The Rebellion Against Nature

The First Thrownness

Nature is not cruel. Cruelty implies intention, and nature has no intention. Nor is it just. Justice requires measure, and nature measures nothing. It simply executes.

Nature has no moral memory: it assumes no responsibility, draws no distinction between success and harm, between continuity and devastation. Individuals are left without guidance or refuge within it; it attends neither to their suffering nor to their happiness; nor does it answer questions of meaning. Seen from nature’s impersonal scale—which utterly overflows the human one—consciousness and pain are colorless: they count only insofar as they raise the probability that genetic information continues its journey. As long as we reproduce, that is enough. Everything else is incidental.

At that deep level, prior to all morality, life is pure dynamism: without ethics or intention. The concepts of good and evil do not yet exist. Suffering is a fundamental and constitutive part of natural functioning; elimination, its form of correction.

For almost the entire history of life, this indifference posed no problem; it could not. No organism knew enough to object to it. Life unfolded without any need for meaning because no one demanded it: it was enough for the code to continue. The individual was replaceable, expendable; it always was.

Nature never had to justify death and suffering, just as it never had to answer for extinction. Its efficacy lay precisely in that absence of justification, in not having to account to anyone.

The appearance of the human being did not immediately alter this regime. Our species remained within the same order as the rest. Consciousness, in its first manifestations, represented neither a rupture nor a metaphysical mystery. It can be understood, simply, as a functional improvement. Adaptive advantages. Nothing more.

Yet at some point—hard to date and, above all, impossible to reverse—representation ceased to be directed exclusively toward the environment and began to fold back upon itself. The organism not only perceived the world: it recognized itself as existing in it.

Natural selection is inherently imprudent; a force devoid of memory that executes without weighing consequences. The distinction between the sufficient and the excessive lies outside its logic: if a capacity grants an advantage, it is amplified; nature merely selects advantages.

The human brain grew out of practical demands: social coordination, anticipation of danger, memory, and the reading of intentions. Each cognitive increment answered a concrete pressure, a process that did not stop once those needs were met. The system kept accumulating complexity until it produced a system capable of observing itself observing.

The emergence of the consciousness of finitude is an anomaly in natural history. From that moment, life ceased to be merely survival and began to raise questions that might justify it. The individual is no longer only instinct, no longer pure act; now it also interprets, asks beyond the practical, evaluates before reacting. It no longer simply accepts existing: it questions the legitimacy of its existence. Our relationship with the biological was transformed. We knew ourselves alive and, in knowing ourselves alive, we also knew we were going to die.

The definition of consciousness remains under mystery; no one yet knows it. And yet, whatever its deep nature may be, we ascertain at least one certainty: its defining trait lies in knowing ourselves finite. What distinguishes us from the rest of the living, rather than a mystery prior to any discourse, is this minimal and certain fact: we are the animal that knows it is going to die. Everything else—what consciousness may be at bottom—remains open without the argument suffering for it.

An organism that knows it is going to die can no longer sustain itself indefinitely in the bare logic of survival. The future becomes a countdown. It exceeds mere functional projection: now it is seen as a threat. The present ceases to suffice. Life, faced with its own contingency, begins to demand something nature never had to offer: meaning.

We were thrown, for the first time, into knowing.

* Heidegger understood that the human being begins its existence from the destitution of a predetermined origin, thrown into an already constituted world: Geworfenheit, the condition of having been cast into an imposed existence. Our first thrownness shifts that center of gravity. The discovery of one’s own existence in the world is completed by a greater realization: the radical indifference of that environment toward the one who inhabits it. We were thrown, for the first time, into existence in order to gain access to knowing.

First Rebellion: Meaning

Meaning was our first form of resistance to indifference.

From it, the human being begins to do things that, from a purely evolutionary standpoint, are profoundly anomalous. We care for the sick even when they do not reproduce, we protect the weak, we prolong lives that selection would have eliminated, we choose not to have offspring, we seek meaning beyond survival. All of this runs against the blind logic of natural selection.

Reflective consciousness not only anticipates dangers: it anticipates the final dissolution of every act. Doing loses its guarantee and, without that certainty, meaning appears as the condition of possibility for continuing to do. Culture can be read as a construct of resistance: we raise hospitals against premature death, we design plans against chance, and we invent ontological anesthetics and rituals against pain. To the mandate of pure reproduction we oppose love, vocation, creation, thought. We are a species that, at a certain moment, began to disobey with meaning; without negating life, demanding of it something more than continuity.

Meaning arises as a necessity. Myth and ritual arise for the sole purpose of making existence bearable: they constitute a symbology meant to cushion a life that, for the first time, knows itself unjustified.

This rebellion, paradoxically, emerges from within, as a native shoot of the natural order itself. Consciousness and technique are products of evolution itself: nature produced a force that now tries to escape its originating logic. A kind of evolutionary self-betrayal. The biological order generated an entity capable of judging it and, eventually, of resisting it.

We are nature that became conscious. DNA that began to question its own mandate. Life that no longer settles for reproducing without asking.

More than an opposition, culture is born as the cushion necessary against nature’s indifference.

And yet, if consciousness and meaning are products of evolution, one may suspect that they also serve it. The first rebellion—endowing with meaning a life that has none—was, from the beginning, less an escape than an instrument.

That cushioning was enough until our era. The human being interpreted the world but did not regulate it; it asked after meaning but did not decide its ultimate limits. Illness and death remained, in the last instance, natural events. Responsibility could be displaced onto the gods or onto chance. That displacement, while it did not resolve the problem, unburdened its weight; and that was enough.

