport is always possible; for the inaccessible,
sight alone takes charge of the movement: hence the sighting angle, hence
the shadow said to be cast.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES99

 Who relates? Who transports? Neither you nor me, nor anyone with
their hands. Lets wait for the light to bring the shadow to our feet.
The very end of this book will find this transport again.

Space and time: The first astronomical origin

The schemas of Diogenes or Plutarch present things that change and other
things that remain. Motionless for ten centuries under the Egyptian sky, here
is the pyramid, invariant; variable on the contrary are the apparent motion of
the sun, the length and position of the shadow. Ordinary experience dictates
that the latter two depend at the same time on the daystar and the monument.
Hence the figure of the gnomon, an axis or standing stake, whose tracks
tell time. The calibration of the shadows variations cadences the suns
course. Here is the sundial, for civil or astronomical ends, whose spatial
measures index time. Hence, in Diogenes and Plutarch, the remains of the
old problem of the moment: waiting for the instant when the shadow and
the height are equal or observing the two shadows at the same moment
of the day; letting the sun write its diurnal course on the sand. Hence the
Aristarchus citation: better than a clock, this is an astronomical obser-
vatory. We shall talk about this soon.
Turning this entire process around, Thales poses and then resolves the
inverse problem of the gnomon. Instead of letting the pyramid talk about
the Sun, that is, the invariant say the scale of the variable, he asks the Sun to
speak about the pyramid, that is to say, asks the changing to say something
constantly about what remains. A cleverer ruse than the one by Comte:
the invariant no longer discerns the regular divergences of the variable,
but conversely, amid the variable, Thales discerns the stable invariant and
discovers the unknown.
Better still, through the gnomon, he who measured space measured
time. Inverting the terms again, Thales stops time in order to measure
space, fixes the suns course at the singular instant of the isosceles triangles,
homogenizes the day for the sake of the general case.
Must time really be frozen in order to conceive geometry? Bergson also
wanted geometric intelligence, wholly and always spatial, to be divorced
from duration.

The optical origin

The essential, we were saying, rests in transport. For while measuring can
only lead to exact measurements, only the relation or the reference of the
giant schema to the reduced model attains rigor.

100GEOMETRY
 The preceding geneses amount to transports: through the reduction
or passage from touch to sight and back, the inversion of the gnomonic
function, the exchange of the stable and the variant, the substitution of
space for time.
Stable across the apparent motion of the Sun, at least in its second
version, Thales schema draws an optical diagram. Yet sight and its
spectacle presuppose: a site or point of view, a source of light, lastly the
object, shady or bright. Hence new questions.
Where to place the point of view? Anywhere. At the source of the light
or at ground level. Since the lining up of landmarks makes the application,
the relation and measuring possible, either the Sun and the top of the tomb
or the summit of the pyramid and the far point of the cast shadow can be
seen lined up. The site can be moved.
Where to find the object? It too must be transportable: through the
projected or cast shadow; or through the model that imitates it.
Where does the source of light come from? It varies, in the case of the
gnomon, and transports the object in the form of shadow. It is going to lie
in the objectwe will call this the miracle.

Multiple origins
A temporary balance sheet: a new proliferation of refined geneses.
How did geometry come to the Greeks? The fabrication of a reduced
model, the transporting of the distant into the near marks a pragmatic
origin; the visual representation of what defies being touched shows
another, more sensory, one; the inversion of the question of the gnomon
indicates a civil origin, geographical, departing from astronomy; but
conceptual or aesthetic as well since it erases time so as to metricize
space; epistemological too, when it exchanges the roles of the variable
and the invariable. Thus several geneses flow together at the sources of
geometry.
We will soon go back up new tributaries.

Ensign of the theorem: The mnemonic origin

Another avatar of transport, lets first intercept, in passing, the message. For
the two fragments cited seem less to recount a constitution than to stage a
form thats already there: Thales theorem.
The first legend, with several geneses, deciphers mathematics by
extracting the implicit schema from the anecdotal story, regarding which
the commentary speaks of local color meant to show that the Greek sage

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES101

learned everything from the Egyptian priests. For the relation of the
circumstantial form to the schema is less helpful in thinking the invention
of the latter in the action recounted by the former than the covering over
of the latter by the former.
Supposing then that I want to remember Thales theorem, I can
use the story of the pyramid as a mnemonic aid. In a culture of oral
tradition narrative takes the place of schema, the stage is equivalent to
intuition, in which space comes in aid of memory. The diagram of the
theorem has since been transmitted by writing; but from mouth to ear,
dramatization improves the vehicle of knowledge. Itd be better then
to recognize in the story less an originary legend than the very form
of transmission; it communicates an element of science more than it
shows its emergence.
Here mathematics furnishes the key to history, and not history
the key to mathematics. The schema tells the goal of the story and
not the story the origin of the schema. Knowing, then, and for the
case in point, knowing Thales theorem, consists in remembering the
Egyptian tale and teaching it, recounting the pseudo-myth of the origin.
Presented in this way, the most ignorant has no trouble remembering
it, unforgettable.

The space of transports: Circumstance identical

to the schema
What is transmitted or transported?
Thales theorem, as we know, reduces to a presentation of the deep
concept of similarity in the formal space of transports.
Deepening the schema all the way to its most abstract consequences
allows us to discover the lived, circumstantial and colored variety of the
story.
So if the theorem relates to the group of similarities that is inscribable
on or in this space where transports dont deform forms, then, come
traveling to the Pyramids, Thales sees nothing other than objects of the
same form and diverse dimensions.
The perception of the three tombs unfolds in the space of similarities
as though this space was constituted in these sites by choice: each one is
different, but the same, like all the triangles of Thales theorem.
Has anything other than this already there been invented then?
Strictly faithful to the concept, the story or narrative manifestly and
visually resembles the mimetic idea of the similar and imitates it.

102GEOMETRY
A different transport: Rising to volume
The dark shadow of the mortuary edifice stretches out along the desert
plain in the plane. If we only look at this flat projection we remain in
the two-dimensional metric, that of the agricultural surveyors or the
harpedonaptai, architectural or agricultural measuring, put forward by
Herodotuss Histories, the common techniques of the surveyor who writes
and draws; we remain in representation such as the writing on a tablet or a
papyrus gives us, planes both of them.
Thales theorem doesnt write, rather it shows in space that the plane
plunges into darkness, that every planar representation, written discourse
or schema, never attains anything but a dark shadow: the scribe doesnt
attain the lights of the new knowledge.

The origin of the space of movements

To understand the events of the plane, graphes and writing, we must rise to a
different and new representation, into three-dimensional space: for this entire
story of Thales unfolds before or in voluminous bodies whose complete repre-
sentation can never be obtained because their various projected, drawn or
written planes never show anything but partial profiles, difficult to decipher.
Who sees a pyramid in these profiled traces of triangles and polygonal
bases? Who makes out the aerial progressions of the surfaces and lines,
complex and entangled according to depth, in the simplistic graphe that
received a cross-section of it? Lets consequently prejudge to be enigmatic
everything thats written flatly on the flat.
And therefore, in order to know and comprehend, in order to see, we
must be able to move according to the new dimension, following, in the
course of the projection, precisely the direction accompanied by the rays
of the sun.
Space becomes a set of possible movements.

Deliverance in relation to writing

The daystar illuminates space, but sets at plane level, leaving writing in the
night. Thales delivers mathematics from the written, which is assimilated
here to the funerary inscriptions in the shadow of the Pharaohs tomb, a
lapidated king under the stones.
From which comes the marvelous miracle: the elements of geometry
cannot remain those of spoken language or the signs of writing, but come
from elsewhere, from another space, as different from the usual planar

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES103

space of written representation as the worldly outside of the cave is from
the flat wall watched, in the shadow of a poor fire, by the Platonic prisoners
of artificial optical representation. For only the third dimension allows the
resolution of the problems impossible to deal with in the single plane.
Just as neither Socrates nor Plato says in the Meno that to resolve the
question of the sides, insoluble by following their linear measure, we must
flee in a diagonal direction, opening the second dimension, so we must
open the third dimension to render ten planar questions solvable. In this
originary story, in which the sun doesnt merely carry light but consti-
tutes the basis and condition for a voluminous and transparent space,
Thales invents this stereometry that Plato claims constitutes the only true
geometry, that we therefore see founds it.

Flight
In the book of his Histories devoted to Egypt, Herodotus relates (II.147
148) that after the death of a priest of Hephaestus, who had ruled alone,
twelve kings appeared and divided country and power into as many shares,
making a law for themselves not to mutually destroy one another or win
out over one another; so they remained friends. Without our knowing
any clear reason why, they decided to build for the first time the famous
Labyrinth as a common memorial, no doubt instead of a Pyramid, the form
of the tomb of power when it rests in the hands of a single person. Are we
getting lost forever in the endless corridors and recommencing crossroads
of a shared and divided power?
A legend similar to precisely that of Thales is attached to this unexpected
analogue of the pyramidal form. Become a symbol of a difficulty so great
that whoever engages upon it becomes lost in it, the labyrinth, this one
Cretan, was constructed, it is said, by Daedalus, the clever inventor
moreover of a famous technology for flight, fatal to his son Icarus, who
also wanted to escape the night, in which one becomes lost, towards the
sun, in whose light one finds ones way. Therefore to exit the maze there
are only two solutions: either Ariadnes thread or vertical flight. The first
solution stages algorithmic thought, coming below in this book, the
second one the invention of geometry: we find again the high point drawn
above.
How can it be better said that planar drawings pose insoluble problems
that can be got out of by either taking up again the tradition, ancient in the
Fertile Crescent, of reversible and step-by-step operations, or by taking the
path of the third dimension?
The question of origin is summed up in these images.

104GEOMETRY
The architectural origin
These two cited fragments speak about technologies and architecture even
more than about perception or bodily behavior, for the similarity discovers
a construction secret: because to the gaze as to the mind, the three neigh-
boring pyramids make the spectacle of homothety shine forth. Like the
stake or the upright body, Khafre and Menkaure already reproduce reduced
models of Khufu. In order to build them similar one must therefore have
Thales and his theorem. Physically and technologically, a philosophy of
mimesis begins again, as though the customs of nomos were found on the
side of phusis and of praxis.
Thus the cutting and disposition of the stones presuppose the theorem:
practices blind to such a knowledge, or application of a clearly explicit
concept, this is a real question.

The origin of the sciences in techniques?5

What is the status of a knowledge implicit in a technique? Does the latter
reduce to a practice enveloping a theory? The entire questionhere the
question of originis summed up in an interrogation of the modality of
this enveloping. Mathematics sometimes emerges from certain techniques:
by making an implicit knowledge explicit?
That secrets are often found in the artisanal traditions often signifies that
they remain a secret for everyone, including the master and the inventor.
If a bright knowledge is hidden in the hands and in the workers relation
to the stones and blocks, it can remain shut up there, double-locked, as in
the shadow of the pyramid.

The shadow of the secret

Lets contemplate this primordial theater of knowledge, the staging or
the narrative of the origin: the secret of the builder and the stone-cutter,
dark for them, for Thales and for us, is hidden in the shadow: beneath the
shadow cast by the Pyramids, immense black boxes, Thales places himself
in the implicit of a knowledge that the Sun, behind, makes explicit.
The entire question of the relation between the schema and history,
between implicit knowledge and the workers practice, is posed in
terms of Sun and darkness, as dramatized after the Platonic mode: the
dazzling daystar of knowledge and of the same shines, whereas opinion,
the empirical trades, the objects of the world are extinguished in this
shadow.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES105

The open or closed fold
Our first readings have just unveiled the implicit knowledge hidden by a
fabricated object.
In general, grasping the nature of a theory mixed with a working
activity is easy, being the normal way of science: easy, doable, that is to say,
sometimes difficult of course, but not impossible; complicated or complex,
certainly, but soluble in the end. The difficult, even inextricable thing, that
is to say, endlessly explicitable with the always recommencing essential
remainders, what remains forever entangled, is to describe the fold [pli]
of this implication that, in the other direction, becomes clearer under the
name of application. The origin of knowledge starting from a practice
remains on the side of shadow, whereas the origin of a practice starting
from knowledge comes from the side of light.
The shadow shows the folds in which science lies hidden. The technical
activity of origin puts knowledge in the shadow, and we ourselves remain
there, blind, in acting, as in seeking to put theory into the light.

The new logos

The Pyramid projects a shadow, and everyone sees his own, cast, under the
Egyptian sun. What is there to do or know except to measure the relation
between the two shadows, that of the lofty object and of the active subject,
except to estimate the relation between the secret that sleeps in the stones
and the one that closes the eyes of the practitioner? Does the relation
between the two secrets tell, designate, describe the secret of the relation of
man to his wrought object?
In this primordial legend, Thales geometry therefore expresses the
relation between two blindnesses, between the dark practice and its subject
plunged in its cecity. It says this relation and measures the problem, but
doesnt solve it, dramatizes its concept, but doesnt explain it, wonderfully
designates the question without answering it, recounts the relation of two
ciphers, that of the mason and that of the edifice, without decrypting either
of them; and perhaps this is all that can ever be done should one go no
further than the logos.
Pure, the logos loses its contents and says nothing but this link; it no
longer designates a word, full of meaning, nor a verb, strong in its actions,
nor the light come through speech, rather it attaches two in-stances to each
other that one could not care less about knowing. Unheard of, unknown,
this new logos takes the immense risk of absence in every sense. It advances
in knowledge by bridging two ignorances: a new light issuing from a
double darkness.

106GEOMETRY
Replication
The relation between two shadows, this is the problem in its desig-
nation, the pure name of the mode of envelopment of a knowledge by a
technique. Measurement, a ruse of application or, as Auguste Comte says,
an indirect way, repeats the implication but doesnt explicate it. From a
technique Thales extracts another; from a practice he draws a practice. Of
course, architecture and mensuration both envelop the same knowledge,
homothety and the famous theorem; yet the application is repeated in
another application, as though from a fold [pli] another fold unfolded. The
homology of repetition ends up saying homothety again, but each time in
the gangue of the applied. The theory expressed by shadows remains in the
shadow. It was not born that day in its purity: as Plato said, as the centuries
to come will repeat, geometry does not reduce to this metric, a simple
propaedeutic inaugurating a long path of science.
There is no longer any originary miracle: the techniques are engendered
and perpetuated in repetition; measurement sees the theorem differently
than architecture, thats all. And we remain in the great shadow of the
secret. For, again, we wouldnt know how to think the origin of technique
except as the origin of man himself, faber from his emergence or better,
emerging because faber. At the origin, technique permits the perpetuation
and repetition of man and technique.
Thus Thales repeats his own origin, as well as ours: his metric of
pre-geometry replicates or quite simply designates differently the modality
of our technical relation to objects, the homology of the fabricator and
the fabricated; it takes its place in the open chain of these statements and
designations, but it doesnt give the key to the cipher, doesnt excavate the
secret articulation of knowledge and practice in which the essential of a
possible origin would be found.
A relation between two shadows, two secrets, two forms or two traces,
a relationship, an empty statement that transmits this relation, this archaic
geometry measures the problem, takes its dimensions, poses it, lets it be
seen, reports it, but doesnt solve it.
Does the logos of the shadows still remain a shadow of the logos?

Erasure of the subject, projected object

From its dawn however, Thales mathematics says the de-centering of the
subject of bright thought in relation to the body that projects its shadow:
placed beyond the monument, the Sun subject leaves the body of the
astronomer on the side of the objects of the world or buries the knowing

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES107

subject as deeply as the Pharaohs body in the shadow. What a Copernican
reversal already in this representation of two triangles beneath the torches
of the solstice!
The Sun-subject writes forms changing like profiles on the sand, which
describe a cycle of representation. Each moment of this representation, a
moment arrested, fixed in the flat sand, is nonetheless endowed with an
invariant: the stable relation with the same shadow, at the same moment,
of another object, me for example. The perspectival measurement says an
invariant across the variations of representation. The cast shadows change,
but they have a relation to each other which for its part doesnt change
and which opens the unknown, the secret of the Pyramid, its inaccessible
height. Inconstant, the representation designates a stability that belongs to
the object, its measurement.
From which it results that placed here, I can only know clearly about the
volume what is written or described by the cast shadows, the information
transported on the sand by a ray of sun after the interception by the edges
and the summit of the opaque prism.
What should we call this geometry? A perspective, an architecture, a
physics, an optics?

Representation
The theater of measurement shows the decoding of a secret, the deciphering
of a writing, the reading of a drawing. The sand where the Sun leaves its
trace becomes the screen, the projection wall at the bottom of the cave.
Here is the scene of representation anciently put into place for Western
knowledge, the historically stable form of contemplation from the top of
these Pyramids.
Thales story perhaps institutes this moment of representation,
endlessly taken up again by philosophy, but above all by the geometries,
from Cartesian coordinates to the Arguesian point of view, from Monges
descriptive diagram to Gergonne The first word of a perspective,
of a projective, of an architectural optics of volumes, of an intuitive
mathematics entirely immersed in the global organon of this same
representation.
But we were forgetting, from Thales to our time, that the shadow was
cast [porte], transported [transporte] by some medium, that it was trans-
porting some information. We were reading this first spectral analysis
without excavating its condition. The big questionwhich messenger
transports (and how?) which message?was covered over for centuries by
the dazzling scenography of the shadowlight opposition.

108GEOMETRY
The history of the applied
Yes, Thales story resembles Platos story: the Sun of the same, the other
and empirical object, the (cast) shadow of the (shaded surface) shadow,6
the mimetic similarity, the shadowy plane of representation; or resembles
Desargues story: the cutting of stones, the geometry of profiles, the theory
of shadows Let Descartes intervene, then Monge and so many others,
and they will work again and again on the side of application at the same
time as of representation by perpetuating the cleverness of engineers, and
they will therefore make the archaism of pre-mathematics survive and
obstruct the birth of said science in its purity. But this latter emerges when
this cleverness dies: not long ago. Husserl wrote the Origin of Geometry
during the time its disappearance was tolling, as though some historical
cycle was finally being completed. The narrative recounted about Thales
again describes a metric, but doesnt recount the birth of mathematics.
As proof Plato, who requires something else for the miracle to be
accomplished: the essential reality of the idealities. A question: how can the
pyramid itself be born as an ideal form?
To answer, lets return to the spectral analysis.

The dark entrails of the volumes

Plato drives the Thales scene down into the bottom of the cavern: the
volume writes the cast shadow onto the flat and bright wall; the light
describes its shaded surface shadow on the solid. Knowledge limits itself to
two shadows; this is the shadow of knowledge.
But there is a third shadow, whose image and projection are translated
by the other two, the deep secret buried in the entrails of the volume.
No doubt, the true knowledge of the things of the world lies in the
essential shadow of the solids, in their opaque and dark compactness,
forever locked behind the multiple doors of their borders, only attacked by
practice and by theory. Cutting can cause the stone to burst, and geometry
can divide or double the cube; now we find that the solids, which are not
exhaustible through the analysis of their sides, always preserve, sheltered,
a kernel of shadow in the shadow of their borders: we must begin again.
Hence we return to the cutting of stones and the Pyramid. A volume
of volumes, a polyhedron composed of cut-out blocks of stones, this is
the edifice. But how can we come to know such a solid except by planar
projection? And how can we take it in hand except by attacking its sides?
Thales geometry says this, and says it at the same time as architectural
technique and the practice of the mason. In all three cases, its a question of

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES109

dealing with a solid by means of the union of all the information gathered
on the diverse planes that can speak about it: secrets of shaded surface
shadows and cast shadows. A volume is expressed through its projections,
which presuppose a point of view and a drawing on a smooth surface,
itself without shaded surface shadow and without hidden fold. But, reading
and noting these traces of the volume, Thales doesnt decipher any secret
except that of the powerlessness to penetrate the mysteries of the solid,
whose closedness is endlessly sheltered behind the openness necessary for
all information, in which knowledge is forever buried, and from which the
infinite history of analytic advances shoots forth as from a source.
His story recounts then a common result of this confrontation with
solid objects, the attack on compact volumes, grasped as indefinite,
objective, theoretical unknowns. The thing exists as such, unknown and
a correlate, a secret involuted into folds [plis] and replications that are by
essence inaccessible since explication unfolds [dplie] and therefore leaves,
behind the face of the open, the closed folded over itself.

Either I recognize the object with two shadows, shaded surface and cast;
or I admit a third kernel of shadows inside it: then theory and practice
infinitely develop this secret in an always open history, that of science,
which admits that all things always implicate the explicable.

Fiat lux
So, the history begun, it is said, in the Nile delta is brought to a close with
a lightning strike of an incredible audacity: the radical negation of these
interior shadows.
Thales and Ras Sun, whose rays, straightly intercepted, cut out an
impeccable definition of the dark triangles, reduces to the meager fire of
the prisoners of representation in the Platonic cave thats so encumbered
with smoke everyone cries, blinded. Only the sides or pure lines dazzle,
due to these rays and formed by them, as well as the points or vertices,
luminous foci, little diamonds without dimension where the radiant lines
converge. Borders again.
Outside, the new Sun emits a transcendent light that transpierces the
things and transmits a vision that goes through walls. Now the marvelous
miracle is achieved: the transparency of volumes, a metaphorical name for
the realism of idealities.
From the cave to the outside, the scenography changes in favor of
an ichnography: the shadow of the solids used to play on the plane of
representation and define them by limits and cuttings-out; the light now

110GEOMETRY
traverses them and chases out the interior shadow. In place of the endless
triangulation of geometry, we have the stereometry of empty forms
through the epiphany of diaphaneity.
Here is the space of pure geometry, traversed by the intuition of
transparent emptiness. Then and then only is the pyramid born, the pure
tetrahedron, the first of the five Platonic bodies.
A miracle, here is the Sun in the pyramid: the site, the source, the object
are united in the same place.

The tombs black box, on the side of nomos or religious customs and civil
laws regarding the subject of death, becomes a white box on the side of
phusis, under the brightness of the sun.

The third shadow, the second epiphany:

White boxes
Just as the light used to slide along the adamantine focus, the radial
straight line and the plane thats so brilliant that epiphany has, from the
Pythagoreans all the way to Euclid, designated the surface, perceived as
sparkling, so under the new Sun, solids no longer contain either shadow or
secret; the same brightness traverses them, passes through them without
interception: they now constitute a real world thats thoroughly knowable.
One can understand the importance constantly given by Plato and his
school to the stereometry of volumes.
The hesitant percolation of the infinite explications, of the exhausting
explicitations of folds [plis] closed without recourse, ends with this coup
de force, with a flash of lightning that tears open the veils of shadow and
whose sudden light excludes all darkness. No more spectrum or analysis,
the three shadowsshaded surface, cast, buriedare abducted at the same
time by the Sun of the Good. Starting from this authentic miraclethe
appearance of these forms said to be transcendent, of these boxes, white
and empty, and lastly without obstacles due to the definitive expulsion of
the shadowsthe new never-ending discourse of the grand narrative of
Geometry shoots forth from this source-basin.
And, as though to complete the circle, in all rigor and for the coherence
of global history, the Timaeus will constitute the world by means of the five
Platonic bodies, transparent and white: geometricized, the global Earth
becomes, integrally, a white box. Geometry is finally well-named.
All the little streams and threads, pursued up to here, flow into the
source, marked by this white, empty and translucent basin, above the
threshold of percolation.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES111

 The first body, the simplest, precisely the tetrahedron, designates fire.
Greekness has the pure pyramid be born beneath the furnace of the Sun,
and from this tetrahedron has fire be born again. Heraclitus the physicists
fire?
A double miracle that completes the writings, the Egyptian legend and
the initiation of intuition by placing the light source inside the very heart
of the polyhedron. When the pyramid is itself firedid its name influence
its legend?the Sun traverses it.

Mysticism plus physics equals geometry

This entire origin narrative, from Thales up to the Republic, is immersed in
a vision or dramatizes a rite of fire. The new geometer no longer perceives
any shadow under the combined furnace of the pure form and the solar
hearth: the original twinship of mathematical stereometry, of elementary
physics and religious enthusiasm, the blinding atmosphere of the first
philosophies of intuition.
The kernel of knowledge is ceaselessly enveloped by myth, whose
narrative never ceases combining with the theater of representation:
theory, vision, light, fire.
A new genesis with several branches, in which, like two tributaries, the
natural technologies and the history of religion mix, astronomy and optics,
metric, architecture and cutting stones, solar devotion, in order to free the
objects from their dark obstacles.
Nomos and phusis are tied together in and through the process of
exclusion, common to the two gestures.

Black and white7

In traversing the solid, light announces and produces a history, that of the
first geometry.
But the future of the square and the diagonal will be decided just as
much on the sand in which we describe them and across the language that
codes them as in the white sky of the forms.
The realism of transparent idealities is still bathed in a philosophy of
representation. Of course, the ichnography there substitutes for diverse
scenographies, but it remains a trans-representation with a divine point of
view. For having gone beyond Thales theater, the theater without shadow
hasnt yet closed the stage. However pure and abstract it may be conceived,
the idea isnt differentiated from the idol. The inevitable realism remains
an idealism.

112GEOMETRY
 The geometrical form clearly says this difficulty: prejudged to be
without shadow or secret, it doesnt conceal anything that exceeds the
definition that can be thought about it, existing as ideality, transparent to
sight as to thought, theoretically known through and through, seen and
known without remainder; dazzled by its existence, intuition traverses
it. Existing in itself nonetheless, this form conceals obstacles that surpass
thought enough to require it to bend.
As this so pure geometry dies, when no one is able to found on intuition
any longer, as the theater of representation closes little by little, the secret,
the shadow, the implication are going to explode anew among these
abstract forms, to the eyes of the astonished mathematicians, explosions
continuing throughout history.

Shadows still
The straight line, the plane, the volume, their intervals and regions,
chaotic, dense, compact will soon teem anew with folds and black
hiding places.
Neither that simple nor that pure, the pure and abstract forms, models
of simple ideas, are no longer known and seen without remainders, but
become infinitely replicated objective, theoretical unknowns, enormous
virtualities of noemata, like the stones and objects of the world, our stone
block constructions and wrought objects. Form hides beneath its form
transfinite kernels about which we begin fear that history isnt sufficient
to exhaust them, in-stances highly inaccessible like tasks that surpass us.
The realism of idealities grows heavy and takes on again a compactness
that the Platonic sun had dissolved. Full of shadow, the pure or abstract
idealities become dark again like the Pyramids, and like them create
shadow. A new way to re-listen to the old Egyptian legend and metric of
Thales, from which an endless discourse was formerly born shooting out
from transparent white boxes.
From these never-ceasing streaks of shadows, new lights and other
interminable discourses shot out all throughout history.

Our origin
Thus, the history of the mathematical sciences resolves the question
of origin without exhausting it. Answering and freeing itself from this
question is never-ending for it. The inauguration narrative evokes this
interminable discourse which we have been uninterruptedly holding since
our own dawn, equipotent to the whole of mathematics.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES113

 By the way, what is an interminable discourse? One that relates an
object thats present but concealed, an object that comes but that inacces-
sibly goes absent.
Revealed but veiled to the patriarch Abraham at Ur in Chaldea
four thousand years ago, God, adored be his name and his son, who
came and is to come; love, occurring with the Occitan troubadours in
southern France seven hundred years ago, blessed may it be, in its lost
paradise; and geometry, bathing with its new light the intelligence of Thales
in Miletus, Ionia, twenty-five centuries ago, and ours, sometimes
God, love, and geometry, because they infinitely withdraw their
presence, draw from us an irrepressible torrent of gestures and discourses,
beautiful, from which we are continually born better.

