History in Turmoil

Convince an enemy, convince him that he’s wrong

Is to win a bloodless battle where victory is long

A simple act of faith, in reason over might

To blow up his children will only prove him right

History will teach us nothing…[1]

And many more Destructions played

In this ghastly masquerade,

All disguised, even to the eyes,

Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.[2]

Introducing turmoil

Reflecting on the ‘atomistic chaos’ of his day, Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out some troubling attributes of the world, which was getting ‘poorer in love and goodness’ the ‘more worldly’ it became.[3]

Individuals, seized by the ‘anxiety of waiting’, grew restless. Pretending to know ‘nothing of these anxieties’, they withdrew into their shells, inside which they could ‘think with an exclusive preoccupation with themselves’ and ‘build and plant for their own day alone’. The urgency surrounding the ‘quest for happiness’ intensified, as though ‘it had to be caught that very day or tomorrow: because perhaps by the day after tomorrow there would be no more hunting at all’. The growing foreboding of the coming ‘winter’s day’ was countered by the ‘greedy exploitation of every minute’, which laid bare ‘all the cowardice and the self-seeking drives of the human soul’. In his later works Nietzsche wondered whether ‘licence and luxury follow when a people approaches destruction, when it degenerates physiologically’, in a manner that could explain ‘craving for ever stronger and more frequent stimulation’.[4] It seemed as though individuals en masse, akin to the characters of Alexander Pushkin’s Feast in Time of Plague, inadvertently beckoned their impending demise by celebrating it as a form of release—almost as deliverance, rather than confronting menace.

Politicians—‘poor wretches’—feigned ignorance and also pretended not to notice that ‘the spirit of humanity was in great danger’, worsening the situation. Whenever one dared to ‘speak of their weakness and resist their pernicious lying spirit’, they spared no effort to make everyone ‘believe that of all the centuries theirs has borne the prize away’. Well-versed in all ‘types of murder that required neither daggers nor assault; they knew that whatever was said well would be believed’.[5] They even ‘shook with artificial merriment’ as they fervently embodied their falsehoods day after day, increasingly emboldened by their perceived sense of impunity.

The sciences, together with the arts, ‘pursued without any restraint and in a spirit of the blindest laissez faire’, inadvertently ‘served the coming barbarism’. The ‘educated classes’ no longer fulfilled the role of ‘lighthouses or refuges’ to safeguard society at large. In silent accord with the ‘physiologically condemned’ potentates, who ascended to the very ‘top of society’ only to direct the proceedings of the cirque diabolique, the ‘cultured wo/man’, in a remarkable feat of self-deception, had no trouble ‘lyingly denying the existence of the universal sickness’, and sybaritically continued ‘obstructing the physicians’.[6]

The economy was fuelled by the ‘brutal greed for money alone’.[7] The emerging ‘immense conglomerates’ sought to replace isolated capitalists in almost every branch of industry, trade and finance.[8] Uncontrolled private credit creation, fuelled by as well as exacerbating the speculative excesses, played out, for a time, in the ‘stock markets, which fell under the curse that casinos had fallen to earlier’.[9] Powerful individual and institutional economic actors systematically ‘misused politics as an instrument of the stock exchange and both the state and society as mechanisms for their own enrichment’.[10]

The geopolitics of the day was marred by the escalating rivalry between the ‘Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs’—ie, the ‘English, Americans, and Russians’—jostling for ‘mastery of the world’.[11] This translated into an urgent demand on Europe to come together as ‘One’ in its bid to remain the world’s ‘centre of culture’ and to ‘retain its intellectual influence’.[12] The juxtaposition of antagonistic forces and the play of perceived historical destinies placed Germany in a precarious position: were it not to transcend the customary role of a ‘mediator and broker’—stuck on the crossroads ‘between Mephistopheles and Wagner’—it would risk being thrust from the side-lines of history into the eye of a geopolitical storm not of its making.[13]

Sovereign nation-states, one after another, were ‘swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy’. Gradually, yet inevitably they succumbed to the ‘crudest and most evil forces’, eventually falling into the hands of ‘the money-makers and the military despots’, who came to ‘hold sway over almost everything on earth’. Under their myopic and self-serving leadership, the nations ‘once again drew away from one another in the most hostile fashion and longed to tear one another to pieces’. Until they did. First in 1914 and then again in 1939, Nietzsche’s warning notwithstanding—or possibly, as suggested by some, because of it.

Might Nietzsche’s analysis of his time and his forewarnings of a tumultuous future have summoned it into being, compelling the troublesome flesh of reality to conform to his visions? Could he see something others did not? Before answering these questions, it is important to appreciate one other thing. Nietzsche’s truly disturbing finding was that the psychic architecture of his contemporary society lacked the (agonistic) mechanisms by which the accrued pressure of systemic antagonisms could be safely released without spilling into armed conflict and bloodshed, in order to reset, for a time, the general rules of engagement known under the name of the ‘social contract’. The resulting question, for us, is whether this precipitous design flaw in the system has been rectified by the tragic history of the two world wars, or whether, in Koselleck’s terms, the tension between the ‘different and jarring layers of time’, contingent on the ‘structures of repetition’, is liable to once again erupt in a succession of ‘singular historical events’, whose unfurling would inevitably ‘surprise those who experience them’?[14]

Malign velocities of secularisation

Fast-forwarding Nietzsche’s fever dream some hundred and fifty years, once again—with or without his eyes—it should not be difficult to notice the unfolding play of ‘tremendous forces’ which are ‘savage, primal, and wholly merciless’. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, more frequently these days we fix our inward gaze upon them ‘with a fearful expectation, as though gazing into the cauldron of a witch’s kitchen’, from which ‘at any moment sparks and flashes may herald dreadful apparitions’.[15] Yet, somewhere overhead ‘the Maestro’ keeps on telling us ‘it is Mozart’ and, even though it distinctly ‘sounds like bubble gum’, mesmerised we sit and listen, waiting ‘for the miracle to come’.[16]

In these circumstances, it might be worth having a brief Breaking Dawn (of The Twilight Saga, 2008-2012) moment, where Alice Cullen helps the arch-enemy, Aro of the Volturi, to visualise the version of the future he most dreaded. By lifting the Veil of Maya obscuring the deeper workings of History, which presents itself to the naked eye as a vibrant and cacophonous tapestry of events, herded by discrete spatiotemporal logics and compressed by the passage of time into narratives we would later call ‘history’, Alice succeeded in preventing History from actualising its consequences. The tragedy which seemed all but inevitable remained unconsummated.

This example illustrates the intricate and frequently misunderstood relationship between small-h history—the catalogue of discrete events marked by clear beginnings and ends—and capital-H History, the unseen forces driving the perpetual cycles of human existence. Small-h history gives us digestible moments: World War I, World War II, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, all condensed by the passage of time into neatly packaged narratives of what has come to pass. These ‘parcels of the past’—contained, manageable, and imminently manipulable—serve their current masters by framing a blissful ‘before’ and a hopeful ‘after,’ helping us cope with the calamity at hand. The past remains forever unpredictable, enslaved by a present that endlessly mutilates it to justify its own lies, all while chaining itself to an unknowable future—a phantom it weaponizes to sanctify its every misdeed and delusion of progress.

Yet today, as is ever the case with small-h history, these seemingly fragmented and loosely connected ‘past’ events, propelled by some unseen structuring logic, are hurtling toward a collision with capital-H History, which recognizes no isolated wars or crises—only the ongoing, unbroken clash of opposing forces, worldviews, and values. When the small and large arcs of history converge, the wars we fight, the recessions we suffer, and the health crises we endure cease to appear as singular disruptions and instead reveal themselves as manifestations of a deeper, cyclical struggle—one that re-emerges to reshape the course of human destiny.

The growing awareness of impending disaster not only incapacitates but augments the thinking concerning such a possible cataclysm as a form of release from the accrued debris of secular modernity. It stimulates obliviousness of the present. Once again, every one of the current ‘theories of the state, of the nation, of the economy, trade and justice’ betrays an air of a deeply cynical and, at times, hysterical ‘defence and exculpation of the present before its own bad conscience’.[17] The more obvious it becomes that the ‘constitutive power of the so-called nation state’ only ‘serves to augment the universal insecurity and atmosphere of menace’, the harder the political establishment tries to convince its electorates that, despite stumbling haphazardly from one crisis to the next and oscillating ever more precariously between the two extremes of the ‘deepest of modern inclinations—to collapse or to explode’, they have actually, for almost a century, been diligently ‘preparing for the absolutely fundamental convulsions’ which—today they tell us—were always inevitable and just a matter of time.[18]

It is not surprising that times such as ours, once described by Nietzsche as times of ‘great danger’ and ‘great exhaustion’, should be characterised by the pervasive corruption of the ruling classes. Spreading from the top down, the ‘corruption’ and ‘paralysis’ of collective reason eventually reaches a critical threshold where it transforms into the collective consciousness of denial, manifesting itself in a steadfast refusal to recognise the ‘mendaciously fabricated world’ for what it is.[19] An equally troubling reckoning is that such corruption and ethical bankruptcy become more likely when the wider society’s communitarian instincts have been systematically weakened, lowering its psychological immunity and making individuals simultaneously more susceptible to a relapse of apathy and the sway of inflammatory and apocalyptic discourses, both ignited by the onset of the crisis.[20]

The closed loop forms where depleted psychic resources and the paralysis of reason reinforce each other, aggravating the trauma of the modern spirit, which Nietzsche conceptualises in terms of the ‘rape of the conscience’.[21] These ‘times of exhaustion’ expose the insanity of continuing to live ‘normally’ in a world which has gone completely mad. Insanity, in this case, is not simply turning a blind eye to the world’s madness, pretending it is not there, that it doesn’t concern and will spare you, or, as Heidegger put it, when ‘people pretend to know what is “happening” but do not surmise what is occurring with themselves’.[22] Insanity runs deeper, as a creeping realisation that by carrying on as though normally—in the vain hope that somehow, if one just tried a little harder and for a little longer, insanity, like a bad dream, would dissipate, or one would peacefully expire before the music stops—one is inevitably contributing to the growing madness and is unable to do otherwise.

