This book attempts to compose the multiple and often contradictory components of current historical events. It is a product of circumstance, without focusing on circumstance. It is a text about politics, but not directly a political text. It is inspired by specific situations, but remains abstract and seemingly detached at first glance. Seeking to express a reality that seems to have escaped any reasonable social, political, or moral control, it suffices to search for the major lines and functions that appear to influence the course of the world that surrounds us. It is a text that deals with the impasse.

Perhaps the highest irony of modern culture, and even more so of the Enlightenment, lies in the fact that it allowed for the artful concealment of real powers behind impenetrable veils of opacity. Within this framework, an ever-evolving system of power was structured that, for the first time in history, no longer "needs" to produce oracles, speak, evaluate, explain, or even democratize. From the moment it can be recognized as the only possible or perhaps even the only conceivable source of visible, reliable, and practically feasible "rules," this "system" does not appear to be threatened by any dissenters or deterred by any internal contradictions.

This is exactly what the title of the book refers to. The impersonal and invisible Leviathan is everywhere and nowhere. It is simply a powerful "system" that functions like a self-tuned "machine" reminiscent of the one described by Kafka in the story In the Penal Colony. In a world where no one knows anymore and is not even commanded to know their "duty," their mistakes, omissions, negligences, or crimes, the "machine" - which goes by the name "Swarm" - does not need to have its own desires, aspirations, or ulterior motives. It exists solely to be able to inscribe on the bodies of (innocent or guilty) "defendants" the commandment "honor your superiors," who are none other than the invisible, anonymous, and perhaps even non-existent operators of the same nightmarish machine. Although the bodies still belong to flesh-and-blood humans, everyone is at the mercy of a post-human power that invokes no values, has no source, and requires no legitimization. A relentlessly blind power that is content with simply being exercised, that is, with "existing."

K. Ts.