1. In a short text dedicated to his daughter Anima entitled Land and Sea, the German jurist Carl Schmitt proposed the term nomosof the land to refer to the “original appropriation of space” upon which a specific legal and political order is built. According to Schmitt, who interpreted the Greek term nomos (Law) as a “land seizure”, the history of the nomos coincides, era after era, with that of the natural elements identified by Aristotle to explain the order of the cosmos. Thus, for a long time, the nomos of the land would predominate, based not only on “land seizure” but also on the configuration of the legal and political order over terrestrial space, leaving maritime space as res nullus. For Schmitt, from the Roman Empire to the Hispanic Empire opened up by the “discovery of the New World,” both were built upon the foundation of the terrestrial element.
However, from the 17th century onward, the British Empire emerged, an empire whose nomos, according to the jurist, was no longer based on the element of “land” but on that of “water”: the British Empire conquered the entire planet, seizing its ports and thereby dominating the maritime domain. According to Schmitt, this was the advantage of the British Empire over the Spanish Empire: if the latter was based on “land,” the British Empire was based on “water.” In this way, the new states not only erected a legal and political structure based on land, but there was also a maritime legal system that would come to regulate the oceanic spaces of each country. In the wake of this reflection and considering the decline of the British Empire after the Second World War (Land and Sea was written in 1945), which Schmitt himself witnesses, he asks what element will replace “water.” Will it be air or fire?
Five years later, in 1950, Schmitt published The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. In it, he more clearly distinguishes between land, sea, and air in light of the emergence of the airplane and the new air warfare, which, according to him, is impossible to compare with land or sea warfare, to the extent that the current powers have not yet been able to reach an agreement on any precise rules of air warfare.[1] This point is important: why does “air” become the singular element for Schmitt compared to earth and water? First and foremost, because in these latter two historically developed forms of nomos, one could still resort to “spoils of war,” in contrast to which areal warfare, with its as-yet-unforeseen nomos, is defined only as a “pure war of destruction”. Schmitt’s emphasis on the nomos of the air, inaugurated by the two world wars, is significant insofar as it would be singular in transgressing the limits of both the terrestrial and maritime nomos. Despite the Cold War, Schmitt does not return to the question posed in Land and Sea regarding the preponderance, or lack thereof, of the element of fire over air.
2. In 2017, James C. Scott, an American political scientist and anthropologist, published Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.[2] Scott’s aim is to trace a history that runs counter to the official narrative, one which presents the state as a symbol of progress in which human populations finally found better living conditions. In contrast to this narrative, Scott emphasises several key points: first, he points out that the dichotomous division between hunter-gatherer and sedentary societies is not so clear, since a single society could combine both strategies depending on the circumstances; second, that sedentism was a settlement practice much older than the state, given the existence of records of agricultural fields in the absence of any institution capable of establishing large-scale societies systematically based on captive and non-free human labour. For Scott, “the State” signifies a form of domestication based on the social division of human labour, in which one class controls the monopoly on grain distribution and whose institution articulates a set of hierarchies and administrative mechanisms. Third, Scott points out, the State form was originally a rather sporadic experiment because, from the outset, it suffered from overcrowding, where diseases arose and spread rapidly, thus resulting in a high mortality rate among the population. In this sense, contrary to the idea that the State arose from a functional character, Scott points out that it is precisely the opposite: it was never functional, but rather introduced the “novelty of overcrowding”, with all of its attendant consequences: “Epidemic disease, however, given the entirely novel crowding the Neolithic revolution made possible, is the most likely suspect, judging from the massive effects of disease that appear in the written records once they become available. The meaning of epidemic disease in this context is not confined to Homo sapiens alone. Epidemics affected domestic animals and crops that were also concentrated in the late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp. A population could as easily be devastated by a disease that swept through their flocks or their grain fields as by a plague that menaced them directly.” [Against the Grain, at The Anarchist Library] Two key issues: the first problem that defines the State will be its constitutive effect of “epidemic overcrowding,” against which it will have to be in constant search of strategies to neutralise. The State collects, agglomerates multispecies populations—not only human—and their concentration will generate the conditions for disease. Therefore, it is not at all “functional,” as the dominant narrative has assumed. The second problem: Scott abandons any human centred narrative by showing that the effects of the state are ecological insofar as they are multi-species: crops, animals, human populations. War can be understood precisely in light of this problem: population renewal through slavery, appropriation of other people’s crops or animals in order to maintain the class hierarchy and control the “grains.” Thus, assuming the model of Uruk, a city of some 25,000 to 50,000 inhabitants, Scott’s thesis becomes concrete: “The logic of crowding and disease transmission is straightforward.” [Against the Grain, at The Anarchist Library].