As Stiegler insisted, we would only be deluding ourselves if we believed that we could ‘leap across two centuries’ simply ‘by failing to see that an historic struggle is underway and in full swing’.[23] The music will not stop. The world is on the move and the gathering storm is already breaking out in thunderous eruptions. Tremors of once distant earthquakes draw ever nearer. The rousing battle cries resound ever more passionately. Many a volcano hitherto concealed by the thin veneer of modern Western civilisation is no longer dormant. The ‘one size fits all’ corset of the ‘rules-based’ world order is crumbling under the weight of irreconcilable schisms. The relentless assault of mass media-driven hysteria crashes with increasing intensity into the exhausted depths of the public psyche, precariously balanced on the razor-sharp edges of a post-welfare state capitalist dystopia, once shielded by the fleeting semblance of civility. Neo-con-liberalism,[24] the deranged brainchild of laissez-faire, is convulsing under the worktable of history as it awaits an overhaul and re-distribution.

Today’s world—America’s Frankenstein—grows impatient. Not yet near its end, at least according to Heidegger, Americanism—‘the pinnacle of nihilism’—is showing unmistakable signs of getting ‘fed up with its own vacuousness’.[25]

Americanism is the organization of the unconditional meaninglessness of ‘existence’, joined to the prospect of an enhanced ‘standard of living’. Historiologically, the proliferation and entrenchment of machination are visible in various forms: one form is the commercial calculation (covered with a veneer of morality) of the Anglo-American world. The doom hastened by this form does not consist merely in what the form produces but still more in what it cannot perform: it is alienated from every essential spiritual decision and has geared everything toward ‘psychology’ and Logistical reckoning […] without any creative impulse.[26]

As the sun sets over Pax Americana, its creators become increasingly overwhelmed by the inexorable rise of forces they once fostered and contained. The bonds that once firmly held the ‘hostile forces’ in check are breaking one after another, and as the ‘pressure is relaxed’ they do not take long to ‘rebel against one another’.[27] Political histrionics and ideological hysterics have long since merged, precipitating the mutation of collective neurosis into mass psychosis, the logical consequence of a world of ‘massive thoughtlessness’ where everyone ‘interprets’ and ‘no one thinks’.[28] There is something to be said for not making things in one’s own image when one is not God.

The psychic trauma sustained in the 2008 financial crisis, which remains unaddressed and unresolved, has deeply affected Western collective consciousness. Persistent rumours and insinuations of an impending war between ‘good and evil’ have continually activated the deep-seated Judeo-Christian narratives embedded in the Western psyche, progressively steering it towards a more militarized stance. This shift reflects not only in policy and rhetoric but also in public sentiment and media portrayal, marking a subtle yet significant transformation in societal attitudes.[29]

The Hollywood style of propaganda-by-entertainment has mastered the dark art of enchantment over many decades, weaving increasingly apocalyptic visions with enviable consistency. This cinematic tapestry portrays an unchanging narrative: the external villain, the brewing conflict, the prophesied day of reckoning, the epic struggle, and the inevitable triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’—elements etched permanently into the script, gaining more precise contours through time.[30] The ‘Symbolic’, systematically ostracized and demonized as the foe of virtue, is nearly destined to materialize in the ‘Real’ of war. The puppeteers of these conflicts know too well the potency of spinning a self-fulfilling prophecy—a guaranteed ‘win-win’. This is the sinister psychology now in motion, and the window to halt its manifestation is closing swiftly. The query we revisited with Nietzsche lingers still: is this merely a patchwork of fiction, unmoored from reality, or are the narrators deliberately foretelling our fates, weaving us into the fabric of the Inevitable and making us its flesh and blood?

In vain may one recall Plato’s admonition that despotism and democracy are siblings joined by destiny at the hip.[31] Long possessed of ‘anarchical temper’, the world’s despots, dictators, and other ‘servants of the people’—while posing as ‘friends of democracy’ and calling themselves ‘protectors’—are spiteful jesters (and each other’s carbon copies) competing in the dark arts of tyranny.[32] The methods of delivering the latter and its side effects may differ these days, but its substance remains unaltered. As in the Middle Ages, clown, puppet, and freak shows are the daily staple of entertaining the masses: the meagre price of keeping them at bay, for now.

Heidegger’s prescient warning concerned ‘mechanistic and biological ways of thinking’ as always expressing ‘merely consequences of the hidden interpretation of beings in terms of machination’, where the latter (Machenschaft) is taken to mean the ‘domination of making and what is made’.[33] Recently schooled in the harsh forms of compliance, like a child who has just been scolded—half ashamed, half afraid but still yearning to trust, be good, and belong—the credulous masses, fed on undiluted ideology, do not simply lack awareness of the deeds carried out in their name but celebrate the very ignorance that would prove the undoing of the dreamworld they inhabit. As Losurdo surmised on Nietzsche’s behalf, the oblivious ‘egoism of the masses or their representatives’ would not stop short of helping to nurture ‘a horror of war’.[34] The form of social life ‘maintained without entering consciousness’—the complete ‘psychological and moral “loss of self”’ stemming from ‘the fact that the masses are deprived of a ground’ and that this very ‘groundlessness’ is celebrated as the ‘terra firma’ of their ‘sovereignty’—is today’s stark reality.[35] In its bosom, under the shimmering light of Agamben’s ‘vanishing points’, regularly administered to humankind as booster vaccines to keep it unquestioningly partaking in ‘progress’, unsavoury things proliferate unchecked.[36]

The unrestrained pursuit of values deemed universal—liberty, equality, democracy, and dignity—has willed into existence their aberrations, in the shape of deep state, ubiquitous big-data driven surveillance and the rising cross-border tide of marketized ‘wokeness’, which crushes the remnants of healthy sense in its path. The collective and individual reservoirs of internalised cruelty and repressed violence (towards the self)—today’s multiplying echo chambers—are filled to the brim and starting to spill over into society with extraordinary effects. The institutional dams will not withstand the rising pressure much longer: the inhumanity of the current human society is forming into the whirlwind of social chaos and uncivil unrest— the ‘two strifes’ which Hesiod considered unhealthy.

Desperate foraging for identity—a kind of ‘its own essential volition into starvation’—revealed no traces of belonging, no existential anchors for the homeless modern soul, able no longer to either ‘win or lose a war’.[37] Revelling in the ephemeral extremes of diversity, inclusivity, and equality, society ends up gripped in the jaws of indignant uniformity. Our progressive aspirations might lead us to see modern social movements—from BLM to MeToo and the transgender revolution—as forces for emancipation, democratization, social equity, and authenticity. However, we must consider the possibility that these movements may merely represent reactionary outgrowths on the weakened carapace of a sickly patriarchy. This could represent its most ‘insidious entrenchment’ yet—an ‘inversion of patriarchal metaphysics’.[38] This suggests a frenzied scramble to plant as many false flags as possible within our fragile collective consciousness. Such actions aim to dominate the Anthropocene, potentially severing the link between humanity and nature irreparably. Indeed, ‘no one is more solidly fixated on the figure of the father, the male, or on principles, than he who claims to have freed himself from it’.[39]

The consummation of modernity: in the age of unconditional machination, the gigantism of criminality becomes public under the title of ‘truth’.[40]

At the core of concepts such as ‘build back better’, ‘great reset’, ‘fourth industrial revolution’, ‘stakeholder economy’, and ESG—all surreptitiously legitimized by COVID-19 and now propelled by AI—lies a singular and unassailable objective: to enact the definitive separation of humanity from nature.[41] Underwriting these new ‘battle cries’ of crippled post-modernity is the same old profit logic. As Nietzsche aptly observed, ‘the means employed by the lust for power’ may change overtime, but ‘the same volcano continues to glow underneath’.[42] Dressed up in new seductive slogans, this immoderate monster is gradually prizing humankind out of nature, as it seeks to dismantle the ultimate boundary of human freedom. Removing it would allow to herd a disempowered and hollowed out humanity into the corrals of virtual reality, ushering in the Anthropocene. Clumsily slapped together from the Greek terms for ‘human’ (‘anthropo’) and ‘new’ (‘cene’), the concept is not only controversial but also highly misleading as it provides no disclosure on the meaning of ‘new humans’, once they have been severed from nature and its gifts.