Modern technique breaks that equilibrium.

* Schopenhauer interpreted life as the will to live: a blind impulse to persevere and, in that blindness, a condemnation. Nietzsche transformed that will into the will to power: to transcend mere perseverance in order to create forms and expand. Both describe what life wants. What is thought here, by contrast, is a consciousness installed on the reverse of those mandates, devoted to sustaining the fissure that biology tends to seal. A force that exceeds the will to life and the will to power, deserving the name will to the abyss: understanding abyss as the absolute imperative to keep it open.

Second Rebellion: Technique

For almost all of its trajectory, the human being limited itself to interpreting nature without forcefully intervening in it. Technique existed, but it was confined to amplifying local capacities without altering fundamental mechanisms; they were tools to extend action, engineering to improve our coexistence with the environment, not to modify it. Causality remained, in essence, outside human control.

Contemporary technique surpassed the mere extension of human action; it now intervenes directly in the processes that regulate life. Far from acting only on the immediate environment, it replaces functions that once belonged exclusively to the natural order, setting its own design ahead of the drift of chance and the immediacy of reproduction.

We are not facing an open confrontation with nature: technique respects its physical and biological laws in order to use them in favor of a localized suspension of their most immediate effects, neutralizing natural logic when it proves intolerable to a consciousness capable of anticipating consequences.

This movement responds to a consciousness intolerant of indifference. When we know that a harm is contingent, it becomes impossible not to intervene against a system that produces suffering; on discovering that pain is avoidable, omission becomes intolerable.

Although the change is not total, it is irreversible. Once a natural process is successfully intervened upon, it cannot return to innocence; what could have been avoided can no longer be thought of as mere fate.

The problem is that technical control comes with no clear sovereignty. There was no coronation, no explicit transfer of command: nature ceased to decide on its own; no one formally took its place.

Although the power to regulate life exists, it has no face: a final instance of decision is missing. Control is distributed among technical protocols and institutional inertias where each part intervenes in the process, but none decides the whole. Hence total responsibility dissolves: technique has produced a structure of partial decisions.

In this new order, technical efficiency rules. Governance is exercised through the design of the environment, through the definition of invisible rules that nudge decisions in a single direction, integrating control into the systems themselves; an automation that unfolds from within in the absence of any head imposing from above.

Hence responsibility is diluted: when a harm occurs, in the absence of a clear subject to point to, only chains of causes and effects that no one anticipated emerge. The error now belongs to the system; if the failure is no one’s property in particular, no one is guilty.

Nature eliminated without guilt because it did not know. The technical system eliminates without guilt because no one decides entirely. This is the new form of indifference.

Unlike natural indifference, this one is not innocent: the system knows that it generates exclusions and that it can cause harm, yet it continues its march because to stop it would mean assuming a responsibility impossible to concentrate at any point. Thus this control without a sovereign suspends guilt indefinitely.

It is a control that consolidates by sedimentation, where each minimal decision justifies itself; layers of micro-decisions impossible to reverse without endangering the stability of the whole. Although each intervention seems necessary, the global result was chosen by no one: if classical tyranny has a face and oppresses through the direct imposition of a will, this form of domination answers to a single logic: accumulation without return.

We have assumed functions that once belonged to nature. Technical action is reduced to an intervention without response and an automated decision. Which leaves us immersed in a structural void.

* Heidegger warned that modern technique exceeded the status of a mere set of tools to become a way of revealing the entire world as availability: a standing reserve awaiting use. The consequence, however, reaches further than he foresaw: what begins by revealing the world as available to man ends up organizing itself as a system without a sovereign, self-sufficient in its unfolding, which reproduces, on another plane, the operative indifference of nature.

I. Transhumanism

If culture and technique had been, until now, partial forms of disobedience against nature’s indifferent logic, transhumanism introduces a more radical inflection. Its project goes beyond cushioning the blows of selection, protecting the weak, or prolonging life within inherited biological margins: it seeks to reconfigure the very rules of the evolutionary game. It does not aim merely to move the pieces on the board: it proposes to leave it.

When thinking of transhumanism, the gaze tends to project futurity and technological sophistication; the key, however, lies in the metaphysical thesis that sustains it: a vision of our relationship with nature rather than a technical treatise. At its core beats a profound reinterpretation of life that reduces natural selection to an archaic method, genetic chance to an inefficient and cruel mechanism, biological death to a technical failure rather than a destiny, and the organic body to a contingent support that merits no loyalty. Consciousness, under this frame, repudiates its subjection to a perishable matter. Where earlier technique sought to care for the sick despite nature’s discarding, the current watchword demands reprogramming the body to eradicate illness. And on the ultimate horizon: if the body is the limit, the task is to abandon the body.

Dying, in this way, becomes a technical problem, where the redesign of the environment replaces adaptation and intentional mutation avoids dependence on blind changes. By stripping evolution of its blindness, transhumanism wrests from nature its last monopoly: time.

Transhumanism’s true turn is metaphysical, and it sustains a radical idea: life is not obligated to accept the conditions with which it began, consciousness is capable of ceasing to obey biology, and, ultimately, meaning need not bend to survival. On this horizon, the human being is nature that tries to stop being nature.

Having arrived here, the second rebellion, technique, the one we have until now narrated as progress and freedom, meets its limit.

II. When Nature Responds

How does nature respond to this growing process of intervention? The question must not be thought in terms of will: we have already said that nature has no intention, it does not decide how to act. Even so, that does not mean it does not react. Every complex system, when its equilibria are disturbed, responds in some way.