It is within this framework that Scott raises a key issue that challenges the question posed by Schmitt: human beings, even before the emergence of states, already knew fire. But, unlike the “humanist” narrative, according to which human civilisation arose thanks to the domestication of fire, Scott emphasises that it was the other way around: it was not humankind that domesticated fire, but fire that domesticated humankind: “Much like certain trees, plants, and fungi, we are a fire-adapted species: pyrophytes. We have adapted our habits, diet, and body to the characteristics of fire, and having done so, we are chained, as it were, to its care and feeding.” [Against the Grain, at The Anarchist Library] Perhaps Scott’s approach allows us to understand why Schmitt set aside the question of fire: it implied discussing the humanism underlying the notion of nomos and, therefore, the necessity of statehood, which Schmitt would hardly have been willing to accept. Scott adopts this view because he traces a history that runs counter to humanism and its state-driven approach: human beings, like “trees, plants, and fungi,” have become pyrophilic, that is, they have been domesticated by fire, constituted by it in their “habits, diet, and bodies.” Fire would demand “care and sustenance” in its initial stage. And this, incidentally, shows that the burning of fields was older than states—as old as hunting, agriculture, and sedentary life—but its use would have been reconfigured under the shadow of the new state apparatus; that is, fire would have been a companion to human and non-human populations (trees, fungi, and plants) insofar as it constituted a kind of ecological imbrication, until the drift toward statehood modified the “pyrophilic” character from a relationship of friendship to a patriarchal fixation, from a way of inhabiting the land to a form of conquest.
First consideration: Beyond Scott, it is necessary to understand what “pyrophilia” means. Initially, it manifests itself as a friendly relationship, where “adaptation” designates a habitability of the living being with the world—in this sense, the living being with fire—only to later become a relationship of conquest and state domination. In other words, the pyrophilia that defines living beings implied an “adaptation” that, with the evolution of the state, became an anomaly and an appropriation of space. Initially, we not only “adapt” to fire, but we enjoy cultivating it, using it, feeding it; fire becomes a friend. But later, the state captures it and renders usaddicted to it. In the first sense, “pyrophilia” designates a relationship of friendship; in the second, a relationship of domination.
Second consideration: If this is the case, we can say that the “land seizure” proposed by Schmitt, strictly speaking, is sustained by the “historical a priori” of our addiction to fire. Without it, there is no appropriation. In this sense, we can say that the question posed by Schmitt (air or fire) could be answered by stating that if there is an original nomos, it is by no means that of the earth, but that of fire. Thus, fire comes before, not after. This means that the law of fire is original to all other forms of appropriation, be it of the earth, sea, or air. This interpretation implies that Schmitt’s conception of history, based on the discontinuity of the “original appropriation of space,” has only been possible through fire, the bearer of myth. In this framework, each nomos would be nothing other than a modality of fire, not three nomos qualitatively different from it.
Third consideration: Prometheus, the clay titan who steals fire from the gods to give it to humankind, constitutes the fundamental myth as the original law of all domination. The Promethean character should be inscribed in this scene: fire as a device of domination, fire as burning, shooting, bombing, fire as the secret that all nomoi hold, be it of the land, the sea, or the air. Thus, modern technology would be founded on this original dominion of fire. But I insist: pyrophilia is no longer a relationship of friendship in which one cultivates and nourishes, but a relationship of conquest in which one dominates and kills. The hyperbolic nature of the myth of Prometheus allows us, therefore, to assume that the fabric of nomos is not only made of fire but also of the illusion of its dominion, where human beings position themselves as lords of the Earth. The Promethean character of technology is precisely inseparable from its power relationship and, in this sense, founds the myth that positions the existence of a dominant class as necessary insofar as the State appears to be necessary. Against this, Scott attempts to show us the unnecessary nature of what the dominant narrative has naturalised as human progress.