Estrangement from Nature confines us within an increasingly virtual bubble of hollow illusions, where agency is systematically dissolved, the emergence of ‘great’ characters becomes nigh impossible, and history—no longer flowing cyclically or organically—accelerates into a fevered compression of time. This rupture gives rise to ever more violent collisions: unresolved tensions of the past, distant as well as recent, clash with the unbridled ambitions of the future, shattering the present and leaving it trapped in relentless repetition. Re-occurrence of the same at different times is no longer an anomaly but the integral feature of lived reality. In this fractured landscape, there is no space for authentic creation, transcendence, or the kind of greatness that once shaped the course of human destiny. The simple yet overlooked point is that a deepening disconnect between humanity and nature allows for an unprecedented consolidation of control over the human environment, behaviour, and experience in disturbingly small number of clammy and covetous hands trembling at the scent of money and power.

An ever increasing swathe of human existence, ‘reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator’—digitally captured and readily available—presents unlimited opportunities for rewiring society and disciplining the outliers with measures as crude or nuanced as the Anthropocene’s architects’ imagination would allow it.[43] The omniscience of today’s digital profiling dwarfs the confessional of the 19th and statistical tyranny of the 20th century. Every sin, secret, misdeed, mis-speak (and soon ‘mis-think’) is meticulously recorded, processed, and carefully deposited.[44] Turned into series of algorithmic data points, we sway like blades of grass in the ominous winds of data politics, while the deep state builds expedient correlations to support increasingly sinister political, economic, and social agendas. In this fertile soil, the insanity of techno-libertarians like Paul Romer actively spawns conceptions of the neo-colonial incubators of economic growth known to some as ‘charter cities’. These tie the impoverished and underdeveloped pockets of the world into a specific form of governance, where economy and property rights not only reign supreme but bulldoze the cherished Western concept of the autonomous individual, levelling democratic aspirations down to the ground.

Irrespective of whether she ever truly grasped the ramifications of her favourite phraseology, Thatcher’s infamous ‘TINA’ (‘there is no alternative’) represents one of the clearest articulations of the completeness and unassailability of the monstrous enterprise of lies which sits at the very core of today’s governing worldview. Akin to Hegel’s ‘bad infinity’, doomed to endlessly seek its own definition and endorsement outside itself, there appears to be no getting to the end of it.[45] The constant striving to overcome or abolish the predicament of ‘bad infinity’ only hatches more perverse turns of it. The impenetrable and (within the Western worldview) incontestable ideological net, cast over the wider world during the past four centuries, presents a significant challenge in the depth of its influence on the modern psyche, which is profound and often debilitating, making it even more difficult to find the ‘starting point of a causal chain’ needed to unravel it:

[W]e are on dangerous ground; in getting too close to it we observe suddenly how our consistency, our positivity, is dissolving itself […] knowledge is marked by a lethal dimension: the subject must pay the approach to it with his own being. In other words, to abolish the misrecognition means at the same time to abolish, to dissolve, the ‘substance’ which was supposed to hide itself behind the form-illusion of misrecognition.[46]

Yet precisely this realisation is necessary to appreciate that there is nothing accidental about billionaires’ fortunes surging throughout the pandemic and the multiplying military conflicts. Likewise, there is nothing accidental about the spectacular rise of Big Tech as the crowning jewel of the US economy’s resilience in the wake of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Something else—at a deeper level, invisible to the eye—always happens in parallel. Under the palatable and outwardly progressive corporate personas, disembodied monsters feed on blood, destruction, misery, and strife. Such are the structural underpinnings of today’s world, in the twilight of which these faceless ‘predators’, agitated by ‘the unpleasantness of hunger’, which, fused with ‘other impulses’, has turned into the ‘rage at the victim’, are once again wide awake and on the prowl for prey.[47]

Today’s geopolitical gambles are not concocted using the anachronistic calculus of land, markets, trading routes, people, resources (save for energy and the 17 chemical elements, known as ‘rare earths’, vital to the Big Tech’s domination of the world), or even the latest technological know-how. The real battles of today are waged for tomorrow’s control over the Anthropocene; the puzzling ‘political homogeneity of the future opponents’ of the existing social order only highlights ‘the hardness of the impending struggle’.[48] The vast, pervasive, borderless (supra-global), and permanently energy-thirsty neo-feudal structures—Apple, Microsoft, Google (‘Alphabet’), Amazon, Netflix, Tesla / Starlink / SpaceX, Facebook (‘Meta Platforms’), Oracle, Adobe, NVIDIA, and AMD—irretrievably embedded in the social fabric and psyche of modern digital society—are busy scoping out Anthropocene’s terrain, from the melting ice-caps of the Arctic to interplanetary dimensions.[49] The energy demands of today’s ‘big tech’ giants are truly boundless, with no limit they won’t exceed, no boundary they won’t cross, and no ‘outdated’, in their view, socio-political structure they won’t seek to dismantle in order to satisfy their insatiable appetite. Drawing on the experience of Germany in the 1930s, Kiesel observed that ideology entwined with the high-tech exhibits a tendency to solidify into an ‘unbending worldview’, which makes history repeating itself all but inevitable.[50]

Fundamentally, neo-feudalism represents an existential condition where one’s life is lived increasingly in the artificial digital environs created and controlled by a small number of excessively powerful commercial entities, from whom lives as well as livelihoods are effectively rented or loaned to their dependents down the pseudo-corporatist architecture (amongst them the vast web of parasitic commercial suckerfish feeding on ‘cookies’) to the individual human dwellers who are digitally constituted, consumed, and recycled ad infinitum.

Neo-feudalism is a ubiquitous socio-economic environment with a minimal political sphere and a diminished (in size and significance) middle class. The system is predicated on severe inequality in terms of the distribution of power and wealth, which forms a social vacuum: the actual detachment of the tech-elites from the fortunes and concerns of the wider serf-like population. Neo-feudal social relations are maximally reduced to impersonal transactions of rent in the conditions of acutely constrained mobility: individual serfs—fully accounted for (that is, digitised and pervasively surveyed)—rent from the global technological corporate structures only that which these structures present to them as comprising their ‘life’ and to which there is no viable and, increasingly, no legal ‘off-grid’ alternative.

The critical difference between the feudalism of old and the hatching neo-feudalism of today is that the former, as an existential predicament, was not chosen. Rather, it was a given construct within a rigid social architecture. Neo-feudalism, at least partially, is chosen: we actively exercise our free will to become digital serfs. What this tells us, on a deeper level, is that the vast majority will inadvertently relapse into serfdom. We do not mind being enslaved, provided we are enslaved in the right way. One way or another—reactively, proactively, or perhaps subconsciously—we fall into slavery, albeit that we prefer to be coerced by reason and persuasion than by force and faith. Remember Cypher, the traitorous crewmember of the Nebuchadnezzar, from The Matrix?

Nietzsche saw clearly the coming of an age which, amid all the ‘raving, especially under scientific disguises, about the conditions of society in which “the exploitative aspect” will be removed’, would only succeed in producing the ‘counter-effect of a despairing boredom of the soul’ and revel in supplying ‘every individual as material for heating the great machines that are an end in themselves’.[51] Today’s colossal digital neo-feudal harvesters are reshaping society from within, driving a deep and deliberate fracture through the dialectic of polarization. On one side, they champion an ever-expanding array of progressive, inclusive, de-colonizing, and ‘un-othering-the-other’ narratives, weaponizing these ‘ideals’ to induce mass conformity and societal complacency. Meanwhile, they counterbalance this by inflaming reactionary forces, gaslighting ‘woke hysteria’ with dangerously far-right, and at times openly neo-fascist, agitation. This calculated manipulation, pitting extremes against each other, sows division while consolidating their own unchecked influence.

In both cases time horizons are shortened, the scope of concerns is narrowed, and discreet agendas are maximally hyped up. Paraphrasing Chomsky, the way to keep people oblivious and obedient is to maximise the amplitude of discussions within the strictly limited spectrums of acceptable opinions.[52] All the while, behind the glittering façade of today’s increasingly fragmented sensibility lurks the spirit of growing lethargy and exhaustion:

To put to sleep or to intoxicate! To silence the conscience, by one means or the other! To help the modern soul to forget its feeling of guilt, not to help it to return to innocence![53]

Simultaneously, by relentlessly controlling communication flows, ruthlessly commoditizing the remnants of human autonomy, and creating inescapable techno-monetary harnesses of increasingly repressive (yet perfectly rational) social control from without, these digital levellers inexorably drive humanity towards the only form of equality thus achievable: the equality of comatose and obsequious digits.