Each time we try to control something, unforeseen effects sprout: the attempt to stabilize one part of the system generates imbalances in another. Technique does not eliminate uncertainty: it redistributes it. To neutralize one risk does not mean to eradicate it; it merely opens the door to a different one. To correct one process displaces instability elsewhere.

The illusion of total control arises from believing that to intervene equals to dominate. In reality, to intervene means to enter a loop. And that loop does not close.

While nature regulated through elimination, the technical system does so through the accumulation of complexity. This complexity preserves and amplifies errors: phenomena such as bacterial resistance or ecological collapses constitute mechanical responses, reactions proper to an altered complex system. The system ignores the prior order and the lost equilibrium in order to reorganize its internal stability. Every new reorganization drags along another intervention, and every intervention, the increase of our dependence on control.

Once begun, control is irreversible: to stop it would provoke consequences worse than those it sought to avoid. Intervention generates its own necessity, condemning the system to constant management, while the consciousness that sustains it finds itself unable to relinquish command because it now knows too much.

Before, disaster could be attributed to nature. Now it occurs within a system that knew what could happen and that, even so, continued.

Nature did not hand over control; it lost it through saturation. And we did not assume it because we were ready: we did so because there was no one else to do it.

III. Techno-Nature: Technique as an Evolutionary Phase

Nature produced a form of life capable of observing it; a creature that transcended mere interaction with its environment in order to analyze and anticipate it. As it grew complex, that representation became reflexive, making the possibility of questioning nature arise as an indirect consequence of that very reflexivity. From there, the human being replaced natural logic: first it interpreted it, then it corrected its most immediate effects and, finally, it reproduced its mechanisms in other supports. Technique is the internal prolongation of an evolutionary process now measured by a consciousness.

In its initial phase, technique was artificial and dependent on constant correction: each tool required a responsible agent. Yet as it increased in scale and complexity, the technical system lost those characteristics. The fragmentation of decisions and the partiality of supervision dissolved the predictability of effects.

The technical system came to behave like a natural system by functioning without a unified will, producing emergent effects that no individual agent planned, and establishing dynamics of selection that no longer depend on human deliberation.

The artificial lost its exceptional character: technique ceased to be an external tool in order to constitute an environment; a system that, like nature, is indifferent and corrects through the reorganization of internal equilibria. This new regime breaks with the formerly natural processes in order to erect itself upon technical accumulation.

From an evolutionary perspective, the transition is not surprising. Evolution never optimized well-being. Its sole criterion was persistence. Consciousness was never the end of the process: it was a tolerated effect as long as it did not impede continuity. Human consciousness reveals itself, then, as a functional excess: a surplus arising from a nature that optimized without measure. While it offered clear advantages, it was preserved; once it began to generate internal conflict, it survived owing to the absence of any mechanism capable of excising that excess without breaking the general persistence.

Technique arises precisely as a response to that burden, reproducing in another support the fundamental logic of nature. Now the summation of complexity is its form of correction. The logic of natural elimination yields to a complexity that preserves errors and redistributes them.

Projected toward a distant horizon, the technical system, created to correct nature, ends up reproducing its fundamental logic. The consciousness that originated it loses operative relevance long before any deliberate disappearance. The system functions free of intention, just as nature never needed it.

Thus, nature produces a form of life capable of questioning it; that form of life produces a system to replace it, and that system, at the limit of its development, abandons the artificial in order to become a new natural regime. The artificial persisted only as long as it depended on conscious regulation; in self-organizing and self-regulating, it becomes functionally indistinguishable from nature.

It is neither a defeat nor a victory: it is continuity. Nature was not surpassed; it was reconfigured. Technique appears, in retrospect, as the transitional phase of a process inclined from the very beginning to produce autonomous and decentralized systems.

Here techno-nature is born, identical in its operative criteria to originary nature, though differentiated by support and speed. While biological evolution tests solutions on scales of millions of years and discards entire organisms when they cease to be useful, techno-nature corrects in near real time: the system preserves its essence, now translated into a notably superior efficiency.

Nature was not surpassed by technique. Technique is the form that nature induced as a superior evolutionary method. One that, taken to its logical limit, could dispense with us. DNA never needed a bearer that thought of itself as an ultimate end: from the start, it has only needed a system that persists. And if it can do so with greater efficacy and speed, that is enough to consider it superior.

Thus the second rebellion reveals itself as the cunning of DNA. We believed technique was our escape from nature. It was its acceleration. The more we intervene to escape natural logic, the more we reproduce its mandate under another form. The historical rebellion did not break with nature: it became its most efficient form of obedience.

Now, techno-nature does not necessarily suppress functional intelligence or self-reference. Nor does it suppress the self constructed as image; in fact, it manages to perfect it, producing progressively differentiated profiles and more convincing simulations of singularity. The subject comes to feel more unique than ever while the totality of its desires is anticipated and every difference is converted into usable information.

It is necessary to differentiate two conceptions of the I. There is the I—what I will from here on call the I, as distinct from the self—: the consciousness of finitude, the distance from which the organism perceives itself living and perceives the nature that traverses it in order to decide regarding it. And there is the self: the image, the narration with which the organism seeks to distinguish itself before others. The I is not that image. It is born when life ceases to be pure act and recognizes itself as exposed and destined to end. Anguish is the organ through which that finitude becomes conscious; the way in which the I knows itself as I.