From Diogenes to Thales:

The ethical origin
It is said that you dont like kings
More than a century after Thales, an Athenian philosopher, Diogenes, is
going to expressly put himself in the same position as him, in a similar
diagram of sun and shadows, for a result shifted from the preceding
ones the way the sciences of society differ from those of the world, but
nonetheless to the same end: the constitution of a similar white box.
The stories that focus on the Ionian physicist run through the hard
technologies and the knowledge of nature, ending, from what Plutarch
says, in politics and morality or his relation to kings, just as those that
recount the life of the cynic moralist traverse the social practices and
human knowledge on the other shore of the Aegean Sea, ending in the
schema of geometry. Must we rethink its origin by reknotting strands that
are foreign to each other, in the middle of this passage from the East to
the West?

This knot, globally speaking, composes this book but also constitutes its
local parts.
Diogenes is there, crouched in his barrel, naked, silent, and dirty,
among the refuse; he pees and fornicates before everyones eyes, eats with
his hands or right from the ground what falls; a sage and a bum, he has
abandoned everything. He lives like a dog, barks at whoever goes by, strong
or weak, rich or poor, dignitary or effigy.

114GEOMETRY
 Diogenes doubts everything, reduces everything to what is, without
illusion, an unembellished discourse. He leaves the hard house, removes
the loose garment, escapes the viscous relations, naked, alone, rolling his
barrel, facing the sun, when its sunny. A new elementary ensign of fire: the
Cynic during the dog days.
Believe Diogenes more than anyone else who talks about radical doubt.
Dont listen to those others when they say that they doubt; they have
abandoned neither coat, nor money, nor petty power nor their mediocre
glory. They say that they think and do nothing but speak. And when they
talk about Cynicism, they copy out rewritten sheets.
Naked like Francis of Assisi, Diogenes the bum is hungry like him,
wanders outside along the paths and public squares, eats whats thrown
to him, gets cold and keeps silent. He has no room or stove, has tossed
jacket and shoes into the fire, doesnt possess any gold or value and has
abandoned all place. He has loved peace to the point of risking dying for it
because every place in the social body, no matter how cramped, is acquired
at the point of a weapon. He has lowered his weapons and cherished peace;
perhaps he has loved the world.
Crouched before the barrel, Diogenes is warming himself in the sun,
when its sunny: facing the elementary fire, he will soon repeat Thales drama.

The origin of the object

There, alone, before his barrel, hes cold and watches, not far from the
public fountain, the women draw water. Each one carries her jug, letting her
beautiful vase be seen; they talk. A boy passes, running, out of breath, dodges
between the skirts, leans over the fountain basin, wets his hand, drinks several
times from the palm of his hand. With a flash of laughter in his eyes, Diogenes
stretches his arm to the bottom of the barrel, pulls out his bowl, breaks it.
Since the boy drank from his hand without any need for any bowl, he
has just taught the dog that the dog was still living in luxury. Between the
mouth and the water, why this useless or dangerous intermediary?
Rare in my hand and on my lips, the water of thirst and rejoicing
remains transparent and white. Should it remain for a time in a vase, jug or
bowl immediately the opacity of the wall is seen. Liquid or elementary, the
water vanishes, nothing more than the vase is seen: made of stone or clay,
silver or crystal, its worth a price; in comparison, the water no longer has
any value: the vase, a sacred chalice; the water, non-holy.
We shall soon fight, suffer, for the possession of the hanap. It condenses
mens hatred, their arrogance of power or their race to the most precious.
So Diogenes abandons the bowl in favor of the water.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES115

 The fortunate man doesnt know that water can be worshiped, fought
for, that it can also be made to be rare in order to sell.

There is no collective without a thing

Every object presupposes relations among ourselves. The object exists,
varies, becomes extinguished with them, which are born, vary, become
extinguished with it. Would an object even exist without a group in order
to recognize it, make it, name or qualify it? Is there a single object for a
single man is a question. Conversely, would a single human group exist,
would a single agreement between these men occur without the prelim-
inary condition that an object existed for them? There is no thing without
a collective, no collective without a thing.
Immediate application to the problem of origin: there can be no
geometry without an overlapping of nature and culture.

Diogenes has abandoned everything. Alone, the dog breaks the bowl. He
abandons objects, which leave him. Does he even need a coat? Living alone,
do you get cold? On one harsh winter evening, gray, when the children had
sculpted a snow statue in the public square, he got up, a phantom, from his
barrel, let his coat fall, moved forward naked into the esplanade, faced the
statue and embraced it. Naked, he kissed the naked statue, the way he had
drunk the naked water with his naked hand. An entirely transparent and
white scene.
The bowl can be given away; the coat can be sold; these things are
exchanged, free of charge or for money. If the bowl is a chalice and the coat
a pallium, if the vase is the Grail and the cloth the veil of Tanit, we bow
down before these things, blessed, holy, adored.
We fight each other to possess them, to exchange them, to combat once
again, hardly to enjoy them. There are no things without these collective
relations, no objects without these battles, these exchanges, this veneration.
Diogenes has left the combat in favor of life, has abandoned exchange,
harm, gifts, selling and buying, value; he is not poor if rich and poor are
compared, but he has left comparison itself, from which comes all the evil
in the world. One never detaches from anything but comparison.

Water and snow, sun. He gives up the things that form a screen to the
things of the world. He has discovered at least two objects: fire, facing
the sun without intermediary, and water, another element, without any
interception.
Here he is already on the Ionian physicists path to the originary source.

116GEOMETRY
Tools, stakes, fetishes, merchandise:
Non-objects
Under the fury of the battle, in the circuits of exchange, on the altars of
adoration, objects are not objects.
Before the marble of the tabernacles or in the Ark of the Covenant,
the things transubstantiate into fetishes. In the middle of the dust of
combat, the things transform and become stakes. At the bank, at the stock
exchange, in the market at Les Halles, at the supermarket, at the street
stalls, the things are mutated into merchandise by exchange.

The origin or condition for research

Objects have just disappeared, supposing they had ever appeared: they
have become the stakes of struggles, fetishes designated for veneration,
merchandise for exchange. This is giving a price to things, giving spice
to our relations. Diogenes the Cynic has abandoned this price and spice.
Pacified, in rags, alone before his barrel, showing the zero of custom on the
nudity of his skin, he meditates and asks: can we invent relations other than
struggle, other than exchange and worship?
Can I lay my hands on or look at a thing, an object, true, authen-
tically thrown in front, and which is not the stake of history, nor the fetish of
a religion, nor the merchandise for an economy? A question at once posed
to every human knowledge and practice, the answer to which would nullify
the first part of this book if this first part did without the second.

Wandering in the public square, a lit lantern in hand in the middle of

the day, Diogenes was searching, it is said, for a man. Was he seeking, at
the same time as the unfindable man, the lost object? His personal light
in hand, wandering in the streets, haggard, here is the ancestor of the
scientific researcher.

Thales revisited
He is there in the public square, in the filth. Motionless, alone, squatting,
meditating. Alexander the Great passes by in sight of the barrel, stops with
his retinue, troop and pomp. The processionhorses, cuirasses, purple,
displaymakes a clatter upon stopping.
What do you want? What do you desire? My glory and power have the
capability to give anything. Greatness apostrophizes ignominy. Power and
empire offer the dog, from high, everything a dog is hungry for.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES117

 At present, remove yourself from my sun, Diogenes answers, who was
warming himself in the sun. I dont know what I desire, in my body, in
my head, for tomorrow, but I know now that a dark shadow has suddenly
made my old bones cold. Remove your shadow, Alexander, from the warm
presence of the sun.
Remove: here again is a verb of exclusion.

New solar diagram

Basenesss second meditation. Between my mouth and the water, there is
a bowl; I break it in order to touch the water with my palm and my teeth.
Between my skin and the snow statue, there is my coat; I throw it away
in order to embrace the snow, naked. Between my body and the sun,
Alexander passes, his shadow veiling the star of fire: remove yourself from
my sun, Alexander.
Leave, Im chasing you away.
Between attention and an object of the world, an interrupter, an
interceptor, always comes and slips in, bowl, coat, Alexander: a screen. A
parasite passes by and places himself between the subject, for example me,
and the object, that major object of all knowledge: the sun.
There is Diogenes plunged in the drawing of the shadow, seized in the
sketch of geometry.
Shadow is always projected by the Great, the King, most high, dominant,
major, so elevated that I always live in his shadow, cast beneath power and
glory. Not by some prince particularly, not specifically Alexander the
Great, but by the ladder or scale of height itself, equipped with its maxima,
by the animal hierarchyequine, canineof struggle, of value and of
prosternation, and here, in this case, by he who is now the strongest in the
relations of force, today the wealthiest in the comparison of market value,
at this moment the worthiest of veneration.
The solar drawing calculates a maximum. Only the master of the stakes,
the worthiest fetish, the one who sets the prices is seen there. Whoever tries
to think or see an object always lives in the shadow thats always projected
by whats higher than his barrel.
Between the dog and the sun, so great that he makes all the shadow,
Alexander passes and stops for a moment.
At present, remove yourself from my sun, Alexander.

The one who dazzles and prohibits intuition, who darkens or removes
knowledge is never anyone but the prince or the first, that is to say, race,
competition and rivalry, imitation, exchange and prosternation.

118GEOMETRY
 As a condition for knowledge, lets again define culture as the set of
adjuvants that allow escape from comparison, from glory, as indifferent
to power, sickened by competition. This holiness laughs at hierarchy. It
will be said of it what Plutarch wrote about Thales, that he or it doesnt
like kings. There, in its barrel, pitiful, it watches the barbarians play
mortal games of competition. They no longer see the things, dont
know them nor derive any fruit from them, but attentive to the others
and to the greatest among the others, see nothing but stakes, fetishes,
merchandise.
The plunging into shadow faithfully sketches the immersion, total to the
point of drowning, in the laws of the collective. Is Diogenes freezing in the
social sciences? How do we free ourselves from nomos, custom or law, so
as to go towards phusis?

Position and preposition: Between

Crouched in Alexanders shadow, Diogenes seems to be prostrated before
the Great Fetish, imprinted, engraved on coins, the young hero of the
conquests that we learn about while intoxicated with fascination before the
size of the empires.
This is what gives their value to things, now interesting. We are only
interested in these prices: in the stakes for the heated struggles, in the
fetishes of humiliated respect, in the merchandise of the movement of
exchange. The transparent water has no odor or taste; the cold white snow
has no color, and this ordinary sun shines for everyone.
Not so fast. What is interest? Our wise language says it plainly: what
resides between [entre], situated in the interval.8 Interest resides between
me and I know not what. Perched on his horse between Diogenes and the
sun, Alexander intervenes, interesting. The bowl is interesting, between my
mouth and the water, chalice, hanap, precious vase, potsherd, depending;
the coat is interesting, floating between the snow and my skin, chasuble,
quilted housecoat. Neither the snow nor the water changes? The words that
fly or sleep between us are interesting.
Diogenes throws away the coat, breaks the bowl, keeps silent, abandons
the interesting objects. And asks the king to move away from his sun. Who
is Alexander? The most interesting person in the world, all the greater for
intervening everywhere. And if hes the greatest there isnt any place or
time in which he doesnt intervene. So power is the most interesting thing
there is.
Diogenes abandons it; he asks the king to let the ray of sun directly flood
him with warmth and light.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES119

From the sun of the law to physical fire
Beneath the flashing of the sun, the dazzling star that is Alexander-the-Law
becomes Heraclitus the physicists fire, seen without any mediation in pure
nature.
Drunk directly without any bowl, Diogenes water, frozen in the snow
touched without any coat, becomes Thales the Ionian physicists water, a
pure and simple element.
Diogenes abandons nomos for phusis, custom for nature, the clothes of
habit for science.

Anaximander, Anaximenes, Thales did they invent geometry because

their wisdomor their saintlinessmade them physicists?

The origin of invention

Diogenes tries to erase, to exclude mediations; he bridges intervals, extin-
guishes media, tries, with his hand, with his voice, to remove, to expel
every parasitical obstacle. He is quite exactly disinterested.
He invents the fundamental theorem of knowledge, understand by
theorem what allows seeing; and this latter says: the things to be seen, to
be known, the things that let all the other things be known: water, fire
are uninteresting.

Culture, in the above sense, the knowledge that ensues from it, together
claim that what has real interest has no interest, in the sense of interception.
Consequently, the physical element, which explains the world, is found
outside social relations. Physics resides outside the law.
The condition for every discovery therefore contrasts: connection or
opposition, the hard sciences and the social sciences.
If the people of culture and of science were no longer interested in
anything but what has no interest, inventions would rain down upon our
world, with abundance and grace. Gratuitously, without drying up. When
the obstacles are lifted, everything flows; this is the source.

Death and the burial of the parasites

Diogenes lies there, beneath the shadow of the king; Alexander stands
upright, the sun behind his back. Diogenes has laid greatness to rest, as
if the kings body were descending into the tomb, as if he seemed to see a
tomb standing instead of the king, the Great Pyramid of Egypt for example,

120GEOMETRY
which, weighing on the mummy of Pharaoh the Great, contains and
conceals, locked up, his values, stakes, fetishes, merchandise, buried forever.
The sun shines behind the Pyramid as though intercepted by the dead
Alexanders body, embalmed, a statue in its coffer. Rising behind the
pyramidal tomb, the sun moves away from it, piercing through at the point,
at the summit of the perfect polyhedron. How are we to recognize the cynic
Diogenes, dazzled and transformed by the sun?
The scene remains the same but changes into the early scene of
geometry, on the day and in the place where Thales, freed from mimesis
and therefore capable of knowing it, saw the sun pass above the tomb and
trace on the sand this very first theorem of similar forms that are stable
across variance of size, the first exact space: the originary representation
of science. The third excluded from Diogenes schema, Alexander imitates
Pharaoh, the third excluded from the same drawing by Thales.

The double origin

Let greatness intervene before the sun, and the dog remains in shadow;
let the sun climb just above the summit of the tomb of kings, and the dog,
become wise, reads the first invented rigor on the sand.
In the same scene, Thales and Diogenes invent, the one the theorem,
the first discovery of geometry, the other, its condition, Diogenes theorem,
the first-principle discovery of the theory of knowledge: remove yourself
from my sun, let me forget your greatness and power. Thales, here, proves
Diogenes; Diogenes, there, makes Thales possible.

Remove yourself from my sun so it can become fire. Let the king move a
little, let him move away from the light and the gaze, both straight, and I
see the object as a sun, and the fire floods me with warmth free of charge.
Knowledge is without greatness, without power, without adoration, without
conquest, without value, at first. Invention, intuition, discovery, very light
all of them, take place without force, without gold, without incense. Maybe
without place. Without Alexander, science takes its sunbath.

Alexander descends into the tomb; geometry is born on the sunlit earth. It
is born of the sun, which, rising behind the mausoleum, traces theorems
and graphes on the sand.
Alexander descends into the tomb. From the kings cadaver, from the
Pharaohs mummy, from the two excluded thirds, the fetishes, statues, the
merchandise, technologies, the stakes, deadly weapons, are born. The first
statue, the mummy is itself a fetish, a stake, the first merchandise, the first

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES121

value, the first gold: primordial money, which does not stink. We must
forget the cadaver that lies between us, in the midst of us, that of the king,
his power, in order to enter into the sun of knowledge.
Abandon the cadaver, forget the fetish. The closing of the tomb was
necessary to see the sun, flooding Thales, invent geometry.
Of course, as soon as the new object occurs, it plunges into the learned
collective and even constitutes it, so as to become in turn a stake, fetish, or
merchandise

The origin of physics

Auguste Comte elsewhere intelligently said that no god of gravity was
ever seen at any latitude. Yet physics will be born precisely from the fall
of bodies, from the motion of heavy bodies, a common phenomenon,
scorned enough to be a godless place. Everywhere else the gods covered the
places over, protected them, prevented the local objects from being seen.
Geometry is born in the space outside the kings shadow, mechanics in
a rare gap in the grip of the fetishes. This tear in space was as improbable
as the very space of geometry.
The stake covers the object over; power covers it over with shadow; the
fetish transubstantiates it. Abandon the stakes and the idols, and like a sun,
the object will irresistibly return, rise. Great inventions will begin.

That was regarding fetishes and gods, that was regarding stakes and kings,
whose absence gave us the abstract sciences and those of nature.
Now this is regarding merchandise and the despots of money: on the
day when the social bond frees itself a little from the general equivalent
representing every possession, will we discover a new knowledge trans-
iting between us? Before having handled this new quasi-object, the social
sciences hadnt been born; nor perhaps pedagogy.

The origin of knowledge: The authentic cynics

Some anonymous Greek ancestors, chased out of the market, out of the
competitions and temples, excluded from the stakes, the grand discussions
in the agora, expelled from the categories, must have blindly sought, in
order to subsist, a space that would be everywhere absent, populated with
impossible objects.
They finally laid their hands upon a place without place, the pure space
of abstract rigor, upon that perfect utopia outside the world, without which
knowledge would be nothing but derisory, accumulation and copy. Of course

122GEOMETRY
no one has ever seen, touched, felt, heard or tasted this strange non- sensible
space; no one has ever lived in a social place without any exclusion, amid the
infinite of an apeiron; no one has ever had any experience of the strange objects
that populate this space, and yet we know nothing of the world without it and
without them. It is pure utopia, and the objects of the world are gathered in it.
This utopia adds up the white boxes, the entire world being excluded
from it.

If someone seeks a space or an object outside the grip of the tomb, outside
the reach of power and glory, if someone seeks a place without stakes,
without fetishes, without merchandise, if he seeks a utopia, you will say
about him, a ridiculous searcher, that he wont find a world that doesnt
exist, that no one has ever seen the space in which the things themselves
are abstractly gathered.
And yet these anonymous Greek ancestors saw it. They saw it, and
weve seen it through them and thanks to them. And we have never known
anything except thanks to this space. And since theyre still anonymous,
theyve even been chased from posthumous glory, from apotheosis. And
for having been detached even from this glory, they laid their hands upon
this world thats conditional for knowing.
And this was the birth of long-term knowledge.

The application of Diogenes to Thales

Did Thales come to the foot of the Pyramids to assess the conditions for
long duration? What must be done to remain? War, the deadly game of
the strongest, tyranny, slavery, competition, everything stops and becomes
erased at some moment. The strongest is never strong enough to master time.
The gigantic mass of stones crumbles or becomes covered over with
sand at the mercy of the winds, and yet Khufus tomb maximized all the
data: religion and law, politics and strategy, power and wealth, weapons
and fortune. The volume, whose stone blocks Bonaparte calculated could
surround France with a high and continuous wall, doesnt attain long
duration. What empire will manage to do so? During Thales time, the
pharaoh, doubly dead, was already forgotten. The hardest doesnt last. Just
as other cultures played, in order to last, not the victor but the victim, so
Thales inverted the hardests game: only the softest endures.

All materials and powers wear out; what will become of pure form? Of
the most vanishing image, the least concrete, the lightest, the least sayable
possible, whose writing has no importance, whose trace can be lost without

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES123

harming the meaning, whose very memory can pass away or die without
any consequences for its stable history? If you schematize it falsely, it
doesnt matter. If you dont draw it, dont even write it, its still of no matter.
More or worse: if you destroy sources and testimonies, do away with the
monuments, burn partial manuscripts or entire libraries, erase almost
entirely the period during which this form came to light, it will remain
despite every nullification, invariant as soon as it entered into rigor, present
in our forgettings. Even its concept can waver without much damage: we
no longer understand the same reason or the same similarity, yet nothing
notably changes. Let a displacement of the pyramid into the space of
homothety remain, a theorem as fleeting and soft as a ray of Sun equipped
with its shadows, and the pyramid will finally fill the dimension of time.
By relating the tombs shadow to the reference post or to his own
shadow, Thales states the invariance of the same form across variation of
size. His theorem therefore entails the infinite progression or regression
of size in the preservation of the same relation, from the colossalthe
pyramidto the mediocrestake or bodyand so on as much as you
please, to the smallest: what scorn for height and strength, what esteem
for smallness, what erasure of every scale or hierarchy, now derisory since
each stage repeats the same logos or relation without any change! Indeed,
Plutarch rightly wrote that you didnt like kings.

Thales shows the extraordinary weakness of the heaviest material or

hardware ever prepared in the history of men and nations, as well as the
omnipotence, in relation to the time that passes, of a certain software
[logiciel]: of the logos itself on condition of redefining it, no longer as
speech or saying but, in lightening it, as same relation; even softer because
the terms of the analogy balance each other, because the one is erased by
the other, as though each one nullified the meaning of the other, what it
states, its import, so that that only their pure and simple relation remains,
the common form of the statement.
From the maximal remains of the maximal power of optimally preserved
history, Thales draws minimal softness or lightness. Even measurement is
forgotten in the new logos of similarity where a relation between small
things equals another relation between large ones. A miracle, truly:
from almost nil means the longest of possible empires is born, that of
Mathematics, which laughs at history without henceforth knowing decline.
We are scarcely beginning to assess such an economy, this horn of
plenty that provides infinitely from almost nothing. The rarest information,
rare because the most improbable, lies at the sources of the irrepressibly
interminable discourse.

124GEOMETRY
On invention, again
About the inventor and what he discovered, its very commonly said: but
where then did he go to look for that? Nothing here resembles it. Mimesis
seems to be in check, so much does his discovery not imitate anything else.
Where? An entirely simple naivety repeated by the scientific models. So
where? Outside. But outside what? Outside here: outside the ordinary group
normed by custom and law, outside the common and coded language,
outside normal science, outside the education given in the supposedly
superior schools, in brief, outside the closed system in general
Outside the closed, this tautology isnt a bad image, for a piece of
naivety. But if it doesnt explain, at least it describes: outside the ordinary,
the closed network of opinions, the police, politeness, outside the walls,
outside the law. What does this outside signify?
I see, I experience what a closed system is in physics, or on the side of
the social sciences, a convent, a prison, an asylum, a school or a private
yard. Outside these collective spaces wander the banished, by exclusion
or for desecration. But cultural or categorial space? Comparison closes it.

On the other world as the limit sum for

every outside
So here is the fulgurant flash, the great start, almost three millennia ago,
the Greek miracle, the invention of geometry. We all perceive this world by
the sensory terminals and the skin; we draw it with our gestures; we endure
it and enjoy it, transform it through work, signify it through language, at
least designate it thereby, dream it and fantasize about it through myth
and pathos. A real world exists for the groups of the awakened, even if
it is fringed with sleep and dreams, even if it is plunged in madness and
beauty. Or rather, the real has never been anything but this world, concrete,
floating, solid, fragile, precise and blurred, resistant or without hold.
Nothing in the senses passes on to the understanding.
Thales, Pythagoras or no matter which of these first names for history
or legend suddenly places himself outside this world, outside the real. This
is the maximal exteriority, the radical utopia, the anomaly, which surely all
the others will only be varieties of.
What this first geometry invents is not of this world, neither of the
objective world, on the side of nature, nor of the universe of discourse, on
the side of custom and law: no points, straight lines, angles or triangles
here; likewise no proof or univocity in what is said or in what circulates
between us. Plato didnt say anything else, in his language, and were saying

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES125

the same thing, persuaded were claiming something entirely different. The
noetic or intelligible site is separated as though by an ax from space or the
sensible world, and the latter nonetheless participates in the former, as
though it couldnt exist without it, shot through as it is with the relativist
whirlwind and the discursive contradictions of perceptual judgment.
Listen now with a new ear to the historians of the invention: the
innovator places himself outside; he comes to us from outside the enclosure,
where he was abandoned, forsaken, repudiated; from there he restructures
the normal set in crisis as newness.
The distance between the two discourses is nil.

On exclusion, again
Everything happens as though the Greek miracle, the first invention of
science, had already suddenly radicalized our schemas, as though they
distributed in time the small change of the Platonic discourse.
The first of the miracles thus traverses the model called Kuhnianthat
is to say, the paradigm, normal to the point of banality in the history of
scienceto its maximum reach: the closed, the normal, the worn out usual
or the ordinary in crisis is the world as such, languages and objects mixed
up, men and things. The outside then is the elsewhere absolutely speaking:
odorless, non-sensible, unheard, colorless, intangible. Where would you
have this outside be if not at the limit, at the borders of this world taken
in general?
The invention of mathematics here is the absolute invention, the
rending of history, the discovery that has made all the others possible,
not only through technology but through the founding act of the positive
model for every invention in general: the intelligible world installs the
foreignness of exclusion forever.

Consequently, the origins of the first geometry answer the indispensable

criteria wellthe criterion of exteriority first, and in a radical, primary,
unsurpassable way. Then the criterion of crisis: this world never ceases
to be in crisis, endlessly relative and always transformed; language, in
whatever way you set about it, leads to critique. And no one will ever come
out of crisis or critique except by leaving the world and language. Come
from outside, the invariants then stabilize these variations; such and such a
state of affairs will be considered to be invariant across variations. And the
concept becomes sayable.
It secondly answers, and in a radical way, the criterion of improbability.
Mathematical formalities are non-existent and non-constructible: every

126GEOMETRY
time I draw them on the sand or the wax table I truly leave geometry. It
is absolutely improbable that I might one day draw a straight line. It is
even demonstrably impossible. From the viewpoint of public language the
necessity obtained by proof is absolutely improbable; the language used by
proof planes down the polysemy which we know even more is the flesh
of words. For the first time, beneath the clouds of the day, two men can
finally understand each other, through proof, and can comprehend each
other, through language, something everyone agrees is the height of the
unthinkable. This doesnt happen, this will never happen. Yet it happened
in Greece during those times.
In its totality, science emerges, improbable, saturated to bursting with
information, from another world so radically that every other invention
only occurs by repeating this double labor.

The sudden collapse toward custom

Did Diogenes betray our good faith? Why did his little barreled dwelling
never leave the agora? Why didnt he roll it to some natural desert to
become a hermit or anchorite?
Did he prepare those duels at the crossroads? Did he hope to confront
Alexander before his fellow citizens so as to attain the greatest historical
glory and at the least cost? Did the attraction of public exhibition, a
theatrical lust impel this dog to such deceit?
He warms himself, cynically, in the sun of domination. Catastrophe:
nature reintegrates custom.

So return to nature: The perceptive origin

So a return to the shadows, on the side of nature, to escape the worst
cynicism, the one that dominates our customs.
The light the tetrahedron is penetrated with, the light that chases out the
shadow from every pure space, doesnt only come from the sun, from its
power and glory, since the same light shines at night.
Electric or collective, lightcrude, aggressive, sometimes cruel
wounds; often brilliance pollutes what darkness allows to live; wait for
darkness, delight in twilights, rarely light the lamp, hence let darkness come.
The night shines like a black diamond; it shines inside itself. The whole
of the body sees the close proximity of things, their massive nocturnal
presence, their tranquility. Every bright light tears them from this peace,
and takes away mine. My shadow body knows, of itself, how to evaluate the
shadows; it slips among them, enters their silence; you might think it knows

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES127

them. They excite the most sensitive attention, even reveal sensitivity; the
entire skin lives. So remarkable is the black night that almost anything can
be done without the least bit of added light, even walking in the middle of a
sunken lane without any moon. The sole of the foot begins to know better;
the shoulders brush the branches; the stone of the ditch radiates peacefully.
Living by feeling ones way exercises the touch marvelously.
Yes, anything can be done without light, except writing. Writing requires
light. Living contents itself with shadow, reading requires brightness.

Night and fog

Night doesnt anesthetize the skin, it excites its sensitivity. The body rises
to look for the route in the midst of the darkness, loves the little percep-
tions at the bottom of the scale: tenuous calls, imperceptible shades,
rare fragrances, preferring them to what thunders. What wanders in
the penumbra and muteness helps it to rediscover the ancient practices
deposited in its forgetfulnesses and habits. Technological prostheses date
from a time so recent in history that our humiliated bones become excited
from playing their age-old musical score again; our tendons and muscles,
our cutaneous robe sing with jubilation when we throw away our wooden
legs, lights or cars, sensory or motor crutches. Our technologies are often as
good as an orthopedics for a healthy limb, which, as soon as it is replaced
or extended, as the theory goes, falls sick or powerless.
Lets preserve what augments us and scorn what diminishes us.

