Žižek’s Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy stakes its claim on a double front: the book’s central question concerns what becomes of materialism once quantum theory is taken as a determinate constraint on ontology rather than as a merely technical calculus, and how this ontological constraint rebounds onto the intelligibility of history, agency, and political intervention. Its governing ambition is to articulate a “quantum history” in which the retroactive structure familiar from dialectics and psychoanalysis is treated as materially grounded, so that the universe’s constitution and historical becoming share a logic of collapse, inscription, and perspectival distortion. Its value as an object of study lies in the way it composes, within one argumentative arc, a sustained confrontation between contemporary quantum motifs (collapse, holography, noncommutativity), a Hegelian account of negativity and retroactivity, and a Lacanian account of the Real and the act, thereby generating a systematic pressure-test of what counts as matter, time, truth, and universality.
From its first pages, the work announces its method by staging a parallax between scientific discovery and philosophical reconfiguration. The opening sequence does not treat quantum mechanics as a settled reservoir of results that philosophy may calmly interpret. It begins instead by dramatizing how formal innovations in physics force a shift in the very coordinates within which “matter,” “reality,” and “appearance” are ordinarily distributed. The initial detour through Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is exemplary: the narrative of dimensional incapacity is used as an allegorical operator for a situation in which the “obvious” world is disclosed as dependent on a structural elsewhere that remains immanent. Yet the book immediately displaces the familiar “more dimensions beyond our grasp” moral by insisting on a reversal: the holographic motif, introduced through popular-scientific formulations about boundary inscriptions and projections, relocates the enigma from “how to add a hidden dimension” to “how a lived four-dimensional universe can be encrypted on a lower-dimensional surface.” This reversal matters for the entire subsequent argument because it makes the decisive philosophical question one of status: whether what appears as depth is grounded in a surface inscription that is not a mere appearance, and whether such grounding requires a timeless “block” in which history is already there, or a barred field in which the future remains genuinely open.
The appeal to Vladimir Lenin and to Materialism and Empiriocriticism is then positioned as a methodological repetition rather than a doctrinal inheritance. The book explicitly concedes the dogmatism and conceptual crudeness of Lenin’s text—its overbroad criterion of matter as what exists independently of perception, its reduction of the transcendental to a solipsist empiricism, its tendency to miss the level at which “conditions of access” structure what counts as reality. This concession functions as an internal safeguard: it prevents the Leninist gesture from collapsing into a nostalgic return to “matter” as elementary stuff. What is retained is a maxim: with each major scientific breakthrough, materialism must be rethought, and the present case demands a thought of “materialism without matter,” formulated as a level “outside our confines of space and time.” The book’s procedure here is characteristic: it does not deny that quantum discourse tempts spiritualist appropriations; it reconstructs how such appropriations operate (entanglement as proof of spiritual immediacy, collapse as mind creating reality, the reduction of matter to simulacrum), and it treats them as symptoms of a deeper crisis of ontological common sense once orthodox pedagogical consensus about interpretation has weakened.
This anti-spiritualist stance is not presented as a simple defence of “objective reality.” The introduction’s pivot is a set of distinctions that do philosophical work by redistributing where “alienation” and “negativity” belong. The book proposes three readings of Hegelian “reconciliation” and uses them to determine what a “proper” dialectical materialism would mean: subjectivist idealism (reality as my product), vulgar naturalism (I am a piece of objective reality), and a third position in which the subject recognizes itself at the point where the Other fails. The third reading—where alienation is doubled, because the subject’s alienation from the Other coincides with the Other’s alienation from itself—becomes a guiding thread: it licenses a materialism in which inconsistency is not a mere epistemic defect. It also sets up a persistent pressure on every attempt to treat the quantum enigma as either a purely mental projection or a purely external mechanism: the enigma belongs to the field itself, as its constitutive torsion.
The book then installs this torsion through a sequence of jokes and contemporary cultural references that function as more than ornament. The point of the Loch Ness anecdote is to define “true atheism” as a stance that accepts monstrosity in reality without taking refuge in a divine guarantee. The juxtaposition with a contemporary media item about atheist chaplains intensifies this stance into a claim about “spirit” as a practical dimension of human life that does not require religion. Here the book ties its quantum-materialist ambition to an account of truth that refuses the security of neutral description. With Louis Althusser and his formula that philosophy represents class struggle in the sciences, the work situates the materialism/idealism opposition as a recurring conflict internal to scientific discourse itself. The cited passage from Althusser is explicitly marked by the book as bearing the “flavour of another era,” which already signals that the author intends to inherit the form of the gesture while transforming its content.
A decisive clarification arrives when the book brings philosophy into contact with psychoanalysis under the shared rubric of “trivialities.” The invocation of Edmund Husserl and his description of philosophy as die Wissenschaft von der Trivialitäten (glossed in the text as “science of trivialities”) places “the transcendental” at the centre: philosophy asks after the presuppositions structuring everyday experience, remaining “on the surface” of experience rather than probing hidden mechanisms. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, takes senseless “glitches” seriously—dreams, slips, bungled acts—and interprets them within meaning while encountering trauma as what eludes meaning. This prepares the work’s distinctive conception of truth as intervention: truth becomes a signifier that changes the subject’s relation to trauma. The citation of Infinite Jest is deployed precisely to emphasise truth’s invasive temporality, a theme that then receives explicit political determination through Agon Hamza’s account of Leninist truth as conjunctural naming from within engagement. The book’s claim is stringent: engaged subjective truth cannot assume the form of neutral knowledge; it can appear as factual untruth that inscribes subjective position into reality. Jean-Paul Sartre is then recruited to sharpen the paradox: official truth can function as lie “corroborated by the facts.” The author’s own example, taken from a pandemic reflection, is explicitly presented as factually false yet subjectively true in Hamza’s sense: fiction can disclose possibilities, and reality can serve as escape from such fiction.
This entire apparatus is not ancillary; it prepares the book’s structural claim about its own movement: it proceeds by what it calls the logic of “UPS,” moving from Universal through Particular to Singular. Importantly, this is not offered as a pedagogical table of contents. It is asserted as the book’s underlying syllogism: quantum implications for dialectical materialism; then historicity through Hegel and Heidegger; then singularity of political acts through “quantum lenses.” The book thus tells the reader how its own levels will be mutually conditioning: later claims will not merely add topics; they will alter what the earlier level was about.
The first part, oriented by the programmatic formula “collapse comes first,” begins by placing the ontological status of collapse at the centre. Collapse is introduced as “arguably the key problem” of quantum mechanics, with the book emphasizing the oscillation between quantitative accounts (collapse as threshold phenomenon) and observational accounts (collapse as tied to observation, with a spectrum of meanings of “observation” extending from mechanical registration to public language). The book does not settle this by choosing a side; it proposes an analogy designed to show how an event can change the situation without adding information: the transition from a “public secret” to explicit public articulation changes the symbolic field, and the one who “learns something new” is the big Other, the public space of meaning. Collapse is thereby immediately placed under a dual determination: it is an ontological passage and a symbolic reconfiguration.