Remember Hegel’s idealistic lament over the statues of Ancient Greece: ‘the statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone’.[54] The same sentiment applies here: the human being systematically reduced to a digit from which all humanity will have flown—‘reduction of the human psyche itself to an object of technological manipulation’—is the goal.[55] Heidegger was not far off in observing the coming of this juncture, as a ‘resultant of the power of machination, which must reduce beings in all spheres into scheduled [planhafte] calculation’:[56]

To say that the quantitative becomes quality, therefore, means that re-presentation, in which what is own-most to the quantitative lets be-ing ‘count’ as mainly what is the most general and as what is the emptiest.[57]

Meanwhile, dissentient opinions are systematically eliminated: big-data driven surveillance is married with hystericized emancipatory vernaculars. Squadrons of ‘co-opted activists’ stand ready to carry out executions-by-media in broad daylight.[58] We live in the age when propositions asserting that ‘nothing happens in a vacuum’ and that ‘outbursts of physical violence are, more often than not, outcomes of systemic violence’ have become sackable offences.[59] One may resolutely dismiss the protection of ‘scholastic sanctuary’ à la Pullman’s Dark Materials as a mere flight of fancy: censorship of academic opinion is near total and reflects the impassioned value absolutism demanded by the unhinged political juggernaut.[60] Even ‘today’s “poets,” ie, pen pushers, have meetings as do the shareholders and directors of a corporation’, while the ‘up-and-coming philosophers are indoctrinated in suitable camps’.[61] Once again, no distinction between philosophy and politics is tolerated.

Forget about Nietzsche, Spengler, Heidegger, Schmitt, and Arendt: how much longer will Orff’s Carmina Burana be allowed to be performed on stage? Rota Fortunae must certainly stop (at least to catch its breath) at some point soon: tomorrow’s Fahrenheit 451 firefighters will make sure of that. Meanwhile, words—heavy words—like ‘genocide’, ‘fascism / Nazism’, and ‘holocaust’ have been abraded of their cognitive weight, deprived of their contextual grounding. Their historical meaning has been hollowed out: they have become commonplace, cheap trinkets of political expediency and ideological manipulation.[62] And that is just the current state of value polarisation: the lines are drawn, and all bets are off, as are the gloves. The ideological echo chambers are all but hermetically sealed.

The growing problems humans face in the hyper-technological digital age of big data demonstrate decisively that there is no one ‘human condition’, no one ‘humankind’ or ‘human community’ which could be mobilised to tackle any of these challenges.[63] Schopenhauer’s desolate boatman is as ever adrift in the ‘stormy sea’ of existence—‘boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves’—clutching to the crumbling edges of his ‘frail craft and [still] trusting in the principium individuationis’.[64] Atomisation and polarisation grow in sync, seemingly reinforcing one another. To think otherwise, in some desperate attempt to grab hold of the ‘right side of history’, exhibits the signs of clinging on to the few remaining ropes hanging off the sides of Noah’s (or should we say Elon’s?) rapidly departing Ark. The troubles and conflicts will continue to proliferate and, as humanity grows ever more fractured and helpless to face them, its devout well-wishers, purporting to see beyond the storm, will continue to rummage enthusiastically around for the last remaining rabbits still taking shelter in the long since unfashionable top hats, with an air of unblemished entitlement and unwavering delusion in their intrinsic self-worth, occasionally mistaken for the innocent, childlike displays of quintessentially English eccentricity.

Those who today speak loudest of reform, advocate tough measures, call for the restoration of truth and respect in public discourse, and defend the need for direct collective action to solve this urgent problem and stop that bloody conflict, like those who champion investing resolutely in the brighter, greener future—the cynical preachers of equality—are tarantulas with revenge in their hearts, wishing ‘that the world become full of the thunderstorms of [their] revenge that we would regard as justice’. As Nietzsche put it, ‘they speak in favour of life, these poisonous spiders, even though they are sitting in their holes and have turned against life, because they want to do harm’.[65]

Make no mistake: the architects of time in their many guises—busy readying the great Halls of the Present to receive the Gift of the Future which is already browning in the ovens of the crumbling social order—are the most rotten ones and the greatest danger. Their corruption is irreversible, as is their task: to introduce the future as the fait accompli. They will unleash the fireworks of chaos to achieve this objective. As Dante remarked, ‘they think not there how much blood it costs’.[66] Their stakes—to become ‘master not over something in life but over life itself’, even if it means destroying it in the process—keep rising; inflation is the only ‘iron law’ they abide by, and they are resolutely prepared to perish in its flames. Only exposure and capture they fear most.[67] This is so, according to Nietzsche, because ‘all power structures of society’ created by them ‘are based on lies’, and ‘in order to maintain a lie’ one ‘has to invent twenty more’.[68] Or, as Lewis Carroll aptly put it, ‘it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place and, if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast’.[69] In the final reckoning, these actors would prefer to engineer the end of the world than risk being caught red-handed.

It should hardly come as a surprise that Europe’s geopolitical predicament, in a world gripped by the all-absorbing ‘encounter between global technology and modern humanity’, has not fundamentally altered and only intensified since Heidegger (stalking Nietzsche) last pondered it in 1953, and since Derrida re-visited Heidegger’s diagnosis in 1989.[70] As Heidegger wrote:

This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the rootless organization of the average man. The situation of Europe is all the more dire because the disempowering of the spirit comes from Europe itself and—though prepared by earlier factors—is determined at last by its own spiritual situation in the first half of the nineteenth century.[71]

When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously ‘experience’ an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph, then, yes then, there still looms like a spectre over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then?[72]

That which is presently obvious to the few will soon become abundantly clear to all. Not, however, as a realisation, but as an inescapable vice of reality. The world is about to be torn asunder: the social pyramid will crumble and split in two. The microscopic top—delirious from having ‘pulled it off’ and wielding the overwhelming power of artificial intelligence—will reign supreme. The vast majority will be commanded and abjectly grateful for their mercy; even the reproduction of human biomass will no longer be contingent on them. Every notion of freedom, equality, and dignity will disappear like a puff of morning mist. Subservience—ennobled with some new, proud, aspirational, and universal name—will run the show. As Schürmann surmised in Broken Hegemonies (2003), ‘the agony is what those who inhabit the monstrous site have to keep alive by resolutely placing themselves under the legislative-transgressive diremption’.[73]

Conceptual wreck diving

The symptomatology outlined above exhibits a certain directionality and a degree of correlation. Some form of abuse of the conscience seems present at every level of society, from the individual (‘ατομική’) to the structures of economic and political power crushing them. A collective consciousness primed for conflict relies on the individual conscience being silenced ‘by one means or another’.[74] The rising levels of internal psychic distress, ‘quelled’ on the inside by the escalating establishmentarian untruths, which only cover up the governments’ inability ‘to do anything towards alleviating the psychic sufferings of the private person’, and the single-minded projection of an external enemy as the cause of all internal problems become positively correlated.[75] This is not a new phenomenon. Although explained painstakingly by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), its causal mechanisms still evade our understanding, leaving us incapable of disabling, let alone dismantling, the ‘infernal machine’ (Höllenmaschine).[76]

A brief Koselleckean look at the conceptual shifts of the historico-cultural phenomenon of ‘Salem’ may help guide us a little deeper into the issue. Deriving primarily from the Hebrew ‘Shalem’, meaning ‘complete’ or ‘peaceful’, which is echoed in the Arabic ‘Salaam’, ‘Salem’ denotes—etymologically speaking—a process of overcoming internal discord and achieving a state of peace. But, in the realm of puritan imagineering, Salem projects the opposite: the unattainability of such a wholesome and self-sufficient condition. It is as though, once disturbed in some way, perfection can never be restored. And precisely this realisation places an overwhelming emphasis on ‘restitution’, which becomes punishment handed out to the different (or othered) for blighting the hopes of completeness and tainting the dreams of paradise (when really it is rage against oneself, realisation of one’s own ontological incompleteness). Something is already amiss here. Was that which is presumed to have been disturbed, some lost ‘perfection’, really present in the first instance? Sometimes, it is the loss of what we never had in the first place that hurts the most. Could it be that this ‘harmony’ was only the embedding of an ‘idea’—an equation the mind is unable to solve using the existential calculus it can muster—which clogged up the psychic algorithm?

It is in this latter capacity that the collective imagination of the West engages with the concept of Salem. Mr Creakle, the ‘heavy handed’ proprietor of Salem House in David Copperfield, expressed the meaning of Salem best:

Now, boys, this is a new half. Take care what you’re about, in this new half. Come fresh up to the lessons, I advise you, for I come fresh up to the punishment. I won’t flinch. It will be of no use your rubbing yourselves; you won’t rub the marks out that I shall give you.[77]

The ‘special marks of distinction’ Creakle wholeheartedly handed out to the boys in his care on a daily basis made ‘half the establishment writhe and cry before the day’s work began’, and there was no telling whether any of the establishment did not join in the tears ‘before the day’s work was over’:

I should think there never can have been a man who enjoyed his profession more than Mr. Creakle did. He had a delight in cutting at the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite. I am confident that he couldn’t resist a chubby boy, especially; that there was a fascination in such a subject, which made him restless in his mind, until he had scored and marked him for the day.[78]

This punitive puritan Geist time-travels from the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93, through Dickens’s ‘Salem House’ (where David Copperfield is sent after biting his stepfather), over to Miller’s The Crucible (1953), which allegorises the ‘Red Scare’ of the 1950s, across to Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1975), echoed in Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ (2002) and, more recently, in Fantastic Beasts (2016), where Mary Lou Barebone of New York’s Second Salem Church, not unlike Mr. Creakle of Salem House, lovingly (mostly through repeated impassioned beatings from the heart’s good intentions) nurtured the destructive ‘Obscurial’ superpowers of Credence Barebone. Mary Lou Barebone, Credence’s foster mother and the leader of the New Salem Philanthropic Society, represents the consummation of Mr Creakle. Possessed of intense hatred—matured through the generations of Scourers—she is unhinged, ruthless, frenzied and unequivocal in her drive to eradicate witchcraft:

Hear my words and heed my warning and laugh if you dare: witches live among us!

