The Radical Singularity. Essay on Singular Phenomena

The human being dies so that God is born. Then God has to die so that the subject is born. Then the subject dies, and we are left with only an objective and realised world.

It is said that we live in a period called Postmodernity (which we are not even able to define). Postmodern delusion is loss hysteria. God is dead. Marx is dead. The human being is dead. Economics is dead. And only the chaos of appearances remains (Sokal and Bricmont). Neither Modernity nor its «solids» could survive this fatality, this delusional reproduction towards infinity accomplished by forgetting the meaning (or the narrative). Even more than a post-Modernity, we should call this period anti-Modernity since it is the historical antithesis of the modern Idea. Modernity, freed from its Idea, turned progress into progressivism, equality into egalitarianism, liberty into liberation, Reason into artificial intelligence, the human being into information, humanism into transhumanism, and so on to infinity. The paradox is that things are destroyed both by their disappearance and by their excess. Any previous antithesis are forms of the surplus, of the cancerous, of what abandons its roots (already dead) and grows above its original reason. With Gehlen’s formula, «the premises of the Enlightenment are dead, only its consequences continue on». In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas tells us that, «as soon as the internal links between the concept of Modernity and the self-understanding of Modernity gained from the horizon of Western reason have been dissolved, we can relativise, as it were, the automatically continuing processes of modernisation from the distanced standpoint of a postmodernist observer. From this perspective, a self-sufficiently advancing modernisation of society has separated itself from the impulses of a cultural modernity that has seemingly become obsolete in the meantime; it only carries out the functional laws of economy and state, technology and science, which are supposed to have amalgamated into a system that cannot be influenced» (1). «From his point of view – Habermas continues – the modernisation of society, cannot survive the end of the cultural from which it arose. It cannot hold its own against the primordial anarchism under whose sign Postmodernity marches» (2). At the end of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, Hegel already sensed that our age is a «golden sunrise», traversing «the last stage of history». The end of history has been discussed about ad nauseam. However, it is worth asking, can we reach the end of what has already been lost?