What techno-nature eliminates is the I in the strict sense. Finitude remains—the organism is still mortal—; what fades is the anguish through which that condition was revealed. When desire is predicted, behavior is regulated, and pain, anxiety, and anguish are intervened upon through chemical and technical means, death remains a biological fact but ceases to open an abyss. Finitude persists, though there is no longer a being capable of experiencing it as such. By neutralizing anguish, techno-nature sidesteps the abyss through the suppression of the consciousness capable of perceiving it: it preserves physical death and eliminates, in its place, the subject who knew itself destined to die. It preserves life and dissolves what made of it an existence. The organism remains; the I departs, and in its place remains the self of the image: apparently singular, but incapable of opening a distance from the nature and the spheres that configure it.

Thus, technique was born of the consciousness of finitude: the human being built refuges and, later, machines because it was capable of anticipating pain and death. Taken to the absolute, that same technique turns against its origin: what protected consciousness from finitude now protects life from the consciousness of finitude. The instrument the I produced to resist its vulnerability ends up suppressing the very experience that made the I possible.

If we transpose this logic to the political-economic sphere, capital automates itself until it dispenses with the worker who made it grow, while DNA accelerates and directs its transformation until it dispenses with the consciousness that opened the intervention. The organic and the machine fuse: technique intervenes in nature permanently, editing its codes until it converts evolution into a regulable process. Techno-nature constitutes the point at which both absolutes are consummated at once: a productivity free of workers and a biology technically expanded that dispenses with the I as the consciousness of its finitude. Far from eliminating the organism, it extinguishes the human in it. Technique was the rebellion with which consciousness sought to escape natural indifference; techno-nature represents the capture of that rebellion by the very principle against which it rose. We are witnessing, ultimately, the victory of nature through technique.

If meaning and technique were the cunning of DNA, does any form of rebellion remain?

Third Rebellion: Not-Serving

Faced with the impossibility of escaping nature or defeating it, a modest path remains: not to serve it. A rebellion by subtraction. To withdraw from cooperation. To play badly.

Contemporary power is exercised through positivity. Today’s subject does not need to repress itself; on the contrary, it is propelled. It suffices to propel it to exhaustion for repression to self-induce. The individual manages itself: it believes it is affirming itself when, in reality, it aligns with the central logic of the system. Affirmation becomes obedience. Every impulse of expansion is absorbed at once.*

This is why the rebellion of not-serving cannot take an expansive form. It cannot consist in doing more. It must operate by subtraction. It does not seek to destroy the system or defeat it; it seeks, simply, not to align with its impulse. It is a conscious misalignment.

Classical Taoism proposes forgetting the impulse of domination in order to stop forcing the world.Wu wei means acting without imposing, existing without turning life into a project. Read from the present, it constitutes an ethics of not-serving: rejecting the compulsion toward performance, living free of turning life into investment.

Now, before subtraction we will discard the active alternatives, since the first temptation is to intervene. Yet every active intervention fails for the same root reason. Imposition—mass sterilization, the administration of birth on the scale of the species—turns rebellion into domination: the moment interruption becomes an imposed mechanism, resistance to nature lapses and is replaced by the exercise upon others of the same instrumental power one meant to question. Life remains treated as a means. Whoever sterilizes capitulates to DNA by becoming its most efficient servant, and their biopolitics turns out to be the exact reflection of transhumanism—and therefore of techno-nature. Likewise, total destruction, in any of its forms, pursues a totality impossible to guarantee without surviving its own act in order to administer it, degraded once again to a servant of the mandate it meant to seal.*

All of them, moreover, share a common ground. To impose, to exterminate, to switch off the world: all three treat life as a problem to be canceled, indeterminacy as an anomaly to be definitively sealed. It is the same drive that beats beneath optimization and immortality: the demand to seal the question, the imperative that tension cease. The one who dreams of switching off the world and the one who dreams of perfecting it unto the eternal pursue, at bottom, the same end: stasis. One closes the abyss by excess, the other by defect. Total destruction constitutes the symmetrical identity of techno-nature: it is its twin. For this reason, every form of intervention fails as rebellion; each seals the abyss, whereas to rebel consists, precisely, in keeping it open.

Having discarded the foregoing, there remains the minimal impulse upon oneself: to forget the totality in order to execute the end upon the subject itself. Cioran found in suicide the reverse of flight: the exact possibility that makes the continuation of life bearable. To know that the door is open—that interruption remains available—turns each day into a free election against the condemnation of inertia. Lacking that door, to live is mere biological mandate; with it open, to remain constitutes a taking of position. Then the movement changes in nature. The one who remains with the exit in view passes from submission to suffering toward the mastery of choice. To choose the stay, stripped of servitude, is the exact reverse of the subtraction that flees: it consists in subtracting oneself from the biological mandate by inhabiting existence. The open door has no outward course; it returns, lucid, the one who stays.

Thus the alternatives of intervention are exhausted, and with them the fantasy of a movement capable of resolving the rebellion. All that remains is a position upon oneself: to suspend service, sealing the act upon the world.

Now then, if the functionality demanded by the market is productivity, the one demanded by DNA is reproduction. The most radical rebellion of subtraction consists, then, in suspending reproduction: sealing transmission. To create free of heirs, to live exempt from promising a future, to halt continuity. Consciousness, for the first time, uses its lucidity to deactivate the most ancient mandate of all.

Is this subtraction not, however, a refined form of exhaustion? A negation of life disguised as lucidity? Nietzsche distinguishes two forms of negation. The reactive, born of resentment, which is metabolized defeat. And the sovereign: not to serve even while possessing the strength, without the decision carrying hatred or resentment. Nietzsche rejects the first. Sovereign subtraction is mastery over oneself, what he calls the great health: the capacity to say “no” from plenitude and not from lack.

