The Blogs: Stéphane Zagdanski Interview | Alex Gilbert #263 | Alexandre Gilbert

Stéphane Zagdanski is a french philosopher and analyzed the context of Christopher Columbus journey in his ‘webinar’, launched in September 2019, on the Genocidal Management of the Globe.” Extracts.

The Genocidal Management of the Globe

Pierre Legendre, in a recent preface to an essay by a contemporary Japanese author focusing on the casuistry of moral dilemmas in classical theater, revisits what I term the mutual fusion-acquisition between the Roman Empire and the katholikê ekklêsia:

“In principle, Christianity claims to draw from the biblical source, the Torah; but upon closer examination, one observation becomes undeniable: the inventiveness of the Christian construct functioned as a de-Judaized Judaism [emphasis added], divorced from Jewish normative practices. This culture, referred to as Judeo-Christian, managed to assert itself socially and achieve a global political destiny [emphasis added], not solely by its own merits, but thanks to its alliance with the legal reservoir of ancient Rome. This alliance was cemented in the Middle Ages, in the 12th century, by the centralism of the papacy imitating the Roman Empire (imitatio Imperii) [emphasis added].”

Nearly twelve centuries after Constantine’s conversion (312 / 1492), Christopher Columbus, one of the main initiators of planetary colonization—not just in practice but intellectually—owed his dreadful success to two entities that were logically complicit: Technology and the “Universal Assembly” (katholikê ekklêsia).

Indeed, the caravels represented a remarkable technological innovation, particularly with their so-called “lateen sails,” which, able to rotate around the masts (reflecting the idea of “turning” inherent in the etymology of “universal”), allowed them to sail against the wind—thus reaching territories previously unattainable by maritime navigation.

This was the first technical breakthrough: the “lateen sails” of Christopher Columbus’s caravels.

What Is Particular About the Universal

The second element, theological, that allowed Imago Mundi by Pierre d’Ailly—the young Columbus’s bedside book—to project its conception of the world into geographical reality, transforming Concept into Conquest, was the papal bulls. These served as the theoretical foundation and rhetorical canon, ideologically justifying the encomienda system: a paternalistic, semi-slavery, and evangelizing colonization regime implemented throughout the Spanish colonial empire starting in the 16th century.

Imago Mundi, that initial map of the world as it was envisioned at the time, inherently represented an “assault” on the world. Columbus would bring this conception into geographical reality, launching an actual assault on the world with the technical aid of his three caravels.

The Genocidal Management of the Globe

Thus, there is a theoretical basis—linked to everything we have discussed so far—specific to the Catholic and Western conceptions of the universal. Let’s examine these, and you will see how undeniable they are.

It is no coincidence that the year of Columbus’s first voyage (August 3, 1492) also marked the expulsion of Jews from Spain (August 2, 1492). As Christopher Columbus embarked on his journey, it was the Western Catholic notion of the universal that was about to be unleashed upon the world. But this universalism needed to first rid itself of what resisted it most.

Conceptually, theologically, spiritually, what resisted it the most was Judaism:

The commandment of charity toward the Stranger—toward the one who is not oneself, who must be treated as oneself, precisely because one has, at some point, been in their position. “You shall love the Stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19). This is central to Jewish thought.
The deep mystical attachment to a single plot of land, confined between Egypt and the Jordan River, known as Eretz Israel. This concept is as crucial for Judaism as “universal” is for Catholicism. Symbolically, it is the locus of all places, where God has made His residence—a real geographical place that one can visit, not comparable to the Roman, Catholic, Spanish, Portuguese, or American empires.
The absence of proselytizing aggression typical of Rabbinic Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple. While there were proselytizing currents and rivalries among Jewish sects, early Christians, and Jewish-Christians for converting pagans, by the time Columbus set off on his expeditions, Judaism was inherently non-proselytizing. In this regard, it contrasts sharply with universalist thought, which is always hyper-proselytizing.

These three elements—respect for the Stranger, attachment to a small geographic locus (Eretz Israel), and a lack of proselytizing aggression—made Judaism spiritually unfit to formulate an Imago Mundi, which owes everything to Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pliny the Elder, the Church Fathers (such as Saint Augustine), and Islamic scholars (Averroes and Avicenna), but nothing to “a small people with a separate abode,” whose God, as expressed in Midrash, is “the place of the world” but not bound to it.