The recourse to a magic trick—David Copperfield’s televised disappearance of the Statue of Liberty—serves as a methodological warning against fetishizing the object that seems to change while ignoring shifts in the observer’s position. This is where the book states, with maximal explicitness, why a Hegelian “needs” quantum mechanics: quantum physics compels a self-reflexive inclusion of the observer’s position, a move ordinarily reserved for the symbolic domain. The book’s chosen emblem is Hegel’s “infinite judgment” “Spirit is a bone,” treated as an operation that works through endorsing the absurdity, producing shock, and thereby allowing Spirit to be grasped as self-relating negativity that includes the subject’s stance. Christianity becomes a parallel form (“God is Christ”), and the book draws from the absurdity the experience of a “crack” in reality that grounds atheism understood as existential position rather than neutral knowledge. Here the book’s own insistence on stance matches its earlier thesis about truth: the standpoint from which atheism is asserted matters more than the propositional content asserted.
The internal tension now becomes acute: quantum “discreteness” seems foreign to Hegel, who remains with Aristotle’s infinite divisibility. The book does not dissolve this tension by technical reconciliation. It relocates the shared feature: the retroactive temporality in which what comes “first” is constituted as first only through repetitions that lead up to it. Alenka Zupančič’s remark about theatre rehearsals (“repetitions”) that lead up to “the first night” is used as an explicit model: superpositions are treated as rehearsals leading up to the premiere of collapse. The book here makes a strong claim that will recur with altered valence: collapse “comes first” because it retroactively posits the superposed field as its own prehistory. The Fall in Hegel’s biblical reading is used to illustrate this retroactivity: the Fall constitutes what it is a fall from, such that “Paradise before the Fall” is “simply the animal kingdom.” The implication is not merely narrative; it redefines what counts as an origin. If the origin is retroactively constituted, then the “happy” domain of free oscillations preceding collapse becomes an illusion, and collapse becomes an ever-present structural feature.
At this point the book registers empirical pressure: it cites reports of experiments testing “physical collapse” models and finding no evidence for predicted effects. This is not used to renounce collapse. It is used to sharpen a dilemma: if collapse is treated as actual physical event, one is tempted to introduce an external factor (gravity, in the Penrose–Diósi line). The author openly declares ignorance of the pure mathematics, and this confession functions as a constraint: the philosophical claim must be made without technical pretence. The book’s wager is then stated with unusual directness: collapse must be accounted for in terms immanent to quantum waves, which requires locating within waves themselves a blind spot, a tension pushing toward collapse. This is the first place where the book’s dialectical imagination is translated into a quasi-metaphysical hypothesis: wave oscillations are treated as reaction to a “primordial collapse” constitutive of oscillations themselves, analogized to Freud’s Ur-Verdraengung (glossed as “primordial repression”). The book distinguishes two collapses: a primordial collapse that gives birth to oscillations and accounts for their instability, and the collapse of waves into ordinary reality as a local attempt to regain stability. The difference is then rendered Hegelian: abstract self-relating negativity versus determinate negation yielding positive entity.
This dual-collapse schema is not merely asserted; it becomes the pole against which the book defines its adversaries. It explicitly rejects readings that ignore the priority of collapse, narratives in which collapse arises as spontaneous immanent development of oscillations, and reductions of quantum reality to an aspect of ordinary reality. Instead it proposes a “para-consistent temporality” in which collapse retroactively posits the wave function, and it aligns this with holography: collapsed reality functions as hologram, a surface on which multiple superpositions remain inscribed. The burden of proof is thereby shifted: the book no longer needs collapse to be a classical intrusion; it needs collapse to be the name of the constitutive instability immanent to the field, an instability that can express itself as retroactive inscription.
When the chapter turns to wave/particle duality, it does so by intensifying the “speculative” move: a particle taking “all possible paths” is redescribed as self-interaction, a multiplicity reduced to self-relationship. Richard Feynman’s positron-as-electron-backwards-in-time proposal is brought in to formalize the simplifying reduction to “one continuous line,” and the cited passage is used to show how accepting backward time direction can simplify ontology. The philosophical point is not that the universe “really” contains such a single line; it is that accepting a paradoxical temporal inversion can reduce multiplicity to a self-relating identity. The chapter thus repeatedly returns to a governing rhythm: an apparently extravagant move (retroactivity, backward time) yields a structural simplification that resembles dialectical identity-through-negativity.
The second chapter in the Universal part sharpens the work’s most delicate wager: quantum mechanics “needs” Hegel because without a dialectical account of incompleteness it slides into a metaphysics of an absolute state that reinstates onto-theology in a displaced form. The chapter’s opening with Thomas Hertog and his account of a quantum Big Bang, co-evolving laws, and a Darwinian struggle among laws does several things at once. It makes contingency internal to law, it treats the emergence of the universal as the outcome of a selection among plural possibilities, and it thereby foreshadows the later political logic of universals as conflicting and holographically encoded. The chapter then ties Hertog’s “top down, backward in time” cosmology to symbolic retroactivity: meaning changes without changing facts. The “trillion-dollar coin” example is introduced as an instance of symbolic efficiency: a small real token locked away can restructure an entire financial field through the symbolic order. The immediate counter-objection is then stated in the text: such retroactivity belongs to symbolization, while observation belongs to ordinary time moving forward. The chapter’s answer is holography: the boundary description lacks time, time emerges in the projection, and thus we inhabit a duality of time and timelessness.
This duality is treated as an internal problem rather than a resolved doctrine. The chapter asks whether the timeless “block universe” and lived temporality form a true parallax or an appearance/reality hierarchy. It uses Carlo Rovelli as the purest articulation of block-like implications: time as effect of our correlation with macroscopic averages, time as “information we don’t have,” time as ignorance. The chapter then draws out what it takes to be the ontological consequence: a distinction between our relational knowledge and an “absolute state” outside time. The author explicitly identifies this as a return of the metaphysical split between reality and appearances “with a vengeance,” aligning it with deterministic sympathies. The turn to Albert Einstein and to his remark “Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht” (glossed in the text as God being subtle without deceit) is used to place determinism under the sign of belief in a harmonious big Other. Even when Einstein denies a personal God, his invocation of Spinoza’s God and of the mysterious force swaying constellations is interpreted as faith in a rationally ordered totality.