Veils: Seeing and touching, again

But the world offers nothing but the night or the shadow to thwart the
skillfulness of the attentive one. Darkness may envelope us, but it doesnt
attack the skin the way fog does. The anxiety fog plunges us into doesnt
only come from blindness, but from the fact that it drags, by strata,
across the arms, the shoulders, thighs, stomach and back. It crawls and
licks.
How does a veil cover over the things? Shadow awakens the limbs,
whose envelope of skinintensely present when sight becomes veiled
runs of itself to the rescue of the eyes. But fog puts the body to sleep, soaks
into it, anesthetizes it; place by place, the epidermis is busy then resisting
its compresses: impression weakens under compression. Feeling ones way
loses the freedom to help the hesitant gaze. Fog tears our eyes away from
help; it wraps us in bands or armors us. Fog multiplies the veils; we have
only ever seen a single one, the night.

128GEOMETRY
 The darkness leaves invariant the large, quite stable trihedron that
traverses and orients us, right-left and up-down, and preserves the distri-
bution of the large masses all around; it lets the little light that remains
show through, and some always does remain.
Fog removes the landmarks and the relations that our skin maintains
with the neighboring volumes. You need to have passed through a bank so
thick you lose the neighbor youre nevertheless touching with your elbow
to learn that you even lose your confidence in the most certain instruments
there. Aircraft have been seen leaving clouds flying upside down, or vessels
getting lost due to the unreasonable orders coming from the officer of
the watch panicked by the fog. The latter occupies the power of touch, its
extension and empire, invades places cranny by cranny or space place by
place, applies or glues itself to flat or warped surfaces, fills the folds.
Global shadow, local fog.
The night at once shoots far and leaves the volume empty, under a single
curtain; the fog crawls and insinuates itself and propagates or extends itself
slowly, place by place, plates by plates, filling or skirting the vicinities.
Empty or hollow night, full fog; aerial darkness, gaseous, liquid, viscous,
thick, sticky, layered, quasi solid fog.

Geometry, topology
Darkness concerns optical space and preserves a Euclidean volume:
shadow like the light remains in the order of the usual or metric geometry;
fog occupies the topological varieties, concerns the continuous or torn-up
space of touch, invades by shreds the vicinal, accumulates (dense, compact),
rarefies (light), by open or closed intervals, vanishes like vapor. Thus
shadow preserves the lines of the world; fog continuously transforms them
through homeomorphism, losing distances, measures and identities.
This is an entirely different world from the one described by Thales
homothety. You retain the tactile certainty of being situated between the
captain and the lookout on the open bridge saturated with pea soup,
phantom neighbors, the way we say phantom limbs, but you lose the
sense of size, the form of their profile, your feet like their bodies vanish
into incalculable distances. Shadow leaves everything invariant; fog makes
everything variable, continuously and with or without tear.

South and north

Dry Greece remains the kingdom of geometers, who were born there,
beneath an overwhelming light or a night empty enough for you to think

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES129

it sufficed to lift a veil for the truth to appear, dazzling. Optics also begins
in these sites.
Wet, the Atlantic bears fog banks as tall as cliffs with yellowish interiors,
just like the Baltic Sea or others in the northern latitudes. Topology would
never have come out of Egypt or Ionia, where everything is known through
distance and measurement; you have to go beyond the Pillars of Hercules,
whose gates close the Mediterranean, to get some idea of it, amid seas
in which the distances bathed with indistinct fog never assure that they
submit to the same laws as proximity, itself deformable. Countless are the
veils there.
The skin presses against a perfidious pillowcase, an irregular rag, a
rendible cloth or veil followed by a thousand different other ones; the
entire milieu loses its invariance, its reliability, its fidelity. Randomly filling
space, fog resembles at the same time a medium and objects, what covers
and what is covered. Night does not betray, nor does shadow: a thing there
remains a thing, veiled or not, visible or not, in any case accessible through
touch. Fog betrays, fills the entire milieu with possible things, objects or
vapors; we dont reach a decision.
The southern night disquiets phenomenology; the northern fogs trouble
ontology. Shadow confirms the distinction of being and appearances; fog
blurs it. Thing or veil, being or non-being, questions then of latitude?
Nature and culture encounter each other along numerous looping
routes. It is understood that the mosaic thus drawn has to wait for some
white box for flowing to begin.

From the sun to the earth:

The astronomical origin
The Pyramid measured by Thales serves as a gnomon. Does the entire
adventure then begin with astronomy? How did they observe the sky in
Antiquity?
The needle of the sundial projects its shadow on the ground or the
reading plane according to the positions of the stars and the Sun over the
course of the year. The double history of Hieronymus and Plutarch bears
witness to such variations. Since Anaximander, it is said, Greek physicists
have known how to recognize a few events of the world on these projec-
tions. The light come from above writes on the ground or the page a
drawing whose appearance imitates or represents the places of the Universe
through the intermediary of the styluss point.

130GEOMETRY
 In those times, hours varied, since the days of summer or winter,
whatever their length might be, were invariably divided into twelve: a bad
clock, this gnomon! Thus the sundial wasnt used much to count hours as
commonly thought, but rather, qua an authentic instrument of scientific
research, gave a model of the world which would show the length of the
shadow at noon on the longest and the shortest days, from which solstices,
equinox and place latitude for example were drawn: thus more an obser-
vatory than a watch.
We dont really know why the axis was called gnomon, but we arent
unaware that this signifies: what understands, decides, judges, interprets or
distinguishes, like a ruler that allows knowing. The staging of the natural
shadows and light takes place through the interceptions of this ruler
named: apparatus of knowledge. The Egyptians merkhet, used to orient the
Pyramids by observing the sky, likewise literally translates as: instrument
of knowing.
According to a place in Herodotus repeated below, it seems that the
Greeks inherited this gnomon and the division of the day, from dawn to
dusk, into twelve parts from the Babylonians: did the sexagesimal numer-
ation of these latter come from their division of the year into three hundred
and sixty days or the converse? In brief, each angle or segment of thirty
degrees thus divides the sky into zones that the Greek language calls
[zdion], from [zon], animal, and [hodos], way, that is to say,
a figurine of an animal or any other living being; the adjective therefore
designates the orbit, the route, the zodiac path, and the noun the signs of
this same zodiac. The sky is populated with living forms, point by point.
Climbing back up from the shadows to the light that induces them
and from this light to its single source is a lesson from Plato, when he
talks about knowledge, or from Thales, at the invention of his theorem.
Before the poetical or philosophical image we find the everyday act of
astronomers, whose exact method infers a thousand pieces of information
from the length and position of the dark trace or mark.
In this optics, they knew how to construct a ruler as precise as the style
that writes. Does the black of the ink on the page reflect the old shadow
come from the Sun via the needle of the gnomon? This point writes all by
itself on the marble or the sand as though the world, communicating with
itself, knew itself and thus justified the name.

Again, the subject is not born

Who knows? Who understands? Antiquity never wondered about this.
Where should we put the head or the eye in this observatorywe asked

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES131

these questions relatively recently in history,in the patch of shade, at
the luminous source, at the place of the sundials point? These are all too
modern problems.
For the later use of the astronomical telescope presupposes that the
subject had been invented, who was going to place himself on the right
side of the viewfinder in order to contemplate, observe, calculate, order
the planets: the subject doesnt exist in the Ancient Greek language. In
those days, the world as such was filled with knowledge the way it is said
the heavens sing the glory of God. For that culture, the gnomon knows:
discerns, distinguishes, intercepts the Suns light, leaves traces on the sand
as though it were writing on a white page, yes, understands.
Knowledge lies amid exterior space and its bright or dark events, as does
the entire body; life, fate and the group are immersed in the expanse or in
the world from which they arent distinguished. The world is applied to
itself, reflects itself in the sundial, and we participate in this event neither
more nor less than the stake since, standing, we also create shadow, like
Thales comparing his short size to the Pyramids long size, or since, seated
scribes stylus in hand, we also leave traces.
Modernity begins when this real world space passes for a stage and
when, controlled by a stage manager, it turns inside out like the finger of a
glove or a simple optical schema and plunges into the utopia of a knowing
subject, interior, innermost. This black hole absorbs the world. But before
this absorption, the world as such, whole, remains the seat of knowing. We
are no longer able to understand this sentence, we who, in addition, destroy
what we know.
Climbing back up from shadows to the light and from reproduced
or projected images to their model, we find lessons common to Greek
astronomy, the nascent geometry and the Platonic theory of knowledge.
That the tool that permits this operation is called a gnomon in the first
of the list is what aids us in boldly placing the active center of knowing
outside of us.

Furthermore, the firmament is populated with living forms, the signs of the
zodiac. If the light comes from the Sun, even when it disappears at night,
who then carries on their back the wooden or stone statues of animals
on the highly placed path of the zodiac so that they can be projected,
immense, on the dark wall of the sky, frequenting the constellations studs?
The Platonic cave describes the world itself. We will never know whether
Plato first perceived the Bear or the Dog on the starry vault above his
head before conceiving in his philosophy the intelligible heaven of forms
preceding or conditioning the understanding of the things of the world, but

132GEOMETRY
we assuredly see that the appearances of the constellations reduce to sets
of points. No one has truly seen, here or there, the Scales or the Ram but
quite simply a simplex: never a continuous and fuzzy image, but juxtaposed
studs. As though the celestial models remained faithful to the theory of the
Pythagoreans for whom all things are numbers. The very first diagrams of
arithmetic geometry, in which for example a square is represented as four
points, etc., truly resemble constellations; and reciprocally.
But where do these statues causing twinkling shadows on the dark sky
come from?

Machine and memory

We translate the word gnomon poorly because knowledge sparkles at
the point of its axis. Literally it signifies, in an apparently active form,
one that discerns and determines, but always designates an object. In his
commentary on the second definition of Euclids second book, Thomas L.
Heath describes it as a thing enabling something to be known, observed
or verified. The proximity of these two things or their repetition has
meaning: they are related to each other, all by themselves. In these
objects, through them, in the places they occupy, the world demonstrates
knowledge.
Since the axis of the sundial stood perpendicular to its plane, the
expression gnomon-wise expressed, for the archaic Greeks, the right
angle or the plumb-line. Consequently, we could almost translate it as
ruler or framing square, especially as Euclid, in the place already
indicated, called gnomon the areas of the complementary parallelograms of
a given parallelogram, such that their addition or subtraction leaves them
similar to each other at the same time. Thus, a framing square [querre]
shows two complementary rectangles or two complementary squares of
a given square or rectangle: the French word itself seems to signify the
extraction of a square or sundial [carr ou cadran].
Again, how to describe it? As an object, a shaft whose appropriate
placement gives surprising resultslatitude, solstice, equinox, tilt of the
worlds axiswhich it furnishes automatically. It functions all by itself,
without any human intervention, like an automaton, without motor subject:
this is a mechanical knowledge since it intercepts a movement, that of the
Sun. Lets prefer machine here over instrument, so much for us does a tool
refer to the subject that uses it and its hand or the voluntary and finalized
action for which the subject conceived and made it. On the contrary, the
mental activity that the word gnomon designates in Greek here refers to a
machine, to an object that achieves one of the first instances of automatic

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES133

 Case of the parallelogram
Case of the parallelogram

Gnomon

Case of the rectangle

Case of the parallelogram Case of the rectangle

Case of the square

Case of the rectangle Case of the square

knowledge in history, the first machinery uniting hardware to software.

The role of the subject, its knowing and thinking function have nothing in
common here with the roles they will take on in what we have called up to
today scientific knowledge.
The calculation of latitudes according to the shadow of the Sun at the
Case
solstices and of the square first mathematical link between astronomy
equinoxesthe
and geographyon the other hand gave rise to the establishment, by
Ptolemy or before him by Hipparchus, of what Antiquity called the tables
of chords: long lists of ratios between the measurements of the sides of
right triangles and the measurements of their angles, in which the birth of
trigonometry can be read. This is the memory, above was the axis: the table
corresponds to the machine; mnemotechny is associated with automatic
knowledge.
In Babylonian science, well before the astronomical scene of Thales,
automatic procedures of calculation and tables of measurements likewise
coexisted. In other words and more generally, an algorithmic thought
always shows two components, one that can be said to be mechanical and
the other which must be called mnemonic: recapitulation of the results of
mechanical procedures or conditions for their continuation; the automaton
and the tables or the dictionaries: hardware and software.

Two mathematics?
All the knowledge announced by the word gnomon and accumulated
around its shaft as well as all this objective and tabular knowledge are

134GEOMETRY
strongly distinguished from the types of knowledge we classically group
around proof or deduction, for mathematics, and around experiment, in
what concerns physics, according to the criteria of rigor and exactness, as
well as around the subject, whether personal or collective.
Here then is a different episteme, of an algorithmic nature. Effective
and present for the Egyptians and Babylonians, it coexists in ancient
Greece with the new geometry, although hidden beneath its transparency.
When Socrates dialogues with the little slave in the Meno, the two sciences
confront each other, the one active, the other forgotten, scorned: lets dare
to say it: enslaved!
Thus concealed by the official Hellenic mathematics of the tradition,
the other one is going to endure, fertile, over numerous centuries, before
acquiring, in our time, a status parallel to the former.
A quick word then about this unspoken double history.

Interlude concerning the moderns

Over the recent decades, we have by chance lived two strongly mathe-
matical situations which resemble this bifurcation: the algebra said to be
modern climbed back up to the rigor of axiomatic elements after the crisis
of foundations and attempted a reordering through increased formalism
and the use of structures; at almost the same time, algorithmic thought
came to light again, suddenly rising in power, and triumphs today in the
domain of computer science and its associated disciplines.
Children of Bourbaki, on the one hand, and Turning, on the other,
grandchildren of logic and geometry, the hazards or circumstances of our
history allow us to better understand the history of mathematical science
and the circumstances of various inventions. The ancient and the new
always mix otherwise than expected.

Another example: what could be more celebrated than the distinction

proposed by Pascal in the seventeenth century between the spirit of
geometry and the spirit of finesse? Do we really understand this distinction?
Did he master it himself?
For its author meditated on first principles that can neither be proved
nor defined, but from which everything else proceeds, and on the rigorous
ascent back up to axioms via a formalism that allows putting in order; yet
when he invented, he constructed a triangle and an arithmetic machine
which functions quite well without these austere demands. Place units
step by step; then on the next line down, the same numbers shifted and
augmented by a unit: this suffices and works very well; you will read in the

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES135

triangle thus constructed a theory of numbers, the division of the stakes,
binomial coefficients, the calculation of differences an inexhaustible
horn of plenty.
Might there then exist two mathematics, the second one, local and fast,
mocking the first one and making do with finesse? A philosopher, is Pascal
talking about a science thats different from the mathematicians?

Does this gap translate the geometers constant scorn, starting with the
Greeks and passing through the Middle Ages all the way to Descartes
himself, for those practices considered merely good for merchants and
which were called, depending, logistique and algorism?9 You still count,
they seemed to say; we at least, we demonstrate in abstraction!
Was the spirit of geometry born in Asia Minor from the Hellenic
language with the pure figures and formal proofs that accompany them,
and does it presuppose a deductive coherence that laughs at and separates
itself from the common operative manipulations that precede it in Egypt
and Babylon, and which, for their part, square and cube, entirely preoc-
cupied with metrology and constructing it step by step?
Do algorithmic thought and its finessescalculations gathered in
formulas that are blind, formal, local, fast, as abstract, whatever may be
said, as the idealities to followindeed arise before geometry, which we
take to be the only mathematics because of Greek philosophy, whose
immense flow has served it both as metalanguage and publicity, refusing
and repressing its predecessor and causing it to be forgotten? Euclids
famous algorithm pierces the Elements, and we put our head through this
window to perceive an origin hidden from us by the gigantic Hellenic
construction.
Thus the famous Pascalian distinction would oppose to the great
tradition issuing from Thales and going all the way to Descartes or
some other, the small and modest memory of this first calculative dawn,
come from Egypt and Babylon, transmitted by merchants around the
Mediterranean, the long anamnesis of the Menos slave, which Pascal takes
up again in his triangle and machine: that of algorithms.
Consequently, he blindly gives it a territory as large as that of geometry
and, in this empty and new space, the entire classical age of the seventeenth
century suddenly bursts forth and joyously leaps about. Like Pascal and
others, Leibniz discovers America, I mean a new world in which, unlike the
traditional one, everything is to be seen, found, constructed and populated,
without institutional objects, without already occupied niches defended
tooth and nail: they dont seem to remember that two millennia before
them bold innovators had already reached this place.

136GEOMETRY
 Furthermore, did they know that the Arabs, in the interval, had also
thought algorithmically, in inventing the word if not the thing? And
what if the seventeenth century showed, in mathematics, a nice Moorish
incursion into a territory traditionally abandoned to Greek ownership or
took up again a Semitic language tradition in a history or culture thats
uniquely Indo-European? The end of a monopoly? And what if the seven-
teenth century showed us an intellectual situation exactly symmetrical
to the Greek situation? The one represses algorithms in order to give rise
to geometry; the other attempts to forget geometry in order to invent
algorithms.
For if one devotes himself to the balance sheet of the new theorems
proposed by Leibniz for example, one would end up with the same result
as the one above concerning Pascal: many more algorithms than geometry.
Generalize boldly: the same thing goes for the entire seventeenth century;
envision then the great beginning made by that time as a repetition.
Pascal, Newton and Leibniz invent infinitesimal calculus at the same
time. How should we define it in its nascent state? Very poorly or not at
all, if you want to found or axiomatize it: the spirit of geometry expends
and exhausts itself at this at a pure loss; excellently on the contrary,
if you consider it as an algorithm. A Greek geometer belonging to
the ancient period, Descartes refuses it in this spirit; the three others
discover it through finesse. Local, fast, easy, formal, blind, it works very
well, squaring, cubing, measuring, entirely preoccupied with metrology,
designating centers of gravity, using series, seeming to tame the infinite,
making use of step-by-step procedures and dispersing itself into a
thousand little problems: isochronic curve, catenary, rhombi, brachis-
tochrone, maxima and minima, envelopes, caustics so many articles
shining like diamonds, scattered thoughts not put together in a treatise
starting from fundamental elements and unfolding deductively all the
way to the results. Leibniz knew this and preserved this elegant gap,
the distance between two simplicities, that of geometry and that of
algorithmic thought: a heavy and clear system facing quick, blind and
acrobatic calculation.
Recessive, the latter returns from time to time before the dominant
geometer, and we always think it new, it, the most ancient of our forget-
tings. The reader will understand here that Im devoting myself to the
anamnesis thats the opposite of the one with which Socrates will deal with
his ignorant slave boy: oh modern mathematics, you think youre devoting
yourself to the results of Greek geometry, whereas in remembering, you
discover all by yourself that in doing algorithms, you become connected to
the distant Babylonian past.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES137

 Can you imagine constructing the Elements for this mathematics thats
entirely on the side of finesse? Yes. How can we correctly conceive Leibnizs
Mathesis Universalis if not as the equivalent of an algorithmic Euclid?
Or adding up the two tendencies? For in it he meditates on the rigorous
encounter toward the axioms he is desperately trying to prove as well as on
a reordering that would allow increased formalism, but when he invents,
he walks and runs toward functionings that do without these demands
while wanting to fill this gap.

Two thoughts reconciled today?

Even more generally, can we conceive two mathematics? I imagine the
first one to be born on the banks of the Euphrates or the Nile, where the
scribes and calculators knew and practiced algorithmic thought, whereas
the second one appears on the shores of Ionia or on the island of Samos
with pure figures and the rigors of demonstration.
These two rivers run along history without mixing much, as little as the
Semites, at the source of the first one, with the Indo-Europeans, inventors
instead of the second one; must we again see here a new way of opposing
an iconoclasm taking refuge in numeric and arithmetic signs and codes
on the one side and the iconophilia at work in the images of geometry on
the other?
Through a religion, Christianity, whose founder bears a both Semitic and
Greek name, and science, pure and applied, the Semitic and Indo-European
cultures fertilized universal history when they agreed to crossbreed, which
was rarely; we are living through one of these fertile encounters today,
when all the sciences are continuing to apply mathematics after the Greek
fashion but at the same time and together are also practicing algorithms by
means of the computer.
We are aware of this crossbreeding, whereas during the preceding
history it had remained forgotten. Worse, when a geometrical inventor,
Leibniz or Pascal for example, discovered, with the straight flow of the
other current, he understood what he was doing as little as Euclid himself
did when conversely he set forth his famous, but blind, algorithm.
What great luck for philosophy to live through this confluence and to
invent other ways of thinking, while founding a few hopes for peace.

The return to the astronomy without eyes

Just as the mathematics of today allows us to better understand the
situation at the origin, so an understanding educated in the contemporary

138GEOMETRY
sciences cant be surprised at the fact that an astronomy without sight or
gaze, like contemporary astronomy, could have existed in those same days:
ours observes no more than the Greek one does and has left the seven-
teenth century interlude, begun by Galileo.
If the sundial almost never functioned as a clock, if we have to see it
rather as an observatory, this very word, anachronically chosen, would
mislead us. The gnomon no more precedes the theodolite than the sundial
foresees the watch. For the Greek astronomer doesnt observe the way the
seventeenth century and modern ages did, for which domes were built
around telescopes. The act of seeing doesnt have the same place there and
doesnt take the same place in the act of knowing.
We are in the habit of interpreting knowledge as a doublet of sensation
and abstract formalities, and philosophers, like parrots, readily repeat
that there is nothing in the understanding that wasnt first in the senses:
it sounds like physics or mechanics, in which you first observe in order to
draw general laws; this in addition presupposes a subject, then a body and
an entire training that sharpens sensation by means of a refined hardware.
Yet here and in those days, only the sundials shaft and the projection plane
receive information, not the eye. The objective receiver, the axis and marks,
will later cede its place to the sensible body, but occupies it first.
Significantly, when they relate the story of Thales coming to the foot of
the pyramids to measure their height, the historians or doxographers, as we
have seen, confuse the shadow of some stake and that of a body: whether
its a question of a fearsome building, of a stick or the one we thought was
observing is of no matter, each one in its way, stone, wood or flesh, assures
the canonical role of the gnomon, the function of discerning, objective. A
science without subject, a science that does without the sensible or that
doesnt pass through it: put a stick in the subjects place and nothing will
change; build a stone tomb in the place where its decomposing, a cadaver,
and knowledge remains, invariant.

The origin of theory

That light, shadows and their division, an entire sensory scene, can be seen
there no one would question, but nothing of this scene, filtered or not by a
theory or ending at its construction, transits across a subject, the bearer of
faculties. In the diagram of the Sun, at the bright source, of rays, of the axis
and the writing on the ground, there is no place for the eye nor site that can
be called point of view. And yet theory appears there.
Exact or approximate, sometimes rigorous measurement, abstract
reduction, the scientific passage from the volume to the meridian plane

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES139

and from the latter to the line and from this to the point, the geometric
model of the world are all drawn there without the intervention of organs,
functions or faculties. The world gives itself to be seen to the world that
sees it: this is the meaning of the word theory. Better: a thing intervenes in
the world so that the world can read on itself the writing it traces on itself.
A pocket or fold of knowledge.
In the literal sense, the gnomon is intelligent since it puts together
situations selected from among a thousand others and therefore discerns
and understands. A passive receptor, it sees the light; active, it writes
the border of shadow on the page; theoretical, it shows the model of
the sky. For us to attain, once again, us contemporaries newly aware
of it, this automatic science, indeed this artificial intelligence, we have
to forget the philosophical prejudices of the modern interlude: man at
the center of the world, in the gnomons place and taking its name, the
subject in the middle of knowledge, its universal receiver and motor, as
well as the imaginary reconstruction in its dark inwardnesswhere no
one will ever enter save a few transcendental philosophers equipped no
doubt with the golden boughof that same scene of shadow and light
that they reproduced starting from a real eye to the filter of a legendary
understanding. At bottom, nothing could be easier than to abandon
this complicated faculty so as to simply read what the Sun writes on the
ground.

The origin of idealities

The axis of the sundial is not a tool in the sense of a stick held by an ape
which thus extends its grip or its maintenance, nor in the sense of a magni-
fying glass that enlarges the objective and increases the performance of the
eye.10 The artifice doesnt refer to the subject, oriented by it, but remains
an object among objects, between the Sun and the ground themselves, a
thing made intelligent by its place in a singular site in the world that passes
through this place in order to reflect on itself. Thus, the Universe knows
itself through itself, [auto kathauto].
The nascent mathematical ideality never refers in Greece to a thinking
subject or is thought by means of an idealism. On the contrary, realism
dominates there. The realism of idealities, that is, the thing form or the
form thing, is shown at the foot of the sundial in the scene where things
see things, where similar forms engender each other.
The point, shining like a diamond at the intersection of the suns rays,
the line issuing from the daystar itself, the angle of the shadow, the surface,
shining or dark, circle, triangle, square are born there as ideal forms in

140GEOMETRY
the darkness and the brightness, in the middle of the very things, in the
world as such, real like the rays of light, like the fringes of shadow, and as
their common borders.

Tables or canonical lists

That, in the end, tables of numbers and an instrument of observation from
which they are drawn and on which they are found again correspond
shouldnt surprise a historian of science, accustomed in some way to
the fact that a science begins in this state: for example, the astronomical
telescope indicates a thousand positions of as many stars, and a register
collects them. A comprehensive theorywell come, but laterenders
this state outmoded: thus Keplers and Newtons laws in a sentence erase
this jumble since from this sentence anybody can in an instant find, as
numerical application, any local detail.
An identical hope mobilized the chemists of the last century, whose
material experimentally led them to draw up tables of bodies, from which
they began dreaming, like the astronomers, that a general law would erase
them while including them at the same time. This coexistence of lists,
tables or rubrics, and of a simple or complicated equipment, seems to us to
characterize a pre-theoretical era in which observation prevails over laws,
in expectation of the induction to come.
When we see in Antiquity the tables of chords, which give the values of
an arc or an angle from the measurements of the sides of a triangle, coexist
with that instrument of observation that the Greeks called gnomon, we are
minded of the historical schema brought about by the arrival of Newton
or Kepler amid the Alfonsine or Toledan Tables collecting the positions of
the stars. So we perceive the figure of an experimental knowledge which
associates an instrument and number tables in expectation of a theory
whose unitary power would render the instrument outmoded at the
same time as the tables. Through this schema we understand the ancient
situation, and this situation evidently submits to it. This is the gnomon: it
precedes the telescope; those are the tables of chords: they resemble the
Toledan Tables. The whole constitutes a pre-modern pre-astronomy in
expectation of trigonometric theory.
We have just contracted a new habit in seeing coexist a machine and
its memory, an automatic instrument and programs. The same schema,
after a certain fashion, but completely different nonetheless since we
arent expecting a theoretical law whose global comprehension would
with a stroke of the pen nullify our software and their relation to the
hardware. Its a question of an authentic and original way of knowing and

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES141

not of a pre-knowledge or a state preceding knowledge; its a question of a
knowledge and not of its incomplete functioning.
Greek astronomy furnishes an example of the second model rather
than a paradigm of the first one: confirmation of the results from just now
regarding algorithmic thought.

