The time has come for us as a community to consider our dependencies on our habituations, indeed to review the circumlocutory logic of our habitual recourse to habituation. It is not the content of the nomos per se that is at fault, but the structural interactions of nomos with its hated opponents: violence, anarchy, nature and anomie. Giorgio Agamben recently requested that we try to think nomos as in contact with its opposite, anomie, without any kind of oppositional relationality, as a precursor to thinking anomie as a thing for itself, not simply the zone of failure of the rule of law. If nomos is set loose from anomie, and anomie empowered to create a new, indifferential and nonrelational ontological and political landscape, then what of nomos, what of our habits of being, existence and power? What will nomos even resemble if its habitual modes of operativity and function are no longer tied to a history of aggression towards that upon which its very existence is negatively founded? To think anomie without nomos is one kind of task, and we have thinkers of indifference to take us into that strange territory. To think nomos without anomie however is another mode of behaviour entirely, and is perhaps the greater intellectual challenge. Who will lead us in this intimidating and deeply unsettling quest, a quest for that which we already possess? Thanos Zartaloudis is the only man for the job, which is why we should all read The Birth of Nomos , because in keeping with Benjamin's idea of Jetzzeit, the ancient history of nomos is, at the same time, our contemporary moment. And Zartaloudis the presiding genius of its essential archaeology. In order for the habitual dictates of power to die, they first have to be truly born, for power has just as much right to be set free from its narratives of oppression, as its victims have the right to walk down a street dressed in the habit of their non-habituation unmolested, unsegregated, and indifferent.

Thanks to Zartaloudis, we are 485 steps closer to this radical potential.