The chapter’s Hegelian demand enters at this point: time can be “saved” only if reality is conceived as “not-all,” incomplete, open to the future. The notion of an “absolute state” is rejected as meaningless in itself, and ignorance is relocated from the finite observer’s limitation into reality: reality is “in itself barred,” crossed by impossibility. This shift is decisive for the book’s overall architecture because it aligns quantum indeterminacy with Lacanian barring: the obstacle that distorts access to the In-itself is treated as the Real itself. The chapter thus effects a migration of responsibility: where the block-universe approach assigns incompleteness to us, the book assigns incompleteness to the field. The discussion of “before the Big Bang” is then used to show that from the boundary side there is no “before,” because there is no information about such a beyond, and the text explicitly rejects the fantasy of a clock outside the universe. Observation is then broadened in Hertog’s sense to include any record, with a quartz crystal serving as observer. This expansion is used to avoid an onto-theological observer-God in Newtonian physics, where space functions as God’s sensorium. The argument thereby continues to tighten the same screw: the field must contain its own conditions of disclosure without recourse to a transcendent guarantor.
The third Universal chapter radicalizes the opposition to purely perspectival relationalism by shifting from collapse to noncommutativity and by staging an interpretive battle over the ontological status of the wave function. The Many Worlds interpretation is presented as the straightforward erasure of collapse by treating ψ as real entity and distributing outcomes across worlds. Rovelli’s “epistemic” approach is presented at the opposite end: ψ as tool like a forecast, probabilistic summarization of knowledge. Yet the chapter immediately notes that Rovelli goes further, treating probabilism as ontological under-determination and defining entities through their interactions. The text then openly identifies the direction of travel: toward a Nāgārjuna-like ontology of emptiness, where reality is perspectival events without underlying substantiality, and the Absolute is sunyata. The author’s objection is not framed as a rejection of void; it is framed as a demand for a split void: the all-encompassing void versus the puncturing void of the Self. The chapter’s key conceptual invention here is the distinction between “nothing” and “less than nothing,” where “nothing” names the pacified global void, and “less than nothing” names a point-like absolute contradiction that comes logically “before” the void and is “primordially repressed” in every pacifying experience of emptiness. This move functions as a Hegelian–Lacanian graft: void as Substance becomes insufficient; void must be conceived as Subject, as negativity that tears.
The internal problem is then sharpened by returning to Rovelli’s claim that ψ is always relative, with each object having a ψ with respect to every other. Rovelli’s Schrödinger scenario—subject in a box with sleeping drug released by quantum mechanism—is cited to illustrate the relativity of superposition: for the subject, there is no doubt; for the external observer, interference between awake and asleep branches can be observed, so the subject is superposed. This is where noncommutativity begins to acquire its full philosophical role: relational descriptions do not commute into a single coherent global picture without remainder, and the book’s insistence on a puncturing negativity suggests that the remainder is not merely perspectival pluralism. The chapter’s burden is to show that “relationality” has a limit: the field’s inconsistency cannot be dissolved into a harmonious network of relations without reinstating a pacified void that loses the violent point of contradiction that, for the author, defines subjectivity and historicity.
At this stage the book has established a set of interconnected theses whose unity is operational rather than declarative: collapse has ontological priority understood retroactively; the field is barred; time requires incompleteness; relationality reaches a limit; void must be split into an encompassing emptiness and a puncturing “less than nothing.” The second part (Particular) then performs a decisive displacement: it relocates these quantum-dialectical motifs into the problem of finitude and historicity by staging a confrontation between Hegel and Heidegger with Robert Pippin as a mediating and destabilizing figure. The initial shock is that Pippin, long a defender of Hegel’s discursive idealism, endorses Heidegger’s characterization of Hegel as culmination of Western metaphysics, with being equated to logos, logic as ontology, and the disclosure of being presupposed by the very system that claims to articulate it. This endorsement is treated as symptomatic: it signals an exhaustion of purely rationalist defences and forces a renewed engagement with Heidegger’s claim that finitude is thrown into a historically destined disclosure of being, requiring a non-discursive “poetic” thinking. The book’s tone here is strategic: it allows humour at Heidegger’s expense (the imagined Heideggerian gloss on a film noir line), yet it refuses to dismiss him, insisting on confrontation.
The conceptual lever is the distinction between “culmination” and “peak,” attributed in the chapter to Heidegger’s positioning of Hegel and Schelling. Culmination is the completion of a system’s immanent potentials; peak is the surpassing element that protrudes beyond the system. The author then applies this duality reflexively: Heidegger may culminate transcendental metaphysics through disclosure as historical a priori, while cognitive science may represent a peak that undermines the subject of science through neural objectivization. The decisive question is then posed about Hegel himself: does Hegel contain both culmination and peak? The chapter answers affirmatively by distinguishing Hegel’s ontological redoubling of the gap (substance containing the subject–substance split, God’s fall internalized in Christ) from an excessive peak that Heidegger misses: the “night of the world,” a pre-discursive madness, a radical negativity that precludes any theology of a positive God, including secularized naturalism.
This is one of the places where the book’s internal “quantum” logic becomes legible at the level of philosophical historiography. The confrontation with Pippin and Heidegger is not merely exegetical; it repeats, at the level of systems, the earlier logic of collapse and retroactivity. The chapter’s deployment of Søren Kierkegaard’s castle-and-shack image is used to assert that Hegel’s “system” is finished only when accompanied by the shack where the builder dwells: the absolute as castle plus shack. The Castle is then invoked as a premonition: approaching the castle reveals dirty shacks. This motif is not decoration; it anticipates the book’s later insistence that universality exists only through a finite, compromised site. It also foreshadows how “Absolute Knowing” will be reinterpreted.
The chapter’s most forceful conceptual reversal occurs when it names Hegel’s “radical finitude” as “Absolute Knowing” and insists that the phrase does not mean knowing everything. The text supports this with Hegel’s prohibition on speculating about the future and with the owl of Minerva passage, quoted at length, about philosophy painting grey on grey once a form of life has grown old. The author then draws a determinate consequence: each epoch retroactively reconstructs its past; knowledge of the past itself is unstable in a manner analogous to quantum collapse structuring its own genesis. Absolute Knowing is thus defined as recognizing the limitation as such, a limitation that cannot be inverted into productive mastery. The book explicitly distinguishes “Wissen” from “Erkenntniss,” and, more importantly, it asserts that the limitation is “absolute” because it is the limitation of the entire field, invisible from within, appearing as openness. The polemical pressure is then redirected: historicist modesty that claims asymptotic approach is treated as arrogance insofar as it assumes a meta-standpoint from which limitation can be known. Hegel’s “modesty” is construed as the deprivation of this safety distance.
The text then makes one of its most uncompromising claims: we are “condemned” to Absolute Knowing because it names total capture—there is no external reference point to perceive one’s own relativity. Here the chapter folds Deleuzian perspectival distortion into Hegelian closure: the real is neither an inaccessible In-itself nor a transcendent beyond; it is the obstacle that distorts our access. This recasts finitude as internal to the field, aligning it with the earlier quantum theme of reality as barred. The chapter then complicates finitude further by pairing it with immortality in a parallax structure. The author introduces Jacques Lacan’s axiom that one cannot escape immortality, opposes it to the philosophy of finitude, and then proposes that the opposition is unstable: immortality can appear as remainder/excess over finitude, finitude as escape from immortality. The text then pluralizes immortality via Cantor as a model, distinguishing a noble immortality of Event-fidelity from a more basic immortality tied to Sadean fantasy and to obscene undeadness, bringing in cultural figures (cartoon survivals, zombies, vampires) and even a colonial Puritan text’s line about never dying while dying every day. It then defines the “immortality” of the death drive as psychic stance, tied to jouissance (excessive enjoyment), and asserts that it is only with jouissance that the human animal becomes properly mortal by relating to extinction.