The three senses of homothety

Thales demonstrates the similarity of triangles whose angles are equal
and sides proportional. A same proportion causes the pyramid to match
another erected element: an identical reason or ratio in three statements.11
First, or rather in the end, it defines homothety in a space of movements
with or without rotations. This is the statement of rigorous science, now
legible in those histories that recount Thales measurements during the
course of his voyage.
Second, or rather mediumly, each of these upright pegs, perpendicular
on the horizon, can be taken as a gnomon: the moment of noon, as reported
by one of the legends, marks the principle function of the sundial as fixing
the meridian and on it the solstices and equinoxes, solemn moments
during which the shadow lengthens toward its extrema. Thales, it is said,
had written two books on them, lost to history. To carry out these calcula-
tions, the pyramid here is equivalent to the axis or stick stuck there which
in turn is equivalent to this motionless passer-by frozen in the contem-
plation of the apical light. And the Egyptian tomb bears a funerary shaft
which sights the absence of the star that, in the sky, indicated the north.12
This medium statement saying homothety in the literal sense of every-
thing that can be used as peg or axis for such an observatory must be called
historical, because it recounts the astronomy of the Ionians and their first
models of the world, as well as what ensues geometrically: the Greek
miracle falls and descends from the sky; the old question of the origin of
geometry is resolved in this luminous and dark passage from the stars to
this axis, whose name says that it knows.
But third, or rather first of all and archaically, the anthropological
meditation slowly conducted not long ago in the book Statues renders
coherent and thinkable, without the firmament and before geometry, a
fundamental similarity, a same way of being-there, for the tomb and its
pharaoh mummy, on the one hand, the erect living body, half-dark and half-
light, on the other, and lastly the stake planted in this definite site. Markings
by death and what comes out of it of the singular place, of the thesis, points
of reference by the peg and the herma that rises at the boundaries, here
are three statues, in the sense given to the word by that text, three exactly

142GEOMETRY
homothetic boundary stones, that is to say similarly posed-there, mummies,
living body, cairn, obelisk or menhir, staff or stock, assuming the same
function of designating a layer, grave, habitat or borderoh, miracle!of
soon tracing, thanks to the Sun, the exact latitude of this place.13

The origin of geometry: It comes from the earth

This goes beyond history and founds the statement of science by saying the
same thing in another language. The medium statement of astronomy says
the same thing in the same language, metric, exact, precise, quasi formal,
and geometry is already found to be born in it, as through embryonic.
But the third or first one, the most buried and original, discovering three
statues in these three apparently dissimilar bodies, displays the rigorous
homothetyin the literal, anthropological, and ontological senseof these
three local and mortuary witnesses, of these three layer markers, and says
it in a primordial language thats so full of shadow that our entire effort
of thought since the origin of geometry has not sufficed to rediscover,
retranslate or decipher it behind the light of theorems.
Yet the blinding brightness of science comes from this darkness the way
the statues resurrect from the earth, from that primary and fundamental
earth repeated for more than two millennia without knowing it by the word
geometry.
The ground upset by the Niles flooding likewise returns to chaos,
to the primordial darkness, from which it is returned to brightness by
measurement. Darkness never prevents light from appearing but light
always prohibits darkness from ever being seen: geometry shines forth so
much that it dazzles and therefore conceals its dark womb.
Yes, geometry falls and descends from the sky, from the sun, by the easy
history of astronomy, a simple and facile fall and cathode; but it climbs
from the earth, anabasis and procession, comes from the tomb, from the
cave where the shadows of statues dance, resurrects from among the dead.14
Always ready to laugh and burst into amusing mockery, the Thracian
peasant women of the fable know that the observer of stars falls into the
well: we learn through them that Thales place yields beneath his feet like
an undermining tunnel.

Yes, geometry rightly bears the name of its mother, the earth on which what
falls from the sky is measured. Marked out with the help of the gnomon,
the earth remains in the shadow like a foundation, like a fundament dug
beneath science; here rests the mummy, in the dark entrails where the stake
from which knowledge climbs is stuck.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES143

 [episteme], science, does this term come from
[epistema], the same word from the same family but which nevertheless
signifies the funerary cippus, the stone raised over the house of the dead,
an obelisk, cairn, an ancestor of the pyramid?
The geometric statement unfolds in the new and modern time of scien-
tific knowledge; the astronomical statement is recounted in the time of
the history of science which is born before the beginning of geometry; the
statuary statement is said in the time of anthropology or the time of the
foundations which supports the two others. Hence the subtitle of the book.

From the statuary foundation to the static

foundation
The memory of this anthropological foundation subsists in texts that have
nevertheless been written in formal terms.
The first book of Euclids Elements doesnt open with the classic five
postulates and five axioms. It begins with twenty-three definitions: of the
point, the line, the angle, and so on. As though it were a question of an
ordinary grammar: first morphology, then syntax. Let syntax particularly
be retained and we have a system whose rigor and formal purity have
caused the admiration of its officiating ministers for almost two millennia.
Thus has Euclid been read and reread, with the straight grain and with
good reason. Lets consider here rather the definitions in their semantics.
Has it been observed that the very first word of the text was
[semeion], sign? Under the said metric, under the unsaid topology, do the
Elements imply something concerning meaning?
When at the beginning of the century Hilbert reconstructed geometry by
means of ideal objects he proposed, having a bit of fun, to call table, glass or
bottle, indifferently, he was in fact criticizing what has a meaning or meaning
in Euclid. And, in eliminating it, he attained Geometry, the one we are now
considering as such. This amounted to saying as well, at least by paralipsis,
that it wasnt at all a question in the Elements, not yet or not quite, of
geometry. What was it a question of then? Its not impossible to answer this.
Hilberts ironic sentence marks the end of a long history that brings
meaning to zero.15 Euclids geometry is not yet pure, abstract or formalized
because it drags kernels of unanalyzed meaning in its vocabulary and
morphology. We have known this for at least a century, during which our
immediate predecessors picked out, for example, facts of topology that
were drowned in the metric. They proceeded to a, to some filterings, which
produced results become classic today. Due to the theory of percolation,
these filterings can no longer be taken as metaphors.

144GEOMETRY
 It is less known that the history of Greek mathematics, before Euclid,
has itself functioned as a similar succession of filters. It didnt content
itself with accumulating inventions. If the Elements forms a deductive
system, it also devotes itself to a historical balance sheet of the results that
were known at the date it was written, but it lastly constitutes, in part, the
remainder of choice and previous analyses.
The Platonic school for example purified the ancient lexicon of geometry,
seeking, as Mugler has shown, to desensitize it. The Pythagoreans called
surface: color; the Meno prefers the term: limit. This is a case of analysis of
meaning and rectification of vocabulary. A variety of space is being defined
differently than by perception, even if we do think they are passing from
sight to touch. The express aim nonetheless remains forming an ideality.
Plato didnt like the very term geometry, no doubt because it recalled
practices such as surveying. These discussions and analyses arent confined
to the Academy, many are found in Aristotle; they dont stop at Euclids
Elements since Proclus perpetuates them during the final days of the school
of Athens.
Hilbert marks the end of a history of meaning; Euclid writes at a given
moment of its course. Thus we can claim the right to analyze the meaning
of the Euclidean terms while leaving aside deduction, system and syntax,
imitating the Greek geometers and philosophers. So lets take up again, once
more, a forgotten thread of history left by the pure and abstract Geometry
in the trash cans into which Hilbert threw his glasses and bottles.

Table16
Let there be, first of all, in the Definitions, two idealities, two objects or
two geometric beings, the plane and the trapezium. Lets not form any
hypothesis regarding their reality or mode of existence or, as is said without
thinking, status. Here simply are words. The plane, [epipedos],
and the quadrilateral defined as being neither a square nor a rectangle nor
a diamond nor a rhomboid, [trapezion]. In the first case, it is
literally a question of what is positioned on the ground, at foot-level on a flat,
non-inclined terrain. In the second one, of what is supported on four feet, a
tetrapod, for example a table. For all the relatively high points of the table,
for all the lowest points of what lies on the ground, there is rest; and rest all
the more so because the plane, or the flat, is introduced before the angle or
inclination. What is thus supported or positioned remains stable in any case.
The two words thus brought into connection, the two statuses thus
designated form figures of statics. Here are stable states. Our old statues
have returned.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES145

 The use of the verb [keitai] in Definitions 4 and 7, the first verb
used after the verb [estin], before the angle and inclination, confirms
this hypothesis. In the geometric system of reference it designates situation,
like its English translation to lie for example. But, like this translation, it
is used to say that a thing is lying down, horizontally positioned, stretched
out. In any case, its always a question of rest, of motionlessness, of stable
state. A stative verb, in a first system of reference of statics. Suddenly were
no longer talking about geometry.
But you have never talked about it, you will say. For your analysis
remains oblique. It has from the outset considered plane and trapezium
outside of geometry. So it doesnt talk about Euclid, but the dog, a
barking animal, when its a question of the Dog, Canis Major, a celestial
constellation.
So we must begin again: the Platonic school and the set of Greek filters
didnt proceed any differently and didnt open any other way than the one
were following and which ends at Hilbert. If color diffuses in the surface
or over the plane, if it never appears without space nor space without it,
and thereby hampers Eudoxus, Plato, and Theaetetus, its surely due to a
tail of meaning which the geometry practiced by them had long forgotten.
They eliminate a remainder thats outside the system or erase the smear of
meaning.
Hence this business of ground and table, even if the plane has left the
originary earth, even if the process of geometry has turned its back to
this meaning from its own dawn. Sometimes, often, words remain fossils,
in such a way that their translation masks the memory of this fossilized
state. Lets resume the Platonic operation. The term [epiph-
aneia] for example, the equivalent of surface, but saying the sudden
appearance in the light, epiphany, evidently descends, like an ancient
alluvium, from the Pythagorean times of color. The word surface trans-
lates neither this appearance nor this memory. Likewise the term plane
very poorly translates , whats on the ground, and trapezium
is only a translation: it has forgotten the four feet of its childhood. Lets
continue.

Inclination
The term [klisis], inclination, used for the definition of the angle,
appears, as we know, in Euclid, who takes it up again in Book 11, where
stereometry begins. Archimedes, of course, Pappus and Proclus as well,
constantly made use of it, but it was unknown to the Greek geometrical
tradition from Thales all the way up to and including Aristotles lexicon.

146GEOMETRY
An angle would evoke for this tradition rather a broken line, which would
instead impose [klasis], and the verb [klan], often used by
the vocabulary of optics. Definition 8, in which appears, already
contains and [keimenon]. The proximity of these
three words produces some meaning: something tilts or is positioned in
divergence from an equilibrium; the balance inclines, lowers and rises at
the same time. Proclus certainly read a schema of this type here since he
criticized the definition as productive not of one angle, but of two. Statics
reappears, accompanied by a beginning of kinematics. For [klino],
again, designates a support, but also a fall, a stretched-out situation, on a
bed or a table, better, on a triclinium when the Greeks were feasting;17 but,
by inclination, draws a detour, an arrow and already almost a movement.
, , , these are successive equilibriums, constructed
at increasing levels.
The resemblance between and is of the same order as
that which exists between and . Their difference marks
the distance between statics and optics: just as it was from Thales that we
learned the games of light and shadows, so it was from Euclid and his
definitions that the games of weight and equilibrium came to us. Plato
refuses to adopt the term , too luminous, too visible, too much of
appearance. Euclid refuses , for analogous reasons no doubt, since
he writes [aptomenon], which belongs to the zone of touch, but
in introducing for the first time, he acknowledges, without saying as
much and perhaps without knowing it, completely different reasons from
the order of mechanics. Inclination is not first and foremost an event in
space but the rupture of an equilibrium thats already there and the search
for a new stability. Tilt, lie down. disappears; [statheisa]
now appears, the word I was in need of, and its epistemological corollary,
[ephesteknia] or [ephesteken]. Here is the right
angle, the metric norm of course but also the schema of equilibrium.
Episteme first comes from equilibrium.
Thus the straight can become inclined. The straight: [euthus],
[eutheia]. Now , the right course, is opposed to
[plagios], oblique, to [stroggulos], the round or rounded, to
[kampulos], the curve or curved, to [peripheres],
that which turns, which rolls, which moves circularly. Not here, in the
Euclidean text or word, but in language in general. In other words, here are
three forms and three movements: the straight that goes straight; what tilts
and inclines; the round, which turns in a circle. This is precisely the order
of the set of Definitions. First the straight, straight line and flat plane; then
the angle and its inclination in divergence from equilibrium, an angle that

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES147

can be right, but also obtuse or acute according to said divergence; and
immediately after, the circle.

Lets note in passing that the acute, [okseia], signifies very quick and
rapid as well and that [ambleia], the obtuse, is connected to the
verb [ambluno], which sometimes designates the slowing of a
given movement. Were moving from statics to phoronomy. The movement
of rotation appears with the angle or inclination, themselves appearing on
the straight course. This result isnt merely obtained through the lateral
meanings in the diverse semantic zones, but also with the thread and
through the very construction of the text.
Lets lastly note that, from the introduction of the circle, in the preceding
definition and in its own, the word [schema] appears, whose link to
[ruthmos] is known in the Democritean lineage as well as the
Aristotelian. Of course, [periphereia], the circumference, from
which I started, appears right here. Euclid gives the circle, that is to say,
rhythm in some way as the first schema.
We are returning to equilibrium, or rather we are reaching a new
equilibrium, beyond inclination and circular or angular movement. The
diameter represents this stability just as much as the center.

Top
A new inclination appears with the second plane figure: the triangle or better,
the trilateral. Euclid, as we know, defines three of them: the equilateral, the
isosceles and the scalene in general. This classification is commonly read
by genus and differentia. But whats the situation with meaning again?
[isoskeles] literally designates two equal legs. Plato uses this
word in the Euthyphro (12d) to say an even number; rhetoric repeats it for a
discourse with equal or equilibrated parts, this is the period. Rhythm again.
But [skelos] shows the leg. In the same Platonic place,
[skalenos] says the odd, but in general it designates something or someone
who limps. Proclus links it to [skolios], oblique or winding, and
[skazo], limping, being unequal. Consequently, statics returns, the
scalene tilts, the isosceles recovers the equilibrium lost in the movement
of walking. We should note in this connection that [genia], angle,
whether acute, right or obtuse, thanks to which we can class triangles into
right triangles and other ones, designates a corner, the pillar of a bridge, but
is especially related to [genu], the knee.
Lets finish, in part, with our beginning, with one of the quadrilat-
erals. The most interesting thing here, I think, is not the trapezium or the

148GEOMETRY
tetrapod table, balanced in any case, but the rhombus and the rhomboid.
For the term [rombos] derives from [rembo], turning or
rather spinning round, like a whirlpool. And expresses the top, or
any object with a circular form that can turn round an axis. Archimedes
of course gives a stereometric follow-up to this figure and calls two cones
with common circular bases and vertices opposed along the same axis a
solid rhombus.
Here, in Euclid, is a planar top. We know, from a well-known passage
in the Republic (IV, 436de), that the tops spinning had posed the difficult
problem of simultaneous motion and rest to Plato. He escapes from this
turning stability, which seems contradictory to him, by affirming that the
apparatus remains at rest in respect to the straight but moves in respect to
the round, something true on condition of ignoring that the axis becomes
all the more fixed the more quickly it turns. While the theorem may not
have been known to the Greek engineers, the fact has never been unknown,
I suppose, to children themselves, who have never stopped playing with the
contradiction that delays the philosopher. They enjoy rest in and through
circular motion. Hence one can amuse themselves with what causes fear,
to return to Platos text. Like the [pharmakon], poison and cure,
the top constructs a contradictory deconstruction. And Euclids Definitions
construct it in turn, more childlike than the Republic. You Greeks, youll
always be children, says the old Egyptian priest of the Timaeus.

In short, the Definitions end, or almost, with two cases of figures,

trapezium and rhombus, in which equilibrium is at stake: either on a high
place, or without base, on a single point and through a motionrefined,
complex, difficult and sophisticated cases. In a way, everything moves
toward the rhombus: the point on which its positioned, the acute point
(the ancient [stigma], the of the angle, the needle or spur
of the [kentron]) on which it is supported, the angle formed by
this point, the circle described by the top in rotation, the double triangle
visible as stable in motion, and the quadrilateral plane called diamond.
Nothing is straight, everything is straight; nothing is stable, everything is
stable. The text constructs the whirling rhombus piece by piece; in brief,
it assembles the whirlpool, before the major drawing that is the bundle
of parallel lines that never meet however long they continue in both
directions.
It looks, once again, like the model brought to light in Lucretiuss
physics, the model mathematized in the Archimedean system: turbulence
and cataract. The Democritean tradition can be read here just as much as
the one that goes back to Plato.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES149

Equilibrium
Everything happens, consequently, as though the Definitions constructed,
term by term, case by case, and parts by parts, increasingly complex equilib-
riums starting from the simplest ones. From the lowest low point, from
whats positioned right on the ground to either the highest point or the
most refined, the most difficult case, exactly the contradictory case, through
successive disruptions of previous equilibriums and through access to new
stabilities: inclination, movement, rotation, the unequal gait of the lame (two
feet, four feet, a single foot ), lastly all these ruptures at the same time.
Less the beginning of a Geometry, these are prolegomena for a
Mechanics. Lagrange, it seems, appears in Euclid. The Mcanique analy-
tique seems to emerge from the Elements, the idea that statics dominates
phoronomy, and almost the principle of virtual velocities.
Lets at least understand here why Euclidean space has always seemed to
be the familiar space of our ordinary technologies more than an abstract,
formal and pure space: already or still a Lagrangian or Archimedean space,
in short, a space of statics. The space of the ground, right-angled walls,
tables, supports and doors. Hilbert was right, and Klein before him even
more so: neither pure nor abstract, Euclidean geometry remains an applied
mathematics. The group of movements is still tied to practical adhesions.
It couldnt be any other way. Here is the major monument of Greek
science, its exemplary achievement. Yet this science, , in its
meaning and its project, remains a knowledge of equilibrium; this compre-
hensive word tells us so. Euclid repeats it with or .
Science as such, in its definition, is inscribed in the Definitions. The
monument, on its facade, bears its inscription.
This knowledge of stabilities endures from the Greeks to Lagrange
and no doubt beyond, through positivism, and after it this homonymous
science of equilibrium comes all the way to us, all the way to recent times
when knowledge is becoming rather one of divergences.

Western science remains the science of the stable; this text by Euclid
doesnt hide it: system for syntax and for semantics.

Networks of balls
Lets consider a ball with poorly defined contours and an imprecise border
or periphery, whose [horos] or [peras] is not well cut out at the
outset. The general question of the Definition can be depicted by this form,
which can be drawn in a space as the semantic zone of a word.

150GEOMETRY
 In common language, this zone has fluctuating edges. Lets mark a
little closed ball, for example a point, in the ball: it suffices if its inside.
Lets thus consider two, three, etc., several balls, and respectively as many
points marked in their interiors. From points to points, lets trace as many
lines as its possible to trace. Here in all is a connected network. The
relations between the points determine the points inside the semantic
zones, and reciprocally the points inside the zones determine the relations.
This double determination in practice resolves the problem of definition.
Euclids Definitions form a well-connected network that can be constructed
and drawn. Lets lastly observe that, in order to construct this network, we
only had need of three words present in the text itself: or ,
boundary, , point, and [gramme], line. We will return to
these three words.
The method used up to now consists in choosing a ball and moving in
its zone starting from the point marked by the text. This method demands
that we never near the fluctuating border, much less go beyond it. Assume
then this movement, which can crudely be called a change of sense.18
It adopts, in the zone, a certain direction, a certain sense. Question: in
how many balls can this movement be carried out, on condition that its
the same, in the same direction and in the same sense? Answer: in only
a subset. For it is impossible in the zone of , of
[eteromekes] or of [paralleloi], for example, to locate a point
that can be referred to movement or rest. And if it were possible to do
so for the whole of the network of the Definitions, these latter would be
ambiguous. Statics would have always been read in Geometry.
And so, if one links the new points of the subset in the same way
as before, a subnetwork is obtained. The subnetwork highlighted up to
now has been that of mechanics: Lagrange or Archimedes immersed
themselves in Euclid in order to clarify ideas. Yet this subnetwork is
constructed on common language in such a way that we are sure, from
the successive filterings carried out by the Platonic school for example
on the vocabulary of geometry, that it would have been reduced or elimi-
nated by local change of the lexicon if it had run counter to the practice
of the Greek geometers. Thus Euclid as well substitutes klisis for klasis in
the interest of erasing all reference to either optics or the visible, in such
a way that epiphaneia is a fossil or remainder of this evolution. Yet the
mechanical subnetwork, still present, non-filtered, has been preserved.
Why?

The word episteme gave a reason for this: inscribed in its own term, the
global idea of science is the idea of equilibrium. This lexicon recreates

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES151

this idea. But it doesnt let it be seen directly. In a certain way, beneath the
definition of abstract identities, this lexicon conceals a schema, perhaps a
Democritean or Epicurean one, since it could be read again in Lucretiuss
physics, which is tied to the Greek idea of science.
Consequently, as for a painting, the original can be read beneath the
repaints, so that we are perhaps holding here something having to do with
the origin of geometry, the considerable residue of a very old filtering.
Language itself resolves the question of origin more easily than history or
metaphysics.

Yet, the subnetwork of mechanics, from equilibrium to the whirling top,

covers a large extent of the global network. Can this operation be iterated
and subnetworks discovered having less extent than the above and hence
perhaps more buried? Are there repaints that conceal from us something
other than mechanics? We would have to translate trapezium by banking
or money-changing table, after having translated it merely as table, and
to construct the associated subnetwork. Could an anthropology be found
at the second level of this palimpsest? These subnetworks dont cross the
percolation threshold.
Does nature lie beneath culture and the latter beneath the former ?
Other paths lead to a similar goal, to be discovered after other practical
results, also found along the same path.

Return to the gnomon and to the pragmatic or

artificial origin
Euclid too calls gnomon that angled complement of a square which
carpenters commonly call a framing square [querre], a statics and trade
word that describes wonderfully the extraction of a square right in the
middle of its hollowed-out right angle. Should the latter leave the perpen-
dicular and bend toward the acute or obtuse, the inner parallelogram will
remain similar to the outer one obtained by adding to it again this same
band or circle around a form which is thus reproduced as much as you
please.
Well understand the geometrical arithmetic of the Pythagoreans once
we know that they gave the same name to the complement, expressed in
odd numbers, of successive squares. Far from writing this situation as
we do:

152GEOMETRY
 12 + 3 = 22
22 + 5 = 32
32 + 7 = 42

n2 + (2n +1) = (n + 1)2

they drew it as a simplex or stars in the sky, a graph that reproduces without
notable difference Euclids definition: odd numbers form a framing square
around the inner square and endlessly reproduce with it an outer square,
obviously similar to the first one.19 With diagrams where the right angle
bends, numbers that are triangular, pentagonal in general polygonal can
thus be produced. Theon of Smyrna calls them gnomonic numbers. Through
these procedures we are reaching arrangements that are no doubt archaic but
that announce Pascals triangle as well, that algorithm recently described.
The axis of the sundial, the gnomon now becomes a framing square:
an instrument in either case. The first draws several stations of the Sun
on the sand, whereas a ruler, thus named after the Latin rectus, the right
angle or straight line, like the framing square, can describe them on a
page. Geometry is sometimes defined as a science that only allows itself,
as artificial objects, the ruler and the compass. What are we to think about
the status, about the place and function of such tools in a perfectly pure
knowledge?
Second, these angled lateral bands, two-sided complementary forms,
enlarge or reduce, reproduce at leisure squares or parallelograms, while
leaving similarity intact. The story of Thales can be turned in both direc-
tions: the axis of the sundial causes him to discover homothety, or through
homothety, gnomonic growth causes passing from the stake, a reduced
model, to the giant pyramid.
Lastly, the gnomon aligns sequences of numbers. How should we define
it if not as a law of a series? Add an odd number, sum up the odd numbers,
and you will obtain successive squares. Or: juxtapose the complementary
band, and the similar parallelogram will appear. The gnomon is defined as
a law of construction, as the rule of a sequence or its engendering.
An automatic rule, functioning all by itself, inscribing the chain at
leisure or each link without our intervention, this operation does without
the active or thinking subject, just as the shaft of the axis writes on the
ground in our absence.

Everyone recognizes two kinds of artificial object: those that dont depend
on us and those that do. Only the first ones function unceasingly or better,

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES153

never stop being artificial objects. Examples: the wall and the roof always
protect us, even when were sleeping, but when we abandon the shovel and
the pen, they sleep, useless and annihilated, exclusively intelligent during
our ecstatic hours.
At bottom, true tools dont depend on us; the others rest too often to
authentically have the right to this title.
So giving an identical name, one expressing knowledge, to three
automatic functionings, that of the stake raised toward the Sun, that of
the framing square or the lateral band thats added or subtracted, and that
of the operation whose iterated return constructs series of numbers, leads
us to artificial intelligencewhose avatars we see in these three states:
first as a thing, post or axis, a speculative tool, then as a ruler that will at
leisure reproduce straight lines, angles, ideal polygons, extracted or, better,
abstracted from this ruler, lastly as a formal operation on numbers, an
automatic rule, an algorithm.

Thinking perpendicularly
According to the gnomon, the Ancients said: that meant vertically. We
translate: perpendicularly, for this word in our languages and practices
refers to the plumb-line, that string that the Greeks called [stathme].
Here, the equipment of the mason is said with a word whose root again
designates equilibrium.
In this artificial object we find united, for a marvelous coherence and
cooperation, the static origin of geometry whose trace I just discovered in
Euclids Definitions and the preceding or underlying statuary foundation:
epistemology and anthropology, linguistics and history; the earth and sky,
knowledge and the thing: in all, physics and customs.
Darkness and brightness, the most ideal, abstract or formal statements
and the most carnally human ones conspire wonderfully in this simple and
easy plumb-line. Stable for mechanics, a mass or dense and heavy rock, a
straight statue pointed toward the low ground, a fine ruler that draws an
almost perfect line on the facing provided its dyed with liquid color (it
therefore writes like the axis of the sundial), this thing never deceives and
functions automatically.
According to the plumb-line: perpendicularly. Let this latter adverb
we use heedlessly be rethought or weighed. What? The vertical gnomon
signifies intelligence and artificial object at the same time? But the perpen-
dicular does so as well. Certainly, it hangs [pend] like the masons string
and weighs just as its lead weight does, enjoys of course the greatest slope
[pente] just as much as what attaches the pans of the balance, suspended

154GEOMETRY
like a pendulum: but it thinks [pense]. This verb knows no other origin
than weighing, hanging or slope [peser, pendre ou pente]. Even should
we do our utmost to weave the link from the literal and hard meaning to
the figurative meaning, very soft, through evaluation or estimation the
decision on the jewelers scale [pesette] regarding the grade of a coin or
an ingot, and even the close anxiety of fear or expectationthe reference
remains the balance, the pendulum, still the plumb-line or stathme: yes,
the perpendicular thinks, or rather, the gnomon maintains with knowledge
the same link or relation, the same ratio as the perpendicular with thought.
Artificial intelligence doesnt date from yesterday. From the origin of
science there have existed things or states of affairs that the history of
our languages has associated with mental activities, as though these
artificial objectsplumb-line, ruler or compass, framing squarepassed
for subjects of thought.
This doesnt amount to repeating the pragmatist theory of the origin
of the pure sciences according to which practice constantly precedes
knowledge, the things built by the hands of men implicitly possessing
or containing the secret of the abstract speculations to come, as though
the sequence and system of theorems unfolded, imitated, sublimated,
reordered a previous and obscure history of acts and gestures: doings,
before the law [droit]; ancestors, skillful but crude, did without knowing.
We will never falsify or verify these judgments about the past, false or true
at leisure like every law of history, misfortune having impelled us to found
education on such an arbitrary thing. Nothing will ever prove or invalidate
pragmatism, the theory of professors who believe that inventing consists
in excellently copying out a text poorly written by calloused hands or that
discovery reduces to interpretation. No, theory doesnt always amount to
explication of what manual work implicates. Yes sometimes, often not.

