Financial politics are exercised around the abduction of persons, ransom systems; social protection leads to the perversion of charity into bodily assistance, of poverty into the power of money-to such an extent that when these great mechanisms stop functioning profitably, the Roman papacy of monks collapses. Its system of military security goes along with its system of social security, the Inquisition with its temporal power. It is the same for the great conquerors: they are all lost as soon as they must renounce the raping of nations . All greatness lies in Assault, in the dimension borrowed from distance. War is assault, because war is the permanent abuse of the earth's hospitality, its penetration. Here, once again, we must look at the speedometer of the racing engine, the combat racecar: an existential measure of the warrior's being, the dizzying flow of time, a rapidity-tax on the covered meter that ruins the earthly inhabitant, but simultaneously destroys the substance of its conqueror and measures the survivor's remaining hours. 5 In short, as in the turnaround of the topological ring, the survivor's disappearance depends on the answer he can give in space and time to Alexander the Great's question, to the problem o f his limits . 6
The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles
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