These determinations do not merely add psychoanalytic colour. They change the earlier quantum motif of collapse by giving it an existential and ethical burden: collapse, act, and retroactivity must be thought under conditions where the subject is structurally deprived of meta-distance, driven by a deranged relation to life, and yet compelled to inhabit a horizon that cannot be closed by a harmonious big Other. The work’s argument thus thickens by integration: the “barred” character of reality, earlier introduced to save time from the block universe, now becomes the condition of finitude understood as absolute knowing and as impossibility of safe relativization.
The opening chapter on finitude reaches its most constraining formulation when it identifies “Absolute Knowing” with the recognition of limitation as such: the limit that cannot be represented as a local obstacle within a wider field because it coincides with the closure of the field itself, and therefore appears from within as openness. The subsequent development, in the chapter on the “night of the world,” puts that thesis under pressure by relocating the site of limitation from the epistemic modesty of a philosopher who abstains from the future to the ontological constitution of subjectivity itself. The book accomplishes this relocation by a strategic detour through contemporary cognitive science, and it does so in a way that retroactively alters the valence of its earlier quantum motifs. Up to this point, the claim that reality is “barred” has functioned primarily as a safeguard against the block-universe fantasy of an absolute state. Now “barring” acquires a more intimate meaning: it names the structural instability within which a self can appear at all, so that finitude ceases to be only a limit on what can be known and becomes a condition of the emergence of a knowing agent.
The chapter begins from Anil Seth’s Being You: A New Science of Consciousness and its central notion of “controlled hallucination.” The book treats Seth’s position as exemplary precisely because it combines explanatory ambition with a disarming sobriety: perception is construed as a predictive modelling that yields the familiar object-world as an internally generated experiential scene, constrained by prediction error. The text’s first move is to extend this account from external perception to the “inner” perception of feelings and, ultimately, to selfhood: the self becomes an imaginative construction of internal state, and free will is approached in an analogous reductionary key. Yet the book does not mobilize this detour in order to endorse a simple eliminativism. It reads this cognitive-scientific deflation as a contemporary form of a thesis that German Idealism already treated as decisive: the subject’s “world” does not offer itself as a transparent given; it is constituted through a synthetic activity whose status cannot be reduced to a neutral representation.
At this point the text turns from cognitive science back to the philosophical lineage that, in its own telling, has already processed the constitutive role of imagination. It re-situates Immanuel Kant’s account of imagination as synthesis, and then marks a “move further from Kant” in G. W. F. Hegel: imagination is no longer only the power that binds; it is also the power that tears apart, an “analysis” that disjoins what seemed organically unified. This is the point at which the title motif becomes operative. Hegel’s “night of the world” is quoted and immediately disciplined: the book cautions against being seduced by the poetry, and it insists on reading the description with conceptual exactness. What matters for the argument is not a romantic image of interior depth. What matters is the structural scene: a “night” in which partial objects, detached fragments, “membra disjecta,” float free of organic wholes; a space where dissociated images erupt and vanish; a gaze into an eye that discloses a terrifying interior not as secret substance but as pure self-relating negativity. The text’s minimal quotation here functions as a conceptual marker (“The human being is this night…”), and the rest of the work is done by paraphrase: the night is not a deeper realm behind the world, it is the disintegration internal to the subject’s constitution.
This precision allows the book to propose one of its strongest identifications: the ghastly “night” gives a natural-state image of the power of Understanding, the capacity to abstract an entity from its context and treat it as if it existed in itself. The horror is then defined with an unusual rigor: horror arises when a higher level of development violently inscribes itself into a lower level’s presupposition, and therefore appears there as monstrous, as an “unnatural combination” of natural elements. The chapter’s stakes, in its own terms, concern the ontological status of madness. Madness is not treated as a contingent psychological accident. It is treated as an internal possibility that belongs to “spirit’s basic ontological constitution,” and the text supports this with Hegel’s claim that insanity is a necessary stage “in general” though not a factual destiny for every individual. The distinction is essential to the book’s method: a formal possibility, constitutive of the structure, can remain empirically avoidable while still functioning as what must be overcome for “normality” to arise. Madness thus becomes “the real” of psychic life in the precise sense that the text assigns to it: a point of reference that cannot be dissolved into the stabilized order that it conditions.
This is the moment where the earlier argument about finitude is re-determined. Absolute Knowing, construed as the recognition of an invisible closure of a field, now receives an internal correlate: the self’s stabilization is itself an overcoming of the possibility of derangement. The “closure” is neither a static boundary nor a purely epistemic horizon; it is the ongoing success of a precarious psychic constitution that holds together in the face of the Real of madness. If one infers an implication at this point, it is an inference strongly warranted by the text’s own staging: the “barred” character of reality that was earlier mobilized against the block universe is now anchored in the “barred” character of subjectivity itself, with the bar experienced as both constitutive threat and constitutive condition. The argument thereby thickens through integration: the same gesture that saved time from timelessness now saves subjectivity from being merely an adaptive hallucination.
The chapter then turns to Martin Heidegger by posing a pointed question: does the “Real of madness” coincide with Heidegger’s “forgetting of the meaning of being”? Heidegger’s diagnosis, as the chapter rehearses it, announces an “age of complete meaninglessness,” and it frames philosophical retrieval as a path to renewed meaningfulness. The book introduces Jean-Paul Sartre’s nausea here as an index of a different relation to meaning: nausea does not merely register the loss of a determinate sense; it exposes the obscene surplus of being, the oppressive facticity that cannot be redeemed by a disclosure that bestows meaning. This shift matters because it pushes a wedge into Heidegger’s own pathos of retrieval. If metaphysics is already a desperate attempt to find a sustaining meaning, then the longing for renewed meaningfulness risks functioning as a defence against the very Real that the “night of the world” exhibits. The book does not settle this opposition as a simple verdict. It uses it to generate a tension inside the category of finitude itself: finitude can appear as the structural limitation that opens the space of meaning, and finitude can appear as the exposure to a meaningless excess that the demand for meaning disavows.