We have to fight—join us, the Second Salemers, in our fight!

Through these examples—both real and fictional—runs the inextinguishable dark irony of inevitability that once drew the devout puritan community, fleeing religious persecution, to establish a society based on extreme intolerance. Having suffered for their faith and painfully aware of the old world’s pitfalls, their providential mission was to begin history anew. Adamant in their belief that Satan—invisible yet undeniably present—would test their faith, they took his appearance in Salem as proof that the New Englanders were somehow the chosen people. The one thing with which they struggled was the idea that the demonic mastermind was never on the outside. Heidegger aptly captured this socio-psychological predicament:

In the metaphysically machinational domain, all concepts, principles, and axioms are simply ‘expedients’ which according to need can turn into their opposites.[79]

All along, the deeply theological underbelly of ‘Salem’ has contained and concealed the dark otherness of the very ‘peace’ it sought to signify. Multiple passages in the Testaments, Old and New, combine into a chilling portrayal of justice as a form of disinterested, objectifying indignation, dispensed with an implacable—almost reptilian—unequivocality. The sentiment, conveying the inevitable triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’, dripping with gratuitous imagery, is communicated through a series of grotesque metaphors which conjure up visions of crushing enemies underfoot, making ‘footstools’ out of them, consigning them to a ‘burning lake of sulphur’ for ‘eternal torment’ in ‘second death’, and burning sinners and evildoers in ‘furnaces’ until ‘not a root or branch’ is left of them, to ensure once and for all that all sinners are obliterated and absolutely ‘no future’ is left for the wicked’.[80] Over the centuries, Salem has become a conduit for this particular kind of energy and signifier of a distinctive disposition—a horcrux of sorts, containing a fragment of primordial unhappiness.

Lamenting its inability to delve deep within and find the switch to that hidden, dark part of its being to extinguish the anguish at its source, Salem sustains itself by continually pitting the proverbial Dr Jekyll against Mr Hyde, and draws power from filling the space between them with the thick smoke of fear and ressentiment, from which the villains and the fiery flames of righteous rage can be easily conjured. As anguish grows and rage over the inability to attain purity mounts, the choice on how to survive becomes more pressing.

Unable to reconcile itself to being incompletely and imperfectly constituted, owing precisely to being endowed with the faculties to imagine harmony and perfection, the theological kernel of Salem is faced with the existential—Kierkegaardian—moment: either tear itself to pieces, or find someone else to blame, someone who robbed Salem of its original innocence and completeness (neither of which ever existed). This ‘choice’ becomes the inception point of every ‘monstrous site’, including Salem. Adorno observed that:

The system in which the sovereign mind imagined itself transfigured, has its primal history in the pre-mental, the animal life of the species. […] In the advance to humanity this is rationalized by projection. The ‘rational animal’ with an appetite for his opponent […] must find a reason [so that it ‘may devour it without misgivings’] […] The animal to be devoured must be evil […] This justifies the principle of the thought as much as it increases the appetite. The system is the belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and every idealism.[81]

Construction of the threatening other is invariably a reflection of the inner deficit of the entity which projects it in the image of a symbolic enemy external to the system. In the final reckoning, however, it is only a projection of a certain hidden part of its own psyche—its internal antagonistic nature. The more fervent such construction becomes, the greater the internal psychic plight. Following the logic of this inverse displacement, when the antagonistic otherness is maximised it also tends to become maximally antagonised, effacing the difference between the demonised (exteriorised evil) and the demonising (internalised violence). In this liminal space where ‘no one is safe’, the demonic comes to reign undivided. Arthur Miller described it as the ‘projection of one’s vileness onto others in order to wipe it out with their blood’.[82] As though crystallising Nietzsche’s curse of having become the monsters it once set out to fight, Salem’s ‘cleansing idea’ ends up preying on itself.[83]

Something else happens within the confines of the vicious circle thus constituted. Salem’s targets—branded as incarnations of evil—are precluded from understanding, let alone realising their identity, which militarises their anguish. And so is Salem: continually denying its own evil by fighting it as images projected onto others, it fails to engage with a critical part of its own genealogical identity in order to learn ways of sublimating it, rather than repressing it to the point where containment becomes impossible, and sparks start to fly.[84] Salem and any one of its countless Others are not separate entities. There is no outside to any of them, no fixed boundary by which they are immanently separated; they continually flow into each other. Their seeming mutual exclusivity forms the unbreakable bond by which they remain connected. Nietzsche explained this in the following terms:

One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole; there nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole.[85]

What, then, are some examples of the recurring ‘real’ of ‘Salem’ as symptom and symbol of the world we live in? In some respects, ‘Salem’ is not so different from what Žižek described in relation to the concentration camps:

What are they if not so many attempts to elude the fact that we are dealing here with the ‘real’ of our civilization which returns as the same traumatic kernel in all social systems? […] We should not forget that concentration camps were an invention of ‘liberal’ England, dating from the Boer War; that they were also used in the US to isolate the Japanese population, and so on.[86]

The indefinite ‘war on terror’, initiated by Bush Junior, is another oft-cited instance. Initiated with a fervent desire to conclude his father’s (and The Father’s) unfinished business, it reflected a personal quest to ‘prove himself to his father’ (and The Father) by defeating the externally constituted evil and establishing his own sense of righteousness, akin to a religious crusade.[87] The evil, as we have subsequently (with considerable delay) come to learn, was not the enemy deemed worthy of obliterating. The re-constitution of ‘good’ remained incomplete because the wrong deficit was targeted, allowing that which needed re-constituting to metamorphose into something else—‘another’ inconspicuous situation. And so the search for the real enemy goes on, all the while only augmenting the darkness and strife inside.

Unabated, Salem’s punitive zest endures in all of today’s conflicts—both external and internal. A symbol of forces obsessed with immortality and the eternal, it strives to reassert or safeguard something ‘sacred’, battered and besieged by the unpredictable fluctuations and occasional upheavals of history’s unfolding events. The prospect of making whole that which never was is resolutely lacking, adding, with each iteration, to the daunting task of salvaging perfection. Every situation presented as ‘the battle of civilization against barbarism’, where only ‘total victory’ would suffice, invariably reveals traces of the existential predicament where both the victor and the defeated, the offender and the avenger ‘still stand and fall on the level of metaphysics and remain excluded from what is other’.[88]

Waging war against an externally perceived and constituted evil, as a means of removing some internal blockage in the system, does not only work by distorting causal relationships. The guise of an external threat allows one to imperceptibly shift the internal problem into a higher gear or to warehouse it in the different corner of the system. When the searching gaze refocuses on it, it will be invariably surprised to discover a new face, or a different acuteness seemingly disconnected from the original condition, which will have become irretrievable ground, suggesting that moving forward notwithstanding is the only possibility. In this game, from the very beginning, in the end, there was nothing to reclaim: the ‘thief’s treasured money-chest was ever empty’.[89] Žižek points to the deeper issue at stake:

Here we encounter a kind of ‘reflexivity’ which cannot be reduced to philosophical reflection: the very feature which seems to exclude the subject from the Other is already a ‘reflexive determination’ of the Other; precisely as excluded from the Other, we are already part of its game.[90]

That ‘Other’—who you fear, resent or hate—is unavoidably inside you, as one of your many yous. Perhaps as some unresolved echo of the past, or a yet unexplored part of your physiology. But there is more to it. In the act of othering, you don’t just confront an external entity. You are that other who is doing the othering. Meta-narratives like religion fuel this internal strife by resonating with and sometimes exploiting the darker, weaker, and injured aspects of these many selves. They aggregate and command impaired ‘souls’ by offering them to exteriorise if not their suffering than at least the responsibility and blame for it.

To overcome Salem’s predacity and break its vicious circle, we must embrace its demon as our own, instead of making it ‘the other’ and endowing it with a separate reality. This prevents it from becoming fortified and returning to haunt and hunt us, particularly when we are further impaired by the guilt associated with having spilt the blood of those we falsely believed were carriers of Salem’s spectral presence.

Time to end it?