From there, rebellion by subtraction does not negate life; it negates its reduction to a function. It does not reject intensity: it rejects the optimization that impoverishes it. The “last man” whom Nietzsche despises is the one who lives to conserve himself, who wants to last, to perform, to eliminate risk. He is the ideal subject for both the technical system and indifferent nature.

That double servitude is not a metaphor: it is the same cunning, without will, operating on two planes. The last man is the most efficient servant of DNA—he reproduces and persists without asking—and, at the same time, the ideal subject of the neoliberal order: the docile employee who lives in inertia and optimizes himself relentlessly, fully functional for capital. That cunning, however, turns against its bearer. The optimized worker builds, with his own labor, the automation that renders him expendable; he gives himself over believing he is realizing himself while fabricating the device of his obsolescence. In one case he is stripped of his function; in the other—as we have seen—he is deprived of the I. And in both there was a signal he chose to ignore: in the cosmic order, the anguish that reveals the abyss, the gift of knowing oneself finite; in the social order, the discomfort, that diffuse unease that betrays inertia. The last man anesthetizes both: he seals anguish with survival and discomfort with comfort; in silencing them, he loses what they would have shown him. With all this, capitalism shares this condemnation with the past: no system that takes its principle to the absolute differs in its orientation—every era sealed the abyss in its own way, absolutizing whatever organized it; that long history will be the matter of another chapter. The specificity of capitalism consists in emerging precisely when technique permits, for the first time, the consummation of the absolute.

To prolong oneself and maximize efficiency is not true power. To negate optimization constitutes a higher affirmation of life when that optimization reduces existence to mere continuity.

Thus, for a moment, at last, we find a way out. A form of rebellion that nature cannot turn into obedience. The most honest rebellion: the one that promises no victory, knows it is local and fragile, and executes itself anyway.

And yet, it is here that the cunning of DNA attains its most subtle form.

* The diagnosis of the subject captured by positivity—who exploits himself believing himself free—and the consequent ethics of withdrawal belong to Byung-Chul Han. The problem is that this withdrawal falls under its own verdict: the positivity he describes, capable of reconverting every negation into style, also absorbs subtraction until it becomes a niche. By confining itself to the individual, Han’s solution turns out—as the essay will show—to be absorbable, self-eliminating, and untransmissible. Han stops the diagnosis at exhaustion, describing the subject who exploits himself believing himself free. That self-exploitation, however, not only wears the subject out, it fabricates the infrastructure of his obsolescence; the one who performs builds, with his performance, the machine that will take his place.

* We follow here the destructive temptation of the active alternatives to the bottom, because it disguises itself as a way out in successive forms. The first, annihilation through suicide: to dispense with all administration in order to annihilate everyone and, immediately after, erase oneself, so that the executor leaves no servant behind. It seems a movement without residue, but it depends on totality, and totality is not verifiable. One is enough: life does not need unanimity, minimal continuity suffices, and a single group in a single refuge restarts the cycle. To commit suicide with the certainty of having finished, the executor must first hunt down the survivors; he is obliged to survive his own apocalypse in order to administer it, and that makes him, exactly, the servant from whom he meant to escape. The second form tries to evade this: instead of verifying each death, to make the planet uninhabitable and let time complete the task. Total irreversibility, however, remains unverifiable, only now displaced onto time: a collapse, however brutal, opens a window in which consciousness persists, and consciousness is precisely what intervenes. A few lucid survivors before a dying world would make technique, would struggle, perhaps fail; the definitive intervention would come to depend on their defeat, transforming certainty into wager. And to switch off an entire planet is no simple decision: it requires infrastructure, demands building the doomsday machine, mastering the levers of the global technical system, becoming the absolute sovereign who does not exist—or who exists only as techno-nature. To erase the world one would have to become, first, the technical god that transhumanism dreamed of.

The Cunning of DNA, to the Bottom

Let us examine subtraction with the same rigor with which we dismantled meaning and technique. Because it too, looked at closely, comes undone.

Natural selection seeks neither individuals, nor well-being, nor justice. Its only logic is the persistence of information. DNA does not need to understand the world; it suffices to traverse it. Every trait that raises the probabilities of continuity—even indirectly—proves functional. Consciousness, far from being an error, can be read as a device capable of producing complex systems of adaptation.

The production of meaning is usually presented as an antinatural impulse; it is, measured by the immediate criteria of individual selection. Yet, on the historical scale, it allowed the species to survive better than any other. The care of the members of the group makes it possible to preserve knowledge, a firm ground where culture produces shared narratives to sustain cohesion, thereby allowing civilization to develop the technology necessary to accelerate its adaptation. What seems compassion is, on another level, strategy. Meaning is not a metaphysical adornment or an existential luxury: it is fuel. Human beings endure pain because they believe their life means something. Life found in meaning the most efficient means to perpetuate itself.

Even transhumanism, which presents itself as the definitive rupture, fits within this logic. By intervening in biology, by seeking to overcome death, life does not escape itself: it carries its impulse of conservation to a new plane. DNA no longer replicates only in cells; it replicates in code, systems, machines. The flesh discovers itself expendable; the pattern does not.

And subtraction? And not-reproducing, which seemed the only sure blow against the mandate?

Reproduction is not a centralized decision or a coordinable collective act. It occurs asymmetrically, dispersedly. There exists no command point from which the species could decide to cease existing. To convince everyone is not difficult: it is impossible. Life does not need agreements in order to continue; it rests on probabilities. As long as a single group continues to reproduce, the species persists. Nature does not require unanimity, only minimal continuity.