The chapter’s next move intensifies the earlier theme of retroactivity by translating it into the register of “controlled hallucination.” The predictive brain produces a world “good enough” for survival; it corrects itself when prediction fails; it stabilizes selfhood as an inner model. From the standpoint of the book’s larger project, this stabilization resembles a local “collapse”: a multiplicity of possible experiential organizations is reduced to a determinate world, and that reduction becomes retroactively experienced as the way the world “always” is. The text does not explicitly equate cognitive stabilization with quantum collapse; it uses the cognitive model to sharpen the idea that stabilization is always secondary to a prior instability. The “night” is not a pathological deviation from an already constituted world. It is a structural underside that must be neutralized for a world to appear. In this sense, the chapter makes good on the earlier Universal claim that “collapse comes first,” now transposed into a psycho-ontological register: the subject’s normality presupposes an overcoming, and the overcoming is the presupposed past of what appears as immediate normal presence.
The third chapter of Part II, on Heidegger’s politics of finitude, is where the book forces this tension into the explicitly political space that it has been preparing from the Introduction onward. It begins with Heidegger’s reading of Kant’s transcendental schematism as disclosure of Being. A schema is defined as a procedural rule connecting categories and sensuous impressions, functioning as an “adapter” that makes heterogeneous elements interact; “substance,” for example, becomes intelligible through temporal permanence. The standard Heideggerian moral is that schematism testifies to finitude: the subject cannot generate its content immanently; it requires mediation because it is exposed to an external otherness. The book then asks whether Hegel dissolves this finitude by allowing the notion to generate its own content. It rejects this understanding as a false picture of Hegelian idealism as a complete reign of concepts that “swallow” exteriority. This rejection is not merely exegetical; it is an internal necessity of the book’s own system. The earlier insistence that reality is “barred” and that Absolute Knowing is recognition of closure entails that Hegel cannot be the thinker of a total mediation that abolishes finitude. The question therefore becomes: how does finitude persist in Hegel, and what goes wrong when Heidegger’s version of finitude is politicized?
To answer this, the text performs a detour through Jacques Lacan, and it justifies the detour by insisting that Lacan’s notion of desire is Kantian: desire is structured by a gap, and it relates to its object through lack rather than correspondence. This is the decisive bridge. If schematism mediates heterogeneous realms because of finitude, desire mediates subject and object through a constitutive non-relation. The book’s claim, supported by its own formulations, is that the “adapter” function of schemata has a libidinal analogue: symbolic forms do not merely represent; they stage and manage a gap that cannot be closed. This is where the “night of the world” returns with altered valence. The tearing power of imagination, the proto-spiritual horror of disintegration, is not an accidental detour away from the transcendental problem. It is the underside of the very apparatus that makes experience possible. In this light, Heidegger’s emphasis on disclosure risks being read as privileging the horizon that grants meaningfulness while underestimating the disruptive Real that conditions that horizon from within.
From here the chapter’s political concern becomes determinate. If finitude is treated primarily as thrownness into a historically destined disclosure of Being, the historical can take on the aspect of destiny. The book has already prepared this critique in the first finitude chapter by warning against the naturalization of contingent political configurations. Now it equips that warning with a mechanism: when the disclosure-horizon is treated as the quasi-transcendental condition of what “matters,” politics can be transposed into the register of responding to the call of Being. At this point the book’s earlier insistence on “truth” as engaged position returns as a constraint: once the horizon itself is treated as authoritative, the engaged decision can be masked as obedience to destiny. The chapter’s development of this point is calibrated; it does not reduce Heidegger’s political catastrophe to mere moral failure, and it does not treat it as an accidental deviation from a neutral philosophy. It treats it as a symptom of the way a philosophy of finitude can generate its own political temptation, a temptation to treat historical antagonism as ontologically grounded vocation.
The text’s procedure is to show how the Kantian–Lacanian line displaces the Heideggerian line. If desire is constitutively non-relational, if the gap is internal, then finitude cannot be redeemed by entering more authentically into a disclosed horizon. Finitude persists as a structural incompletion whose Real cannot be integrated into meaningfulness. The political consequence is then legible: a politics that seeks grounding in destiny or vocation becomes a defence against the constitutive inconsistency that the subject embodies. The book’s earlier theme of immortality and the death drive functions here as an implicit support. The subject’s deranged attachment to jouissance, to an obscene immortality, can bind it to a collective fantasy that promises meaningful destiny. The book does not explicitly say, in this chapter’s opening pages, that Heidegger’s politics is an expression of the death drive. Yet it places all the conceptual pieces needed for such a reading into proximity: finitude as disclosure, desire as gap, madness as Real, and vocation as the political form in which finitude can be fetishized.
An inference, clearly marked as such, becomes warranted at this juncture by the chapter’s argumentative staging: the book is constructing two rival ways of “owning” finitude. One way treats finitude as the condition for meaningful disclosure and seeks salvation in an authentic relation to that disclosure. The other way treats finitude as an internal rupture sustained by the Real of madness and by the non-relation of desire, and it seeks sobriety in acknowledging that no disclosure secures the gap. The book’s preference is not asserted as a mere choice; it is produced by the accumulation of constraints introduced earlier: the rejection of an absolute state, the insistence on the barred character of reality, the definition of Absolute Knowing as recognition of closure, and the identification of horror/madness as formally constitutive. These constraints make a destiny-politics appear as a conceptual evasion rather than as a legitimate completion of finitude.
At the same time, the text does not allow this alternative to become tranquil. It insists on the irreducibility of the “night” and thereby keeps open the possibility that every stabilization of meaning is haunted by disintegration. This insistence generates a pressure that will become decisive in Part III: if political universals are always holographically encoded and conflicting, then no political horizon can provide the closure that finitude demands. The politics of finitude thus leads into the politics of universality: the very attempt to anchor politics in destiny will encounter the non-commutativity of symbolic acts and the collapse-structure of decisions that retroactively rewrite their own conditions.
The third chapter’s return to Martin Heidegger through Immanuel Kant’s transcendental schematism is constructed as a controlled re-entry into the question of finitude under a newly tightened constraint. A schema is presented in the book’s own didactic idiom as a “procedural rule” that associates a pure concept with a sensuous impression, functioning as an adapter that allows two heterogeneous registers to “interact.” The crucial point is not the illustrative simplicity of the adapter metaphor; it is the philosophical burden assigned to it: the need for schemata testifies to finitude, understood as the irreducible duality of spontaneity and receptivity. The text immediately blocks the familiar shortcut that would treat G. W. F. Hegel as the thinker who abolishes this duality by allowing the Concept to generate all content from within. It calls this image a false notion of idealism as the “complete reign of concepts” swallowing externality, and that refusal is itself a methodological commitment of the whole work: the book’s quantum-materialist wager cannot tolerate a Hegel who simply eliminates finitude, because its own defence of time and history against the block-universe relies on finitude being transposed into reality itself.
The announced detour through Jacques Lacan is then justified with a precision that mirrors the book’s earlier strategy of using psychoanalysis to define what “truth” is doing in a field where neutrality is structurally unavailable. Desire is declared “Kantian”: it concerns a gap rather than a relation, the lacking object rather than a harmonious fit between need and satisfaction. The book proposes, in an explicitly Kantian sense, a “critique of pure desire,” where the “critique” preserves the separation between empirical objects and the impossible object-cause. The hinge is objet petit a (glossed by the book as Lacan’s name for the a priori object-cause of desire), and the philosophical task is to show how a priori structuring can exist without providing a positive content that would close desire’s gap.
