After the Machine of the World

The Western tradition of the “Machine of the World”, from Dante to Camões, organized a desire for intelligible totality, operating simultaneously as a cosmological structure and a poetic allegory. In this model, the cosmos presented itself as a legible artifact, ordered for human comprehension, a dimension that, in Camões, serves as a compass for imperial and historical expansion. However, modernity imposes a radical rupture of scale and nature, a transition that finds its critical witness in Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who, by rejecting cosmic revelation as a “trifling gift” [dom despiciendo] and facing the mining “pit” in his hometown of Itabira, denounces the collapse of ancient mechanical metaphors. We no longer inhabit a concentric “World” in the classical sense of mundus (a closed, ordered cosmos designed for habitation), but an accelerating, expanding universe, governed by a mathematical efficacy that escapes sensible imagination. This paper investigates how this ontological turn generates an “allegorical scarcity”: a diminished capacity of language to render a physical reality defined by events and relations rather than stable substances. I argue that this scarcity entails an epistemic-justice cost, widening the gap between technically valid knowledge and socially shareable intelligibility. Instead of restoring a lost symbolic cosmology, theory should embrace an asymptotic horizon as a new ethical figure. Under this lens, the “Machine of the Universe” emerges as a fugitive edge of representation, superseding the old image of visible gears and demanding an epistemic stance that recognizes structural incompleteness as the condition of knowledge.