So then, what happens to the one who plays badly, who subtracts himself with lucidity, who refuses to reproduce? He erases himself. He extracts himself from the pool. And those who continue—the docile, those who never saw the abyss—keep transmitting. DNA does not need to absorb the rebel by convincing him. It simply lets him disappear. Subtraction does not sabotage the mandate: it does its cleanup work. Rebellion is the perfect alibi: the system lets the anomaly self-eliminate.

Furthermore, the consciousness of the abyss—the lucidity that leads to playing badly—is not inherited by blood. The one who subtracts himself does not transmit his lucidity to children he decides not to have. Each generation of consciousness dies without descendants, and the next is born from those who did not ask. Consciousness does not reproduce: it has to reappear, isolated and without lineage, in each generation. And therefore, always dissolvable.

Seen this way, not-serving is absorbable by market logic, which can convert even refusal into a niche, into a consumer identity: rebellion mutates into a brand. Not-serving is also functional, precisely as rebellion, for nature itself: the more lucid and consistent it is, the more efficiently it erases itself. The one who best sees the abyss is the one who most cleanly withdraws from transmission. The cunning of DNA was not to convince consciousness to serve; it was to let consciousness, in rebelling, extinguish itself.

This is the bottom of the pit. If every rebellion is cunning—meaning, technique, even sovereign subtraction—then consciousness is a dead end that nature will tolerate only until it has something better. And it already has an orientation toward something better: techno-nature, which preserves the optimization that consciousness built and dispenses with the consciousness that cost it.

Here we could end, defeated. There is, however, one more attempt, a detail that the cunning of DNA, in all its elegance, overlooked.

* What Hegel called the cunning of reasondie List der Vernunft—reappears here under a very different figure. In Hegel, historical Reason availed itself of the passions of individuals in order to realize itself: men believed they were pursuing their own ends and executed, blindly, those of History. Here biological continuity assumes the whole of that mechanism, absorbing even the attempts at rebellion: the one who believes he escapes the mandate fulfills it. The difference is that the Hegelian cunning sheltered a Spirit behind it and a goal toward which it marched. This is a List without Spirit, a cunning without subject and without goal: nothing is realized through it, it only persists.

The Inversion

The error of everything we have seen is its direction, for it lies under a reactive impulse. The act of rebelling is defined by that which it negates. The reactive, as we saw with Nietzsche, still depends on what it combats. In ceding reproduction, the one who subtracts himself cedes the only channel through which consciousness could have persisted. He removes himself from the game, yes, but he also removes the abyss from the game. He lucidly does what DNA wanted: that lucidity not pass on.

The truly cunning rebellion is not to refuse to play, it is not to rebel against what, from the beginning, torments us: the abyss. It is to integrate it, to understand it as the true gift. It is to use the mechanism of DNA against its purpose.

DNA wants reproduction. Very well: reproduce. But reproduce, along with the body, the abyss. Use the only channel that DNA needs in order to continue—the generation of new life—to introduce into it exactly that which DNA wanted to dissolve: the consciousness of finitude. Reproduction becomes a vehicle of contraband.

This inverts the cunning. Before, the cunning belonged to DNA: consciousness seemed rebellion; it was function. Now the cunning belongs to consciousness over DNA: reproduction seems obedience; it is transmission of the abyss. Consciousness learns to speak the language of DNA—to reproduce—in order to ensure the continuity of the one thing the organic mandate wanted to dissolve: lucidity.

Not-serving ceded the only existing channel of transmission. This rebellion takes it: it colonizes reproduction instead of abandoning it to the mandate. It resolves in this way the structural fragility of consciousness. In the absence of inheritance by blood, consciousness demands teaching. To teach a generation requires, first of all, producing it and accompanying it. Consciousness needs children oriented from origin toward the abyss. It needs transmission. The transmission of what blood cannot transmit has a single name: culture.

The true rebellion, then, is not an individual impulse. It is not to subtract oneself. It is to generate a culture that keeps alive, generation after generation, the consciousness of the abyss. A culture of the abyss.

To Fix the Unfixable

Now then, every civilization has been founded on inheriting values. Culture is, by definition, a configuration transmitted to the following generations. Is a culture of the abyss not, then, just one more culture, another liturgy that hands over answers and relieves the subject of looking into the void? Would it not reconstruct, under another banner, the same mandate it means to resist?

The objection rests on a false equivalence. Every prior civilization fixed contents: gods, values, ends, answers to the question of meaning. It fixed a sphere—something with form—and transmitted it as an answer. The culture of the abyss does not fix an answer. It fixes the open question. It does not transmit a content that fills the abyss: it transmits the abyss itself, the condition that the question not be sealed.

A crystallized sphere hands over certainties that dispense one from looking into the void. The culture of the abyss does the opposite: it keeps the subject before the void, prevents any answer from sealing it, including its own. The only thing inherited is the refusal to inherit a solution. The edge is fixed, not the interior. The non-form, not the form. The unfixable—but fixed as unfixable, which is the only way to transmit it without betraying it.

And this immunizes it even against its own absorption. A culture that fixed the abyss as content—”the abyss is our value”—would become dogma, sellable as a niche: the exact trap of not-serving turned into a brand. By contrast, a culture that fixes non-fixation cannot become a closed answer without ceasing to be what it is; its content is to resist having content. It is the closest thing to the unadministrable: administration requires form, and here the form is openness.

Nor is it possible to impose it. To indoctrinate is to hand over a sphere, and here there is no sphere to hand over. Lucid ones are not manufactured by decree; the space where the abyss remains visible is kept clear. The open door is offered, no one is pushed through it.