From here the text introduces what it calls Lacan’s sexual schematism, and the inversion it attributes to this schematism matters because it becomes a model for how finitude can be rethought without being dissolved. The universal fact is formulated as the inexistence of a sexual relationship; what enters as “schema” is therefore not a universal rule that would guarantee harmony. It is the singular fantasy that each subject invents as a private formula making a relation workable. Fantasy is assigned the function of a transcendental mediator: it does not merely stage imaginary satisfaction; it constitutes desire and “teaches us how to desire,” in the book’s own blunt formulation that fantasy tells the subject what it desires in the first place. This is not introduced as a colourful aside. It is the book’s way of making schematism legible beyond Kant’s cognitive register: mediation becomes necessary whenever two heterogeneous terms are forced into relation without a pre-given common measure, and the mediating term cannot be treated as a neutral bridge between already formed poles. It produces the poles as poles by providing the rule of their linkage.
At this juncture the text proposes a Hegelian reading of schematism that reconfigures the theological example into a formal model. The mediator is aligned with the figure of Christ as “scheme” of divine-human unity, and the point is carefully dialectical: the mediator is not an externally added link between two independent realms. It is the third moment through which the two “opposed poles” achieve actuality as the opposed poles they are. The book’s compressed formulation that “there is no god which precedes Christ” functions here as an operator of retroactivity: the Absolute is realized through mediation, and the mediation is inseparable from the death that enacts it. Once this is in place, the category of finitude is sharpened: Kant can see finitude only as finitude of the transcendental subject constrained by time and schematism. The Hegelian task becomes the transposition of finitude into the Thing itself, so that the Absolute is no longer a positive infinity opposed to finite reality. The text’s claim that a God conceived as external to finite reality is itself finite is a way of insisting that “true infinity” belongs to mediation, to the movement that includes the gap rather than abolishing it.
This transposition is where the chapter recycles the “night of the world” with altered function. The chaotic mess of partial objects from the earlier Hegel passage is now explicitly identified as the Real in a “pre-schematized mode,” imagination prior to synthetic fantasy and meaningfulness. The insistence that this chaos is not yet “schematized” is doing more than placing madness beneath order; it assigns to finitude an ontological underside, a remainder that every disclosure of meaning depends on and cannot absorb. The chapter then poses a question that keeps the internal tension live: the gap between this non-schematized chaos and Heideggerian finitude/historicity is enormous, and yet Heidegger’s own account of thrownness allows him to say something radical about universality and destiny. Robert Pippin is quoted to articulate this radicality: what matters is inextricable from thrownness into a historically contingent world; constancy is possible only as resolve and readiness for anxiety, combined with refusal of the tranquilizing normalcy of das Man (glossed once here as the anonymous “one,” the impersonal social normativity of everydayness).
The book’s next move is to ask whether everyday engagement and care themselves function as tranquilization, and this question begins the chapter’s explicit political drift. Novalis’ motif of homelessness is brought in as Heidegger’s image of longing for home; the text then tightens the screw by suggesting that homelessness could be the founding gesture of becoming human, “with nothing beneath it.” If disclosure of mattering is radically contingent, the book argues, Heidegger has no space for universals such as human rights, freedom, dignity. This is framed as an anti-Jürgen Habermas stance: there is no big Other of universal pragmatic rules independent of a “home.” Pippin’s criticism is then cited in full force: the central attunement to death is “intensely private and unsharable,” rendering ordinary life escapist, and placing dignity in refusal of self-deceit before death. The text lingers on “almost all of ordinary life,” explicitly extending the suspicion beyond das Man to caring engagement with the ready-to-hand.
This prepares a knot of four existential stances that the chapter holds in tension without resolving into a single synthesis: authentic care as owned thrownness into a historical disclosure; anxiety as confrontation with mortality; rootless das Man; metaphysical distanced observation, whose classical form the book has already argued quantum mechanics undermines in science. The chapter allows itself a parenthetical generalization that matters: Heidegger usually treats being-toward-death anxiety as individual, yet sometimes hints that a society can make an authentic collective decision when confronted with annihilation. The political implications will emerge later, but the text keeps them suspended here, as if to show how easily existential categories can be collectivized.
The transition to enjoyment begins with Heidegger’s reading of Critique of Practical Reason and Kant’s “a priori feelings” (respect, dignity, anxiety, guilt). Heidegger’s brief attempt to distinguish pleasure and enjoyment is quoted, and then the book marks it as abandoned too soon. The critique is precise: Heidegger’s opposition remains trapped in an object–subject schema, whereas enjoyment includes enjoyment of pain, enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle. This is the chapter’s entry into the Freudian question of enjoying oppression itself, and the political stakes become determinate in the way the book anatomizes the mechanism: power does not secure obedience only through fear and repression; it bribes subjects by offering a perverted pleasure in renunciation itself, a gain in loss. Lacan’s surplus-enjoyment is introduced as the name for this perversion, and the concept is sharpened through a paradox the book insists on: surplus-enjoyment is always excess over itself, in its “normal” state it is nothing. There is no “basic enjoyment” plus an extra; enjoyment is structurally surplus.
The chapter then uses Michel Foucault as a foil, claiming a Hegelian response: repression generates what it represses, and repression itself becomes libidinally invested. The example from Franz Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” read through Aaron Schuster, condenses the logic: fasting that begins as refusal becomes compulsion to “eat the nothing,” to feast on the fast itself. The passage from pleasure to enjoyment is thereby rendered as a structural reversal: repression turns into desire for repression; regulation of pleasures becomes pleasure of regulation; disciplinary practices themselves become the true excess. The chapter’s insistence here is methodological: if one wants to understand why subjects consent to their own domination, one must treat enjoyment as internal to the apparatus of domination, not as an accidental by-product.
From this libidinal analysis the text pivots back to the “main argument” by asking how one passes from engaged care to modern experience of reality as availability for manipulation. Pippin’s suggestion that a “screen of theoretical sedimentation” distorts ordinary expectations is treated as implausible in its causal direction. The chapter presses a different mediation: social classes and division of labour. The theoretical distance enabling scientific exploitation presupposes both the division between those who work and those who live from others’ work, and the division within production between physical labour and planning/regulation. This is where the chapter makes its generalizable move against Heidegger: in describing technological exploitation of nature, Heidegger ignores the social relationship within which exploitation happens.
The classical question of political economy (is labour the only source of value?) is introduced as a test-case for this claim, and the chapter’s compact Marxian answer depends on a shift of level: value is not an intrinsic property of an object; it is expression of a social relationship, and only humans are elements in such a relationship. This line is then extended into a polemic against rights attributed to animals, rivers, mountains. The book’s argument here is formal: rights imply responsibilities; only humans can be held responsible. The medieval French trials of birds are invoked to show what happens when one literalizes rights without responsibility. The point is not to license cruelty; the point is to mark the conceptual status of rights as a normative institution embedded in responsible agency.