Two forces, therefore, articulate the mythological machine of the State: on the one hand, the “endemic overcrowding” produced by population concentration, and on the other, the immune system, bolstered by the Promethean myth, capable of generating strategies against the disease-causing and multi-species effects that arise from this “endemic overcrowding.” In short, the problem with the State is that it generates its own shortcomings, the very weapons against which its own destruction will be built. Thus, the State—we might think with Scott—will always be threatened by its own ecological effects, and in this sense, its structure will consist solely of working to counteract them. However, neutralising its ecological effects means reproducing the same problem and, therefore, maintaining the State as a machine that lives under threat from itself and that, consequently, must wage war in different forms if it does not want to succumb.
In this light, how can we explain that fires shape terrestrial spaces and settlements, that the ships that dominated the ocean from 1492 onward never ceased firing their cannons and devastating ports with their plunder, burning entire villages, or that, as Schmitt aptly points out, airplanes—today drones—continue firing from the sky, but are themselves propelled by fire, just like spacecraft that propel themselves beyond the confines of the solar system?
More profoundly yet, the evolution of the nomos has done nothing but promote fire, propel it, and enable it to ultimately conquer the entire globe. Thus, we find ourselves in a kind of gigantic “gas chamber” in which fire continues to spread, ravaging lands, oceans, and air, and under which all living beings, crammed together, are ultimately exterminated. What is AI, as a cybernetic nomos, if not the intensification of the same law of fire by other means, under the new algorithmic architecture that, once again, carries Prometheus?
What about the Leviathan? A sea monster, a symbol of the sea, precisely, aimed at neutralising the ever-present threat of civil war. One might ask whether Hobbes doesn’t contain the utopia of a politics of water (like the British one described by Schmitt) which, nevertheless, to fulfil its function, had to update fire, to expand it now onto water, because the sovereignty that conditions the very form of the state could not be exempt from war.
3. In a lecture given in 2024 entitled The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth, the Swedish writer and activist Andreas Malm offers an important perspective for understanding the brutal colonisation of Palestine and, in particular, its genocidal intensification promoted by Zionist forces since October 2023. Malm’s thesis is that the colonisation of Palestine must necessarily be viewed in light of the invention of fossil capital by British imperialism: from 1840, Great Britain decided to initiate the colonisation of the Middle East through the first armed incursion into Palestine against the troops of Muhammad Ali, who were waiting in Acre. Unlike previous Western imperialism, which used wind power for its ships, Great Britain began using coal, thus accelerating its imperial campaign and making it far more effective in carrying out the conquest. Indeed, we would say with Scott, imperialism is an ecological effect of the dual force that articulates the mythological machine of the State, which must venture outward and conquer lands, peoples, and crops, if it is not to succumb to its own overcrowding.
Therefore, for Malm, the “destruction of Palestine” will not be just any particular of conquest, but will coincide with the total “destruction of the Earth”, in the sense that Palestine inaugurates the process by which imperialist efficiency will require the production of fossil capital to sustain itself and drive new conquests. The Promethean radicalisation intensifies and highlights that the only nomos that had truly been decisive was that of fire. In Malm’s description of the first imperialist assault on Palestine, a kind of circularity is revealed, by which British imperialism will become the most powerful in the world: the production of fossil capital to conquer new horizons and thus the need for the ever-increasing production of said capital. A machine juxtaposed to the classic population model: more capital means more population and, in this sense, greater endemic overcrowding that must be countered through new conquests. In this sense, coal combustion emerges as the primary material upon which the colonisation of the Middle East in general, and Palestine in particular, is based.
As “capital,” coal cannot be conceived simply as a thing but as a fundamental commodity for the new imperialist drive with which Great Britain will ultimately dominate the seas. Thus, unlike Schmitt, Malm shows precisely how the maritime nomos is conditioned by the technical modernisation of the nomos of fire and, therefore, is nothing more than a new modality of it: the steamship with which the British demolish Acre and destroy Ali’s troops constitutes a new ensemble that, nevertheless, deepens the influence of fire within the realm of maritime domination: cannons annihilate the Palestinian coast, but coal serves as fuel for the speed of movement deployed by the ships.
Malm, in effect, shows how the destruction of Palestine thus implied the liberation of fossil fuels, with which the United States, Europe, and Israel now fuel the genocidal industry. However, a caveat should be made here, beyond Malm: we could say that, unlike Spanish imperialism in the Americas, the imperialist history of the Middle East is uniquely defined by the use of fossil capital, which would later spread like a veritable pandemic through all the imperialisms vying for “land” during the second half of the 19th and the 20th centuries. But what is unique about this British imperialism is defined by its use of fossil capital.
