Sublime

Does she ‘go crazy’? No, not at all: after a few moments of bewildered fugue, Heather Lelache accepts the ‘new’ world as the ‘true’ world, editing out the point of suture. This strategy – of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question – has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play

The famous “end of history” idea articulated by political scientist Francis Fukuyama described how the end of the Soviet Union brought an end to the struggle for political ideas.

other: Western capitalism’s a-symbolic vision, which produces monstrous inequalities and pathogenic disorientation, and the vision commonly known as “communism,” which, ever since the time of Marx and his contemporaries, has been proposing the creation of an egalitarian symbolization.

The idea that the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so-called interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge.

the unseen shift by the state from monitoring to control, the last chapter of the long tale of democracy, free will deformed into willing compliance.

I believe that future critics of our current political order will identify, as political fictions, what might be called the liberalism triad: freedom of speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice.

However, twenty-first-century technology may enable external algorithms to know me far better than I know myself, and once this happens, the belief in individualism will collapse and authority will shift from individual humans to networked algorithms.

Accordingly, liberalism was correct in counseling people to follow their hearts rather than the dictates of some priest or party apparatchik. However, soon computer algorithms might be able to give you better counsel than human feelings. As the Spanish Inquisition and the KGB give way to Google and Baidu, “free will” likely will be exposed as a

Populism gives life to Michel Foucault’s celebrated reversal of the Clausewitz dictum: Politics is the pursuit of war by other means.