“The legend about the origins of the Wahungwe people refers to a king called ‘Madsivoa.’²⁷ His name is said to derive from dsivoa (lake, ford, pool).” Any Western theory about legitimacy is lacking in one respect: it knows nothing about the waters of origin. “Who made you king?” Aldebert, count of Périgord and ancestor of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, asks Hugh Capet, king of the Île-de-France and first king of France. But Capet is unable to say “I come from Dsivoa, from the pool of origins, I came out of one of those water bubbles that form spontaneously on its surface.” Without those waters, all are usurpers. And the first usurpers can then appeal to one single ally—time. When a sovereign power exists for a certain time it is supposed that the ruthlessness with which it has exerted its authority is already encased and covered by the douceur of custom, by prolonged acceptance, and finally: by tradition. And so tradition will no longer serve to establish the origins, but to conceal them. The great Aufklärer, the terrible Enlighteners, up to Nietzsche, to Freud, have always been fanatical searchers for origins and genealogies—that was the peculiar nefas of the West that attracted and dazzled them. By filling the missing gap of origin, they thought it would be possible at last to move down without delusion to the present. They then discovered origin as a delusion, choosing in this way the delusion into which they wanted to fall—and it would hound them to the last.

Legitimacy brings together two fundamental operations that take place in the mind: analogy and convention, branches that grow out of one single trunk: substitution. By analogy, the only legitimacy is that of sacred investiture, which descends by resonances and attractions through all levels of being. Where that resonance dies out, there can be no legitimacy. By convention, legitimacy is the prime example of that arbitrary pact that allows all kinds of mechanisms to operate, from language to society. As always, convention is not concerned in this case either with essences or with substances, but with functionality—and, being the very soul of substitution, it is ready to swap one form for the other.

In 1956, John Von Neumann used the Silliman Lectures to give a short outline of what had happened recently, what was now happening between machines that calculated by themselves. When he began setting out the distinction between digital computers and analog computers, he gave a new name to the two poles that secretly sustain us. The digital pole would seem biologically secondary and dependent, in the same way that exchange would seem secondary to the object being exchanged. But then the digital pole takes command, revealing a capacity to envelop the other pole, to absorb it—and naturally to utilize it. The digital pole confers great power, but it does not contain, within the machine, that physicality of changing values that is a last palpable record of the outside world. Digitality is pure sequence of signs: when its control is extended to everything, we no longer know what earth supports us—if there still is an earth. We continue experiencing the analog pole, we no longer know what to call it: it is mute emotion that overwhelms and no longer flows into its ancient estuary. Digitality has made it a new bed, indestructible silicon. Above, a silent current flows, waiting for the Bateau Ivre.