The Universal as a Mechanism of Control

You can see that a religion centered on this type of “God” cannot be universal in the common sense of the word, let alone imperialistic. It is a conception of God and place fundamentally different from Christian thought. The Christian conception of place and God within Catholicism is the theological breath propelling Columbus’s lateen sails, capable of turning on themselves and thus navigating against the wind. It’s the same breath that inspired the papal bulls that preceded Columbus’s voyages by just a few decades.

Dum Diversas, the first of these papal bulls, dated June 18, 1452:

“By our apostolic authority, we grant you [the kings of Spain and Portugal] complete and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens, pagans, and all other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, along with their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other possessions… and to reduce their persons to perpetual servitude.”

Another Papal Bull from the same period, Romanus Pontifex, January 8, 1455:

“The Roman Pontiff, successor to the bearer of the keys to the kingdom of heaven and vicar of Jesus Christ, contemplating with a fatherly spirit…”

This is extraordinary! This papal bull bases the authority of the Pope on the act of contemplating — it’s still about vision, a universal panoptic view —

“…all the various latitudes of the world and the characteristics of all the nations that inhabit them, and seeking and desiring the salvation of all [emphasis added], he firmly orders and decrees, after careful deliberation, those things which he believes are pleasing to His Divine Majesty, by which he may bring the sheep entrusted to him by God into the one divine fold, thus granting them the reward of eternal happiness and the forgiveness of their souls.”

This “fatherly” bull confirms the notion that the universal cannot even imagine not being universal. The ideology of universality, intrinsic to the Catholic Church and now to the entire Western ideology that arose from the merger of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, cannot even conceive of an other — except to subjugate it — to its universality. This is more than blindness; it is an absolute denial, without which it would collapse.

Through this bull with its “fatherly spirit,” Pope Nicholas V grants Alfonso V of Portugal exclusive rights over trade, colonization, and slavery across all lands south of Cape Bojador in Africa.

The first bull was directed at the Kingdom of Spain, specifically the Spanish Empire, and the second at the Portuguese Empire. The world was essentially divided between the two Catholic empires of the time. A third bull would soon follow, just a year after Columbus’s first voyage, Inter Cætera, issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493, reestablishing the balance in favor of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs:

“But behold, after having, with God’s permission, recovered said Kingdom, you wished to carry out your purpose, and to our dear son Christopher Columbus, a most worthy and commendable man, well-suited to such a great task, providing him with ships and necessary crews, you gave him the laborious, dangerous, and costly mission to diligently seek out Continents and islands, distant and unknown, in a sea where no one had navigated before. These men, with God’s help, exerted great zeal in exploring the vast Ocean, where they discovered certain islands, very far away, and even continents that no one had yet found. Numerous nations inhabit these lands, living peacefully, reportedly accustomed to walking naked and refraining from eating meat. As far as your aforementioned envoys can conjecture, these same nations who inhabit the mentioned islands and continents believe that there is one sole Creator God in heaven; they appear quite ready to embrace the Catholic Faith and to be trained in good morals; and it is hoped that if they were instructed, the worship of our Savior, Jesus Christ, could be easily established in these continents and islands. Said Christopher has already built and established, on one of the main islands mentioned, a rather strong fort where he left certain Christians in his retinue, who will guard it and search for other remote and unknown islands and continents. In these same newly discovered islands and continents, gold, spices, and numerous other precious goods of various types and qualities are found.”

These people are candid; they do not hide their interests or their plans. This same Pope, Alexander VI, as Pierre Legendre notes in L’Empire du Management, “proclaimed the managerial ideal: ‘to undertake, to study, to diligently care, sparing no effort, expense, or dangers, even to the point of shedding one’s own blood.’”

Thus, the modern era was born, giving rise to a world in which Facebook would become the Imago Mundi and, until recently, Donald Trump, the buffoonish pontifex maximus.

What stands out — as we see in the end of the bull where the Pope mentions that they have already discovered gold, spices, and a vast number of precious items in these newly discovered islands and continents — what also stands out in the merger between the Roman Empire and the katholikê ekklêsia is the embryonic mobilization of what, fifteen centuries later — aided by scholarly logic, evangelical theology, and the “spirit of Protestantism” — would produce the capitalist devastation of the world.

It turns out that this capitalist devastation of the world was already contained within the word “universal.” You’ll see how this all comes full circle perfectly. The Indo-European root sol, found at the end of “univer-sal,” also gave rise to the Latin solidus, meaning “massive, solid,” which, as Jacqueline Picoche explains, was abbreviated in late Latin to nummus solidus, a “stable gold coin from the time of Constantine”… There exists an intimate relationship between the word “universal” and the “thing” conceived as the most universal: money, the “stable gold coin.”