In this regard, we will mention three important points that Malm either overlooks or does not sufficiently emphasise: first, that the Zionist machine, insofar as it traces its genealogy to 17th-century British imperialism as Christian Zionism initially, and later as Jewish Zionism, crystallised after 1948 with the founding of the State of Israel, is the machine of fossil capital; but second, that this capital undergoes forms of abstraction: first as coal, it refers to “stone,” then to “liquid” when oil extraction began at the end of the 19th century, and finally to “aerial” as natural gas, moved through pipelines that crisscross the land. Mineral, liquid, and gas: three phases that today operate in a juxtaposed manner. Third, it is crucial to understand the type of colonialism taking place in Palestine: not the Hispanic colonialism that functioned centripetally, integrating the native population into the metropolitan worldview, but rather settler colonialism, which is centrifugal with respect to the native population. Thus, the Zionist colonial project consists of replacing one population with another, expelling one and settling another. In this sense, settler colonialism is precisely the colonial technique most faithful to the nomos of fire: burning villages, population replacement, destruction of forests, confiscation of water, “land seizure” without a population: “a land without a people for a people without a land” is the phrase Lord Shafestbury used to describe the Zionist colonial enterprise, where the theological colonial notion of the “Promised Land” functions precisely as that territory ready for conquest.
The “pyrophilic” nature described by Scott, which could be present in hunter-gatherers and sedentary, stateless societies, intensifies in the Zionist colonial enterprise insofar as, once again, fire is no longer tended or fed, but rather accumulated and ignited. Fire is not merely one element among others, but the original law of space, a mechanism of domination that extends endlessly, producing the phenomenon of global warming as an expression of the planetary civil war that multiplies the outbreaks of fire. Fossil fuels, which today constitute the capital that unleashes this planetary civil war, causing fires to proliferate everywhere, remind us of the continued relevance of this original law, which today has been left unmediated and grows by burning everything in its path.
January, 2026
[1] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, Telos Press, 2003, pp. 316-320.
[2] James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press, 2017.
Rodrigo Karmy Bolton: The law of fire
From Ficción de la razón (21/01/2026)
1. In a short text dedicated to his daughter Anima entitled Land and Sea, the German jurist Carl Schmitt proposed the term nomos of the land to refer to the “original appropriation of space” upon which a specific legal and political order is built. According to Schmitt, who interpreted the Greek term nomos (Law) as a “land seizure”, the history of the nomos coincides, era after era, with that of the natural elements identified by Aristotle to explain the order of the cosmos. Thus, for a long time, the nomos of the land would predominate, based not only on “land seizure” but also on the configuration of the legal and political order over terrestrial space, leaving maritime space as res nullus. For Schmitt, from the Roman Empire to the Hispanic Empire opened up by the “discovery of the New World,” both were built upon the foundation of the terrestrial element.
However, from the 17th century onward, the British Empire emerged, an empire whose nomos, according to the jurist, was no longer based on the element of “land” but on that of “water”: the British Empire conquered the entire planet, seizing its ports and thereby dominating the maritime domain. According to Schmitt, this was the advantage of the British Empire over the Spanish Empire: if the latter was based on “land,” the British Empire was based on “water.” In this way, the new states not only erected a legal and political structure based on land, but there was also a maritime legal system that would come to regulate the oceanic spaces of each country. In the wake of this reflection and considering the decline of the British Empire after the Second World War (Land and Sea was written in 1945), which Schmitt himself witnesses, he asks what element will replace “water.” Will it be air or fire?
Five years later, in 1950, Schmitt published The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. In it, he more clearly distinguishes between land, sea, and air in light of the emergence of the airplane and the new air warfare, which, according to him, is impossible to compare with land or sea warfare, to the extent that the current powers have not yet been able to reach an agreement on any precise rules of air warfare.[1] This point is important: why does “air” become the singular element for Schmitt compared to earth and water? First and foremost, because in these latter two historically developed forms of nomos, one could still resort to “spoils of war,” in contrast to which areal warfare, with its as-yet-unforeseen nomos, is defined only as a “pure war of destruction”. Schmitt’s emphasis on the nomos of the air, inaugurated by the two world wars, is significant insofar as it would be singular in transgressing the limits of both the terrestrial and maritime nomos. Despite the Cold War, Schmitt does not return to the question posed in Land and Sea regarding the preponderance, or lack thereof, of the element of fire over air.