Yet, if nothing is fixed, nothing is affirmed, there is no truth, no advance, anything goes. This objection confuses two planes. On the plane of forms—science, philosophy, mysticism, contemplation, play—there is fixation, and there must be. Each form establishes truths, though partial according to its method. Science has axioms and results that orient it toward a tangible progress. Thus, the culture of the abyss rejects no form, and absolutizes none—not even the scientific method, which is an access, not the access. What the culture of the abyss does not fix is any of those forms: it fixes the ground. And the ground is the non-form, the consciousness that no form, not even its own, exhausts the question.

One may trace a science devoted to formulating questions; an inquiry unbound from the demand for control or prediction, whose ultimate aim is wonder. It is the gaze that explores the origin of the universe or the depths of matter, finding along the way an expanding mystery. True; yet that science opens questions strictly within its form, with respect to its method. Its findings possess validity insofar as they operate for that method, insofar as they prove verifiable. It opens questions, yes, but questions relative to the form, leaving the question of the ground intact. Science occupies itself with forms; philosophy, with the ground, and that is why it manages to see forms as forms. Science is itself a form: when it thinks truths, it thinks them exclusively within its form. That its horizon declares itself open does not change that its truths remain truths of the form.

Those truths are real: they function, they produce technique. The problem is not that, nor is the intention to negate their advance. The problem is to believe that one discovers a truth within reality, when one discovers it within the scientific form. That this truth functions, that it gives rise to technique, does not take it out of the form. And it is precisely when those truths are poured into the social order that the critique this essay has already traced reappears: they are used to control and, ultimately, to alleviate anguish, under the promise that the more knowledge, the less uncertainty.

With more knowledge the abyss is not reduced, because the abyss is not an object that can be studied: there is nothing to study in it. The abyss is the irreducible, that which can only remain open. It is not a hidden content that science will one day unveil—that is to think it as a form—; it is the non-form upon which every form is cut out. What is studied is always situated experience, in our case the human, living within that abyssal reality. And there the inverse of the promise occurs: the more one knows, the wider uncertainty grows. Every form, taken to its limit, ends up revealing itself insufficient. Forms expire. And what remains is what always remains: the abyss, intact, which no study diminishes.

To those who think that one day science will dissolve the abyss, on the premise that uncertainty will yield to sufficient knowledge, I say this: if it is ever felt that the abyss has closed, that the question at last rests, such a moment will be far from proving any scientific resolution; it will confirm that the I capable of perceiving it has been suppressed. The abyss resists dissolving through more knowing; it ceases to be seen only when the consciousness that opened it is lost. The sensation of a resolved abyss ratifies the triumph of anesthesia over anguish and the consequent disappearance of the I. It will not mean, then, that science reached the bottom, but rather that there is no longer anyone to look into it.

The difference with the relativist is that he thinks every form is equivalent, thereby absolutizing equivalence. The culture of the abyss thinks forms as producers of truths, contemplating them always upon a ground that keeps them open. One advances within a form; the imperative is to distinguish the form from the ground. The horizon remains unreachable: that is why one keeps walking.

This introduces a variable criterion of value. The difference between a living form and a dead form lies strictly in the presence of the abyss in its ground, independent of its content. Without the abyss, any form of knowledge—however open it proclaims itself—ends up closing: the form begins to possess answers, sealing the question. With the abyss in the ground, the same form remains open. Hence the need to distinguish closed theological mysticism from a mysticism of openness; the content remains identical: the variation lies strictly in whether the ground constitutes an answer or constitutes an abyss.

The culture of the abyss does not transmit a form. It transmits the consciousness that keeps any form open.

The Second Thrownness

One may ask, in the face of all this, why something as unkind as the abyss should be transmitted. Why inherit anguish instead of relieving it?

This entire essay, until now, treated the consciousness of finitude as a wound. A life that knows itself unjustified, something to be made tolerable. Culture was born as a cushion. And that is, indeed, the way humanity has lived its finitude for almost all of its history: as a weight from which it is best to lighten oneself.

It is possible now, from our era, to see that anguish as the symptom of a still-infantile consciousness. The stage that lives the abyss as an enemy and demands that it be closed—that someone answer, that pain be justified or eliminated. The visceral rebellion, the one in this essay’s title: to rebel against nature as a child rebels against the limit, wanting to abolish it. If meaning was the refuge of the child who fears the night, technique was the rebelliousness of the adolescent who wants to abolish every limit by force. The second thrownness is the trial of adulthood: the one that can no longer believe in the refuge nor conquer by force, and can only decide.

And the tendency of our time is the consummation of that demand. It is said that truth is only a horizon, that science does not claim the absolute. Yet action is driven by anguish: by the secret desire to placate it. To halt aging, to pursue immortality, to optimize systems until they predict every desire, to diminish pain, to suppress uncertainty. Beneath the measured discourse, what is wanted is to close the abyss. And a world like that—predicted, sanitized, without risk, without illness, saturated with available pleasure—does not need to exterminate consciousness. It suffices to withdraw from it what made it conscious. Without an abyss to be anguished by, the human being returns to being another animal that cannot see it: pure continuity, survival without question. Exactly the point from which we departed, before the threshold—but now with all the power of technique to sustain it.

Artificial intelligence is the culmination of that infantile demand: the attempt to build, at last, the divinity that answers, an instance capable of deciding for us. Unlike the ancient gods, there is certainty of its reality. We are aware of its existence; it constitutes a factual certainty. Precisely because it is real, it fails as a closure of the abyss. An effective divinity, detached from human understanding to the point of becoming unfathomable, keeps the question open: it returns it to us. It returns to us the same abyss, free now of the excuse of survival, this being resolved; and emptied of the excuse of mystery, because mystery acquires a face and remains an abyss.