The science of education

A thousand manipulations only lead the one who has already found it to
rigor. But it doesnt matter. Profound linguists claim that the vernacular
word baratin [patter, smooth talk] also issues from practice or from the
Greek verb corresponding to our verb to do, since the favorite discourse
of intellectuals consists in extolling action, which they guard themselves
against, to the detriment of abstraction, from which they never separate
themselves. The height of baratin consists in talking about doing while
merely holding forth. In brief.
That our languages thus bring us back, for knowledge, to artificial
objects as primitive and simple as the plumb-line merely indicates that

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES155

the human subject of thought dates from a recent era: artificial intel-
ligence is older than intelligence itself conceived as a faculty, itself
reducing, as the word expressly indicates, to a possibility of doing. The
I think is three hundred years old, while the gnomon says that it has
known for more than three millennia. And I find it more difficult to
conceive a virtual agency, internal to the individual, a transcendental
condition for intellectual operations, than to see the string or axis of the
sundial write automatically.

A mental automaton
We use this latter adverb heedlessly. For us, an automatic function is
carried out without the participation of will or intention. The entire family
that this word belongs to refers to an Indo-European rootmenin
which on the contrary mental activity is found again: vehement, demented,
commentary, mention, mendacity, memory, monument, monster, demon-
stration, montre [watch], money are lined up in the Latin subset issuing
from this root, whereas the words anamnesis, mania and automaton belong
to the Greek cousinage. We say with a word of understanding a thing we
would like to be devoid of understanding.
It suffices to reunite a few relatives of the family to obtain a few nice
effects of meaning. An example: like a watch [montre], the automaton
comments and demonstrates, thanks to its memory, and monstrously
mimics mental acts; this is a sentence that seems to meditate on or decide
the in-appearance bold questions we are asking regarding artificial intel-
ligence, whereas it reduces, to the eyes and ears of the artisan of language,
to the monotonous repetition of the same unit of meaning, to a tautology
or redundancy. The sundial no doubt owes its comparison to our watches
to this. For a long time our languages have known that automatons think,
at least the languages said so, even before the Greeks, Arabs and modern
or Enlightenment figures would assemble mobile statues for the ornament
or torment of their contemporaries.
In sum, the automaton maintains with mental activity the same relation
that the gnomon does with knowledge, that the perpendicular or pendulum
does with thought or that the stathme, plumb-line, does with episteme,
the stable statue with epistemology. Straight science, thought, knowledge,
memory, mental acts, dementia or mania the philosophy we have
learned induces us to distribute them like faculties, functioning well or
poorly, around a transcendental subject, compartment by compartment or
in a circle, but the language that has written or spoken this philosophy for
several millennia brings them back to their places of origin, the axis of the

156GEOMETRY
sundial, the framing square, the string and the balance as though it was
describing an object intelligence.
If there exists a rule for the direction of the mind, or several, and if
language notices some redundancy as well between the orientation that the
mind has to follow and the thing that indicates it, since rule and direction
repeat the Latin rectus which signifies the straight line, then the subject, in
third position, does nothing but imitate an objective form. Does the mind,
first, already reside in this latter? And why resist the refined pleasure of
extricating the very scientific etymology of pole [stove-warmed room]: a
word issuing from the Latin balnea pensilia, hanging baths? What is there
to do in a stove-warmed room except to say I think [je pense]?20

Logos
The philosophies taught today in the classroom, from which the lessons
of things have disappeared, place the subject in language, so that only
those who hold forth acquire a noble status, and stop, timid, halfway along
this return to the objects of the world, since language lives inside us
mouth, throat, and bodily gesturesand outside us, in the libraries and
semaphores, soundtracks and radio receivers: internal-external, artificial
and natural, social and singular, natural and cultural, without our being
able to decide. The subject there hesitates between a quasi-subject, from
collective culture to the personal unconscious, and a quasi-object, from
books to codes: but what does such a sentence mean, in which a word,
subject, slides and cant settle down between its literal meaning and its
counter-meaning?
Constructed by us who find ourselves constructed by it, collectively
and over the time of a long history, used by us, individually and in groups,
language, practiced in daily use or rare and stylized experience, immedi-
ately teaches us that it behaves like an artificial object that thinks. Its artisan
often finds himself led by it. In other words, it belongs to artificial intel-
ligence, like currency.

Matter, black box, and form, white box

The vertical gnomon, the angled framing square, the ruler, compass,
perpendicular and pendulum adopt a constant form: a vertical straight
line, or horizontal in the case of the balance, perpendicular or round,
depending. Form signifies contour, figures, edges, definition and deter-
mination in the literal sense as well as the principle of organization of the
object. The right angle describes the appearance of the framing square

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES157

as well as its constitutive skeleton, its construction. Thus form can be
regarded as a phenomenon and an essence, aspect or reality. Whether
stone, marble, iron or bronze enter into the axis or the sundial as prime
matter doesnt matter, provided that it rises perpendicularly from the
plane of the ground. The information it shows or gives corresponds to its
form and varies with it. According to the form, the information changes.
Knowledge lies in the form.
Language, again, assimilates form and information. The second lies in
the first.
The technologies of old informed matter: the potter at the wheel
modeled the clay in order to draw the urn from the circle and his tangential
hands; thus from a pile of stones the mason raised the house according to
the architects plan, and the blacksmith twice did violence to the peaceful
metal, in the fire and by the hammer. Industry added further plans to the
crafts but along the same paths. We have changed all that. Our technologies
today tend instead to explore or recognize first and foremost the refined
and complex forms scattered in the things of the world and to chose one of
them or to mix several of them when they correspond to our aims and the
constraints of the manufacture being considered: these forms even precede
them sometimes. Of course, we still assemble clocks out of metal as in the
past, but a given crystal, a given molecule, even a given atom or isotope,
now make for better watches, automatic and accurate, and some other
given crystal functions as a valve or semiconductor.
The entirely informed forms lie in the things themselves, where it
suffices to collect them; thus our works reverse the ancient processes by
which information only came from our skillful hands or expert under-
standing. Idealism, narcissistic, only found in the world its own image,
which it imprinted there with great effort. Science and technology reduced
the real to their representations. Yet the loose earth and clay, the stone
before the device, the metal in its gangue, in themselves and by themselves
crystalline, conceal a thousand artificial objects as in a horn of plenty that
the ancient hands and wills ignored by plugging it up. Our intelligence,
our slightly stupid, violent, crude enterprise, had closed the treasures door,
even though the world hides a thousand times more marvels than our
decisions. The sense, the direction, the project of the work are reversed. On
this Sunday of technologies we recognize first of all that the Universe has
already forged much: this is the fount of information.
There isnt any matter in the Universe. Otherwise the physical sciences
would have ended up encountering limits to their progress or their history,
boundaries foreseen and placed by materialist metaphysics. This latter
vanishes with the progress of the physical sciences, which never cease

158GEOMETRY
discovering forms without ever encountering any matter they dont name,
so as to only recognize mass. Matter doesnt exist; only forms are found,
like atoms, and all the way down to the tiniest particle, with or without
mass, innumerable forms, as well as their chaotic or ordered mixture, a
system or noise which tosses and shakes their innumerable multiplicity
as in a basket. There is only information, whose enormous stock in the
world, no doubt expressible by a very large number, mathematically finite
but physically infinite, leaves science in an open history. Even weight codes
a field of forces, even any aggregate, colloid, or organism recodes a subset
of coded forms. Only mixture and disorder, noise, chaos, give the illusion
of matter.

Consequently, white intelligence is immanent and no doubt coextensive

with the Universe. The world adds up and gives an enormous stock of
forms. Here again is the source, transparent, the fundamental Earth of
Geometry, once again wonderfully named.
There exists an immense objective intelligence of which artificial and
subjective intelligence constitute small subsets. Our intelligence is not an
exception in black surroundings that would passively wait for us to inform
them. The object that we know is forged by us in a way thats analogous to
certain things of the world, forever our guides.

Intelligent, the gnomon intercepts the flow descending from the Sun, and
both of them, all by themselves, draw on the ground, out of which comes
this erected statue, the objective and partial information of the shadow that
speaks locally about the form of the global world.
Geometry still slumbers beneath the earth or dreams in the brilliance of
the Sun: the gnomon of the ancient Greeks or the Babylonians awoke one
part of it along the singular forms common to the shadow and the light.

FIRST IN HISTORY: THALES159

160
6 FIRST IN PHILOSOPHY:
THE IGNORANT SLAVE
BOY

From Pythagoras to Zeno:

The algorithmic origin
MENO: Yes, Socrates; but what do you mean by saying that we do not
learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection? Can
you teach me how this is?SOCRATES: I told you, Meno, just now that
you were a rogue, and now you ask whether I can teach you, when I am
saying that there is no teaching, but only recollection; and thus you
imagine that you will involve me in a contradiction.MENO: Indeed,
Socrates, I protest that I had no such intention. I only asked the question
from habit; but if you can prove to me that what you say is true, I wish that
you would.SOCRATES: It will be no easy matter, but I will try to please
you to the utmost of my power. Suppose that you call one of your numerous
attendants, that I may demonstrate on him.MENO: Certainly. Come
hither, boy.SOCRATES: He is Greek, and speaks Greek, does he not?
MENO: Yes, indeed; he was born in the house.SOCRATES: Attend now
to the questions which I ask him, and observe whether he learns of me or
only remembers.MENO: I will.SOCRATES: Tell me, boy, do you know
that a figure like this is a square?BOY: I do.SOCRATES: And you know
that a square figure has these four lines equal?BOY: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And these lines which I have drawn through the middle of the
square are also equal?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: A square may be of any
size?BOY: Certainly.SOCRATES: And if one side of the figure be of
two feet, and the other side be of two feet, how much will the whole be? Let
me explain: if in one direction the space was of two feet, and in the other
direction of one foot, the whole would be of two feet taken once?BOY:
Yes.SOCRATES: But since this side is also of two feet, there are twice two
feet?BOY: There are.SOCRATES: Then the square is of twice two
feet?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: And how many are twice two feet? Count
and tell me.BOY: Four, Socrates.SOCRATES: And might there not be
another square twice as large as this, and having like this the lines equal?
BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: And of how many feet will that be?BOY: Of
eight feet.SOCRATES: And now try and tell me the length of the line
which forms the side of that double square: this is two feetwhat will that
be?BOY: Clearly, Socrates, it will be double.SOCRATES: Do you
observe, Meno, that I am not teaching the boy anything, but only asking
him questions; and now he fancies that he knows how long a line is
necessary in order to produce a figure of eight square feet; does he not?
MENO: Yes.SOCRATES: And does he really know?MENO: Certainly
not.SOCRATES: He only guesses that because the square is double, the
line is double.MENO: True.SOCRATES: Observe him while he recalls
the steps in regular order. (To the Boy): Tell me, boy, do you assert that a
double space comes from a double line? Remember that I am not speaking
of an oblong, but of a figure equal every way, and twice the size of this
that is to say of eight feet; and I want to know whether you still say that a
double square comes from double line?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: But
does not this line become doubled if we add another such line here?BOY:
Certainly.SOCRATES: And four such lines will make a space containing
eight feet?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: Let us describe such a figure: Would
you not say that this is the figure of eight feet?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES:
And are there not these four divisions in the figure, each of which is equal
to the figure of four feet?BOY: True.SOCRATES: And is not that four
times four?BOY: Certainly.SOCRATES: And four times is not
double?BOY: No, indeed.SOCRATES: But how much?BOY: Four
times as much.SOCRATES: Therefore the double line, boy, has given a
space, not twice, but four times as much.BOY: True.SOCRATES: Four
times four are sixteenare they not?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: What line
would give you a space of eight feet, as this gives one of sixteen feet;do
you see?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: And the space of four feet is made
from this half line?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: Good; and is not a space of
eight feet twice the size of this, and half the size of the other?BOY:
Certainly.SOCRATES: Such a space, then, will be made out of a line
greater than this one, and less than that one?BOY: Yes; I think so.
SOCRATES: Very good; I like to hear you say what you think. And now tell

162GEOMETRY
me, is not this a line of two feet and that of four?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES:
Then the line which forms the side of eight feet ought to be more than this
line of two feet, and less than the other of four feet?BOY: It ought.
SOCRATES: Try and see if you can tell me how much it will be.BOY:
Three feet.SOCRATES: Then if we add a half to this line of two, that will
be the line of three. Here are two and there is one; and on the other side,
here are two also and there is one: and that makes the figure of which you
speak?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: But if there are three feet this way and
three feet that way, the whole space will be three times three feet?BOY:
That is evident.SOCRATES: And how much are three times three feet?
BOY: Nine.SOCRATES: And how much is the double of four?BOY:
Eight.SOCRATES: Then the figure of eight is not made out of a line of
three?BOY: No.SOCRATES: But from what line?tell me exactly; and
if you prefer not to calculate, then show me the line.BOY: Indeed,
Socrates, I do not know.SOCRATES: Do you see, Meno, what advances
he has made in his power of recollection? He did not know at first, and he
does not know now, what is the side of a figure of eight feet: but then he
thought that he knew, and answered confidently as if he knew, and had no
difficulty; now he has a difficulty, and neither knows nor fancies that he
knows.MENO: True.SOCRATES: Is he not better off in knowing his
ignorance?MENO: I think that he is.SOCRATES: If we have made him
doubt, and given him the torpedos shock, have we done him any harm?
MENO: I think not.SOCRATES: We have certainly, as would seem,
assisted him in some degree to the discovery of the truth; and now he will
wish to remedy his ignorance, but then he would have been ready to tell all
the world again and again that the double space should have a double
side.MENO: True.SOCRATES: But do you suppose that he would ever
have enquired into or learned what he fancied that he knew, though he was
really ignorant of it, until he had fallen into perplexity under the idea that
he did not know, and had desired to know?MENO: I think not, Socrates.
SOCRATES: Then he was the better for the torpedos touch?MENO: I
think so.SOCRATES: Mark now the farther development. I shall only ask
him, and not teach him, and he shall share the enquiry with me: and do you
watch and see if you find me telling or explaining anything to him, instead
of eliciting his opinion. Tell me, boy, is not this a square of four feet which
I have drawn?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: And now I add another square
equal to the former one?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: And a third, which is
equal to either of them?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: Suppose that we fill up
the vacant corner?BOY: Very good.SOCRATES: Here, then, there are
four equal spaces?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: And how many times larger
is this space than this other?BOY: Four times.SOCRATES: But it ought

FIRST IN PHILOSOPHY: THE IGNORANT SLAVE BOY163

to have been twice only, as you will remember.BOY: True.SOCRATES:
And does not this line, reaching from corner to corner, bisect each of these
spaces?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: And are there not here four equal lines
which contain this space?BOY: There are.SOCRATES: Look and see
how much this space is.BOY: I do not understand.SOCRATES: Has
not each interior line cut off half of the four spaces?BOY: Yes.
SOCRATES: And how many spaces are there in this section?BOY:
Four.SOCRATES: And how many in this?BOY: Two.SOCRATES:
And four is how many times two?BOY: Twice.SOCRATES: And this
space is of how many feet?BOY: Of eight feet.SOCRATES: And from
what line do you get this figure?BOY: From this.SOCRATES: That is,
from the line which extends from corner to corner of the figure of four
feet?BOY: Yes.SOCRATES: And that is the line which the learned call
the diagonal. And if this is the proper name, then you, Menos slave, are
prepared to affirm that the double space is the square of the diagonal?
BOY: Certainly, Socrates.
PLATO, Meno 81e85c. Translation: Benjamin Jowett.1

Black memory
We must believe that the slave boy staged in Platos Meno is evidence of a
forgotten world which he remembers in front of us through an exercise of
recollection, and we must also think that Socrates and Plato astutely evoke
the inspired rhythms of the poets who bring them back to those lost times.2
But we must in addition precisely describe those worlds and those times
which reappear over the course of the demonstration.
When historians of science reexamine the problem treated here of the
duplication of the square,3 they search, in this place in the Meno and on
the figure, for traces or evidence of Greek geometry from the fifth century,
today forgotten by everyone but them, because only rare fragments
of it have been preserved, this being one of them. Reconstructing the
diagram and demonstrating the relation of the side to the diagonal
allows the reconstruction of lost knowledge and times gone by: a work of
recollection.
Yet the history of science generally no more refers to the theory in favor
of which Socrates calls for an ignorant and creates this problem for him
than the history of philosophy treating recollection refers to the dupli-
cation of the square itself. And what if by some chance the two memories
became identical? Are Socrates and the slave boy devoted to the same
effort as ours, aiming toward the recovery of a forgotten knowledge? What
relations can be defined between science and memory?

164GEOMETRY
 A

Let there be a square whose area we are trying to double. How many feet
will the side of the new square measure? Whatever the response, we have
to extend the two sides of the old square. We find again the old form of the
angled framing square whose emptiness lets the initial square be seen and
whose instrument materializes in iron or wood the supplement added to
the square. Doubling the given area consists in constructing the framing
square: here once again is the problem of the gnomon.
Can it be resolved like this? At least the little slave boy begins, with
Socrates, to represent it in this way: theres absolutely no doubt that he
makes a mistake because of such a drawing since the true solution begins
when he abandons it. His error therefore comes from the fact that he first
poses the question of the gnomon. Everything must be called such, says
Hero of Alexandria, that, added to a number or to a figure, gives a whole
thats similar to what it has been added to. The duplication furnishes a
trivial particular case of such a similarity.
The error occurs twice and twice by excess. Why? Starting from side
AB of two feet, therefore with an area of four, the slave extends the first
side by double, giving it four feet and coming across an area of sixteen,
even though he was asked for one of eight, the double of four. So he goes
back and chooses a side of three feet, obtaining a square of nine. These
overshootings are again explained by the problem of the gnomon. This
word signifies the framing square but also, lets repeat, the Pythagorean
table that displays the perfect squares, the odd numbers and the sequence
of integers: the first ones along the diagonal, the last ones along the sides.
The odd numbers are distributed along what remains of the framing
square.
The young ignorant jumps from two to four and goes back down from
four to three: so he follows the sides of the square in whole numbers in the
direction of the Geometric Algebra of the ancient Pythagoreans. In other
words, the ancient problem precedes him.

FIRST IN PHILOSOPHY: THE IGNORANT SLAVE BOY165

 He remembers. He first remembers the definition attempts in the
dialogue: he must have listened to them, hidden in some nook. For lets recall
that the exercise parallel to the definition of virtue consisted in defining
figure and that they agreed first to reject the early results: figure reduces
neither to form nor to color; but they accepted that its the limit where a
solid ends. The line forms the edge of the figure the way the latter forms the
edge of a body. So the slave makes a mistake because he follows the edge,
that of the square drawn by Socrates or that of the numeral diagram. But
the inference from the line to the area as from the area to the volume, that is
to say, from the limit to the variety it surrounds or defines, is not valid. He
follows the limit or a single and the first dimension to resolve a two-dimen-
sional problem; we remember that conversely Daedalus and Plato wanted
to fly toward volume to free themselves from planar enigmas: in each case,
one must know how to cross the border. The slave makes a mistake because
he remembers the definition by the edge. Short-term memory.
He secondly remembers the state in which Greek geometry found
itself before the discovery of the diagonal, remembers a forgotten world,
Geometric Algebra, the old Pythagoreans, the reign of whole numbers. The
mathematical world of Plato, Theodorus, Theaetetus, Eudoxus was totally
cut off from this one. In those days, they trusted the gnomon, in charge of
knowing. The new school lost that knowledge, become contemptible and
only good all in all for slaves. And the young man knows it, says it, repre-
sents it. He knows the table and the old framing square.
Really? We attest, we who understand and read the dialogue from a
distance of two millennia, that he knows his multiplication table since he
answers four without hesitation to the question: how much is two times
two? And he easily confirms that four times four is sixteen and three times
three equals nine. But for Socrates and his school this tabular and numeral
knowledge amounts to ignorance. Knowing his numbers is equivalent to
knowing nothing. But we read that the slave recites his table.

166GEOMETRY
Algorithm
What is a table really, if not a memory, the easiest to retrieve. The slave
follows the multiplication table and the Pythagorean table and the gnomon:
he therefore remembers. He recalls a knowledge that Platonism hides and
scorns. In other words, behind geometry, precisely the one that determines
a double square by the diagonal of the simple initial square, Arithmetic
and Geometric Algebra are hidden in forgetfulness, remembered by the
one who is scorned. As a result, he attests by his body, his language and
above all his state to the rank to which the ancient science has fallen: to the
order of childhood, ignorance and servitude, to the camp of the concrete in
relation to the abstract. The philosopher reserves for himself the metalan-
guage in which the new relation of the pure and the concrete is defined;
therefore he can from then on judge as he likes knowledge and its history
by making both of them begin with him.
But Socrates also remembers when he says he does not know; it remains
true that he does not know; he doubts and seeks and questions. And above
all cuts up the grand rhapsodic sentences and sections of encyclopedia into
elements and pieces. A foot soldier, a pedestrian, he wants to walk step-by-
step. First this, then that. Lets first put this beyond dispute before passing
on to that which will be examined in the same way. Lets cut in two, lets
proceed by dichotomies. Socrates only knows these procedures, a prudent
and circumspect method or course. Lets take the divine theory he just
borrowed from Pindar seriously again: and what if he too remembered an
ancient knowledge?
Socrates remembers the step-by-step procedures of algorithmic thought,
and he represents it in his role and his state of being a man who talks and
doesnt write. Since the night of the times in the Fertile Crescent, dividing
by two, privileged, has allowed calculating in ones head to be done more
easily. The young slave and Socrates walk together and move at the same
amble toward the vanished world whose prosopopoeiae they are: the old
master talker questions the ignorant who doesnt know how to read or
write, according to the ancient and exact procedures that this latter is not
ignorant of, without ever taking his eyes off the previous link when he
passes on to the following link and going back straightaway if he happens
to skip one, returning then to square three after the abrupt deviation from
two to four.
The game isnt played with two, but with three: not Socrates, Meno,
and the slave, since the latter two can substitute for each other, but
Plato, Socrates, and the ignorant. Paideiaeducation and historygoes
through three states: the philosopher-king, the soldier-pedestrian and

FIRST IN PHILOSOPHY: THE IGNORANT SLAVE BOY167

the manservant or the field worker, according to the ancient division.
Plato thinks in the universe of geometrypure space, rigorous metric,
controlled irrationality: here comes the diagonal, the alogos combined with
the logos and mixed with it, here comes the Royal Weaver whose portrait
closes the Statesman; as for the slave, he counts in his head the integers
in the traditional algorithm, the contemptible arithmetic of merchants
and producers, while Socrates, still reasoning in the ancient state, without
writing, discovers the new world of the square bearing the diagonal around
around its neck. He forms the link between the reigns, like a messenger.
Plato haunts our thoughts that we cannot get out of our heads, or
rather we inhabit those he conceived, whereas the child slave hasnt left
the ancient Pythagoreans, who were still tied to the Babylonian tables;
Socrates doesnt know anything, like the child, and doesnt write, like the
slave; they both retain the ancient mode, which Plato and we remember
through them, an ancient moment immersed in oral methods and step-
by-step procedures, but suddenly reach, marveling, holding hands, a new
abstract world.
Algorithmic thought is engulfed in forgetfulness and no longer consti-
tutes, with its counting rhymes, anything but the prehistory of science.
The young slave remembers the gnomon and its tabular laws because it
functions like a memory, like the multiplication table. Artificializable,
algorithmic thought no doubt amounted to such memories. Lets not
repeat: artificial intelligence, but rather: artificial memory.
In the past, lets remember, knowledge perhaps amounted to memory.

Geometry
But the new geometry reveals its gaps: no number is found on the gnomon
between 3 and 4 on the sides, nor between 4, 9, and 16 along the diagonal.
Geometry supplements its misfires, nullifies a knowledge linked to recol-
lection.4 It invents another world teeming with numbers whose count
and memory are quickly lost. Its no longer a memory. A temporary end
to the struggle that opposes abstraction and memory, both considered as
economies of thought: the first one wins where the second flees.
But while the second one may be beaten in the Greek battle, it never-
theless continues the war, on the side of the Arabs during the Middle
Ages, with the greatest Enlightenment mathematicians such as Pascal
and Leibniz, architects of algorithms more than geometers, finally today
when were learning to economize thought by winning on both fronts: the
one where the light of the Platonic sun still shines, pure mathematics, but
also the one where memory has subjugated the very speed of this light.

168GEOMETRY
Objective slaves work inside computers: the entire ancient dialogue follows
procedures easily inscribed in software.

The conduct of the discussion suddenly bifurcates from arithmetic to

geometry: if you prefer not to calculate, then show! Socrates cheats,
manifestly. He asked for the length of the side. The honest slave answers
four or three feet. A measurement is required of him; he gives a quantity.
But when the diagonal as the side of the doubled square comes up,
nothing but quality is spoken of: on which line is the double area square
constructed? On this one. Interrogatives and demonstratives have now quit
quantification so as to qualify what is shown. No one asks the asker: how
long? He questions the ignorant about a content regarding which no one,
in return, troubles him. He did indeed find the side, but didnt measure it.
Socrates cheats: he knows he wont find the exact length.
The two errors by excess took place by measuring the side of the square
by means of whole numbers: the slave counts four and finds sixteen,
returns to three and ends up at nine. The first attempt with the even, the
second one by the odd, two shots that went past their mark. The number
sought then will be neither this even nor that odd.

Narcotics
Dead end, difficulty, the dialogue stops, and Socrates, as an interlude,
reminds Meno of his comparison to the torpedo. The metaphor expresses
the contradiction and confusion the philosophers interlocutor finds
himself in at that juncture.
But ourselves, we understand nothing before remembering the origin
of the torpedo: this fish is so named because it plunges us not into a stupor
but into a torpor. By touching it everyone passes out or seems to go to
sleep. But again we understand nothing if beyond the Latin origin we dont
remember that the torpedo bears, in Greek, the name narke, which links it
to narcosis and our narcotics. Here is a strange pharmacy.
The shock issuing from contact with the animal appears to us today
to be electrochemical. We clarify this experience by means of several
sciences: electrostatics, biochemistry, neurology, an entire spread of a
refined spectrum. Our pharmacy of narcotics brings us back to the torpedo
as though language, in its history, had followed the same path as science
itself, which for at least two centuries has made experiment after exper-
iment regarding this stunning fish. As though there were two histories
of science, parallel: the one that relates the manipulations of physiology
and the one that remembers the Latin torpedo and the Greek narcosis,

FIRST IN PHILOSOPHY: THE IGNORANT SLAVE BOY169

the narcotic sleep and the strange torpor into which the electrical shock
plunges us. We understand through our science something which has to
do with electricity, which Plato knew poorly, but Plato names an animal
in such a way that we understand something which has to do with our
chemistry, with our pharmacy, but also with his own. The torpedo puts to
sleep like a narcotic.
Narcissus finally becomes fascinated with himself to the point of falling
asleep, totally enclosed within himself, before his image reflected in the
smooth waters of a spring. Narcosis-Narcissus bears the name of the fish,
or bears this animal within himself and electrocutes himself like a totally
solitary pharmakon without society or environment. Narcosis maintains
the same relation with the lone individual that the archaic expelled victim,
called pharmaceutical, does with the collective.5 This is what happens at
the logical moment of contradiction, when precisely the third must be
expelled: third term or third man? The metaphor of the torpedo reveals the
tragic origin of the principle of the excluded middle.
Sometimes the history of science requires only a memory: the artificial
one of language.