2. In 2017, James C. Scott, an American political scientist and anthropologist, published Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.[2] Scott’s aim is to trace a history that runs counter to the official narrative, one which presents the state as a symbol of progress in which human populations finally found better living conditions. In contrast to this narrative, Scott emphasises several key points: first, he points out that the dichotomous division between hunter-gatherer and sedentary societies is not so clear, since a single society could combine both strategies depending on the circumstances; second, that sedentism was a settlement practice much older than the state, given the existence of records of agricultural fields in the absence of any institution capable of establishing large-scale societies systematically based on captive and non-free human labour. For Scott, “the State” signifies a form of domestication based on the social division of human labour, in which one class controls the monopoly on grain distribution and whose institution articulates a set of hierarchies and administrative mechanisms. Third, Scott points out, the State form was originally a rather sporadic experiment because, from the outset, it suffered from overcrowding, where diseases arose and spread rapidly, thus resulting in a high mortality rate among the population. In this sense, contrary to the idea that the State arose from a functional character, Scott points out that it is precisely the opposite: it was never functional, but rather introduced the “novelty of overcrowding”, with all of its attendant consequences: “Epidemic disease, however, given the entirely novel crowding the Neolithic revolution made possible, is the most likely suspect, judging from the massive effects of disease that appear in the written records once they become available. The meaning of epidemic disease in this context is not confined to Homo sapiens alone. Epidemics affected domestic animals and crops that were also concentrated in the late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp. A population could as easily be devastated by a disease that swept through their flocks or their grain fields as by a plague that menaced them directly.” [Against the Grain, at The Anarchist Library] Two key issues: the first problem that defines the State will be its constitutive effect of “epidemic overcrowding,” against which it will have to be in constant search of strategies to neutralise. The State collects, agglomerates multispecies populations—not only human—and their concentration will generate the conditions for disease. Therefore, it is not at all “functional,” as the dominant narrative has assumed. The second problem: Scott abandons any human centred narrative by showing that the effects of the state are ecological insofar as they are multi-species: crops, animals, human populations. War can be understood precisely in light of this problem: population renewal through slavery, appropriation of other people’s crops or animals in order to maintain the class hierarchy and control the “grains.” Thus, assuming the model of Uruk, a city of some 25,000 to 50,000 inhabitants, Scott’s thesis becomes concrete: “The logic of crowding and disease transmission is straightforward.” [Against the Grain, at The Anarchist Library].
It is within this framework that Scott raises a key issue that challenges the question posed by Schmitt: human beings, even before the emergence of states, already knew fire. But, unlike the “humanist” narrative, according to which human civilisation arose thanks to the domestication of fire, Scott emphasises that it was the other way around: it was not humankind that domesticated fire, but fire that domesticated humankind: “Much like certain trees, plants, and fungi, we are a fire-adapted species: pyrophytes. We have adapted our habits, diet, and body to the characteristics of fire, and having done so, we are chained, as it were, to its care and feeding.” [Against the Grain, at The Anarchist Library] Perhaps Scott’s approach allows us to understand why Schmitt set aside the question of fire: it implied discussing the humanism underlying the notion of nomos and, therefore, the necessity of statehood, which Schmitt would hardly have been willing to accept. Scott adopts this view because he traces a history that runs counter to humanism and its state-driven approach: human beings, like “trees, plants, and fungi,” have become pyrophilic, that is, they have been domesticated by fire, constituted by it in their “habits, diet, and bodies.” Fire would demand “care and sustenance” in its initial stage. And this, incidentally, shows that the burning of fields was older than states—as old as hunting, agriculture, and sedentary life—but its use would have been reconfigured under the shadow of the new state apparatus; that is, fire would have been a companion to human and non-human populations (trees, fungi, and plants) insofar as it constituted a kind of ecological imbrication, until the drift toward statehood modified the “pyrophilic” character from a relationship of friendship to a patriarchal fixation, from a way of inhabiting the land to a form of conquest.