As though paraphrasing Nietzsche with an eye on today’s secular upheaval, Josep Borrell recently lamented that ‘we live in a world where there is more and more confrontation and less co-operation’.[91] If Nietzsche’s dissection of his day should bear any resemblance to our present reality, it is because Nietzsche was correct in his audacious claim to be telling us the ‘history of the next two centuries’ which could ‘no longer come otherwise’.[92] Can we yet thwart Nietzsche’s forecast for the tragic unfolding of modernity as the ‘great drama’ played out ‘in a hundred acts’ across ‘two centuries’?[93] Intoxicated by history, blind to a darkening future, and increasingly ensnared by the ghostly rhythms of History, echoing the beat of inevitable fate—with 90 seconds left on the Doomsday Clock—can we still wake up from the dream, which dreams within a dream, in the nick of time? Can we snatch history from the undiscriminating jaws of History before it once again spits out our present as the indigestible ‘surplus-object, the leftover of the Real eluding symbolization’?[94]

The story of the Titanic offers a compelling parallel. In 1898, a little-known, struggling American author named Morgan Robertson produced a novella about a ‘fabulous Atlantic liner, far larger than any that had ever been built’. Unwittingly articulating the psychic hauntings of his time—‘the Zeitgeist that a certain age was coming to an end’—the author ‘loaded his ship with rich and complacent people and then wrecked it one cold April night on an iceberg’. This somehow showed the ‘futility of everything’, and in fact, the book was called Futility or the Wreck of the Titan. [95] Most troubling was the inexplicable accuracy and detail with which the author predicted the coming tragedy.

Many subsequent inquiries into the wreck of the Titanic revealed dozens of meaningful warning signs ahead of the sinking, far more than would have been necessary to prevent the accident from occurring.[96] Despite, or perhaps because of, this ‘psychic foreshadowing’, the real Titanic sunk spectacularly, albeit horrifyingly, on 10 April 1912. The impression is created that the Titanic, for reasons we cannot know, was earmarked by a far greater calamity, already unfolding, as its harbinger, and no amount of pre-cognition would be sufficient to stop it. It was already selected by History as its sacrificial lamb. The Great War, waiting in the wings, produced an obvious symptom, a leading indicator, which would retroactively become its chilling symbol as well. The world at large did not identify with the Titanic as a symptom of its own condition and continued to celebrate it as the highest achievement the tragic sinking notwithstanding. Consequently, only the unfolding of actual catastrophic events on a grander canvas was lagging: the machinations of history lagged behind the inertia of History.

What is the Titanic of our era, the moment when history once again accelerated beyond the designated cruising pace, to catch a glimpse of History before its descent into the abyss? Could it have been misinterpreted as the collapse of the Soviet Union, inadvertently revealing the iceberg we failed to notice as we rejoiced in slaying the authoritarian monster, consigning it to a fleeting micro-narrative filled to the brim with negative connotations and soon to be written out from history textbooks, except as a scarecrow from the past? Are we presently aboard the Titanic, having barely avoided the tip of the iceberg and convinced ourselves that the vessel escaped the collision entirely (perhaps even strengthened and reinvigorated by the scare it experienced in the process), blindly forging ahead towards the presumed felicitous singularity where history, having finally converged with History, would sign off on a happy note? If so, if the Soviet Union was not the proverbial Titanic we imagined but merely the tip of the emerging iceberg, and we are not the observers of the sinking ship from afar, but passengers aboard the Titanic which has hit the iceberg and is starting to sink, then what is underneath the surface? What awaits us just beyond the darkening horizon?

There can be little doubt that today we inhabit a ‘monstrous site’—filled with the precipitancy of crisis, extreme ‘diremption’ and ‘terrible warnings’ of every kind—where we ‘dwell dangerously and in poverty’.[97] All the sophistication of academic discourse on conceptualising history and contextualising historical knowledge notwithstanding, we are yet to grasp the relationship between History and history. We remain unable to claim ‘missed’ lessons from the former, to preclude the latter appearing as some inexplicable repetition of itself, becoming increasingly more grotesque with each turn. It may well be, as Žižek claims (building on Marx), that ‘the Symbolic returns in the Real—in the form of hallucinatory phenomena’.[98]

Small-‘h’ history is the semantic debris left at the base of the strainer from which the turbulent waters of History have drained away. Neither ‘history’ nor ‘History’ can definitively delineate the nature of the ‘strainer’, but their modes of entanglement with it reveal much about situating human experience. Through the intricate interplay of History and history, we can discern the contours of the ‘strainer’—those hidden dimensions that underpin and reveal the complexities of human experience. While History emerges from and withdraws into the depths, history often operates under the cover of darkness. It is not, however, to be confused with ‘the owl of Minerva’, which ‘spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’.[99]

The confusing trail left by History becomes known to us as history, documenting and interpreting past events. The Titanic was an event, a trigger, a history-in-the-making, a symptom of what was already happening, but not yet a symbol of what could not have come otherwise. It was an instrument in the invisible hand of History and, if we could only snatch it from this guiding hand, History, momentarily startled by such Promethean audacity, would retreat into the shadows of a yet undisclosed future. By not revealing itself in the present, it would allow history to run a different course, explore a different narrative and take a different turn instead of repeating itself.

Yet, the unfolding of history-as-events which suspends, erases, or redraws boundaries that just yesterday seemed unshakeable, only exposes the inherent illusoriness of meta-narratives, including the one sketched out here, making them less revealing, relevant, and impactful. The disconnect which arises, explaining some of the high-pitch dissonance in today’s world, is that specific situations, possessed of Titanic-like precipitancy, such as the tragic conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine, still have meta-narratives, which make an appeal to History under the guise of ‘universal human values’, forcibly projected over them through the medium of ideology, in the hands of those busy stitching up history. It is painfully clear that using such ethically bankrupt and outdated discourses in conjunction with the worn and cynically abused ‘values’ of yonder years as filters for understanding the world’s current happenings cannot suffice. Although it may not be entirely as Sting suggested—that our entire ‘written history is a catalogue of crime’ concocted by ‘the sordid and the powerful’—we can certainly no longer ‘seek solace in the prisons of the distant past’, nor trust in the ‘security in human systems we were told would always last’.[100]

Nietzsche, in particular, exposes the ‘counterfeit quality’ within the legitimizing assertions of meta-narratives which lay claim to exclusive insights, supposedly bestowed by History itself, into ‘why humankind is here’.[101] This claim not only serves as the inception point and genesis of all subsequent historical trajectories but also assumes authority in defining the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Meta-narratives wield this authority as their primary instrument for steering and occasionally ‘correcting’ history’s course, all the while zealously guarding against any disruption to the delicate fabric of History, allowing it to retreat back into the indecipherable depths from whence it emerged, in order to illuminate the farthest reaches of existence but once.

Whichever way we wish to conceptualise the current juncture, it is clear that history is once again knocking more resolutely on the invisibly-present and presently-locked proverbial door, on the other side of which History awaits.[102] Nietzsche and Marx thought that barricading this door from the inside—permanently blocking human imagination, arresting emancipation, and inhibiting becoming—was the totalising creed of Judeo-Christianity. This hegemonic doctrine continues to make History inaudible to history, as well as antagonising humanity’s relationship with nature. Akin to a deep scratch on the LP of History, it traps the needle of history, causing it to skip, replaying the same line of the song over and over again, seemingly unable to get past it.

Overcoming this creed is not the same as ‘destroying’ it (as in Heidegger). For Nietzsche, Judeo-Christianity is the Manifesto of Slave Morality: an unrepentant articulation of the blighted soul which, held up to an unreachable standard, becomes fragmented in the chaos of secularisation. Deposited in a number of horcruxes, it lives on, causing continual annihilation (Vernichtung) of the world and devastation (Verwüstung) of the earth:

God makes himself small and pushes his way through the whole world […] also as a demon of annihilation.[103]

Earlier we touched on the cultural trope of Salem, which has become a horcrux domiciling a fragment of the blighted soul. Marx finds the horcrux of capital—the indigestible ‘surplus-object, the leftover of the Real’, which becomes secular modernity’s absorbing meta-narrative.[104] Capital represents the frontier of intelligibility, which history needs to dismantle in order to unchain human imagination and enable it to see past the end of capitalism to the consummation of History. Marx’s Capital—a particularly protean form of private property—is more than the nexus of capitalistic social relations. Not unlike Salem, it externalises society’s own deeply rooted antagonistic nature. It is unable to deliver humankind from the dregs of psychic disorder, to help it become whole again, on account of it being endowed with the very characteristics of the reactive kernel which it is meant to expel from society’s psyche.

Capital, like Salem, is powered by the very reactive energy it is meant to have removed. As a result, its real impact is to return as the meta-narrative of modernity, which enslaves the dismembered society and precludes it from achieving fuller identity. Not only was the internal antagonism expelled solely in abstract form, but the abstraction itself, re-packaged into a dream, returned to haunt the fractured psyche, exacerbating its predicament within a self-sustaining cycle. This complex metamorphosis conceals the return of the most pernicious component of the Judaeo-Christian creed, hard-wired to the constant expropriation of nature and alienation of human essence. The source of capital’s energy as well as its power is none other than this theological machination, which disables the agonistic reception of the world and replaces it with immanent antagonism.

How can we at least think about preventing the ‘same traumatic kernel’ from returning indefinitely and ‘in all social systems’?[105] Žižek suggests that dismantling of meta-narratives starts by detecting ‘in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility’ and precludes the possibility of discerning, let alone experiencing ‘full identity’. Such exposure, by inverting the ‘causality as perceived by the totalitarian gaze’, subverts and splinters it.[106] The danger, however, does not simply dissipate at this point. It lurks in losing sight of the forest for seeing the trees. In their time, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida all warned of this.

