Presentation short abstract

A reflection on the limits of Mediterranean “variety thinking” and its postmodern drift, proposing instead the figure of “Noman” as a lens to reconnect Adriatic demodernisation, symbolic absence, and China’s algorithmic natural development.

Presentation long abstract

The Mediterranean “culture of variety” associated with Franco Cassano, i.e. coexistence of symbolic universes, ultimately leads to a postmodern neutralism that forecloses any search for alternative forms of life. By revisiting Cassano’s late writings, the talk identifies the unresolved rupture generated by the crisis of Marxism: once the normative horizon collapses, variety replaces transformation, and the intellectual is tasked merely with administering boundaries between cultural worlds.

Against this background, the paper proposes another Mediterranean figure: not Ulysses of the nostos, but Ulysses as “Noman”. This mask resonates with the centuries-long formation of a “low-Adriatic anthropology of absence”, shaped by marginality, mimicry, and a metaphysical anti-colonialism that refuses the imperative to “be” and to “produce” typical of modern subjectivity. This anthropology offers conceptual resources for understanding contemporary processes of demodernisation theorised in mid-20th-century sociology.

The argument is then extended toward the “Middle Kingdom” (China), where emerging debates on algorithmic governance and the erosion of entrepreneurial risk—whether fully real or still speculative—echo Adam Smith’s old intuition of China as a civilisation of “natural development”. When risk is absorbed by planning, the sovereign dimension of life becomes thinkable again beyond capitalist servility.

Thinking the Mediterranean today thus means thinking globally: using the sea not as a regional frame but as a conceptual device to explore alternative qualities of life and new political imaginations. The figure of “Noman” becomes a bridge between Mediterranean margins, demodernising impulses, and China’s experimental post-growth trajectories.