First consideration: Beyond Scott, it is necessary to understand what “pyrophilia” means. Initially, it manifests itself as a friendly relationship, where “adaptation” designates a habitability of the living being with the world—in this sense, the living being with fire—only to later become a relationship of conquest and state domination. In other words, the pyrophilia that defines living beings implied an “adaptation” that, with the evolution of the state, became an anomaly and an appropriation of space. Initially, we not only “adapt” to fire, but we enjoy cultivating it, using it, feeding it; fire becomes a friend. But later, the state captures it and renders us addicted to it. In the first sense, “pyrophilia” designates a relationship of friendship; in the second, a relationship of domination.
Second consideration: If this is the case, we can say that the “land seizure” proposed by Schmitt, strictly speaking, is sustained by the “historical a priori” of our addiction to fire. Without it, there is no appropriation. In this sense, we can say that the question posed by Schmitt (air or fire) could be answered by stating that if there is an original nomos, it is by no means that of the earth, but that of fire. Thus, fire comes before, not after. This means that the law of fire is original to all other forms of appropriation, be it of the earth, sea, or air. This interpretation implies that Schmitt’s conception of history, based on the discontinuity of the “original appropriation of space,” has only been possible through fire, the bearer of myth. In this framework, each nomos would be nothing other than a modality of fire, not three nomos qualitatively different from it.
Third consideration: Prometheus, the clay titan who steals fire from the gods to give it to humankind, constitutes the fundamental myth as the original law of all domination. The Promethean character should be inscribed in this scene: fire as a device of domination, fire as burning, shooting, bombing, fire as the secret that all nomoi hold, be it of the land, the sea, or the air. Thus, modern technology would be founded on this original dominion of fire. But I insist: pyrophilia is no longer a relationship of friendship in which one cultivates and nourishes, but a relationship of conquest in which one dominates and kills. The hyperbolic nature of the myth of Prometheus allows us, therefore, to assume that the fabric of nomos is not only made of fire but also of the illusion of its dominion, where human beings position themselves as lords of the Earth. The Promethean character of technology is precisely inseparable from its power relationship and, in this sense, founds the myth that positions the existence of a dominant class as necessary insofar as the State appears to be necessary. Against this, Scott attempts to show us the unnecessary nature of what the dominant narrative has naturalised as human progress.
Two forces, therefore, articulate the mythological machine of the State: on the one hand, the “endemic overcrowding” produced by population concentration, and on the other, the immune system, bolstered by the Promethean myth, capable of generating strategies against the disease-causing and multi-species effects that arise from this “endemic overcrowding.” In short, the problem with the State is that it generates its own shortcomings, the very weapons against which its own destruction will be built. Thus, the State—we might think with Scott—will always be threatened by its own ecological effects, and in this sense, its structure will consist solely of working to counteract them. However, neutralising its ecological effects means reproducing the same problem and, therefore, maintaining the State as a machine that lives under threat from itself and that, consequently, must wage war in different forms if it does not want to succumb.
In this light, how can we explain that fires shape terrestrial spaces and settlements, that the ships that dominated the ocean from 1492 onward never ceased firing their cannons and devastating ports with their plunder, burning entire villages, or that, as Schmitt aptly points out, airplanes—today drones—continue firing from the sky, but are themselves propelled by fire, just like spacecraft that propel themselves beyond the confines of the solar system?
More profoundly yet, the evolution of the nomos has done nothing but promote fire, propel it, and enable it to ultimately conquer the entire globe. Thus, we find ourselves in a kind of gigantic “gas chamber” in which fire continues to spread, ravaging lands, oceans, and air, and under which all living beings, crammed together, are ultimately exterminated. What is AI, as a cybernetic nomos, if not the intensification of the same law of fire by other means, under the new algorithmic architecture that, once again, carries Prometheus?
What about the Leviathan? A sea monster, a symbol of the sea, precisely, aimed at neutralising the ever-present threat of civil war. One might ask whether Hobbes doesn’t contain the utopia of a politics of water (like the British one described by Schmitt) which, nevertheless, to fulfil its function, had to update fire, to expand it now onto water, because the sovereignty that conditions the very form of the state could not be exempt from war.
3. In a lecture given in 2024 entitled The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth, the Swedish writer and activist Andreas Malm offers an important perspective for understanding the brutal colonisation of Palestine and, in particular, its genocidal intensification promoted by Zionist forces since October 2023. Malm’s thesis is that the colonisation of Palestine must necessarily be viewed in light of the invention of fossil capital by British imperialism: from 1840, Great Britain decided to initiate the colonisation of the Middle East through the first armed incursion into Palestine against the troops of Muhammad Ali, who were waiting in Acre. Unlike previous Western imperialism, which used wind power for its ships, Great Britain began using coal, thus accelerating its imperial campaign and making it far more effective in carrying out the conquest. Indeed, we would say with Scott, imperialism is an ecological effect of the dual force that articulates the mythological machine of the State, which must venture outward and conquer lands, peoples, and crops, if it is not to succumb to its own overcrowding.
