Post-Scriptum: Of Enemies & Venison (2026)
After a conversation with Matt Bluemink and Alessandro Sbordoni—during which my ability to express myself was greatly hampered by my limited mastery of English—it seemed important to return briefly to the topic of the book. These reflections could certainly have been incorporated into the text itself, but the distance I felt with the text during the editing process has now given way to a newfound closeness. My book ends on an open note, leaving everyone the chance to make their own of what is discreetly developed within it. The current state of the world compels me to clarify certain points as well. If, after reading the book, some might be tempted to entertain the idea of renewing something like the idea of sacrifice, that is not my intention. Certainly, I do not believe that attempting to establish something like a “mystical community”—as Bataille and the Acéphale group tried to do—is an interesting path to take. Moreover, sacrifice—as a stabilizing force for a social body—has never truly disappeared; this is the lesson René Girard teaches us.1 In any case, I do not believe that any form of re-enchantment of the world is a viable path for the Western world. However, (and this is what I want to focus on here) the dynamic of identification described in my work—just like the concept of buen vivir (Sumak Kawsay)—has the potential to be reinterpreted outside its original cosmological context. I would therefore like to highlight two implications regarding this.
1. First of all, I believe that the dynamics of identification I explore in my book can serve as an antidote to a view of politics reduced to a friend-enemy dichotomy. The Schmittian conception—which has left its mark on everyone from the Tiqqunians to the neo-reactionaries of Dark Alignments, and even, it must be noted, none other than King Macron—is by no means a critical conception of politics. On the contrary, it is merely an expression of a technical state of the world in which othering is a sine qua non condition for acting upon the world and relating to others. This technical state, as discussed in the text, takes on a certain murderous radicalism in its configuration with the nation(alism)-biopolitics-state triptych, which manifests in Canadian necropolitics toward First Nations as well as in ICE raids in the United States aimed at expelling all internal enemies and purifying the social body. In fact, at a time of global remilitarization (is this truly new, one might humbly ask?), the reaffirmation of nation-states, and a supposed restructuring of the world order as asserted by Mark Carney in Davos, Schmittian political thought seems strangely in vogue. There is reason to be skeptical.
I certainly believe it is important to understand and take this concept into account in order to have a pragmatic view of politics (in the sense of the politics promoted by the Empire we are facing) but it seems to me that this view must be transcended. While war is indeed an age-old practice of our species, that does not mean it can be anything other than “a slave revolt of technology”2 or that our relationships must be conceived solely in terms of a warlike relationship. No one is surprised that our “lived-world”—in other words, our world of experience shared with others—and that the conditions under which we reproduce interpersonal relationships, are in fact altered by something like a technical system. This is what a recently deceased liberal German philosopher—formerly a Marxist—would have said.
Without having studied the matter in depth, Derrida seems to offer an interesting avenue with his concept—both ethical and political—of “hospitality” and “hostipitality,” which “owes nothing to the comfort of homogeneity or stability, and is prepared to expose both the individual self and collective standards to the risk of the unknown and unforeseeable.”3 At the risk of opening oneself to the enemy, perhaps there is something like the possibility of a beneficial perversion. Certainly, it may be this very risk—which Schmitt’s paranoid-fascist-immunological project of the social fears so much—that we must praise4 and put at the service of an extreme radicalization of friendship. “Does[n’t] the work of politics, the properly political act or operation, amount to creating (producing, making, etc.) as much friendship as possible?”5 But is political friendship possible without Schmittian enmity looming on the horizon? This is a question to which we have no answer. However, identification, as an ethical requirement—this is how it must be understood by those who wish to renew it—appears as a relationship to others in which the self is always at stake, responsible in its relationship with the other, whether the other is human or not. In the Mesoamerican world, you are the other, the object, nature, the enemy (who is never human). It is the ground assumed for the emergence of the self, which can be neither reified nor denied due to the inevitable consequences. This is one of the paths we are trying to chart for a possible future politic, whichever name it may be given.
2. Perhaps, then, our central proposition is something akin to an ethic—that which serves as a tool of legitimization, a kind of “hand soap” for both geneticists and AI developers alike. This does not mean we should declare it de facto powerless: the strength of an ethic can only come from its ability to be translated into concrete political action. Therein lies the implicit proposition underlying my writing; the answer to “how can we apply what is found in the book?” A political community, for example, could incorporate the necessity of identification and its counterpoint—the refusal of othering—as a condition for accepting a technology. If that technology—whether it be a killer drone, a nuclear bomb, the Tinder app, algorithmic recommendations, prisons, or methods used in psychiatry—does not meet this condition, then it is rejected.
I am convinced that the implementation of this requirement would mark a radical break with what many have termed “Zweckrationalität” or “instrumental rationality”—a rationality in which means are subordinated to ends, one that has no qualms about manipulating living beings and has played a major role in the widespread depoliticization of society. It also stands in stark contrast to the political agenda of technofascists like Yarvin Curtis or Peter Thiel, who see technology as an “incredible alternative to politics,” a way to “change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you.”6
The requirement for identification does, admittedly, presuppose political autonomy and a certain capacity for action. There needs to be something like the forms-of-life we have described, but that is not a done deal. And yet, all over the world, people want to reclaim their means of existence and their lives. But as Agamben wrote 30 years ago:
In the current structure of Western societies (liberal democracies, capitalist nations, nation-states), the all-too-often repeated refrain that technology operates autonomously or that no one truly makes decisions tends to push us toward authoritarian and decisionist forms akin to those of Schmitt. Yet technologies such as AI in its contemporary form, with all that it entails—even if “nobody asked for this,” as a friend once told me—have nonetheless emerged from a very specific complex of political, entrepreneurial, and economic actors (spheres that overlap). If we can believe that artifacts are political because they are 1. designed to produce a specific political effect (e.g., Robert Moses’s bridges in New York, deliberately built too low to prevent buses—and thus the poor—from passing) or 2. can only exist within a particular social configuration (e.g., nuclear energy), their acceptance remains in fine a political choice.8 The question of technology, whether technodeterminists like it or not, is therefore not technological, but political.
I hope this clarifies my point somewhat and broadens the discussion. The attentive reader will have already noticed what has just been written between the lines of the book.
Endnotes
1 Girard, R. 19777. La violence et le sacré. Paris : Grasset.
2 Benjamin, W. (1991) 'Théories du fascisme allemand. À propos du collectif Guerre et Guerriers édité par Ernst Jünger', Lignes, 1(13), p.64
3 Shildrick, M. (2005) 'Transgressing the law with Foucault and Derrida: some reflections on anomalous embodiment', Critical Quarterly, 47(3), p. 42.
4 Dufourmantelle, A. (2019) In Praise of Risk. Translated by S. Rendall. New York: Fordham University Press.
5 Derrida, J. (1994) Politiques de l'amitié. Suivi de L'oreille de Heidegger. Paris: Éditions Galilée. p.255
6 Libertopia (2010) Peter Thiel at Libertopia 2010. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgH7Lv2gQdk&t=902s .
7 Agamben, G. (1993) The Coming Community. Translated by M. Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p.86
8 Winner, L. (1980) ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’, Daedalus, 109(1), pp. 121-136 pp.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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