An Introduction to Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking

Kostas Axelos, Vers la pensée planétaire: Le devenir-pensée du monde et le devenir-monde de la pensée (Minuit, 1964), 19. Toward the end of the introduction, Axelos states clearly an impasse: “Y aurait-il des nouveautés possibles, plus ou moins radicales? Pour le moment, aucun prophétisme, aucune rêverie et aucune utopie ne parviennent à dépasser cet état mouvant des choses. Ils restent muets et creux” (42). Axelos thinks that we are perhaps marching toward a planetary thinking that will be a retake (reprise) of the past and a preparation of the future.

For Heidegger, writing in the 1930s, planetarization implies a planetary lack of sensemaking (Besinnungslosigkeit), which is not limited to Europe but is also, for example, applicable to the United States and Japan. This lack of sensemaking is even more obvious today. Even if European philosophy completely reinvents itself, disruptive technologies will continue throughout the globe; see Martin Heidegger, GA66 Besinnung (1938/39) (Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 74.

Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 114.

Bruno Latour’s effort is the most remarkable in the past decade. Latour achieved this not only via writings but also through exhibitions and workshops.

Among all the outstanding works, just to mention a few, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (University of Chicago Press, 2021); Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015); William E. Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Duke University Press, 2017); Sam Mickey, Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence: Ecological Wisdom at the Intersection of Religion, Ecology, and Philosophy (Routledge, 2015); Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 1, Technics and Human Development (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), 188.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1; Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Howard Caygill, “Heidegger and the Automatic Earth Image,” Philosophy Today 65, no. 2 (2021).

Marshall McLuhan, “At the Moment of Sputnik the Planet Became a Global Theatre in Which There Are No Spectators but Only Actors,” Journal of Communication 24, no. 1 (1974): 49.

Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Georg Reimer, 1866), vol. 2, 286–87; also quoted by Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 8, footnote 28.

James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press, 2000).

The film, on the one hand, has a strong emphasis on national pride and, on the other hand, sets a cosmopolitan mission to save the whole of humanity.

United Nations, “UN Climate Report: It’s ‘Now or Never’ to Limit Global Warming to 1.5 Degrees” →.

Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being, trans. Johan Stambaugh (Harper & Row, 1972), 59.

For elaboration on thermodynamic ideology and its relation to postmodern discourse, see Yuk Hui, “Lyotard after Us,” in Lyotard and Critical Practice, ed. Kiff Bamford and Margret Grebowicz (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Before the synchronization in modern logistics, we saw already the synchronizing effect of clocks used in production. As Marx correctly observed in a letter to Engels, “the clock is the first automatic machine applied to practical purpose; the whole theory of production and regular motion was developed through it.” Quoted by Mumford, Myth of the Machine, vol. 1, 286.

Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Telos, 2006), 70.

Philippe Soulier, André Leroi-Gourhan: Une Vie (1911–1986) (CNRS, 2018), 287–88.

Georges Bataille, Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art (L’Atelier Contemporain, 2021).

André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (MIT Press, 1993).

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford University Press, 1998), 159. “Neglecting the crucial nature of these questions, Leroi-Gourhan reintroduces the very metaphysical notion of Homo faber, in a movement that can be found again, for example, in George Bataille … a notion opposed to that of Homo sapiens. This opposition between technicity and intellect is, however, contradicted by the role given later to writing, as technics, in the constitution of thought.”

Kant, Political Writings, 106.

Bruno Latour and his team worked on this project for many years until his death in 2022. I had the occasion to participate in Latour’s project in Shanghai in 2018, and to act as an advisor to the Taipei Biennial 2020, which Latour curated.

Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History, trans. Michael K. Boudaghs (Duke University Press, 2014), 1. In a very different vein, Axelos also considers Hegel as the philosopher who systematized and historicized the becoming thinking of the world and the becoming world of thinking in the nineteenth century. Axelos therefore declares that Hegel’s thinking remains unsurpassed: “sa logique n’est pas même comprise et sa philosophie de l’historie qui en découle n’aura qu’à se radicaliser et se généraliser advantage.” Axelos, Vers la pensée planétaire, 35.

Karatani, Structure of World History, 220.

Karatani, Structure of World History, 224.

See Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist, trans Arthur Goldhammer (Zone Books, 2000), 82.

G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford University Press, 2008).

G. W. F. Hegel, “The German Constitution,” in Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

This concept of the “organic machine” is taken from Claude Bernard, who distinguishes a mechanical machine from an organic machine that is animal. See Canguilhem, Vital Rationalist, 86. This imaginary organic machine could also be identified in Adam Smith’s concept of the market and its invisible hand. Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner compared Adam Smith’s invisible hand with Hegel’s cunning of reason, but it might be more appropriate to say that they were both influenced by the political epistemology of the organism. For Kittsteiner’s comment, see Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, Listen der Vernunft: Motive geschichtsphilosophischen Denkens (Fischer, 1998).

Canguilhem, Vital Rationalist, 302.

Karl Marx, “Kritik der Hegelschen Staatsrechts,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MEW / Marx-Engels-Werke Band 1 1839–1844 (Karl Dietz Verlag, 2017), 206.

Gotthard Günther, Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen: Eine Metaphysik der Kybernetik (Agis-Verlag, 1963).

For a summary of these statements and criticism of them, see Quentin Skinner, “The Sovereign State: A Genealogy,” in Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, ed. Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Antonio Negri, The End of Sovereignty, trans. Ed Emery (Polity, 2022), 79.

Negri, End of Sovereignty, 72; this summary was pronounced by Roberto Esposito and not Negri himself.

Esposito responds by saying, “My impression is that the processes triggered in America, Europe, and Asia in the early years of the new century have been going in the opposite direction, as all the latest events have shown most manifestly.” Negri, End of Sovereignty, 72.

Negri, End of Sovereignty, 73.

Negri, End of Sovereignty, 83.

Melissa Lane, “Why Donald Trump Was the Ultimate Anarchist,” New Statesman, February 8, 2021 →.

Carl Schmitt, Die drei Arten rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens (Duncker & Humblot, 1993), 46–47.

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.

Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 99.

Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss on Political Philosophy: Responding to the Challenge of Positivism and Historicism (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Martin Heidegger, On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. Andrew Mitchell (Bloomsbury, 2014), 186.

Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 351–55.

Carl Schmitt, Staat, Großraum, Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916–1969 (Duncker & Humblot, 1995), 235–36.

Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (Verso, 2018). “Climate Leviathan is a direct descendant from Hobbes’ original to Schmitt’s sovereign: when it comes to climate, Leviathan will decide and is constituted precisely in the act of decision. It expresses a desire for, and the recognition of, the necessity of a planetary sovereign to seize command, declare an emergency, and bring order to the Earth, all in the name of saving life.” This also seems to be something that preoccupies Axelos and which remains problematic if not overstated when he says in Vers la pensée planétaire, 302, that “la souveraineté n’est plus celle d’une cité, d’un empire, d’une nation, d’une classe: la souveraineté atteint son caractère suprême, sa pleine puissance, en cessant d’être souveraineté particulière et en devenant puissance et autorité suprême, pouvoir mondial déferlant sur les—plus qu’échouant aux—citoyens du cosmos dans leur totalité. Aucune personne et aucune institution ne portent plus ce pouvoir.”