The Great Interregnum

The only dangerous and radical critique is the political critique of democracy. Because the emblem of the present age, its fetish, its phallus, is democracy. So long as we do not know how to construct a large-scale creative critique of State democracy, we will remain, stagnate, in the financial brothel of images.—Alain Badiou, The Pornographic Age

“The basic premise of the Hegelian dialectics is that the path to truth is a moment of truth itself: truth is ultimately nothing other than the systematic articulation of a succession of errors.” —Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in A Wired Brain

Badiou calls it the interval, the gap between a failed world of images and our subtraction from that hall of mirrors. Market democracy rules the planet under various guises of political corruption. But let’s be clear there is no exit, no place to go, no island or safe haven from its ugly face. We are all trapped in the prison house of an economic system of State Democracy. As long as we collude with it we will all fall-fail with it. Badiou would like us to subtract ourselves from this false system of images, bound as we are in a world of social media that entraps us like victims of our own success.

Russia and China have returned to despotism with a capitalist face. The EU is a stateless State of austerity in which economics rules rather than democracy. America is in ragnarok, eclipsed by its own blindness, overreach, and corrupted dreams of globalism. Both reactionary and progressive politics is dead with only the semblance of a farcical comedy of corporate controlled minions left to do its bidding. We pretend with ourselves that we can change it, reform it, modify it by political means… we can’t. But those who still believe in it will continue to merge with its images till the mirror world finally folds them in its dark economic enslavement.

The Pandemic is a natural and unnatural process that in itself is only one pebble in a slow but methodical avalanche of disasters coming our way on this planet. Already we see how the façade of market democracy has failed us, and will continue to fail us. Oh, don’t get me wrong, people will cling to the sinking ship till they drown… people don’t really want to change. They want their utopian dreams, their little petty lives to go on as before, as if their little lives mattered. They don’t. No one gives a shit about your petty lives. Especially those who mask power in the halls of government. True, I’m pessimistic about our prospects because people for the most part are like compliant and passive prisoners awaiting a judgment that will never come. They’ve judged themselves.

Oh, sure, people will protest this or that, but revolt… revolution? No. People have become domesticate animals entrapped in the comforts of false desires, minions of a technocratic worldview that offers them simple distractions and images of freedom rather than freedom itself. Justice. How can there be justice in a world of images?

Posthuman Control

Unlike his friend Badiou, Zizek accepts that the technocratic worldview will replace our current chaotic interval, that we are already in the midst of this transitional phase, moving in that demarcated zone of Singularity beyond which no one can see but the wise among us can at least speculate:

“The prospect of total digital control of which we are not even aware confronts us brutally with the basic philosophical question: is our only chance of freedom in isolation from the space of Singularity, or is there a dimension of being-human which in principle eludes Singularity even if we are fully immersed in it?”

–Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in A Wired Brain