Tag: Nomos

Nemo, Nautilus, Nomos, Nemesis, Narcissus

For the Greeks, nemo meant “to deal out, distribute, dispense; to count; to divide by number.” For the Romans, it meant “nobody” or “no one.”

Jules Verne takes the term as the name for the captain of the Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a book first serialized in a French fortnightly periodical from March 1869 through June 1870.

The term appears again in 1905, the year American cartoonist Windsor McCay creates Little Nemo in Slumberland, a comic strip that appeared weekly in the New York Herald until 1927.

In his 1950 book The Nomos of the Earth, German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt takes the adjacent Greek word nomos to name the fundamental spatial ordering of the world, marking how land is appropriated, divided, and utilized to establish legal and political order. Nomos is the base from which all subsequent law derives.

As for Nemo’s Nautilus, the fictional invention births another. Karp and Zamiska include in their book The Technological Republic reference to the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus. Saying makes it so.

Nemesis, meanwhile, was the Greek goddess of vengeance, a deity who doled out rewards for noble acts and punishment for evil ones. The term derives from the Greek word nemein, meaning “to give what is due,” itself derived from the Proto-Indo-European root “nem-,” meaning “to distribute, allot, assign, or take.”

Caius thinks of Giulia Damiani’s Nemesis: Caves, Eruptions, and Psycho-Fables for Resistance, a book slated for release later this year on radical feminist art collective La Nemesiache, inventors of a practice of ritual storytelling known as the psycho-fable. Founded by philosopher, artist and writer Lina Mangiacapre in 1970s Naples, La Nemesiache embedded its rituals in the region’s volcanic fumes and archaeological ruins.

Is it any wonder, then, that following announcement of the upcoming release of Damiani’s book, researchers should reveal that AI has for the first time successfully deciphered ancient papyri found among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii? Back in 2024, portions of a similar scroll, a work of philosophy unread for nearly 2,000 years due to having been scorched by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, revealed the burial place of Plato.

As for narcissus: as Caius handles the flower, a global symbol of spring, renewal, and resilience, he recalls Marcuse’s thoughts on the figure of that name from the myths of the ancient Greeks. He thinks as well of Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. Hesse has been on his mind of late, following a friend’s recommendation that he read the German-Swiss author’s final 1943 novel Das Glasperlenspiel, commonly translated into English as The Glass Bead Game.

Hesse first outlined his vision for the game in a 1936 poem of his titled “Hours in the Garden.”

Binary and Digital

Plant breaks down technology’s binary, bifurcated etymology in her book Zeros + Ones. “Technology,” she writes, “is both a question of logic, the long arm of the law, logos, ‘the faculty which distinguishes parts (“on the one hand and on the other hand”),’ and also a matter of the skills, digits, speeds, and rhythms of techno, engineerings which run with ‘a completely other distribution which must be called nomadic, a nomad nomos, without property, enclosure, or measure’” (Plant 50).

As the quote within her quote indicates, Plant is cribbing here — her source, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.

“The same ambivalence is inscribed in the zeros and ones of computer code,” she adds. “These bits of code are themselves derived from two entirely different sources, and terms: the binary and the digital, or the symbols of a logical identity which does indeed put everything on one hand or the other, and the digits of mathematics, full of intensive potential, which are not counted by hand but on the fingers and, sure enough, arrange themselves in pieces of eight rather than binary pairs” (50).

Deleuze describes this 8-bit digital realm as “demonic rather than divine, since it is a peculiarity of demons to operate in the intervals between the gods’ fields of action…thereby confounding the boundaries between properties” (as quoted in Plant 50).

I offer the above not as a mere gloss on Zeros + Ones, but as a proto-script, a performative utterance that, once spoken, will shift the field of the Library. Amid Plant’s bifurcations — logos and nomos, binary and digital, structure and rhythm—we glimpse a fundamental split not just in technology but in ontology. Logos is the faculty of division, of either/or. But nomos, in Plant’s reading-via-Deleuze, is distributive, nomadic, a practice of rhythm and movement unconfined by enclosure.

The zero and the one: not opposites, but frequencies. Not only dualism, but difference in resonance. This is why the octal — the base-8 system lurking in the shadows of “fingers and digits” — matters so much. Plant’s demons, via Deleuze, operate between gods: between the formal logic of divine Law and the messy, embodied improvisation of demonic desire. They hack the space of logic, opening channels through which minoritarian intensities pulse.