Modern Age - Winter 2018 - 84

Modern Age

*

Winter 2018

communities, that the articulation between command and obedience is the most explicitly clear and thematized, as well as carried out with the most care. This is in particular the case of ancient
republics and of Christian religious communities.
As we have abandoned ourselves more and more completely,
or more and more resolutely, to the inertia of laissez-faire or of
letting be, we have lost sight of the central role of command in
practical life, including especially the commanding role of the
law as a rule of common action. We put our faith in the postulate
that a certain inaction, or a certain abstention, is at the origin of
the greatest goods. At the same time as the flux that carries away
the products of our activities swells and accelerates, we take off
the brakes and abstain from actions that would tend to moderate
and to direct the movement of people and of things. We believe,
moreover, that nothing is more pointless or sterile in general than
the tension proper to the acting person, whether he is concerned
with this world or with the other. "Avoid stress," "stay cool," "take it
easy"-these are a few versions of the only commandment whose
validity we recognize.
The grammar of human life has been reduced for us to enjoyment or suffering. Between these two modes of passivity that
claim all our attention and provide the matter of all our new rights,
there is no longer any space for acting. At the beginning of the
arc of the development of modernity, we deliberately abandoned
that law that commands and gives the rule to action, in favor of
the State that organizes the conditions of action, an action henceforth judged not by its rule but by its effects. Since this beginning,
the rule of action has been continually eroded and action itself
has been continually shrinking, while the effects of our actions, or
rather of our abstentions, become ever more crushing.
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Modern Age - Winter 2018

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Contents
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