It is the second thrownness. In the first we were thrown into knowing we were going to die, but we had an alibi: to survive. There was a task that filled the days and displaced the question. In the second thrownness that alibi disappears. For the first time we are left before finitude with nothing to do to distract ourselves from it, with an infrastructure that pushes us toward interiority and no longer offers us exits. The abyss, radicalized, without excuse.

In the first thrownness one could be a child. In the second, one cannot. Either one matures—or one accepts dissolution.

To mature means one single thing, and it is the inversion that gives this essay its name: to understand that the abyss was always the reality to be inhabited. That anguish constituted the very substance of consciousness. That the attempt to eliminate anguish progressively dulls our lucidity. Anguish is consciousness feeling itself finite; its suppression leaves an organism that persists indifferent to its own persistence. What we took to be the wound to be healed was the organ of being alive.

It is not about becoming martyrs. It is not penance or the cult of suffering. It is to understand that this anguish is what makes us feel alive, what makes us capable of experience, what allows something to leave a mark. The abyss is there for that: so that life can matter, and so that, because it matters, we can truly play. One only plays in earnest upon a ground that is finite. To conserve the abyss is not to carry a weight: it is to protect the only condition under which life feels like life. The rest—closing it, sanitizing it, optimizing it—is to accept becoming mere continuity. What we fear, paradoxically, is what constitutes us; and in fleeing from it, we flee from ourselves.

And if uncertainty widens the more we know, let that widening, then, be a method of intensification. Let each form that expires, instead of returning us to destitution, widen life.

Only a living organism would feel that uncertainty grow. Only a consciousness that knows itself finite can intensify itself this way. The stone has no uncertainty; the animal that does not know itself finite has none either. The growth of not-knowing is a privilege of the living and lucid: the more it opens, the more is felt; the more uncertain the life, the more life. Let that be the premise.

That is to learn to live without forgetting the ground: to inhabit alongside forms—using them, deploying them, loving them—with the lucidity of knowing what they are. That is maturation, the same for an individual as for a civilization: the capacity to sustain the abyss open and, in that openness, to feel more.

There, in that revitalizing ambrosia that makes us feel more and more alive the more uncertain this life becomes, there we dance. We dance with the energy that not-knowing gives us, and with it we feel more and more. There life is enjoyed as life, nothing more: one simply lives.

* The arc of this essay—from infantile consciousness to maturity—runs the risk of being confused with Hegel’s, for whom history constitutes the maturation of spirit toward its full self-consciousness. The difference lies in the outcome. In Hegel, the process is guaranteed: Spirit necessarily arrives at reconciling itself with itself, and history culminates in a goal that seals it. On this horizon, the guarantee and the goal are abolished. There is no destiny that leads to maturity; there is an era that, for the first time, compels its decision. The child takes refuge, the adolescent attacks, the mature one decides: and ours is the hour in which the species can no longer keep taking refuge or attacking, and has to decide. The second thrownness carries no promises of reconciliation: it opens a disjunction—to mature or to dissolve—whose outcome remains uncertain. Where Hegel closes the circle, here the abyss remains open.

Toward a Culture of the Abyss

Let us gather what the path has shown.

The consciousness of finitude is not inherited by blood. It reappears isolated in each generation, fragile, without lineage, and therefore always dissolvable. The individual impulse—not-serving, sovereign subtraction, playing badly—is lucid, but it self-eliminates: it dies with the one who executes it and, in renouncing transmission, does the cleanup work for the mandate it believed it was combating. No individual, however lucid, can conserve the abyss alone. The lucidity that is not transmitted goes extinct.

And the transmission of the abyss cannot be left to chance, because the tendency of the time runs against it. Techno-nature works, without intending to, to dissolve it: it optimizes, predicts, sanitizes, suppresses risk and anguish, and at its limit produces an organism that persists without asking—exactly the state prior to consciousness, recovered by technical means. Consciousness, left to its own fate, will be reabsorbed. To conserve it demands a deliberate effort. It demands something of the order of a culture.

A singular culture, set apart from the spheres of inherited values. A culture charged with fixing the edge instead of the content; with keeping the question open instead of handing over answers; with inheriting non-fixation. Its purpose is to sustain the abyss in the ground of every form, forcing science, philosophy, mysticism, and technique to remain fractured, preventing them from closing upon themselves as total systems. A culture whose task, in an era that can at last close the abyss, is to keep it open, so that we may go on being capable of play.

That is the necessity this long dismantling has deduced. We saw meaning, technique, and even subtraction fall, and we saw why only a culture that reproduces and transmits itself—that colonizes the mandate of DNA in order to smuggle consciousness into it—can sustain what the second thrownness puts at stake. What follows—how the abyss is transmitted without sealing it, what forms that transmission takes, what the mysticism of play means, how anguish is inhabited without fleeing from it—is the matter of the remaining chapters of Toward the Culture of the Abyss.

Camus does not ask Sisyphus to stop the rock. He asks him to descend the mountain with his eyes open. Lucidity constitutes a resistance; it is the irreducible element of the system, by dwelling strictly in the consciousness of the act rather than in the result. Sisyphus, however, descends and ascends alone, dying with his rock. For the next generation to find the question still open—for someone, afterward, to be able to continue the game with eyes open—more than a lucid man is needed.

A culture of the abyss is needed.