Jan Makovský
SUMMARY
Among all realities subject to domestication, fire occupies a unique position: it is the archetypal case of domestication. Without taming fire, no ordered sphere of the human world likely could have emerged. Within this order, it became possible to impose limits on plants, animals, and materials while at the same time assuming their own limits—or in other words, to incorporate them into the human world and develop forms of control over them. Fire is at once an invention and a device: the essence of technology and the first artifice through which nature revealed itself as appropriable, transformable, and governable. As an archetypal case, however, it contains within itself its own image—a reflexive quality it shares with imagination, with geometrical analogy, with motion, with the machine, and more generally with all phenomena that arise from continuity. To step onto the fiery ground is therefore to confront ambiguity, duality, and reflexivity—qualities that are the natural marks of continuity, and by which we may, in turn, impose limits and ultimately measure fire. From here, three paths of domestication can be traced: in imagination, in motion, and in machinery.