E l’utopia si rivelò...

Financial economy reigns over the contemporary world and powerfully and overwhelmingly transforms organizations and social structures. It is about a world organized more geometrico – which is almost chorally constructed in successive phases that are analytically described in this article by the author – in which quantitative and mathematical relations go hand in hand with decision making devices which are highly verticalized and automatized: this new order is the order of the financial markets which, by now, sets itself up as the representative of the current rule of law. The language of measure and res extensa permeates the daily life of contemporary societies, modifies the actual languages in both their lexicon and syntax – through an outrageous exaltation of the subject-object relation – and establishes a factual consensus to this antique utopia which is finally realized. Everything that intends to escape the hegemony of the res extensa – above all persons, local and descent groups, societies – looks for space in the dominion of virtual reality where the social actor who tries to break free from the sole part of consumer and from the attribution of protocol identities. Anthropology is therefore called upon to elaborate a critical thought as a contribution to the foundation of a new res-man relationship and therefore also of a new man-man relationship in the context of an ongoing apocalypse. The duty of the anthropologist, as the author suggests, does not consists in the trivial although sophisticated practice of a tekhne anymore but rather reveals itself as the practice of testimony and demand for the right that every society should have to signify the axiological beginning of world eschatology. The duty of the anthropologist should then consist in the practice of a “different way to think” the history of man.