Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture

125. The madman. Have you not heard of that madman who lighted a lantern at the bright sunshine of the morning, ran to the market, and began ceaselessly screaming: "I seek God! I seek God!"?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science¹

This present essay is a shortened and adapted version of the first chapter of a large book of mine devoted to a comparison between ancient Greece and Christianity, shortly to be published in English by Michigan State University Press. Its theoretical core is the idea of mediation, that is to say, the intangible connective element acting as a medium capable of linking humans to the world and the divine sphere that made the world possible in ancient times². All this is related to our experience of object meant not only as a "thing" endowed with meaning, but as the source itself of meaning. As a consequence, this world-facilitating and "objectual" (not simply objective) medium is able to unite humans and make them exist, in fact, at the very moment that they unite. For human beings, nothing is more vital and fragile than the objectual [End Page 193] mediations they derive from. In the nature of things, these mediations must originally have been religious in character, since human beings cannot mediate themselves and be born spontaneously by themselves.

All that we know of mankind's cultural history suggests this, with further support from an internal, genetically phenomenological analysis of the way in which human cultures take shape and develop. If mediation is in fact what functions as medium, it is also, and above all, the supreme point of reference, what offers humans a common direction precisely because it is above and transcends them. Such a powerful, productive arrangement, with nothing like it in the animal kingdom, could not have been produced by simple accidental changes, or by a mere accumulation of circumstances. Instead, a crystallization must have occurred; a new collective experience, a dynamic force created by some event or, rather, series of events that must have finally condensed into a new significant organizing state, into the very beginnings of man and culture.

This essay aims to explain my theory of mediation by reference to a philosophical and scientific "tradition" that has still to be discovered and really understood in its significance and historical role. Its spectacular starting point can be seen in the thinking of Nietzsche, and more precisely in his most famous and influential text, the aphorism containing the announcement of the death of God, normally interpreted as simply the discovery of the inexistence of God. But for such a foreseeable announcement Nietzsche's genius was not necessary at all. Much more is involved, which must now receive our attention.