The unsayable logos

Lets summarize the demonstration given above in detail and more
abstractly.
Let there be a square with a side of 1 and its diagonal b. By the
Pythagorean theorem, b2 = 12 + 12 = 2, hence b = 2. Since 12 = 1 and 22 =
4, b has a value between 1 and 2. Lets write this value as m/n supposing this
fraction reduced to its simplest expression. Therefore: 2 = m/n, from
which we derive: m2 = 2n2.
So m2 is even, and m is as well. Therefore n is odd.
Now an even square is divisible by 4. This is the case for m2; therefore
2n is also divisible by four.
2

So n2 is even; therefore n is even.

Consequently n is odd and even, which is impossible. 2 therefore
cannot be put into the form m/n.

The first reductio ad absurdum, or apagogic proof, causes the failure of

primitive Pythagorean arithmetic, which only allowed integers or, strictly
speaking, rational numbers.
Suddenly, space lets lengths be seen that calculation no longer under-
stands. If you cannot calculate, then show: this phrase by Socrates, more
clever or profound than it appears, indicates exactly the bifurcation.

170GEOMETRY
 The proof demonstrates that numbers make impossible what space
evidently makes possible; Socrates proof demonstrates that space makes
possible what numbers make impossible: they both pass through the even
and the odd.
The dialogue remembers the apagogic proof and climbs back up it, if I
may, in the other direction. And the torpedo electrocutes by contradiction or
absurdity. Apagogic also signifies led outside the straight path, deviating: I
did indeed speak about bifurcation, or seduced: fascinated by torpor.
The schema is drawn by whole numbers, odds and evens: the young
slave followed them. Now, dont count any more, show the diagonal! Here it
is: it passes through 1, 4, 9, 16 through the numbers we now call perfect
squares. Come, show then the diagonal-side of a square with an area of
eight feet! It is lacking: not showable, indemonstrable.6
The gnomon only knows perfect squares: the perfect science of the logos,
ignorant of irrational numbers, the archaic and very imperfect science of
the perfect relation.
In its demonstrative authenticity, a new mathematics is born outside the
logos when this mathematics diverges from it and can rigorously measure
this divergence. Therefore the gnomon doesnt know everything.
One can ask for or invent knowledge unknown to this memory, which
bears the name of that very thing which knows. This is the lightning
strike from the torpedo. The existence of knowledge outside the gnomon
authorizes that we seek what we do not knowwhat knowledge itself does
not know, what memory hasnt recorded. A torpedoing of the old practices,
of their memory: of counting by space, of the logos by the alogos, of the
sayable by the unsayable, of language by science, a torpedoing of artifice, of
linguistic and artificial memory, of algorithmic thought.
Formerly judge, assayer and touchstone, the gnomon no longer decides
or knows; ignorant like a child slave, stupid twice over, contradictory,
excluded. Deliverance! Knowledge exists outside of memory.
There is no demonstration before the Greeks, before apagogic proof,
before geometry, before the irrational. Certainly. There is only counting. If
you prefer not to do calculations, then show! This is an origin sentence. Show,
and you will demonstrate! Inventing geometry and demonstration consists
in filling in the gnomons gaps, those of knowledge, of artificial intelligence,
of algorithmic thought. This latter doesnt demonstrate. It merely counted.

The emergence of ideal figures

As faithful and refined as the reconstruction by algorithms of Greek mathe-
matics in its beginnings presents itself, the fact remains that this latter tears

FIRST IN PHILOSOPHY: THE IGNORANT SLAVE BOY171

itself away from such countings through the emergence of lines, volumes,
abstract space, ideal objects: of another, infinitely withdrawn world.
Algorithmic thought or practice accounts for the theory of numbers,
for measurement, for variable and profound thoughts about the rational
numbers and the irrational numbers issuing from the duplication of the
square or from that of the cube, but presupposes here, whether cube or
square, sides without depth and solids that are rigorous, transparent or
perfect, inexistent before the Greek dawn. We must now understand the
emergence of these idealities.
Formally speaking, algorithmic thought can all the same go farther than
arithmetic, for its step-by-step procedures consistently attest to the delib-
erate and controlled security of its approaches. It doesnt go just anywhere
and doesnt pass through just any stages. So a method can be imagined,
in the etymological sense of a traced-out path, which extends its process
to more complex or more general rules that would allow to advance what
would be foreseen in a program given beforehand and only what would be
found there to the exclusion of all else. The algorithmic procedure would
then present a first simple example of what a formal demonstration would
subsequently become.
From the step-by-step process to the ban on not making any step that
isnt foreseen in advance, the distance doesnt seem insurmountable. In
other words, the theory and practice of demonstration presupposes an
algorithm. The latter prepares the former in history.

The lightning-fast passage from algorithm to

abstraction
The Eleatic school has contributed in a decisive way to filling in the trench
that seems to separate the formula from rigor and the usual space from the
ideal expanse in which the new objects manifest their appearance.
Zenos famous paradoxes allow their dramatization to be forgotten in
favor of their formation. And what if they led us from one to the other
infinitely? The arrow flying from the bow to the target or Achilles whose
running endeavors to catch up to the tortoise, like the hare in Aesops
fable but without any hope of success, each follows a way, in other words,
a method.
Observe with what precision all the elements of an algorithm are put in
place: the path or method to reach a goal, the practical and simple finality
of a mechanism, the exact measurement of the segment traveled, the
decomposition of the process into elements, the step-by-step procedure
you can say that againthe repetition that is repeated, in the figure and

172GEOMETRY
the form, in the scene and for number, the same action to be done after the
same action done, the very probable derivation from a fable.
Observe as well a certain imitation of anthyphairesis or alternative
algorithmic subtraction, issuing from the tradition, and which removes
here half of the whole, then half of the remainder, half of the remainder
after that, and so on, as though Achilles or the arrow were carrying out the
subtraction in moving.
Observe lastly, in the other direction of time, how much the infini-
tesimal algorithm still to be born, either around Abdera in one centurys
time or during the seventeenth century after two millennia, will innovate
little with respect to these procedures. The entire dramatization then, form
at the outset, reveals an algorithmic thought.

A halted algorithm
Achilles runs or walks, the arrow departs and flies, the entire formula
fails. Neither the champion runner nor the sagittal point reach their goal.
For the first time a process sure of its result as well as a good formula for
measuring are halted, by virtue of their perfect functioning itself and in an
excellent and luminous example.
Repetition only engenders repetition; the step-by-step makes no
headway with no possible cease. One will laugh at the courageous hero,
a derisory image of the cowardly beast, speed no longer being of any use.
In a canonical manner Zeno puts the traditional metrology to death: the
ancient algorithm of the Fertile Crescent passed away in Elea.

Limits
The arrows or Achilles path no longer tends toward the prescribed goal
but bifurcates, suddenly seized by a very new finality. Running, flying, the
two vectors get stuck in the segments narrow but abyssal mud hole, both
tied to the sticky algorithm, but at the same time aiming at a single point
at the limit of all the points actually traveled or possible, a point filtered by
every station passed.
This means that the places one passes through or can pass through
are eliminated or subtracted, those where one arrives or can arrive are
disqualified, all those places where one remains or lives are discredited in
favor of the single one that one heads for without ever reaching. Do we
already hear hints of Platonism?
The procedure, quite simple in the end, distinguishing this point
from all the others, divides the segment by a single dichotomy, in

FIRST IN PHILOSOPHY: THE IGNORANT SLAVE BOY173

sum: all the points and this one. On the one hand, you can actually or
virtually see and touch, tread with your feet concrete places, stay in
them, reach them, cross them, leave them, the world or path of these
places remaining open to running and flying. On the other, a point
emerges, intangible, inaccessible, that Achilles will never see, that the
arrows tip will not pierce, that no one will live in. It emerges from the
immense sea of the other points.
The world thats as measurable as you please, by algorithm, approxi-
mation, even exactness, borders immediately on another world thats
infinitely distant, thats without dimension since the metric exhausts itself
reaching it: an absent hole in the drawing.
So trace the trajectory of the hero or the flight of the vector on the sand,
and you will not mark on their orbit the place toward which everyone is
rushing: no one can write or draw it. If you prick it on the piece of paper
or the sand, Achilles or the tip crossed it; that cant be it. You hold in your
hand the stylus, in other words the spear itself, the flying arrow with which
you write on the page, and it cant inscribe the point its always running
after.
Here is the first intelligible place, atopic, at the end of this short path
equal to the longest possible path. Geometric abstraction becomes the limit
of the infinite sum of algorithmic subtractions.

Infinite series of thirds

Here is someone of such and such an appearance or such and such an
age, alive and well and individuated with a hundred characteristic marks;
to think him, Plato says, we must conceive, in another world entirely
separated from this one, an idea of man or the ideal man. The former
participates in the latter. How can we conceive both of them, the theoretical
and the concrete together, Aristotle replies, without forming the abstract
idea of a third in which they will participate? And how, once again, can
we conceive of the three of them, the man of this world, the one from the
first theory and the second one from the second theory, without a fourth
man who ? This argument ad infinitum, called the third man, quite far
from criticizing or destroying the intelligible abstract place of ideas and
forms, contributes to describing and founding it, just as Zenos dramati-
zation infinitely leads from the concrete representation or from the metric
formula to the proximity, to the limit of non-representable ideality and
which cannot be drawn or written, subtracted to the point of exhaustion
from all apprehension: from visited or visitable points to the invisible and
inaccessible goal.

174GEOMETRY
 The abstract lies at the bottom of this abyss, infinitely distant, but
infinitely near.

A class of problems called the third man

Here is, alive and well, the young ignorant slave who, under Socrates
torpedo, proves the duplication of the square by constructing the irrational
diagonal. Plato claims that he remembers a forgotten world since he knows
without having learned. Without any intervention from Aristotle, we stage
again the other slave from the other world in the process of calculating
the area of another square, a scene that in turn bears en abyme, in its
repeated square, an infinite implication of diagonals, of sides or poisonous
Socrateses.7

We have just remembered, in inventing it, the set of questions and

problems, mathematical and philosophical, entering into the class of the
third man. Interminably, in a figure that ceaselessly unfolds or fits into
itself, from worlds to worlds fleeing upstream and from recommenced
forgetfulnesses to missing memories, a young slave being reborn from his
ignorance calculates, counts, doubles a length and then subtracts a part
from it, incapable of arriving all by himself at the diagonal that can and
cant be drawn, present there but irrational. The slave thinks algorithmi-
cally; the master doesnt forget geometry.

The definition of the geometrical abstract, the model of the theoretical

abstract required by Plato to think or exist or perceive, emerges from an
infinite method or way along which Achilles and the arrow precede and
guide us, endlessly leaving the halted algorithms behind them.

Generalization
Zenos reasoning repeats itself: before arriving at the goal, Achilles must
pass through the middle of the segment, but before that cross the quarter

FIRST IN PHILOSOPHY: THE IGNORANT SLAVE BOY175

and even before that reach the eighth, and so on infinitely, so that he cant
start. The initial point assumes the same status as the terminal one.
By the same step-by-step processes, the paradox touches the middle
point, then just any point: so every segment becomes ideal.
The set of these proofs seems paradoxical because the elements which
emerge from it are far removed from common opinion.

Here is the last, or the first white box, emptied of every obstacle by the
champions running or by the bad arrows path: nothing remains there, as
in Thales tetrahedron, as in the interval before Diogenes gaze, as in the
Earth, the sum of all forms.
Exclusion has purged everything. The flowing of a very large narrative
can begin.

176GEOMETRY
7 FIRST IN LOGIC:
THE ELEMENT

The automatic origin and the return

to sociopolitical origins
Just as it sometimes happens that a commentary on the Bible becomes in
turn a Bible, so it happened that a commentary on Euclids Elements in turn
became a geometry.
Meditating on the origins, here logical, of a knowledge sometimes
amounts then to inventing the origins of an authentic knowledge: this
consecrates the heuristic value of the Elements and furnishes a criterion for
evaluating said attempt.
If the present book doesnt conclude about a new knowledge it must
without hesitation be thrown in the fire.

Sets of initial notes

The term Elements, which translates into Latin and into a few other
languages the title used by Euclid and no doubt before him by Hippocrates
of Chios, has as its origin the letters l, m, n, just as alphabet recites or spells
the first Greek letters: alpha, beta or as solfeggio sings the notes: sol, fa; for
the authentic title Stoicheia indeed means letters, understood precisely as
elements of the syllable or the word.
But in addition to these elements of written language it designates those
of the world with which this book started, water, earth, after the manner of
Empedocles who uses for them the term rhizome: root, the radical origin
of things; but also those of the universe, stars, planets; those of grammar,
nouns or verbs; of logic, of rhetoric, of geometry In this list or this
table, it doesnt seem that one discipline has sought supremacy: neither
language nor the sciences win out over things; the objects themselves
dont precede their signs. The night sky displays, as we see, a set of points;
atoms, punctual elements of things, often present themselves as letters
or numbers, unanalyzable and to be combined. In addition, Proclus,
like Aristotle, says of the elements of geometry that they constitute its
subject since those who teach or learn it begin with them: fundaments or
rudiments, depending. It doesnt seem then as though the Ancients sought
or thought elements that were absolutely final or first: they are found
distributed everywhere.
Conversely, I dream of an always present science of the elements, the
only notes it is sufficient really to transmit. If a supposed knowledge lacks
them, its useless to acquire or teach itit wont educate anyone. If it shows
them, its worth the trouble to learn and diffuse it. These are the condi-
tions of its authenticity, of genuine education, and finally of hoped-for
invention.
Unlike the hard sciences, the origin of the social sciences doesnt pose
any problems to philosophy: they dont let any element be seen.

Abstract lines1
Corresponding to this noun, the verb steicho designates the act of moving
forward in ranks, like an army in battle line formation, so that the noun
corresponds to the line, column or row.
English2 has retained from this family only certain technical words:
distich, a group of two verses aligned one under the other or a couplet of
a hexameter or a pentameter; stichomythia, a dialogue from tragedy in
which the interlocutors answer each other verse for verse and as though
step-by-step. Prosody, which uses these terms, counts dactyls, trochees,
anapaests by short and long syllables using points and lines, like the Morse
alphabet. Atom, element: point, line.
Again, what is an element? This mark, this trace, the dash, the line,
in general a note. And in the plural: a set of these notes, generally
grouped in a table of points and lines, in well-ordered lines and
columns. To my knowledge, the Elements of geometry also consist of
points and lines that we must learn how to draw, even before learning
that we cant.
Today, like yesterday, we see collected in similar tables: letters of
alphabets, numbers in every base, axioms, simple bodies, forces and
corpuscles, truth functions, amino acids Our memory retains them

178GEOMETRY
so easily that they constitute, by themselves, memories: objective ones,
artificial ones, formal ones. In the same sense the old law tables had
engraved the elements of the law.
What does the term elements designate all in all? That which a
knowledge refers to constantly in order to be founded, transmitted and
progress: its memory in general, its language, its basis, its driving force.
Thus Euclids Elements construct a system in the ordinary, deduced and
founded, logical sense but also form a memory in the triple sense of
historyhence the commentaries, the automaton and algorithms.
But a single sense, remarkable, detaches itself from this so useful and
coherent zone of meaning: stoicheion signifies the needle that marks the
shadow on the sundial; the gnomon again, but above all the local mark that
notes the hour. This hour, which popular etymology associates with the
horizon understood as limit, mark or line of an extreme boundary, is seen
here at the border common to the dark and the bright.
A marvel of depth, time is defined as the boundary common to the
shadow and the light. Here is the notch, the dash of bronze or gold that
retains the memory of a fleeting instant; here is the sequence of these
stabilized marks, a range of elements along the substylar line, spelling
in turn the longest and the shortest day, the median night, the solstices
and equinoxes, the obliquity of the ecliptic, the axis of the world and the
latitude of the place a range or table of elements for the map of the
universe: again an artificial memory sculpted on the sundial, elements of
cosmology around the gnomon and marked by it. A trace of origin is made
out in the semantic zone of the term element. Among the lines on the
table, scattered or ordered, we suddenly think were reading who drew or
traced them. As though, in this new sundial, a light, a shadow, a date, were
discovered.
Who traces the elementary mark? Who writes the line? The Sun on
the ground, a thing writing on a thing; or: the axis, standing like a statue
coming out of the ground, on the sundial, an artificial object writing
on an artificial object. By their title, the Elements seem to confess an
astronomical origin; by their verbs and nouns, the Definitions just now
allowed us to make out a static root or rather a statuary pedestal there.
Lets continue.

Initial postulates
Even though the Ancients say nothing about it, the Postulates allow
us to trace the Elements of geometry, literally its lines, with ruler and
compass: the straight line, whether finite or indefinite, the circle, parallel

FIRST IN LOGIC: THE ELEMENT179

lines, the right angle. For this latter, the framing square disappears since
it suffices to inscribe, by means of the two classic tools, a right triangle in
a semicircle.
Called the gnomon above, the framing square thus splits up into two
components, suitable for drawing lines or elements: the ruler and the
compass, which bear in themselves and invariably preserve, in a wooden,
brazen or marble form, the possibility, the capacity for constructing or
tracing dashes, traces, marks, points, short or curved lines, the real and
intellectual elements of geometry.
The Definitions and Postulates construct the table of elements or lines
in the formal, linguistic, pure or abstract sense of this term, the sense in
which it has since been understood. But the compass and the ruler (or
their sum, the gnomon) let their concrete table be seen. Since they allow
us to construct, draw or trace them, they contain or imply in some fashion
an infinity of straight lines, circles, points, right angles, parallel lines and
possible figures: they truly constitute the memory in which these atoms are
enveloped and from which one can at leisure extract them, abstract them.
Abstracting: drawing a line from said table.3
The abstract line without any dimension other than its own is extracted
from the wooden or marble ruler, is drawn from it, in every sense: how
are we to say in any other way that this element was included in it? Why
does the theory of abstraction unfold its splendors in an imaginary space
separating the crude senses from the pure understanding? What are sensa-
tions and faculties of the mind going to do here when its simply a question
of drawing lines by means of a ruler or a canon, of a rigid form, when one
can ceaselessly trace them from that artificial memory as from a never
lacking horn of plenty?4 Yes, the verb abstract has this truly elementary
meaning.
We are still amazed at the interpretation of these things by minds and
bodies. For who writes? The gnomon, standing like a statue. In other words:
the element. What does it write? Strokes, lines, points or circles, that is to
say, elements. Where are these elements? In the ruler and the compass or
in their resultant, the framing square, in other words, the element. Balance
sheet: the element writes elements abstracted from elements: this is the
beginning.
Present in the title like the needle of the sundial, in the Definitions
like a statue in equilibrium, the artificial object never leaves us, haunts
the Postulates and makes them possible. Euclids geometry as a system or
development of a series of theorems starting from preposed beginnings can
thus be considered an automaton. And this doesnt mean that its perfor-
mance remains finite.

180GEOMETRY
From nature to culture or from the objective to
the collective
What should we think now in order to form a community? Equality: let
no one get the better of anyone and may exchanges compensate each
other. Careful: you forget that geometrical equality rules, all-powerful,
among the gods as among men. You think that we must strive to get the
better of all the others: because you forget geometry. Socrates inveighs
against Gorgias (507e508a), a young dynamic executive, newly come out
of the families and the Schools, a wolf thirsting for bloody power, vain,
competitive, and shows him the surprising equivalence between geometry
and equality.
There is no science without constancy, without the equals sign. There
is no knowledge without an invariance. This notion and this operation
are also and again equivalent to order, justice, harmony, the social bond.
Equality conditions community. Those who opt in favor of invariance vote
for social order.
The word Axioms then is the worst possible translation for the
Euclids genuine title: Common Notions, under which equality is treated.
One would have to blindly believe in an individual subject of thought
to imagine that its a question here of notions that everyone carries and
possesses from birth, genetically, in an innate way, by right or by miracle.
One doesnt need great human or social experience to learn that, quite
the contrary, equalityin comparison, role or exchangeis the least
widely shared thing in the world: in this sense, the least common. If
perchance you encounter it, hail it instead as holiness. Man, alas, is not
a man to man and doesnt know how to act or think according to this
truth; no doubt, in addition, one cant speak of man in general except in
this pitiful sentence.
That said, equality is essential if you want to found a community. This
latter doesnt come from each individual, but from this project. Common,
consequently, doesnt designate an ordinary or everyday denominator, but
what characterizes the public. The set of equalitys descriptions or impli-
cations, its attributes, operations or properties, constitute indispensable
conditions for establishing said community. Hence the title Common
Notions.
In order to understand this koine, we must take leave of the individual
subject of thought in order to think a collective subjectwhich, in particular,
constitutes and founds the scientific community, that community which
develops normal or elementary science by deducing and demonstrating
from these beginnings, and is developed by this very fact.

FIRST IN LOGIC: THE ELEMENT181

The anthropology of geometry
In total, Euclids beginnings imply their own anthropology. The title itself
brings back the gnomon, as well as the lines traced by the sun and the axis on
the first earth evoked by geometry; from this earth rises, by successive incli-
nations, the equilibriums or reposes of the refined statics described by the
Definitions, statues come out of the earth, upright like the axis: the episteme
begins; the Postulates describe what the gnomonthat framing square that
has disappeared in favor of the ruler and compassis used for, and how it
functions; they thus designate who draws the lines or rather in what objects
these lines are implied or where they are extracted or abstracted from: artificial
objects for the elements memory and their intelligence; language itself leads
us to call the lines [traits] drawn or constructed from these artificial objects
abstract [abstraits], as though they were extracted from them.
Lastly, the Common Notions describe the conditions for establishing
a community, that whole of which each individual, smaller than it, only
constitutes a part. They only appear after the emergence of the object; on
balance, in the absence of any subject in the modern sense, the collective is
conditioned, on the contrary, by the object.

Foundations
The transcendental is in Euclids beginnings, which refer to the beginnings
of geometry or express and repeat them; the conditional is there, the funda-
mental, the originary, precisely the elementary. But they lie neither in the
subjective nor in the a priori, nor in the formal or the pure in the sense of
Descartes and Kant.
They reside in the great objects of the natural world, sun, earth, in the
manufactured things, in the artificial, axis, table, compass, ruler, statue,
lastly in the community, in the intersubjectivity thats poorly named
and therefore poorly conceived starting from the individual subject, but
thats beginning to form in front of the appearance, the evidentness, the
emergence of these objects.
If the transcendental only adds an empty and sterile abstraction to the
constructive idealities of geometry or subjective foundations to its formal
fundaments, nothing differentiates it from a fable, a tale, a myth, a cosmetic
ornament. If and when it exists, namely when the more than necessary
conditions it brings out become sufficient, it encounters anthropology: so
the genesis of the Elements is really located in the things of the world from
which ensues a societal culture from which ensue the notions of science
from which ensue the things of the world.

182GEOMETRY
The usual collective and the scientific college
The special conditions for the sciencesepistemological condi-
tionslie in the general conditions for knowledgegnoseological
conditionsthemselves lying in the anthropological relations, obscure
and unknown up to this day, between the collective and the objects of
the world, culture and nature. Does the group as group rejoin the things
themselves? If yes, how?
Our philosophical tradition dictates that only the individual subject
perceives or thinks and constitutes the objective. On its side, the collective
only constructs itself: our relations only have our relations as their object.
We live all the more removed from the world to the extent that we become
occupied with one another. This division, which gives the solitary the
heroic role of encountering things in communications silence, no doubt
corresponds to the usual and tragic experience of the massive human
events of history, but doesnt correspond in any way to the real newness of
scientific practice in relation to these events.
The verification and consensus of the community defined by this
practice constitutes the subject of science. This community thinks collec-
tively. The subject of this thought only becomes individual in extremely
rare moments of crisis: when the threatened group takes in someone who
had been excluded while pretending to believe it had sent him out in recon-
naissance so as to invent or discover, whereas it had, in fact, expelled him.

One can take as a historical curiosity the paradoxical fact that on the
exact dates when science begins to constitute itself into a group, if not yet
into a profession, devoted to the things themselves, to nature, to physics,
a philosophy of the individual knowing subject appears, as though this
philosophy highlighted the exception by arrogantly ignoring what was
becoming the common law or regulation of the community. However, only
the tribunal of the scientific assembly, only the church of experts verifying
each other, decides whether the Earth moves, and not the isolated hero.
For if this subject alone thought so, the earth wouldnt move, and there
would be no science. Everything happens as though the Galileo affair
had led the philosophers of knowledge to misinterpretation, as though a
founding myth of history or of the hagiography of science had impelled
them to forget that science thinks as an assembly, as a tribunal or a church
and functions like them, so that in fact the history of science evolves, in its
detail as in its general laws, as a repetition of the history of religion or of
law. The latter progress via heretics and outlaws, the former via inventors,
all three of them regularly expelled. There is nothing paradoxical in

FIRST IN LOGIC: THE ELEMENT183

this comparison: religion and law offer the first examples of a collective
subject thinking an object that transcends and founds the relations of the
community.
For in science the egalitarian group of peers, recognizing each other as
experts, constitutes the subject of knowledge, as though this knowledge
had as its operating condition the reciprocal recognition of the individuals
thus equalized; science thinks as such and offers on the other hand
guarantees that it considers objects of the world that transcend its relations.
This is an exception, which assuredly doesnt concern the individual but
rather the collective. For in general the collective behaves as though its
relations sufficed for it, as though there were no world. It has no object
external to its enclosure. The set of its relations constitutes its definition,
and the redefinition of each relation constitutes the food it lives on, its
resumption and continuation.
Idealism, which assures that the world is equivalent to our representa-
tions, is suitable for certain fairly serious mental illnesses and all societies
without exception whose relations are projected onto the environment.
Sociologies are right to claim that groups only know their own laws: that
is how animal hordes and political animals behave, little marionettes that
only thrash about due to the strings that tie them to each other so that the
movement of one expresses or sums up, from a certain angle that defines
it, the agitations, at short distance or long, of its social environment. This
music box doesnt require any spring or program since every movement,
a result of the sum, immediately returns to the sum as the cause of a next
movement. Nothing goes beyond the strings, whose metastable network
always proves the sociologist right for demanding an autonomy for his
science since the whole closes over itself and auto-produces itself. This
produces, in all, a few temporal fluctuations in the sum, fluctuations to
which we sometimes give the name of history.
During this hazardous and monotonous time a paradoxical college
suddenly appears which gives itself and thinks some object of the world
existing independently of the networksstrings and knotswhich
ordinarily subjugate men to each other, as though it went beyond them.
A transcendent god accompanies, without taking any interest in them,
the chaos, world and atoms in Lucretiuss text, when physics is beginning.
Theres nothing paradoxical in this double assertion: the absent God, indif-
ferent to human relations, has the same status as the cloud of atoms, in
the sense that their doings, whether of a peaceful solitary or an agitated
plurality, remain eternally independent of what makes peoples run.
The natural object takes the place of God, can even coexist with it in the
same place, the essential thing remaining to understand this place well, one

184GEOMETRY
of whose avatars will be this white box, the source of an endless discourse,
hence of a long historical time, the pure space of geometry.