The text then announces its approach to evil, and here Kant returns in a new guise. Evil is not primarily the conscious choice of wrong over right; its most radical form is renunciation of the very choice, the renunciation of freedom implied by choosing. The chapter’s contemporary examples—Russia on Ukraine, the Israel Defense Forces on Gaza—are cited as instances of “we had no choice.” The text then distinguishes this renunciation from the logic of a truly great ethical act, which can also take the form of “I cannot do otherwise,” yet with a radically different affect: the renunciation of choice relaxes responsibility, while the ethical act is haunted by pressure precisely because it assumes responsibility.
The chapter then diagnoses a contemporary liberal moral style as “human rights realism”: an obsession with cruelty that expands the field of what counts as violence, paired with a realism that refuses to “expect too much,” thereby insinuating that we are not really free. The suppressed freedom returns, the text claims, in brutal violence and pleasure in humiliation. Heidegger’s answer to twentieth-century evil is then reconstructed as expected: ontic crimes are displaced by the ontological evil of nihilism in global techno-scientific civilization. Yet the chapter insists that this displacement relies on ontic choices, and it draws this out with decisive specificity: Heidegger’s identification of modern nihilism with Judaism, including post-war remarks about “planetary criminality,” the calculus of Machenschaft (glossed here as the regime of manipulative “machination”), and deracination. The chapter notes the defence strategy that would separate Heidegger’s ontologico-ontic distinction from his anti-Semitism by being “more faithful” to his ontology than he was. It then names the structural error: positing a specific agent responsible for social evil, a classic ideological move.
At this point the book inserts a cinematic operator that is explicitly called “in quantum terms”: The Usual Suspects by Bryan Singer, together with Charles Baudelaire’s Le Figaro line about the devil’s trick. The movie’s superposition of possibilities—who is Keyser Soze?—is treated as a series of superpositions, and the ending is treated as collapse. The book’s crucial reversal is then stated: the devil’s greatest trick consists in convincing us that he exists as a single agent pulling strings, because that subjectivation is ideology at its purest. The trap is focusing on the agent’s identity rather than on what the revelation does to the status of the narrative: the “truth” that Kint is Soze turns everything else into potential lie, a truth that produces a generalized doubt. The book names this in Lacanian terms as the exception sustaining universality of lie, and it proposes this as an accurate definition of the devil. This is not a decorative analogy; it is a formal demonstration of how a “collapse” can yield one determinate point while dissolving the epistemic ground for everything else. The chapter thereby folds its quantum motif back into ideology critique: determination at one point can increase indeterminacy elsewhere, and the “answer” can function as a destabilizing operator.
The return to Heidegger is then brutal in its consequences. The chapter claims that Heidegger short-circuits ontological and ontic by making Jews the embodiment of Machenschaft while making Germans the unique metaphysical people capable of a new beginning. It cites Heidegger’s perverse manoeuvre of treating the Holocaust as Jewish self-annihilation “in the metaphysical sense,” thereby making the empirical perpetrators disappear into an anonymous instrument. The parallel with contemporary justificatory rhetoric—IDF responsibility displaced onto Palestinian human shields—is stated as structurally similar. The irony is then pushed further: if Germans embody machination more radically than Jews, then Germany’s destruction becomes self-destruction. Against Heidegger’s fetishization of roots, “blood and soil,” the chapter asserts that in global capitalism every such reference loses innocence and serves global machination.
Pippin’s political diagnosis is cited: Heidegger treats modern pathologies—alienation, domination, humiliating labour, anomie, deracination—as implications of the metaphysical tradition, excluding other options as traps. Heidegger’s own 1953 line that World War II “decided nothing” in the history of Being is then aligned with the notorious implication: ontological betrayal outweighs the gas chambers. The chapter quotes from the Black Notebooks and then paraphrases the message with explicitness: the ontic crime becomes less terrifying than the post-war “concentration camp” of Germany deprived of world-willing (Weltwollen), the will to enact a historical disclosure of Being. Peter Trawny is cited as stating the consequence succinctly: world-willing becomes onto-historically more important than the gruesomeness of gas chambers. The chapter then shows how Heidegger’s phrase about the “brutalization” of National Socialism implies that global machination brutalized an originally more “positive” spiritual project, a formulation that makes the ontological narrative swallow the political horror.
The text punctuates this analysis with two kinds of reminders that function as checks on its own tendency to universalize. One is a contemporary line from A Murder at the End of the World about guilt as easier than contending with truth, introduced to complicate the meaning of guilt itself. Another is a recollection from late-1960s student revolts and the ontological elevation of protest into a yearning for new beginning, with the Croat Heideggerian Vanja Sutlić as a representative voice, plus the anecdote of students visiting Heidegger in 1967 and Heidegger claiming their aim aligned with what he sought as rector in 1934. These reminders are not digressions; they are examples of how Heideggerian categories can slide into political romanticization, offering a generalized spiritual reading that displaces the concrete antagonisms of labour and power.
The chapter then returns to the term whose absence in Heidegger is treated as symptomatic: capitalism. Pippin’s parenthetical admission that Heidegger would never say “capitalism” is answered by the book’s insistence that capitalism is not merely an ontic organization of technological disclosure. It has “transcendental-ontological status” because modern science and technology become continuous domination and exploitation only within capitalism’s drive toward expanded self-reproduction. The convergence with radical conservatives is marked through Patrick Buisson’s dictum that capitalism is the great deconstructor. The text then adds class struggle as the missing name: technological availability is not homogeneous; objects resist; social antagonism is internal. Heidegger’s prohibited words thus become diagnostic of what his ontology excludes.
The chapter closes by forcing the most painful question into the open: is Heidegger’s Nazi engagement a contingent error, or is it grounded in his philosophical stance, or does the grounding run in the other direction? The book proposes that the only way to clarify this is to analyze the implicit philosophical foundations of Mein Kampf, and it endorses Trawny’s risk in doing so. The result is articulated as a paradox that the chapter refuses to soften: Heidegger was an engaged Nazi and a titan of philosophy. The suggestion then receives its most destabilizing form: Heidegger may have seen certain crucial things because of his political monstrosity, meaning that access to some ontological truths can be bound to terrifying error at the ontic level. The chapter cites an anecdote about a Jewish friend immersed in Jewish spirituality who invokes Talmudic motifs where painful truths can be spoken only from the position of Satan. The text immediately places a constraint on this temptation: this cannot be the final position; one must “pass through” Heidegger and supplement his thought so that the Nazi link is no longer required. This is where the chapter’s inner movement becomes retrospectively intelligible: the entire route from schematism through desire, fantasy, surplus-enjoyment, class, evil, and ideological devilry has been staging a problem of mediation that Heidegger’s ontology both illuminates and catastrophically distorts.
