The essay by Massimo Cacciari and Roberto Esposito

Beyond the logic of sovereignty and domination

The confusion and disorder that seem to mark the era perhaps conceal a Void where new orders and new principles are maturing.

by Pier Luigi Portaluri

16 April 2026

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

It is Chaos the origin of every Order, and so of States. Threatened in turn - if not actually disrupted - by larger structures: the Great Spaces, which clash for hegemony over the world. Today it is China, Russia and the United States that are generating new dis-Order.

It is Kaos, in fact, the title of the book - very dense - by Massimo Cacciari and Roberto Esposito, just published by il Mulino.

Two essays, with a Premise that sets the dominant tone: 'the confusion and disorder that seem to mark the age perhaps conceal a Void that is the womb where new orders and new principles are maturing. For the Void opens up infinite possibilities'.

Poetically immersed in the knowledge of Greek classicism, as well as in the line of thought that goes from Goethe to Bachofen then to Nietzsche, The Myth of the Globe is the essay by Cacciari with which the book opens. It is dominated by the category of the Political, seen in relation to Space: the European State - says Cacciari - is originally 'terrestrial' power, since it has its first root in the soil. But it soon crosses that threshold and opens up towards the Beyond, towards the open Sea, still without paths and memories. It does not stop yet: the Ocean still has a boundary, a limes, while the Open, the Air is limitless. It must therefore be conquered to secure hegemony over the Globe. The expansion continues. In his eternal momentum (the Streben), man abandons the dimension of physicality in order to tend towards a "process of dematerialisation of all forms of life": whereby the state "will have to extend its sovereignty more and more [...] by dominating the immaterial complex of waves [...] that carry all information within themselves".

But what institutionalised power, what 'timaic' government - asks the author. - will be able to regulate this new Great Space, increasingly contested in the struggle for global domination? A new order will certainly not come from the 'legalisation of conflict', that is, from the 'constitution of international authorities and courts recognised by all': world history is not made by praetors, said Hegel. Perhaps it will be the 'unity of the techno-economic-financial system' that will avert a total war for final hegemony; or, on the contrary, that system will seek precisely 'the great catastrophe' to free itself from the 'old Politics'. Perhaps a tragic realism will save us: aware - as Nietzsche's Zarathustra says - that the things of History always dance at the feet of Chance.

And tragic is the 'mind' that drives Roberto Esposito's essay, Geopolitics and Metaphysics. It starts, somewhat surprisingly, from the 'metaphysical' assumptions of Henry Kissinger's thought: a German Jew who escaped the Nazis, he too thinks tragically, as he sees that human history is a succumbing struggle against Chaos and Destiny.

If not a solution, at least a tool for analysis lies in geopolitics, a discipline that studies the conditioning of human action caused by space: a concept that has always been a harbinger of antagonism and conflict.

Esposito takes us on a journey through time. It begins with American President Monroe's doctrine of the intangibility of the Western Hemisphere, claimed against Russia and Europe itself. Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, the English diplomat John Mackinder warns us of the dangers of a possible Russian-German alliance: this, in fact, was the dream of Hitler's advisor Karl Haushofer, which came true with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but tragically foundered with the Nazi invasion of the USSR.

During the Cold War, then, the idea of strategic 'coexistence' with the enemy - i.e. with the Communist Great Space - would be championed by George Kennan, a realist theorist of containment: 'Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world can be contained by the skilful and vigilant activation of a counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the movements and manoeuvres of Soviet policy'.

But this is the past. New categories are needed, which set aside the logics of sovereignty and domination, moving instead towards practices of governmentality in which - according to Esposito - it is law that plays a decisive role: because 'without legal form, geopolitical space would remain completely indeterminate'.