We are living through a fundamental fissure in historical time, where the world (humanity) is becoming ever more fractured and polarised, while the earth (nature) is becoming increasingly homogenised. All the while, the world and the earth are pulling away from each other, seemingly unstoppably. The fourth dimension, concealed underneath that phenomenal flux—be it Einstein’s ‘spacetime’, Heidegger’s ‘temporality’, Bergson’s ‘la durée’, or Kant’s ‘transcendental time’ which govern the motions of Emerson’s ‘Oversoul’ and Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’—reveals that the world and the earth share the same inescapable direction: both are becoming less controllable and more themselves. Humans can no longer adequately control nature’s power, just as the world is seeking to de-couple from nature in every sense which used to inform the meaning of being-‘human’.[107] This de-coupling may mean both the end of human history (albeit not of History), understood both physically and metaphorically, and the concealment of the meaning of the Earth:

In some remote corner of the universe poured out into countless flickering solar systems there was once a star on which some clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and most untruthful minute of world history, but still only a minute. When nature had drawn a few breaths the star solidified, and the clever animals died. It was time, too: for although they prided themselves on knowing a lot, they had finally discovered, to their great annoyance, that they knew everything wrongly.[108]

Following in Nietzsche’s footsteps and leaving a few of his own bombshells behind as a parting shot, Heidegger insinuated that ‘only God can help us now’, to which Schürmann retorted: ‘only Proteus’.[109] The originary sea-god Proteus—symbol of the ‘primordial unconsciousness’ and ‘perfection of the art’ (Khunrath) with ‘power over all things’ (Jung)—is a poignant riposte.[110] Able to foretell the future, unable to lie, and forever changing shapes and colours—he resists capture in the metaphysical nets of meta-narratives and would reveal his prophetic knowledge only to those able to hold him without corrupting the ‘original, non-differentiated unity of the world’.

History, which lays the groundwork of history, weaves its profound, underlying narrative that forms the fabric of our collective consciousness and channels its flow. We can catch but glimpses of the ontological structures that underpin and configure the realm of existence in Nietzsche’s insatiable ‘will to power’, Heidegger’s ‘being in the world’ as Dasein’s primordial condition, Derrida’s inexhaustible ‘textuality of experience’, and Koselleck’s tapestry of experience and expectation, crafting the temporal frameworks of historical consciousness.

Fundamental questions, pertaining to history, which track the evolution of key concepts shaping our understanding of the world and defining historical paradigms—‘revolution’, ‘progress’, ‘democracy’, or ‘freedom’, to name but a few—have not yielded satisfactory answers for some time. All fundamental words have long since been used up, recycled and exhausted. Foundational questions, the remit of History, may well remain beyond our grasp. Stranded between the inexorable fate, as History, and the inevitable fallacy of history, how do we chart our course? For us there is no way out of history and no way into History: our standpoint is the liminal space between, where the circle of life inevitably forms and spins from the same ‘unseen forces which twist our hearts’.[111] These forces originate well before we are born and continue long after we perish:

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.[112]

Our vital insight into the vicious circles of history is never that they cannot be broken or stopped, but that this only happens when those undaunted by History itself rise up from the turmoil and step forward to face its constitutional unknowability, prepared to ground themselves in the recognition of the abyss rather than being wrapped in the rags of dubious truths. Interrupting history’s repeating circles is only a matter of who can take the cost of breaking them. Thinking at the end of metaphysics, they have many names.

Whether Plato’s philosopher-kings, Aristotle’s great-souled men, Hegel’s world-historical individuals, or Nietzsche’s Hyperboreans, it is not the name that defines these figures, but their ability to rise above the chaos and bluster of history—the transient, noisy events that mark our times—and harness the untamed forces of History itself. They are not mere instruments of fate but the mercurial declinations of the atom, confounding the Void, weaving from the discordant voices of History a new direction shaped by their will. What truly matters is not their title but that they emerge to lead humanity when it stands on the precipice of disaster. Borrowing from Heidegger, we may even call them ‘grounders of the abyss’.[113] Their true distinguishing quality, however, is repose—capable of calming existential storms and persuading even Proteus to speak.

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Dmitri Safronov

Dmitri Safronov holds a PhD in Political Economy from the University of Cambridge for research on ‘Nietzsche’s Political Economy’ (2020). Dmitri received an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and Honors BA in Philosophy and Politics from Trent University. Prior to matriculating at Cambridge, he spent over 20 years in the City of London, working for the leading global investment banking franchises. Dmitri’s profile and list of recent publications can be found on <https://philpeople.org/profiles/dmitri-safronov>.

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[1] Sting, ‘History Will Teach Us Nothing’ [1987] (Sting) <https://www.sting.com/discography/lyrics/145> accessed 1 February 2025.

[2] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ [1819] (Scottish Poetry Library) <https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/the-masque-of-anarchy/> accessed 1 February 2025.

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge University Press 1997) III §4. Unless indicated otherwise, all subsequent citations in ‘Introducing Turmoil’ are from §4 of Nietzsche’s third untimely meditation, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’.

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of The Idols, Or How to Philosophise with a Hammer in Walter Kaufmann (ed), The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin Classics 1994) Errors §2.

[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Vintage Books 1974) §23.

[6] NF-1888:25[1]. NB: This article quotes extensively from Nietzsche’s unpublished notes. These are assembled in the Nachlass and accessed from <http://www.nietzschesource.org>. Notes in the Nachlass are organized according to the year, number of the notebook, and number of the notebook entry, eg NF-1885:2[179].

[7] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §4.

[8] NF-1870:5[105]; Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Cambridge University Press 1996) I §472.

[9] NF-1870:5[105]; Nietzsche (n 8) II The Wanderer and His Shadow [WS] §§209, 285.

[10] NF-1871:10[1].

[11] NF-1880:7[205]; NF-1884:25[112], [137]; Nietzsche (n 4) Maxims §23.

[12] Nietzsche (n 8) II WS §87; NF-1884:25[112]; NF-1885:37[9]; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in Walter Kaufmann (ed), Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library 2000) §256. See also Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton University Press 2016) 20, 160-2, 183.

[13] NF-1885:37[9]; Nietzsche (n 8) I §408.

[14] See Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time (Stanford University Press 2018) 4-7, 158-77.

[15] Nietzsche (n 3) III §4.

[16] Leonard Cohen, ‘Waiting for the Miracle’ (1992). Cohen relays the miracle of ‘The Future’ with astonishing prescience.

[17] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §6.

[18] ibid III §4.

[19] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist in Kaufmann (n 4) §§5-10, 55.

[20] Nietzsche (n 5) §23.

[21] Nietzsche (n 4) Skirmishes §36; see Nietzsche (n 19) §43.

[22] Martin Heidegger, Ponderings XII–XV, Black Notebooks 1939–1941 (Indiana University Press 2017) 153.

[23] Bernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies vol 1 (Polity Press 2011) 55.

[24] See Michael Schwartz, ‘The liberal neocon: The paradox of liberal foreign policy’ (March 2011) 76 International Socialist Review <https://isreview.org/issue/67/liberal-neocon/index.html> accessed 1 February 2025.

[25] For reasons never properly explained, Heidegger thought it would take until ‘around the year 2300 at the earliest’ before Americanism fully ‘exhausted itself’. Heidegger (n 22) 177.

[26] ibid 89, 176-7, 208-13; my emphasis. For a rebuttal of Heidegger’s views (with reference to Schmitt and Weber) see Paul Slama, ‘Heidegger on Americanism, After Carl Schmitt and Max Weber: The United States as a Figure of a Historical Transcendental’ in John Rogove and Pietro D’Oriano (eds), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception (Springer 2022) 311-33.

[27] Nietzsche (n 3) III §4.

[28] Heidegger (n 22) 218.

[29] The idea of a ‘coming war’ in Judeo-Christian narratives features prominently in the context of apocalyptic literature, in both Old (eg the Book of Daniel) and New (eg the Book of Revelation) Testaments, which describe the end times, involving great battles or wars between the forces of good and evil and the ultimate triumph of God’s kingdom. As far back as 2016, the ‘critically minded’ audiences at the leading UK universities, including Cambridge, welcomed with open arms such dubious ‘masterpieces’ as Richard Shirreff, War with Russia: An Urgent Warning from Senior Military Command (Coronet 2016).

[30] The Hunt for Red October and Red Phoenix came out in 1990, followed by The Sum of All Fears in 1991. This particular deeply theological well of fearmongering has never dried up, either on screen or in pop-literature. Ask ChatGPT 3.5 for a list of Hollywood flicks since 1990 portraying Russkis as the baddies and it will respond with at least 62 titles—circa 2.0 notable items per year—adding up, some thirty years later, to our collective astonishment that the self-fulfilling prophecy has fulfilled itself and now this is really so. For completeness, also run the ‘opposite’ search for the Russian flicks where Americans/Brits are portrayed as antagonists. Let me know if you find anything besides Brother 2 (2000) and War (2002), both of which I recommend watching before passing judgement.

[31] Plato, The Republic (Penguin 2007) §545b.

[32] ibid §§562e, 566b.

[33] Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (Indiana University Press 1999) 88-92.

[34] Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel (Brill 2019) 133.