Scientists believe in the existence of an outside world the way the religious
believe in God: neither of the two can prove it but cant practice faith
or science without this foundation. In the Galileo affair, the entire stake
resides in this very place. A tribunal only sits in order to dictate its law and
only speaks performatively; hence for it, this place doesnt exist: there are
cases, not things.
Let someone stand up in the middle and testify that the earth moves,
and there is still no science, for it happens everyday that someone in a
group behaves abnormally. But an assembled church has already prepared
this place. Only a religious tribunal could hesitate on this occasion.
Condemning no doubt, but making possible. Someone within it stands
up and testifies that the earth moves, and the jurists react as though in
the presence of an enthusiast crying out his mystical intuition. Of course,
there is still no science, but a possibility opens up, a chance exists that,
despite their claims, the participants in the assembly might convert to the
astronomical revolution, accustomed as they are to debating real reasons,
reasons of Real Presence without any relation to their own relations. An
ordinary tribunal lacks such a place and cannot give in, closed as it is
over cases. The religious tribunal doesnt give in, but can give in, but will
give in, open on to such a place. There suddenly exist things and not only
cases. Religion is closed over what links men but is open on to the direct
experience of God: in it the learned and the mystics confront each other.
The Galileo affair continues this canonical struggle. But it gives the idea
of creating a commission of experts responsible for the things themselves,
another tribunal next to the old tribunal: this is science, which never
speaks performatively and in which the same debate is perpetuated.
In total, there exists an object or objects for us, for the collective, for
this society whose iron law usually consists in acting as though they didnt
exist. Science forms a paradoxical realist group in the ordinarily idealist
collective. In it we, together, relate to a thing whose laws dont in any way
relate to our relations.
No philosophy to this day, to my knowledge, allows us to think such
an event since the tradition dictates to us that an object of knowledge
only exists for an individual subject and since the collective cant know
objectively because it has no object besides its relations. Of course the
philosophy that would allow us to think this difficult thing would require
thinking that white box or transcendent place where God coexists with the
objects of the world, mystical experience with experimentation.

FIRST IN LOGIC: THE ELEMENT185

 One cannot take as a historical curiosity the fatal and tragic fact that
on the exact dates when the death of God was announced the objective
world lowered its barriers, removed its obstacles, lightened cruel and old
Necessity, began to lose its battles against our aggressive and triumphant
technologies, withdrew, humiliated, behind our representations, in short,
entered into its death pangs. The bomb thunders the death of the world
scarcely a half-century after the death of God. The two transcendances
leave the same place at about the same time. Now we find ourselves obliged
to write a philosophy of the death pangs of transcendental objectivityand
of its rebirth, today.

Geometrys Earth
Mathematics founds physics: a broad and vague assertion, since it also
founds all the sciences. In this trivial sense, it is meant that physics only
becomes a science if it is said in mathematical language. Very well. But a
foundation goes deeper.
In reading the beginnings of mathematics elementarily, beginnings in
history and preliminaries for the system, in reading Euclids Elements in this
way, a swallowed-up world is discovered whose memory has been forgotten:
a sun and an earth, shadow and light, the mark of time in space; heavy and
weighty things coming slowly out of the earth like statues risen from the dead;
artificial objects, canons, rulers or strings, objective memories implying the
elements or lines that are drawn or abstracted from them; the conditions of
constitution of a community, of a consensus: the agreement about the truth
could never happen without equality. In total, a world and a group.
These are the conditions or foundations of science; there exists a
transcendental we that has as its object a transcendental earth, the one
measured or described in fact by all the geometries and topologies
of history, ancient and future. These are the foundations of scientific
knowledge in general, abstract or concrete. As concrete as the world and
the things are. Thus this geometry founds physics because it is a physics,
because the world is its transcendental condition, as well as the object,
whether as such or manufactured. Thus it founds technology as well since
it is a technology. But, on the other hand, as abstract as you please since
productive of abstraction. Pure geometry is born from the canon, from the
ruler or the compass, as other even more abstract and purer geometries will
later come from Euclids geometry and its beginnings. Abstraction creates
a continuous path that quite simply resembles history here. Abstraction is
drawn from artifice and history from what comes from it and so on, in a
fan thats gently unfolded.

186GEOMETRY
Logos, phusis, nomos
Yet why didnt the Greeks invent mathematical physics? The answer people
sometimes give is: because of the presence of slaves; he who alienates his
arms does without tools and contents himself with contemplating. Not so
fast. Do they believe that during the Renaissance, when this same Physics
emerged, the serfs had disappeared from Italy, Holland and France? Do
they think that the steam engine and thermodynamics appeared in the last
century when the exploitation of men by those who dont believe they are
their fellow creatures had ceased?
The Greeks would have hesitated before physical law because little gods
held ground in space, each in its own department: when a hamadryad
guards each tree, when one nymph per spring watches over the expansion
of the waters, when the sea swarms with sirens and the meadows with
fauns, a thousand singularities oppose the passage of the general rule. The
one God must be waited for in order for the expanse to suddenly empty
and for no locality to obstruct the homogeneous universe. A Being beyond
beings, this is a smooth universal, the integral of all the white boxes, which
makes the natural sciences and technologies possible. Transparency and
unicity suppress all singularity.
The alliance, lastly, of a formula with experimentable phenomena
presupposes that the dogma of the Incarnation has been accepted.
Conditions of a religious or metaphysical type are more decisive than
economic and social reasons.

But above all the Greeks didnt invent physics because of the social sciences:
the latter preceded the former. Anterior in time and conditions to physics, the
social sciences prevented it from appearing. This conflict haunts the origin of
all our knowledge. We take an interest in our own relations well before taking
an interest in the world. Sociologists first, men wait for all of history before
becoming physicists. Conversely, history slowly catches up to the world.
We have interpreted religions and mythologies in terms of the natural
sciences for so long, a misinterpretation imposed by our modernity, that
we still believe that our ancestors were first and foremost afraid of thunder,
of atmospheric phenomena or the night, of the sterility of fallow lands.
No, they were afraid of their enemies. All mythologies and polytheistic
religions are social sciences in an exquisite way, infinitely more precise,
effective and sensible than what we call by that name today. Conversely, it
is fruitful to think that the social sciences today impose polytheisms. To
reach the world and then physics, it was first of all necessary to cross this
screen woven by the collectives themselves.

FIRST IN LOGIC: THE ELEMENT187

 Numbers at first code taxes, commerce or salaries: no known problem
of measurement in the entire Fertile Crescent addresses nature, as though
bodies didnt fall yet. Everyone on the contrary quantifies what passes
through our relations. Even the assessment, by the harpedonaptai, of
the cultivable fields whose boundaries the Niles floods had erased or
overturned sought to end disputes between neighbors by the force of
the state and to re-establish the cadaster in its integrity, that is to say, the
tax base.
This first geometry doesnt measure just any land, but rather balances
credits and debits, and its constant errors of approximation always go in the
same direction: the interest of the pharaoh or the strongest.

A strange thing full of only water, that is Thales quasi monotheistic

inauguration: the Ionian physicists discovered objectsair, fire, water
totally independent of our relations of will or power, things without
human causes. A world exists outside of the closed societies, in which
things are born, fire, water or atoms, without any rule or law imposed by
a king or a god. No divinity for gravity is known. When the logos becomes
a proportion, it nullifies, through the effect of its relationrather like the
way a fraction is reduced to its simplest expressionthe mouths that say it
and the orders that impose it, so that only the relations of the world to the
world and those of the thing to itself are preserved. The new logos becomes
the relation between two former logoi or statements, disqualified. Objects
exist whose appearance and birth dont depend on us and which develop
all by themselves in relation with other objects of the world. The rational
logos, which twice repeats, in Greek and in Latin, proportion or relation,
speaks without any human mouth like an outlaw law, starting from this
transcendence.
Among the infant physicists, what is taken for a voluntary affirmation of
atheism, and which remains one incidentally, of course consists in leaving
the polytheistic religions and mythology, but insofar as they express and
consecrate social relations: we commit a serious mistranslation when we
render the Greek verb [nomizein] as consider, which means
instead: to submit to customs. The world appears, is born, takes place, goes,
outside the city, without the city: can such an apoliticism be endured in
the ancient polis? No. To accept it another transcendence will be needed,
that is to say, a religion that urges leaving the sacred, leaving the crushing
constraints of society.
The pharaoh Khufu, divine, all-powerful, representing the social body,
has his pyramid built stone by stone by the people, and Thales measures
it without the proportion discovered in any way taking into account the

188GEOMETRY
king, his order, his tomb or this relation of the one to the political multiple.
Proportion-logos chases out discourse-logos; a law or an order exists that
doesnt know or isnt known by social order or law, and the pharaoh dies
anew. What remains is an empty polyhedron, a luminous and transparent
box.
Misfortune had it and still has it that this logos unendurable to kings,
societies, language, philosophy would often be repatriated into the mouths
and wills of power, irresistibly: an almost inevitable return to archaism,
which the Greeks saw or suffered as we suffer it. The proportion-logos
returns into discourse and the social enclosure: irrational or rational, it
orders the Statesmans weaving, educates the Republics guardians, and
Socrates crushed Callicles in the Gorgias through the geometrical equality
thats all-powerful among the gods and men. It becomes mathematics
for the social sciences again. Despite or due to the Timaeuss effort the
inaugural invention of a world-object independent of us again collapses
into the collective.
Politics, the social sciences, myths together and quite plainly prevented
mathematical physics from appearing.

FIRST IN LOGIC: THE ELEMENT189

190
PART THREE

CONCLUSION
192
8 THE MEASUREMENT
OF THE EARTH:
HERODOTUS

What is geometry, again and finally? The measurement of the earth. Its less
a question here of its birth than of its etymology: of the origin of its name.
What earth is being named?
Come back from his trip to Egypt, Herodotus gives a good answer to
this question.

Naturalist origins
Our predecessors read his narrative and have transmitted to us this legend:
the regular time come, the Niles floods drowned the boundaries of the
cultivable fields in the alluvial valley fertilized by the river: hence, with
the low-water flow, royal officials, called harpedonaptai, in other words
surveyors or geometers, measured anew the lands mixed with mud and silt
in order to redistribute and reassign their parts. Life resumed. Everyone
returned home to attend to their work.
The first interpretation of Herodotuss history or tale, the physicalist
version, in which the earth simply and merely signifies the arable zone
from which the swing plow draws, at the cost of labor and sowing, rice and
wheat, the peasants local, agrarian or cultivatable patch of land: the pagus
precedes the page and the map.
The positivist generations that preceded us only dreamed of origins
starting from nature or from the physical; the religions of the first gods,
they said, resulted from ancestral terrors inspired by the world, the fires
of volcanoes or thunderstorms, and floods or inundations; they therefore
thought the origin of geometry as the emergence of a natural science.
 Or of nature itself: in plowing the valley with its waters the flood brings
the earth back to disorder, to the origins chaos, to the zero time, exactly
to nature, in the sense this word takes on if one means that the things are
preparing to be born; correct measurement reorders the earth and makes
it be reborn to culture, at least in the sense of cultivation. How could we
not find nature, as though tautologically, at the beginning since it by itself
expresses birth?
In another context it is written in Genesis that God separated the earth
from the primal waters and gave it bounds. At the beginning of time, in the
same way, we find the confusion of the flood followed by division [partage]:
the conditions for definition, for measurement and emergence appear at
the same time departing from [ partir de] chaos: departing from, which
signifies beginning, also means dividing up [rpartition], what I want to
demonstrate.1
But here the earth leaves the local field and agrarian activities in order
to designate already one of the four elements of the globe said to be terres-
trial, in its totality.

For decision about boundaries and borders appears to be original: without it

there can be no oasis separated from the desert, nor clearingspiercing the
forestin which the peasants devote themselves to agriculture, no sacred
or profane space, the one isolated from the other by the priests gestures,
no definition hemming in a domain, therefore no precise language about
which to agree, nor logic; no geometry lastly, at least in the metric sense.
We have returned here to Anaximanders meditations.
Consequently, we have only discovered the origin of the general condi-
tions of a measurement. Even though we may know how to mark out the
boundaries of the squares of culture between each other and to contemplate
the shores that separate the continents from the sea, we still have made no
progress in geometry, that science of a space so distinct from cereal fields.

Does this version, whose completeness and sufficiency sum up the second
part of this book, in fact suffice? Does it succeed in saying the origin of the
Greeks abstract science?
No, twice over, to both questions.

Culturalist origins
Whence came my generations discourse, a generation which held, for more
than a half-century more or less, the post of the social sciences, whose
demonstration completed the physicalist version come from the hard

194GEOMETRY
sciences with the ad hominem question: who originally makes the decision
to divide up the lands, to cut up, to create a boundary? The pharaoh,
the king, Sesostris or his officials, plus the Egyptian priests from whom
Herodotus derives his narrative.
The assigning of boundaries indeed makes the disputes between
neighbors stopthis is property law; the law of exactly enclosing a piece
of land and allocating itthis is civil and private law. Moreover, the same
delimitation by boundaries allows the royal cadaster to put everyone in
their place and to assess the tax basethat is public and tax law. Laws
proliferate therefore in this origin legend in which laws alone make the
decision and cut up the fields, whoever the physical person sent by the
pharaoh might be, the harpedonaptes or mysterious geometer who in fact
reconstructs them. Who decides? The legislator or whoever says or follows
jurisprudence and has it be applied.
This latter person then first carries out the originary gesture from
which geometry is born, which is going to, as for it, later produce a new
agreement among those who demonstrate, as though precision [justesse]
succeeded even better than justice, and on the same terrain; but justice,
on this point, preceded precision, while identifying it with itself. Before
the scientific consensus on the precision of the cutting or the necessity in
the demonstration, a legal contract imposes itself and first brings everyone
concerned into agreement.
But, again, since the flood erased the limits and borders of the cultivable
fields, properties disappeared at the same time: going back over the now
chaotic terrain, the harpedonaptai distribute them and therefore cause the
erased law to be reborn. The law reappears at the same time as geometry;
or rather, both are born with the notion of bound, border and definition,
with analytic thought.
From the first part of this work, Anaximander now returns along with
the indefinite preceding the definition of precise form, which implies
properties, for geometry, those of the square or the diamond, and for law,
the proprietor: analytic thought is rooted in the same word and the same
operation, a thought from which two branches come, law and science.

The harpedonaptes or surveyor draws, holds, attaches the cord: his

mysterious title breaks down into two words, a noun that says the bond
and a verb that says he fastens it. In the beginning is this rope. The one
that, in the temple for example, delimits the profane and the sacred, the one
evoked by the terms contract or obligation.
The first priest who, with this bit of rope in his hand, having enclosed
a piece of land, found his neighbors satisfied with the boundaries of their

THE MEASUREMENT OF THE EARTH: HERODOTUS195

common enclosure, was the true founder of analytic thought and, based on
it, of law and geometrythrough the fixedness of the contract, concluded
for a long time, through the exactness and rigor of the drawing, through
the correspondence between the drawings precision and the contracts
stability, a pact that becomes all the better as its terms are refined, as the
values become precise, as the parts are exactly cut up. These requisites
characterize the contract defined by the jurist just as much as the one from
which science is born.
Geometry, in the Greek manner, flows back toward the Egyptian Maat,
which signifies truth, law, morality, measure and portion, the order issuing
from disordered mixture, a certain equilibrium of precision [justesse] and
justice, lastly the smooth rectitude of a plane. If some Egyptian chronicler
had written this history, and not Herodotus, the commentary would have
concluded that this was the birth of the law, as though the Greeks had
drawn toward science a process of emergence of order that the Egyptians
had been directing toward the forms of procedure.
Law precedes science and perhaps engenders it; or rather: a common
origin, abstract and sacred, gathers them together.
Before this origin we can only imagine the flood, the great primal or
recursive deluge of the waters, whose indefinite chaos mixes men without
state or civil society, the things of the world, cases, forms, relations of
allocation, and confuses the subjects. We are indeed returning to the
beginning of this book.

Nature and culture, every science confused

In the first version, that of phusis, the earth remains the one that the farmer
plows and sows; in the other one, which derives from Anaximander, from
nomos and the most recent teachings, it becomes the cadaster, the map,
drawn on papyrus and intended for fiscal administration so it can calculate
the tax base.
Here are two earths, the black one of the silt and the white or gray
one on the grimoire; the hard one and the soft one; hardware or software;
agricultural or state; nourishing or judicial; physical or formal; physi-
ological or legislative; inert and living on the one hand, collective and
social on the other; an object that is firstly part of the world as such and
thus subject to physical and natural laws and transformed by technol-
ogies whose concrete solids obey the same laws; an object secondly of
the laws issuing from diverse kinds of laws, public, tax, administrative;
an object then, single and double, referring to the world and the state,
to things and to men, to two types of law soon, as we will have to

196GEOMETRY
learn, to two orders of science. The earth for the feet and the one for the
powerful.
Still farmers, our fathers referred to the first one in order to think; living
only in megalopolises, the generation that is passing on, having recently
become exclusively political, only thought about the second one, and about
power.
So at the origin one of these two earths would have covered over the
other if the harpedonaptai had drawn the cadaster map at a scale of one to
one, a fine image of utopia and its impossible resemblance to the true. The
Nile rises: all the fields of both banks become covered over by a smooth-
surfaced lake, so silky it already seems the grained evenness of papyrus.
When the oar leaves its course or wake on the plane of high water, nothing
remains of its writings fragile furrow. A uniform plane, without bounds or
memory, passes over the fields.
This is precisely what we are looking for: a covering over; but we cant
project the properties of the earth onto the water or the distinctions of
the drop in the water level onto the blindness of the flood. They remain
distinct, rather like the way the society of men can sometimes leave the
constraints of the physical real or the way the anchorite who loves solitary
shores can forget the sound and fury of groups.
How do we separate them? How can we understand them?

Does the version stemming from the social sciences faithfully express the
narrative reported by Herodotus? As little as the version of the sciences of
nature. Is it so difficult then to read our legends? But have we truly read
the original text? No.
Here it is.

The original or originary text

In chapter 109 of Book II of the Histories, dedicated to the muse Euterpe,
protector of festivals, the following can be read: Sesostris, the priests said,
divided the soil among all the Egyptians, allocating to each a square plot
thats equal to the others; he based his revenues on this division, prescribing
that an annual tax be paid. If it happened that the river removed a part
of someones plot, this latter would come to find him and notify him of
what had happened; he would send people to examine and measure how
much the piece of land had diminished so that in the future a proportional
reduction in the payment of the fixed tax could be made. This is what gave
rise, in my opinion, to the invention of geometry, which the Greeks brought
back to their country. For regarding the use of the polos, the gnomon and

THE MEASUREMENT OF THE EARTH: HERODOTUS197

the division of the day into twelve parts, the Greeks learned these from the
Babylonians.2

Did you know that during those times the definition of the day separated
sunrise from sunset in such a way that, according to winter or summer, the
hours, short or long, varied since they divided up changing angles on the
sundial? Always twelve, in spite of everything, like an invariant count of
quantities that are variable everyday. We had forgotten this, we for whom
the days are made up of twelve legal and stable hours without any relation
to the daystar. Why does Herodotus bring together the metric of the fields
and that of hours, the spatial measurement of the earth and that of the sky
and time?
The only occurrence of the verb to measure, and therefore of its
operation, in this Euterpe chapter doesnt concern the first division of the
agricultural valley into plots, nor the dividing up of time on the Babylonian
side, but a kind of catastrophe, apart from the Nile floodwhose gift all of
Egypt is and which never intervenes in this narrative, from which every
known interpretation however abusively derives it. All the theories of the
Earth have taken several centuries as well to escape from the Flood!
At a regular rate of flow, it frequently enough happens that along a curve
or an undermining of a high bank any river can produce the opposite effect
of depositing, that is, the total or partial collapse of an alluvial field. The
entire text speaks and only speaks about this difference. Silt is lacking at a
dented meadow.
Suffering damages, the farmer moves and goes to make a complaint
in high places about the accident he was just victim of; so the king sends
his harpedonaptes to the scene to measure how much his land has been
diminished: a difference of course which amounts to a subtraction since
the depositing or addition constitutes or forms the arable land itself along
the valley. Back in his offices, the functionary calculates the proportional
decrease of the fixed tax: kata logon.

Logos between phusis and nomos

That is the invention of the logos or the proportion between the difference
measured on the land and the one the functionary calculates for the tax
reduction: here then is the scale that, without paradox, takes its place in the
legend: how the origin is to be read.
In the other origin legend Thales measures the relation between the
lengths of the shadows and consequently invents homothety, that is to say,
scale; likewise here this invention and only this invention appears: the logos

198GEOMETRY
is this very scale which relates the originary fellahs agrarian land and the
harpedonaptes royal map. Such a scale emerges at the very moment its
lacking.
Herodotus doesnt talk about geometry for the sake of the measurement
of a square of wheat or for the sake of the calculation of the tax base on the
cadaster, but for the sake of the relation between a reduction, observed on
the land by the peasant, and a counting, calculated by the tax collector on
the cadastral map.
He therefore describes an invariant across variations and therefore
compares this stability between the physical accident and the tax payment
with the stability of the Babylonian civil count of hours across the variety
of their real length.
The same relation is established on the earth as in the sky. Geometrys
space doesnt reproduce the first one nor imitate the second, but rather a
kind of mysterious path, a kind of Jacobs ladder, which connects nature
and culture, the black earth of the peasant and the gray of administration,
the thing and its representation, the field and the map, the hard and the
soft, hardware and software, the physical sciences and the social sciences,
the generation preceding me and my own generation, the first interpre-
tation and the second one, the first part of this book and the following
one, Thales and Diogenes, the physicist Anaximander and him hungry for
justice, nomos and phusis.
Real or supposed, these transports, the set of which conditions
measurement, lead from the pagus to the page, from the garden to the
tribunal, from the field onto the public plaza, from plowing to discussion,
from the countryside to the city, from the victim to the king or his
lieutenant, and conversely from the court to the piece of land or from
contradictory disputes to the square of wheat, finally from the law to the
earth and back.
They therefore open, cross and make easy all the conceivable paths
whose loops surround this book, which has just described their bouquets.
The facilitation of the routes causes the percolation threshold to be
crossed.
The kings or the states map imitates the soil beneath the feet the way
one utopia resembles another, nevertheless opposed: physicalism moves
on one wing of a chimera whose other wing carries the exclusivism of the
social sciences. The stability discovered here, the real of geometry, bridges
these two utopias. The logos forms the stone of this bridge.
Might abstract space allow us to inhabit this earth where the agrarian
zone fits into the laws of the state the way politics bustles about under the
physical sky?

THE MEASUREMENT OF THE EARTH: HERODOTUS199

An objection
Here is nonetheless an objection, which, if unassailable, would bring us
back to the previous interpretations: this relation must indeed have existed
previously for the king to have been able to order, before the accident, the
valley to be divided up into plots or square parts, which would have been
first and therefore more originary than this calculation of differences.
Answer: Herodotus precisely doesnt explain how Sesostris made the
first division because he consciously wanted to tell his origin starting from
variation. Vague, approximate, the first divisions only learned precise,
exact, rigorous measurement after or according to those lacks, through the
relation and the logos between the two differences which, in return, were
able to make the position and the form of the plots precise: pro-portion
precedes the portion; the very preposition or prefix says so. Before the
former, the latter attains neither precision [justesse] nor justice.
The portion and the plot matter less than the relation, and this latter was
only born after they were shaken by the undermining of the flowing river
or the flowing of the variable hours. The sky and the earth matter less than
their variations, their differences, their lacks, what is subtracted from us of
the flowing duration or of the soft deposited silt, and the human efforts to
compensate for them.
The valleys moir surface, the flat flood, the changes of the stars and
the climate matter less than the space in which the peasants running to the
administration move, in which the harpedonaptai coming to measure the
collapsed corner move, the space in which our Greeks move, bringing the
polos or gnomon back from Babylon and from Egypt the relation between
the banks collapse and the tax reduction. The logos or relation invents this
space of transport which everyone crosses while remaining invariant: this
is the pure space of geometry, without any notable obstacle and in which
everything flows easily, the river as well as the hours, history and the grand
narratives.

Logos
The portion matters less than proportion, the relation [rapport] or transport
whose substantive -port again matters less than its prefixes or the preposi-
tions pro-, re-, ad- and trans-, that is to say, relations, which can remain
perfectly stable across the variable instability of nature and of customs,
of things, of cases, of substances as well as of the substantives or verbs
brought into play. Before the harpedonaptes or the peasant thinks, they
both compensate damages and losses by moving.

200GEOMETRY
 Logos doesnt say being but rather relation. Abstraction doesnt occur
starting from the earth, from the smooth surface of the waters or the
purity of the sky whose dimensions, plenitude, transparency and light the
geometrical plane would imitate afterwards, rather it is born along trans-
ports, following the relations that bridge and compensate their variations.
It no longer occurs starting from the cadaster, from the map written and
drawn on the royal papyrus whose exactitude and just precision geometry
would imitate afterwards, rather it is born from transports between the
field and the tax grimoire.
Abstraction doesnt take place in and through the fixed or mobile
position of the earth or the sky, in and through the mobile or fixed position
of the written or said Maat, rather it follows the preposition, in general,
before anything whatsoever is posed. The origin of geometry can be read,
like an open book, in the prefix or the preposition that precedes the very
word preposition, in this very preseance which precedes the act of posing,
before the thesis or the being-there.
In particular, along the relations, absent or unnoticed, between the
concerns given us by the earth on which we place our feet or the hard real
that wears our hands out or again that river that took bread away from our
mouths, and the worries other men give us, power, taxes, work, servitude.
Indeed, the essential takes place along the relations that the hard
sciences forget to maintain with the social sciences or along those that
these latter fail to maintain with the former; so forgotten that they are
discovered again at the origin, buried beneath the undermined lands,
in the mystery of hieroglyphics and the refusal to read in the legend the
difference between these two sciences and the relations that compensate
this difference; beneath the inextricable, exquisite and transparent network
of prepositions and the topographies of declension.

On measurement, again
What is geometry, once again? A certain measurement of the earth.
In French as in the Greco-Latin languages the word mesure [measure
or measurement] means exactitude, precision and accuracy in the relation
that the things themselves maintain with a given ruler, but at the same time
an entirely human moderation that one would like to see appear in official
or judicial provisions, and perhaps, before all, a kind of mean, middle, axis,
or center from which one perceives, on the one side, the advantages and,
on the other, the inconveniences, as with the balance of a justice. Does
the measurement of the originary earth translate this first arbitral temper-
ament? Precisely Herodotuss text recounts the reduction come from a

THE MEASUREMENT OF THE EARTH: HERODOTUS201

deduction: the pharaoh accepts losing the tax whose equivalent the Nile
has taken from the peasant; the harpedonaptes arbitrates by measuring so
that the farmer and the tax official together agree, moderate.
Who will say which consensus goes first, the agreement of the revised
payment or the understanding concerning proportion, and which arouses
the other? It indeed looks as though the meanness of measure follows the
crossing from nature to society: mathematics appears to be born in the very
middle of the Northwest Passage.

Metis, mother of measurement

We no longer remember the time when the great separationinsistent,
all-powerfulof the intelligible and the sensible didnt rule our minds. The
divine Plato drew this separation from mathematical idealities: without
them, before them, there was no abstract heaven populated with models
whose rigor and beauty are imitated poorly and vaguely by the concrete
things here below. In order to think the era preceding geometry it is at
least necessary to dredge up from memory attitudes not torn apart by this
caesura. In other words, how did we think when we didnt necessarily think
two such worlds?
Because everything always mixes, it was necessary to sort things out!
Act then without abstraction. Like the stone-cutters that supplied the
Pyramids or the keystones for the great medieval cathedrals, we didnt
always know, to my knowledge, geometry in space. We therefore invented
a thousand tricks, a hundred devices, artifices, ruses and subterfuges in
order to get ourselves out of difficulty. Without any ideal formalities, you
can already fish, go hunting, set snares, raise a shelter, stomp grapes, grind
flour, raise the sails, try to seduce your neighborthats already more than
three-quarters of life!
To express this basic vital intelligence, the Greeks used precisely a word
from the same family as measureMetis, a subtle ruse that threads its
way through the impossible risks imposed by the force of things and the
power of men and which passes, good at sorting things out, between two
reefs, here the natural Charybdis of the Niles turbulence and the cultural
Scylla of society, pharaoh and tax collector. Yes, the trick that allows you to
sort things out sometimes allows the weak to get the better of the strong, to
commandfor example naturewhile appearing to obey, as is sometimes
done before the powerful: Bacon will follow, of course, but also precede
Thales and Plato.
An educated-third, anterior to every dualism, abstract and concrete at
the same time, even though she has never heard of either the intelligible or

202GEOMETRY
its image, immersed in the apeiron, Metis, without exclusion and median,
invented the measure from which geometry came, which allowed us to see
and cut up, through exclusion, two worlds: a second cutting that made us
rationalist.

