#average man

Incapable of understanding work as patience, churning out boredom, envy and resentment like sausages, has consensual engineering vanquished politics forever? Was Pareto right? Do the phases of History swing back and forth like the oscillations of a pendulum: youth, maturity, decadence, elites succeeding one another like the cycle of thin cows and fat cows, their cadavers accumulating like fossils? Is History just a graveyard of aristocracies, an interminable chronicle of triumphs as ephemeral and derisory as the perpetual pugilism of the Great Natural Banquet in which the species gobble each other up? To the mediocrity of the 'average man', incapable of enthusiasm and wallowing in pluralism (that anaesthetised multiple), we should oppose the anyone [l'homme quelconque], capable of awakening the political gesture that surpasses all routine and every anticipated possibility. For there is a heroism of the anyone, of that anyone who, at once singular and innocent, might be the vehicle of an exception that, as Carl Schmitt says, 'thinks the general with intense passion'