[35] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge University Press 1994) III §7; Heidegger (n 22) 160.

[36] See Minoli Salgado, ‘Vanishing points/visible fictions: the textual politics of terror’ (2013) 27(2) Textual Practice 207-23.

[37] Heidegger (n 22) 213.

[38] Heidegger (n 22) 104.

[39] Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies (Indiana University Press 2003) 514. See INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Duke University Press 2017) 21-63; Heidegger (n 22) 104.

[40] Heidegger (n 22) 90.

[41] Klaus Schwab’s ‘Fourth Industrial revolution’ openly beckons the blurring of boundaries between the physical, digital, and biological worlds, largely driven by new technologies like artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.

[42] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (Cambridge University Press 1997) §§204, 206; NF-1887:9[173].

[43] Nietzsche (n 5) §373.

[44] Heidegger correctly warned that by virtue of its ‘decisive knowing’, ‘modern science’ is structurally complicit in ‘machination’. Heidegger (n 33) 98.

[45] See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic (Cambridge University Press 2010) 192-212, 572-3, 596-613, 733.

[46] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso 1989) 73.

[47] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (Continuum 2007) 22. Think also of the allegory portrayed in Venom (2018), where failed journalist Eddie suddenly gains superpowers after becoming the host of an alien symbiote, Venom, whose species are bent on the destruction of Earth.

[48] Heidegger (n 22) 161.

[49] See John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (Allen Lane 2023) 22-49, 131; Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (Encounter Books 2023) 27-41; Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Bodley Head) 58-92; Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure (Bloomsbury Academic 2023) 161-85.

[50] Theodor Kiesel, ‘Heidegger’s Philosophical Geopolitics in the Third Reich’ in Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (eds), A Companion to Heidegger's “Introduction to Metaphysics” (Yale University Press 2001) 248.

[51] Nietzsche (n 12) §259; Nietzsche (n 8) II WS §§218, 220; I §585.

[52] Noam Chomsky, The Common Good (Odonian Press) 29-31.

[53] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §6.

[54] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press 1977) 455.

[55] Žižek (n 49) 38.

[56] Quoted in Babette Babich, ‘Heidegger’s Black Night: The Nachlass and its Wirkungsgeschichte’ in Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas (eds), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931-1941 (MIT Press 2016) 77.

[57] Heidegger (n 33) 95.

[58] See Karen Kurczynski, ‘Expression as vandalism: Asger Jorn’s “Modifications”’ (2008) 53/54 RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 295; or, for a more visceral, up-to-date, and less-politically correct description of the same, Urfaust’s ‘New Salem’ (2019).

[59] See the thought-provoking discussion in Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (Profile Books 2009) 2, 12-14, 80.

[60] Ponder the difference between the Salem witch trials of 1692-93, McCarthy’s ‘Red Scare’ trials of the 1950s, and the recent grilling of US academics over the hypothetical on campus consequences of the Israel-Hamas conflict. See also Heidegger on ‘celebrated academic freedom’ in Germany in the 1930s (Martin Heidegger, ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten’ Der Spiegel (Hamburg, 30 May 1976)). Was not the same impassioned religiosity of righteous fury the real fuel of them all?

[61] Heidegger (n 22) 72, 154.

[62] Ironically, didn’t Heidegger predict precisely this, when he warned that all ‘fundamental words’ would be used up and the ‘genuine relation to the word’ would be destroyed? See John Sallis, ‘Grounders of the abyss’ in Charles E Scott, Susan Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro Arturo Vallega (eds), Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Indiana University Press 2001) 181.

[63] See NF-1887:11[226].

[64] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol 1 (Dover 1969) 352.

[65] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Random House 1954) III Tarantulas.

[66] Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy (Houghton, Mifflin and Company 1867) 588 [Paradiso XXIX, line 91].

[67] Nietzsche (n 42) §453; Nietzsche (n 35) III §11.

[68] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo in Kaufmann (n 12) Destiny §1; Nietzsche (n 8) II Assorted Opinions and Maxims [AOM] §54.

[69] Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass (Macmillan & Co. 1872) 42.

[70] Heidegger’s summation is a clear poke at Nietzsche’s ‘Ending’ (Schluß). See NF-1885: 2[207]; 38[13]. For further context see Nietzsche (n 12) §§106, 211, 282. Regarding Derrida see Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (University of Chicago Press 1989) 45-6.

[71] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale University Press 2000) 40.

[72] ibid 48.

[73] Schürmann (n 39) 527; my emphasis.

[74] Nietzsche (n 3) IV §6.

[75] Nietzsche (n 8) I §472.

[76] Nietzsche (n 68) Wise §3.

[77] Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (T.B. Peterson & Brothers 1850) 125. See ibid 113: when David, punished for a ‘misdoing’ during the holiday-time, finds a ‘beautifully written’ plasterboard placard which ‘bore these words: “TAKE CARE OF HIM. HE BITES”, and starts looking for a dangerous dog, hoping that protecting his master might grant him forgiveness for his sins and reinstatement into the ranks of humans, Creakle hurries to clarify: ‘that’s not a dog. That’s a boy. My instructions are, Copperfield, to put this placard on your back’ (my emphasis).

[78] ibid 126.

[79] Heidegger (n 22) 88. See Kellner’s criticism of Bush’s war rhetoric in 2001, which, ‘like that of fascism, deploys a mistrust of language, reducing it to manipulative speechifying, speaking in codes, repeating the same phrases over and over. Bush’s discourse displayed Orwellian features of Doublespeak, where war against Iraq is for peace, the occupation of Iraq is its liberation, destroying its food and water supplies enables “humanitarian” action, and the killing of countless Iraqis and destruction of the country will produce “freedom” and “democracy”’. Douglas Kellner, ‘Bushspeak and the politics of lying: presidential rhetoric in the “war on terror”’ (2007) 37(4) Presidential Studies Quarterly 636.

[80] See NIV Psalm 37:20; Psalm 37:38; Psalm 92:7; Psalm 110:1-2; Revelation 20:7-15; Peter 3:10; Romans 16:20; 1 Corinthians 15:24-27; Malachi 4:1; Matthew 13:49-50; 2 Thessalonians 1:9; Psalm 37:20.

[81] Adorno (n 47) 22-3; my emphasis.

[82] Arthur Miller, Timebends (Methuen Books 1987) 337.

[83] Nietzsche (n 12) §146.

[84] See Žižek (n 46) 143.

[85] Nietzsche (n 4) Great Errors §8; my emphasis.

[86] Žižek (n 46) 51.

[87] Kellner (n 79) 635.

[88] Heidegger (n 22) 104.

[89] Nietzsche (n 8) I §209.

[90] Probing the ontology of antisemitism, Žižek ((n 46) 70-1, 174)) expresses this point exquisitely. Still, one of the most powerful and imperforate explorations of antisemitism, even surpassing Žižek’s analysis, is Shakespeare’s examination of persecuted otherness in The Merchant of Venice (1600), inspired by Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (‘The Dunce’, 1378-85), which pondered the mind-crushing predicament of ‘not cutting more or less, and shedding no blood’, when claiming the ‘pound of flesh’ (Ser Giovanni, day iv, 57).

[91] Lyse Doucet, ‘Munich security talks marked by global “lose-lose” anxiety’ (BBC News, 19 February 2024) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68334715> accessed 8 February 2025.

[92] NF-1887:11[411].

[93] Nietzsche (n 35) III §27.

[94] Žižek (n 46) 51.

[95] I am borrowing from Žižek’s animated recounting of the Titanic lore (ibid 74-77).

[96] See George Behe, Titanic: Psychic Forewarnings of a Tragedy (Patrick Stephens Ltd 1997).

[97] Nietzsche (n 3) III §4; Schürmann (n 39) 515-22.

[98] Žižek (n 46) 78.

[99] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Oxford University Press 1949) 13.

[100] Sting (n 1).

[101] NF-1888:15[48].

[102] See Jameson’s proposition that ‘it is easier […] to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism’ and Žižek’s that it is easier to envisage ‘a total catastrophe which ends all life on earth than it is to imagine a real change in capitalist relations’, which delimit our existential vision by the strictly monetary logic of Capital. Frederic Jameson, ‘Future City’ (2003) 21 New Left Review <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii21/articles/fredric-jameson-future-city> accessed 13 February 2025; Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso 2008) 334.

[103] NF-1884:26[220].

[104] Žižek (n 46) 50.

[105] ibid 51.

[106] ibid 143.

[107] See discussion in Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press 2022) 2-22.

[108] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Pathos of Truth’ in Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, Writings from the Early Notebooks (Cambridge University Press 2015) §2.

[109] Reiner Schürmann, ‘“Only Proteus Can Save Us Now”: On Anarchy and Broken Hegemonies’ (2021) 41(1) Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 1.

[110] Carl Jung, The Collected Works vol. 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis (Princeton University Press, 1970) 56 [§50], 462 [§660].

[111] The wording is inspired by Cloud Atlas (2012), a film adapted from David Mitchell’s novel of the same name by Lilly and Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer. See <https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/cloud-atlas-2012.pdf?v=1729114887> accessed 8 February 2025.

[112] ibid.

[113] Sallis (n 62) 181, 197.