Therefore, for Malm, the “destruction of Palestine” will not be just any particular of conquest, but will coincide with the total “destruction of the Earth”, in the sense that Palestine inaugurates the process by which imperialist efficiency will require the production of fossil capital to sustain itself and drive new conquests. The Promethean radicalisation intensifies and highlights that the only nomos that had truly been decisive was that of fire. In Malm’s description of the first imperialist assault on Palestine, a kind of circularity is revealed, by which British imperialism will become the most powerful in the world: the production of fossil capital to conquer new horizons and thus the need for the ever-increasing production of said capital. A machine juxtaposed to the classic population model: more capital means more population and, in this sense, greater endemic overcrowding that must be countered through new conquests. In this sense, coal combustion emerges as the primary material upon which the colonisation of the Middle East in general, and Palestine in particular, is based.
As “capital,” coal cannot be conceived simply as a thing but as a fundamental commodity for the new imperialist drive with which Great Britain will ultimately dominate the seas. Thus, unlike Schmitt, Malm shows precisely how the maritime nomos is conditioned by the technical modernisation of the nomos of fire and, therefore, is nothing more than a new modality of it: the steamship with which the British demolish Acre and destroy Ali’s troops constitutes a new ensemble that, nevertheless, deepens the influence of fire within the realm of maritime domination: cannons annihilate the Palestinian coast, but coal serves as fuel for the speed of movement deployed by the ships.
Malm, in effect, shows how the destruction of Palestine thus implied the liberation of fossil fuels, with which the United States, Europe, and Israel now fuel the genocidal industry. However, a caveat should be made here, beyond Malm: we could say that, unlike Spanish imperialism in the Americas, the imperialist history of the Middle East is uniquely defined by the use of fossil capital, which would later spread like a veritable pandemic through all the imperialisms vying for “land” during the second half of the 19th and the 20th centuries. But what is unique about this British imperialism is defined by its use of fossil capital.
In this regard, we will mention three important points that Malm either overlooks or does not sufficiently emphasise: first, that the Zionist machine, insofar as it traces its genealogy to 17th-century British imperialism as Christian Zionism initially, and later as Jewish Zionism, crystallised after 1948 with the founding of the State of Israel, is the machine of fossil capital; but second, that this capital undergoes forms of abstraction: first as coal, it refers to “stone,” then to “liquid” when oil extraction began at the end of the 19th century, and finally to “aerial” as natural gas, moved through pipelines that crisscross the land. Mineral, liquid, and gas: three phases that today operate in a juxtaposed manner. Third, it is crucial to understand the type of colonialism taking place in Palestine: not the Hispanic colonialism that functioned centripetally, integrating the native population into the metropolitan worldview, but rather settler colonialism, which is centrifugal with respect to the native population. Thus, the Zionist colonial project consists of replacing one population with another, expelling one and settling another. In this sense, settler colonialism is precisely the colonial technique most faithful to the nomos of fire: burning villages, population replacement, destruction of forests, confiscation of water, “land seizure” without a population: “a land without a people for a people without a land” is the phrase Lord Shafestbury used to describe the Zionist colonial enterprise, where the theological colonial notion of the “Promised Land” functions precisely as that territory ready for conquest.
The “pyrophilic” nature described by Scott, which could be present in hunter-gatherers and sedentary, stateless societies, intensifies in the Zionist colonial enterprise insofar as, once again, fire is no longer tended or fed, but rather accumulated and ignited. Fire is not merely one element among others, but the original law of space, a mechanism of domination that extends endlessly, producing the phenomenon of global warming as an expression of the planetary civil war that multiplies the outbreaks of fire. Fossil fuels, which today constitute the capital that unleashes this planetary civil war, causing fires to proliferate everywhere, remind us of the continued relevance of this original law, which today has been left unmediated and grows by burning everything in its path.
January, 2026
[1] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, Telos Press, 2003, pp. 316-320.
[2] James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press, 2017.