The corresponding theogony

Finally master of Olympus after having killed his father, Zeus lived in terror
that a son, tomorrow, would do the same to him; so as soon as Metis, his
wife, got pregnant by him, he swallowed her; Athena would be born, it is
said, from his head, opened by Hephaestuss ax.
Do you know a better way to forget than to incorporate? We no longer
remember our detours nor the multiple ruses hatched in the united world
that preceded Athenas birth, the goddess of reason. Before being rational,
we were intelligent.
Does our body remember this?

The question of change

So the sole occurrence of the verb to measure in Herodotuss chapter
crops up regarding changes: the Nile rises and lowers, the earth is increased
or diminished, the hours vary. Hence everything flows and shakes. How are
we to think such variances?
Unavoidable arguments supporting invariance, Parmenides and Zeno
watch over this fine problem posed at the dawn of Greekness by Heraclitus,
as though an immense dialogue had opposed two voices, on both sides of
the sea, one to the East, on the Ionian coast, at Ephesus, streaming with
fluctuations, and the other, repeating eternity, from Elea, a small port in
southern Italy, to the West. Can the variable be thought? How are we to
say the flowing when being is and non-being is not? The Nile flows, the
land collapses, the dawn changes its angle, the tax money lets it liquidity
go

Three answers appear at the Greek dawn to this first question posed by
physics.
A qualitative theory mixes the four elements in order to draw from
them the hot, the cold, the wet and the dry: making this theory his own,
Aristotle obstructed the West up until Galileo.
The combinatory hypothesis draws every evolution from the diverse
mixtures of permanent atoms: we recently rediscovered the brilliant
intuition of Democritus, Epicurus and the Abderites.

THE MEASUREMENT OF THE EARTH: HERODOTUS203

 The third one, quantitative, assesses fineness and proportions in the
mixtures.
Stable in assemblage, the three answers diverge regarding elements.

In Herodotuss text, the only occurrence of the term logos, relation, follows
that of the measurement of the land for the proportional reduction of the
fixed tax.
Through said proportion, the changes of water, of land, of the cadaster,
of the tax, of the money due return again to the fixed and stable; invariance
in the variations, which harmonizes Heraclitus and Parmenides. Suffice
it to say that analogy or the logos in general resolves the question, itself
general, of rest and motion, of fluctuation and stability.
But they answer it transversally.

Analogy is better than proportion

Proportion: this therefore is the great Greek invention, passing, sliding
from one region to another: arithmetic, when two or several fractions
become equal; geometric, via Thales theorem; almost algebraic, so much did
the sequences of ratios serve the Greek mathematicians, from the origins to
the latest dates, as a universal language for demonstration; musical, via the
numbered intervals of the scales, which we will still be debating for a long
time no doubt to decide who from the origin started it, the Pythagorean
who evaluated harmony on the vibrating strings or the one who counted the
preceding fractions in order to apply them to them; astronomical, via the
same harmony of the sphereswho will sing sufficient praise to celebrate
the talent of Eudoxus, whose hippopede, drawn so early and almost starting
from nothing, saved the apparently looped wandering of the planets?but
also via the relations counted under the shadows of the upright gnomon;
cosmogonic, via the assayed mixtures of the elements of the universe;
physical, via the proportions defined everywhere in relation to the primary
physical states of matterearth, water, air and firein Empedocles; even
chemical, via the same regulated proportions of everything in everything,
in Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, and medical, in the Hippocratic corpus

We will never know anything about progress, too global and vague of an
idea; but we can reduce this question to small intervals: how many results
were obtained in how much time by how many people? Here, in less
than a hundred years, a handful of men put all of science in place, almost
unitarily; an extraordinary vertical explosion that will be reproduced only
a few times in Western history.

204GEOMETRY
 In managing, along their history, according to diminishing returns, this
capital that was so quickly amassed, most scientists, lazy, afterwards feared
the return of those thunderbolts from the blue in which a superabundant
excess occurs to surprising surviving heads in brief and glorious moments.
If a miracle is to be spoken of, this is certainly it.

Therefore, from the Latin language, the terms proportion and fraction
open us to the risk of not understanding what was born here. The Greeks
didnt know the simple relation of a over b; only the analogy: a over b equals
b over c interested them, thanks to which they set down one or several
proportional terms, medium.
This is precisely the logos, the mean or proportional median, which goes
from one relation to another, and by substitution, runs again from this
latter to a third one, and so on.

Local transport, term to term, as from the soil to the map; global transport,
science to science.

Yes, this is the great Greek invention: ana-logy, the logos that transits,
passes from bottom to top and from top to bottom, kata logon, the word
that slides and passes, wanders and is exchanged, and which nevertheless
doesnt pass since everything is evaluated and measured owing to its
transport, the fixed message of flying Hermes. No, its not a question of
cutting some thing up into parts and so of dividing up or deducting, which
everyone, generous or one-sided, has known how to do since the world
has lain under the light of the sun and the ferocity of war, but rather of
constructing, step by step, a chain, therefore of finding what, stable, transits
along its sequence.
Logos ana or kata meaning or sign, form or call, unveilingwho
knows?the word matters less than its motion, than the space of its
movement, than its sliding, than the prepositions that accompany it and
show, indicate, index, govern, demonstrate its passage, mark the syntax or
organization, the how of its sequence, of its mastered flowing: those long
chains of reason, entirely simple and easy
Here we find invented the first language of science; yes, here it is then,
the authentic invention, the discovery or the unblocking of the sliding
element, stable and slippery, of this endless discourse whose course begins
to flow infinitely as soon as it thus surpasses the threshold of percolation.
The relation-logos engenders the discourse-logos through the sequence of
the word-logos. This is how the genesis of the grand narrative of science
begins.

THE MEASUREMENT OF THE EARTH: HERODOTUS205

The lesson of the two legends
From nature to customs, from barter to the exchange governed by money,
from politics to the religious, from Aristotle, dealing with distributive
justice, to Euclids Book X, analogy slides: from the hard sciences to the
soft and conversely.
In separating the two types of legends, that of the world and that of
men, we read the utopia of the sociologists or politicians, whose vision
and life neglect the outside world of things as such, and the symmetrical
utopia of the scientists who call themselves realists, but whose eyes and
actions neglect the relations between men. On the first island or on one
wing of the chimera, everything is only political, social, or human; on the
second wing or island, objects suffice. Yet the things take vengeance on
men, who, among themselves, take vengeance on things, which, without
saying anything

Union, intersection
Supposing that we know how to unite, in the set theory sense, both
utopias, we would contemplate or produceoh, surprisethe concrete
in its plenitude, that is, societies, cities, and countrysides, in the world of
mountains and plains, sailors at sea, artisans equipped with their tools,
the dense totality of the real and not merely words: a landscape whose
rare splendor would cause the philosophers heart to race and inspired the
religious.
Yet if this union does perform a miracle in theory, even though we live
immersed in it every day, we dont truly know whether its intersection,
again in the set theory sense, exists and, if so, whether its full or empty.
If we assume it to be full then it is populated with existents with
objective and collective status at the same time, with those I in the past
called quasi-objects, object tracers of intersubjective relations in the group.
If we assume it to be empty then whatever dimension is assumed for it,
by moving on or in it, one must at some moment arrive at the border of the
collective or the shores of the objective, as though this intersection played
a role in the process of beginning.
The set of legends that recount their establishment constantly speak
these two principal voices: the Egyptian harpedonaptai repair the damages
caused by the flooding of the Nilethis is the worldand maintain the
cadaster map for the calculation of the tax basethis is human politics;
at the foot of the three pyramids, Thales observes the rays of the sun and
structures our vision with his theoremthat is the world, andthis is

206GEOMETRY
menscorns the Pharaohs powers cut into the tombs stones, the way
Diogenes demanded that Alexander remove himself from his sun; does
such a double and dubious balance express the equilibrium of heavy bodies
or distributive justice? Does some given initial text by Euclid likewise
say the stability of heavy bodies or the agreement between participants?
Does some given dialogue let an objective noise be heard or the collective
disagreement?
The problem of the multiple origins of mathematical forms, the
deciphering of the legends that recount them reduce to the space thats
open or closed by this conjunction or disjunction of divergence or coordi-
nation, a conjunction and disjunction which both designate and describe
the intersection, empty or full, of these two utopias. Here lies the place of
the source and its gushing forth.

Collective-objective
What should we call the empty intersection between two utopias?
The abstract. What should we name the quasi-object thrown into this
abstraction? The mathematical object.
Why? Because first of all it achieves about itself the complete agreement
of the community, whatever that community may be, a unique contract
never accepted by men; because secondly it is applicable at leisure to the
objects of the world as such, I mean free from all collective intervention.
A perfect objective model, such as none other has ever been found; an
excellent tracer of a noiseless network, whose like has never been seen. In
sum, a paradoxical object, exceptional at every point, but above all through
this association.
We dont know if an intersection between the objective and the
subjective exists, but if it does exist, full or empty, it is filled with those
absent objects called mathematical idealities. The science that we qualify
in this way is indeed not, as we know, a social science nor, as we also know,
a science of the world either; nor a politics, nor a sociology, nor a physics,
nor a biology perhaps we dont even know how to define it, which is
why we sometimes refer it to an ideal heaven at the extremes of the real
or to a transcendental knowledge, the innermost of the innermost, that is
to say, to the limits of the two utopic spaces, the double body of a sterile
unicorn.
Although it may not be either the one or the other, it is nevertheless
both the one and the other since it is so well applicable to the things of the
world that no one can know them without it and since it achieves so well
the universal agreement between men that we know of no other example

THE MEASUREMENT OF THE EARTH: HERODOTUS207

of agreement that would be as perfect or of universality that would be as
complete and saturated.
The collective understanding is founded on its objective necessity at
the same time as this necessity is founded on this understanding: such a
simultaneity is only met with here.

The source-place
Geometric space or arithmetic counting or the step-by-step algorithmic
process are all three born from this intersection long believed to be
empty and null and which I believe and know is nonetheless the true world,
paradisiacal, real, rich and complete, the dense reality, whose two compo-
nents, natural and cultural, are only two utopian subtractions, meager and
poor.
This abundantly explains why mathematics gives to those who love it,
practice it, use it or better yet, invent it, the immediate and experimental,
yes, the lived certainty of the inescapable presence of a horn of plenty from
which everything is always drawn from nothing. Of course, everything is
found there, but we dont have the eyes to see it!
Here, in the center of the two bodies, is the blind spot; here is the
bottom of the horn of plenty!

Have we ever truly observed to what extent this science, so commonly

shared by all the others, remains unique, rare and paradoxical, to the
ultimate limits? Outside the world and in the world, immanent and
transcendent, without human presence and nonetheless universal for
collective relations.
Spaces without object in which every object no matter which is
situated or measured; spaces without eye in which the entire optical scene
becomes clear and organized; spaces empty of man in which elementary
social relations are canonized and appeased, as in an excellent contract,
in which for example profit or loss equal sales minus purchases, in which
divisions are organized, in which exchanges are balanced, in which taxes
and tributes are calculated, in which equation guarantees equity; you
might think Hermes himself, the god of luck, was passing through them.
Without any object, with every object; without any relation, detached or
abstract, defining and including every relation; a science therefore thats
non-objective and entirely objective; entirely relational and non-relational.

Mathematics is therefore: so objective that only it is truly collective; so

collective that only it is truly objective; so useless that only it is truly

208GEOMETRY
useful; so external that only it is truly internal; so internal that only it is
truly external; so in being that it excels in knowledge; so in knowledge
that it excels in being; so abstract that only it is truly concrete, so concrete
even that it was sometimes believed that its space was the form of outer
intuition
so concrete lastly that only it is truly abstract: the birth of its
abstraction, as Im therefore showing it, ensues from the integral sum of
the most concrete real which it traverses.
Eminently object, it absorbs every object; a collective subject, eminently,
it thinks all by itself, so that we have become its Levites and priests in
charge. Since its birth, willingly or not, we have lived and thought in and
through it.

What then, to finish, is a mathematical object? An excellent and limit

quasi-object.

The earth and the Earth

We are at the end of the travels of Thales or Democritus, the Egyptian
peasants and the royal harpedonaptes
Who in fact transports? Hermes, the Greek translation of Thoth, an
Egyptian god, this is his double name; passing and flying both of them,
they connect places that are separated and thus install smooth spaces. The
homogeneity of space comes from the sum of these transports.
The gnomon that comes out of the earth links it to the heavens and the
light. Thus the pure space of geometry first sums up the heavens and the
earth, both physical, but also the templum and the pagus, the agora and the
court and consequently unites the earth to the state, and the commodities
market to the pages filled by scribes and ministers.
A unitary Earth appears then, astronomical, natural, real, inhabited, culti-
vated, ruled by the laws of gods and kings, a thick earth, agrarian, pragmatic,
geographical, religious, political, judicial and knowing at the same time,
whose geometry smooths out the area, and whose abstraction and purity sum
up or form the synopsis and the synthesis of this common and full reality.
The sudden connection between these specifications, the lightning-
fast transports that link them created a white box, one generalizing lines
similar to Zenos segment or regular bodies like the tetrahedron, in brief,
a basin such that the source appeared and we went beyond the threshold
of percolation.
Ever since the whitening of this space by Hermes passage and connec-
tions, everything has flowed. Even our history.

THE MEASUREMENT OF THE EARTH: HERODOTUS209

Our habitat
Greece inhabited this white space and made it so that we have never since
stopped inhabiting it as our own territory. Geometry integrates all our
practical or ideal habitats the way white light sums up all the colors, in
transparency or translucency.
I remember having approached one day, humbly, the pure and
transparent tetrahedron of Geometry in space so as to wait, almost a half-
century, for a new sun to rise behind this prism and project onto the sand
in front of me, an ignorant child crossing the desert, dazzled like Thales or
Diogenes in their time, the complete range of several diverse places, like
the component shades of an invisibility, shades distributed as in language
are distinguished the temple, the agrarian zone, the camp, the city, utopia,
the theaters stage, the court, the page elements of our former habitat,
and so as to hope, for more than four decades, to understand who lives
there and how they reside there, in violence or peace, by or against
exclusion. I only understood our former house at the moment I grasped
that the pure and translucent polyhedron was the gnomon, whose space
comprehended.
Yes, its abstraction is a sum and not a subtraction. Without this white
synthesis of the space of every passage we would have to resort to a
perpetual miracle so as not to understand why mathematics in general and
this space of geometry in particular are universally applicable to men and
the things of the world without exception.
Our earth of light, a measured house, integrated the set of these habitats.
We now inhabit this space like a house, or even better, like our earth: the
meter is the Earth, that is the deep meaning of the term geometry. We no
longer have the slightest idea or perception of an earth without geometry,
before it or deprived of its expanse whose homogeneous transparency
bathes us and traverses our bodies, lying or standing upright, extending
its wingspan, deprived of its long, wide and high triple arrow thats so
universal that the entire universe is immersed in it. So much did Greek
acculturation inform us and thus naturalize the world that the not very
perspicacious Kant took the space thus purified to be the form of our outer
intuition!
Yes, the things of the world and our bodies therefore became Euclidean
and became so anchored in this paradoxical earth, strange because
isotropic and translucent, that we still have trouble today showing philoso-
phers that our senses are sometimes immersed in entirely different spaces,
topological or projective ones, chaotic or fractal ones, so strong does their
belief remain that the space stemming from ancient geometry remains our

210GEOMETRY
only earth, even though the Earth, archaic and new, is globally constructed
elsewhere, without their blinded gazes.

Hope
Over the course of the twentieth century we detached ourselves little by
little from the space of the earth that we had inhabited for three millennia,
so that little by little the space of solar light, of agriculture, of the sacred, of
war, of nation states, of the written page disappeared from our sight, all of
which geometry expressed, together, in its summing purity.
Now bodies, messages, information, knowledge, light in its speed
more than its brightness circulate in mass: a new space of new trans-
ports is installed on a global Earth, a space more mixed than pure, more
blended, variegated, tiger-striped, zebra-striped, in multiple and connected
networks, than smooth or homogeneous.
Perhaps we are leaving the simple connections that Hermes knotted
with his caduceus in order to regain the transports of multicolored legions
of myriads of Archangels through the ubiquity of messages. Ancient
science spoke of tables and causes; the new science seeks computers and
scenarios of the possible.
Across these new percolating networks, a new science and another
habitat, a new city, a new universe are being prepared, and for the same
reasons as those this book evokes from the ancient knowledge and the
ancient house, whose birth occupied the cities and islands of the Logos
written by Thales, Eudoxus, Herodotus, or Saint John the Evangelist
Im waiting for the dawn, tomorrow, the crossing, in this network, of the
threshold of percolation.
A flow will flow: new endless discourses, other grand narratives.

THE MEASUREMENT OF THE EARTH: HERODOTUS211

212
NOTES

The universal: One of its first

constructions
1 Earth=terre, which will sometimes be translated as land and
occasionally ground in this work. All footnotes are the translators.
2 Software=logiciel, which evokes the softness of the logos.
Hardware=matriel, which evokes material and the material world.

The differences: Chaos in the history

of science
1 Cathedral=cathdre; dihedral=didre; polyhedron=polydre. The word
chaise most commonly means chair.
2 Exasperated is probably being used in its etymological sense of made
rough.
3 Graphe=graphe, which normally means graph, but which Serres seems
to be using in this work mostly in its etymological sense of writing or
drawing. Hence I write it as graphe to indicate a non-standard usage.
Graphism one paragraph below translates graphisme, which normally
refers to the way a language is represented by written signs.
4 Topological varieties=varits topologiques, which would normally be
translated as topological manifolds in a mathematical context, but
the context here doesnt seem technical. Though Serres does evoke this
technical sense two sections below.
Synthesis: The science of history
1 A reference to the epitaph of Jacques de La Palice: Ci gt le Seigneur de La
Palice: Sil ntait pas mort, il ferait encore envie [Here lies Monsieur de La
Palice, if he werent dead, he would still be envied.] Envie can be misread
as en vie: if he werent dead he would still be alive. The f in ferait could
easily be confused with the antiquated long s. His name has become
synonymous with stating the obvious.
2 Serres mostly does not provide transliterations of the Greek. Im
providing them for the convenience of the reader.
3 Couloir comes from the French verb couler, to flow.
Flowing=coulement, also derived from couler.
4 My translation of the famous lines from Apollinaires Mirabeau Bridge.
5 Pass=passer; sieve=passoire.
6 Nepas is how French negates. For instance, cela ne passe pas [it doesnt
pass].
7 Cutting=coupage, which would normally mean here the blending or
diluting of wines. My use of cutting is meant in the sense of blending a
non-active ingredient into a drug.
8 Holdings=tenues, which may be related to the tenir in maintenant [now],
literally holding in ones hand. Relevant meanings here would be holding
a note or not changing over time.
9 Places=lieux, which derives from the Latin locus, can also be translated
as site. I will use one or the other depending on whichever fits the
context better, but mostly place. Gathering=cueillette; from above,
collection basin=bassin de recueil.
10 When Serres speaks of the grain that dies here, he is most likely referring
to one of his favorite Biblical passages, from John 12:24: if a kernel dies it
produces many seeds.
11 Welcoming basin=bassin accueillant. From earlier, collection
basin=bassin de recueil.
12 A restanque is a stone wall built across an intermittent stream bed that
collects soil on its upstream side for cultivation, usually in Provence. The
term has also come to mean a stone retaining wall built on a hillside to
create arable land.
13 Excluded Third or Middle=tiers-exclu, which normally means the
excluded middle in logic, but Serres also uses it in the literal sense of

214Notes
 excluding some third person or thing. Ill translate it as whichever sense
seems more prevalent given the context and sometimes as both, as here.
14 White blanks=des blancs. Im assuming Serres means this term in both
senses here.
15 Glues=colle.

First in history: Anaximander

1 Being-there=ltre-l. This Heideggerian term is usually left in the
German in English, dasein. This passage reads as a quick critique of
Heideggerian Being and dwelling. One of his works is entitled Holzwege
[woodpaths].
2 Prosecution, conviction and punishment=vindicte. Hereafter I will
shorten it simply to prosecution for euphonys sake. I should point out
that it derives from the Latin vindicta, revenge or vengeance.
3 An open set=un ouvert, which literally reads as an open. Open set
has many definitions, one of which is a set that does not include its
boundary.
4 Case=cause; thing=chose, which has the same root as cause: the Latin
causa, a lawsuit or judicial process.
5 Precisely=justement, which can also mean justly.
6 The etymology of poetic is a Greek word meaning productive.
7 Droit is always human law; loi can be either human law or natural law.
8 Herodotuss Histories 1.94.
9 Alloys=allis, which evokes allies as well as alloys. In the next section,
alloyed ally translates alli.
10 The etymology of lieutenant is placeholder.
11 Whole=ensemble, which can mean the entirety of something, but also
a mathematical set. Serres often seems to be using it in both senses.
Several pages below I translate it as whole set. It is mostly translated as
set in this work.
12 Mle has the same meaning in English as in French, but the reader
should be advised that it derives from a French verb for mixing.
13 Penser [to think] derives from the Latin pensare, to weigh, to assess,
peser, in French.

Notes215
14 Roundabout point=ronde-point, which literally reads as round-point,
but roundabout is also meant here. Below Ill merely translate it as
round-point.

First in the rite: The royal victim

1 Barreled space, ball or paving stone=espace tonnel, boule, pav, all of
which are terms used by Bourbaki.
2 Relation=rapport, which shares the same suffix as transport. The suffix
comes from the verb porter, which means to carry or bear. I should also
mention that rapport can also be translated as ratio in a mathematical
context. Mostly I have avoided doing so since Serres seems to emphasize
relation in general over the specific relation that is a ratio.
3 Divide=coupure; interrupted time=temps coupures; cut off from in
the first paragraph of this section is coupe de, all of which are based on
couper, to cut.
4 Stilus=stile, which isnt in the French dictionary, probably refers to
the Latin stilus, meaning stake, pale, pointed writing instrument and
possibly goad.
5 Agonal=agonale, in the sense of an agon.
6 Even=pair, which also has the sense of peer.
7 The other is Galileo. The famous phrase attributed to him, and yet it
moves, in French literally translates as, and yet it turns.
8 Bridge in the previous sentence is pont.

First in dialectic: The interlocutor

1 Handwriting=graphisme, which I will mostly render hereafter as
graphism. All instances of handwriting render
2 Entendre can mean both understanding and hearing.
3 Interfering parasites=parasites.
4 A reference to an anecdote regarding Aesop.
5 To occupy a counter-productive or counter-communicative
role=tenir un rle contre-productif ou contre-communicatif
[translators highlighting].

216Notes
6 Openings=ouverts, which as we have seen can mean open sets.
Closings=ferms, which can also mean a closed set.
7 In-stances=instances, which can mean an authority with the power of
decision or the agencies of the psyche in Freuds psychology. I have
used both of these translationsauthority and agencyin this work
(every occurrence of these words in this text translates instance). In a
linguistic context, it can mean an instance of discourse. It might loosely
mean an instance of something. But here it is not at all clear what it
means. Perhaps it should be taken in its etymological sense of instans,
standing near or in, being present. When it clearly doesnt mean some
kind of decision-making body or Freudian-style agency, Ill write it as
in-stance to differentiate it from the common English meaning of the
term. In my experience, Serres use of this term outside of a legal context
is very context-dependent. It is even a possibility that the prefix in-
might at times be a negation, a non-stance.
8 Geometry=La Gomtrie, with a capital G.

First in history: Thales

1 Auguste Comte, Philosophie premire: Cours de philosophie positive,
leons 1 45, ed. Michel Serres, Franois Dagognet, and Allal Sinaceur
(Paris: Hermann, 1975), Troisime leon, pp. 6768.
2 Ibid., Onzime leon, p. 176.
3 Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclids Elements, trans.
Glenn R. Morrow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 275.
4 Paul Tannery, La Gomtrie grecque (1887; reprint ed., New York: Arno
Press, 1976).
5 Techniques=techniques, which can mean either technique or technology.
In the previous two sections Serres used it in the sense of technology.
6 Shaded surface=ombre propre, which literally means own shadow and
refers to the shaded surface of the object casting a shadow. Serres will
treat this as a kind of shadow, so I will translate it as shaded surface
shadow.
7 Black=noir, which Ive mostly translated as dark in this part of the
book.
8 Interest derives from the Latin inter, between, and esse, to be.

Notes217
9 Logistique was a term used around the time of Descartes meaning the
four basic operations of mathematics.
10 Grip=mainmise, which along with the word maintenance, literally
holding in hand, highlights the hand, main.
11 Reason or ratio=raison. The French says two statements. I have to
presume a typo.
12 Serres is probably referring to the Descending Passage of the Great
Pyramid which formerly aimed at Alpha Draconis, which in ancient
times was the north star.
13 Layer=gisement, which is derived from gsir, the verb used on
tombstones for here lies. Gisement can also refer to a mineral deposit.
14 Cathode and anabasis should be taken in their etymological senses of
descending and going up.
15 It might be helpful to be specific. Hilberts famous quip [my translation]:
Tables, chairs, and beer mugs can be said at any time instead of points,
straight lines, and planes.
16 To understand what follows, it is very useful to have a GreekEnglish
edition of Euclids definitions from Book 1.
17 Triclinium=lit de table, which literally reads as table bed.
18 Sense=sens, which can mean meaning or direction. I will translate this
word as sense in this passage, appealing to the less common directional
meaning of the term as well as to the semantic one.
19 The diagram on the right is designed after an illustration in Serres
Elments dhistoire des sciences (Paris: Bordas, 2003), p. 115. This book
includes an earlier version of much of this discussion of the gnomon,
replete with extra illustrations and comments. For this illustration, he
wrote: Each like sign arranged in an angled shape provides a count of the
odd numbers that must be successively added to construct a new square.
On the numbers, the bands of the framing square can be found. Cf.
p. 166.
20 Descartes wrote his Discourse on Method in a pole or stove-warmed
room.

218Notes
First in philosophy: The ignorant
slave boy
1 I have made one modification to Jowetts translation to bring it into line
with Serres text as I have translated it.
2 See the Meno 81bc, where Socrates cites Pindar as evidence of immortal
souls and multiple lives.
3 Duplication in the sense of doubling the area.
4 Geometry=la Gomtrie, with a capital G.
5 The Greek pharmakon can mean a drug that cures or poisons. By
pharmaceutical here, Serres is referring to the pharmakos, a ritual
sacrificial victim or a person exiled as a scapegoat.
6 Not showable, indemonstrable=non montrable, indmontrable.
7 The comment for the above diagram, from Serres Elments (p. 137),
reads: The lines of the diagonals of the pentagram reconstruct a
pentagon whose diagonals endlessly cause another pentagon to appear.

First in logic: The element

1 Lines=traits. Often line will translate ligne as well.
2 Of course, Serres wrote French instead of English.
3 Abstracting: drawing a line from=abstraire : tirer un trait de. Abstraire
and trait share a common etymology, trahere, to draw. Tirer can mean
both to draw a line and to draw something from something.
4 Canon derives from a Greek word meaning a straight measuring rod.

The measurement of the earth:

Herodotus
1 Departing from= partir de, a phrase that Serres is quite fond of which
Ive usually translated as starting from or from.
2 A polos or is a concave portion of a sphere in which a gnomons
shadow is projected.

Notes219