From this point the book’s shift into the Singular part is not a thematic add-on; it is the systematic relocation of responsibility. The Universal part treated collapse, time, and the barred field. The Particular part forced the barred structure into finitude and into the political temptations of disclosure. The Singular part begins by asking how universality itself appears as a social fact under capitalism, and it does so in a way that makes the previous chapter’s critique of Heidegger’s “no universals” into a new object of analysis rather than a settled verdict.
The opening of “The hologram of conflicting universalities” begins by acknowledging that universality has “a bad reputation” because neutral-universal positions are experienced as covert privilege. The book then refuses the simplicity of this diagnosis by adding a second determination: contemporary life is simultaneously less universal than believed, since subjects remain caught in particular cultural universes, and more universal than believed, since all are enmeshed in trans-cultural global capitalism. The question becomes genealogical and structural: under what historical conditions does abstract universality become a lived fact? The answer is positioned explicitly through Marx’s commodity fetishism: when commodity exchange predominates, abstraction becomes a direct feature of social life. Individuals relate to themselves and to objects as embodiments of abstract universals; concrete background becomes contingent, while the “abstract” capacity to work or think becomes defining. The example of “profession” is used to show this lived abstraction: modern subjects experience their social role as not directly inherited, as dependent on interplay of contingent circumstances and choice, whereas the medieval serf’s peasant status does not function as “profession” in this sense.
The book then introduces a decisive criterion that will govern the chapter’s entire argument: universality becomes “for itself” only insofar as subjects do not fully identify their being with their particular situation, only insofar as they experience themselves as “out of joint” with it. Universality’s appearance is therefore described as violent disruption of a prior social texture. This is the first place where the hologram motif begins to acquire its political meaning. Universality-for-itself is opposed to organic totality, and the book gives a rigorous formalization: universality becomes for itself in an element that cannot achieve identity in the whole, that lacks a proper place, whose particularity is thwarted. The text offers radical feminism as a formal instance: women stand for universality insofar as they are prevented from fully becoming what they are. Jewish identity is then introduced as another haunted site of such universality, and Heidegger’s portrayal of Jews as failed nation is turned against him: the very “failure” as nation becomes what makes Jews a stand-in for universality.
The logic of traditional anti-Semitism is then shown to become complicated by Zionism’s own rhetoric of roots, and the chapter introduces Alain Finkielkraut’s letter in Le Monde that Jews have chosen rootedness. The text identifies the echo of Heidegger’s emphasis on homeland and rootedness and immediately formulates the irony: Zionism can function as an attempt to mobilize anti-Semitic clichés in reverse. At this point the chapter is already performing its core thesis: universality appears through a conflicted field of particularizations, and the attempt to stabilize a universal through rootedness generates new distortions. The hologram is not yet explicitly defined in these opening paragraphs, yet the structure is already operative: the universal is legible only through the point where the whole fails to totalize, and every attempt to fix the universal in a particular form produces symptomatic remainders that betray the fixation.
The chapter proceeds by turning the foregoing irony into a methodological injunction: universality is never given as a tranquil common denominator; it appears as a fracture within any purportedly organic order, and it therefore tends to be experienced as violence. The text insists on this violence as a determinate historical phenomenon. The universal that emerges with commodity exchange and the abstract equality of market subjects does not merely hover above concrete life as an “idea”; it reorganizes the field of concrete attachments by installing a dimension in which subjects can compare themselves, exchange themselves, and judge themselves independently of inherited place. Precisely because this dimension is abstract and formally egalitarian, it generates the suspicion that it is secretly biased; and precisely because it is actually operative in everyday practice, it cannot be eliminated by an ethical appeal to local rootedness. The chapter’s guiding tension is thus set: universality is both the site of emancipation and the medium through which domination can be universalized. The question the chapter keeps re-posing is how to think this two-sidedness without dissolving it into relativism, and without converting it into a metaphysical destiny of “the West.”
The hologram motif is then sharpened by an insistence on partiality as constitutive. The chapter treats every universal as inseparable from a particular mode of inscription, and it presses this inseparability beyond the banal point that universals need examples. The universal is said to exist only as a distortion of itself, because it can appear only through a situated perspective that is itself caught in antagonism. The chapter’s choice of examples is designed to make the distortion visible: universal human rights, universal market rationality, universal cultural mission, universal religious truth. In each case, the universal functions as an organizing signifier that binds a field and simultaneously produces a remainder that cannot be integrated. The hologram becomes a formal name for this structure: the whole is present in each point, and it is present there under a particular deformation that is not accidental but necessary. The chapter thereby converts a familiar critique of “false universals” into a stricter thesis: there are no universals without deformation, and the deformation is the medium through which the universal is real.
This is where the book introduces a difficult distinction between universality as abstract equivalence and universality as the name of an antagonism. Abstract equivalence is treated as historically specific: it is the universality of exchange, of money as general equivalent, of the legal subject as bearer of rights and obligations. The chapter repeatedly indicates that this universality has an objective efficacy; it is not a mere ideology. Yet it is also the universality through which inequalities can be reproduced precisely because agents are formally equal while materially unequal. The second type of universality is then presented as the universal that appears at the point where the abstract equivalence fails to integrate a group or a position. Here the universal is not a shared property; it is a shared impossibility. The chapter’s earlier examples of thwarted becoming (in the feminist case, in the Jewish case) return in this new register: the universal is the name for a point where the social whole cannot achieve closure, where a “part” stands for the whole because it embodies its blockage.
The internal pressure at this point concerns the status of such privileged “parts.” The text explicitly registers the danger that the claim “this group stands for universality” can become its own ideological weapon, a new election that licenses violence in the name of the universal. The chapter does not deny the danger. It attempts to neutralize it by insisting on a formal criterion: a position stands for universality only insofar as it does not coincide with itself, only insofar as it is marked by internal division and cannot fully appropriate its own identity. The chapter’s argument thus binds universality to non-identity. This binding is crucial for the book’s larger system because it repeats, in the political register, the earlier insistence that reality is barred and that subjectivity is constituted through a crack. A universal that would coincide with itself, fully adequate to its content, would function like the “absolute state” the book rejected in cosmology. The political universal must therefore remain incomplete, and its incompleteness is what prevents it from hardening into a new metaphysical One.
From this point the chapter makes a move that is both clarifying and destabilizing: it turns its critique against the fashionable rejection of universals. The text treats the contemporary preference for local narratives, identities, and plural “ways of life” as understandable reaction to imperial universals, yet it argues that this rejection itself is parasitic on a universal framework. The very act of claiming equal respect for plural identities presupposes a universal norm of equality; the very insistence that no identity should dominate presupposes a universal demand. The chapter therefore proposes that the anti-universal stance does not abolish universality; it displaces it into a hidden form, making it harder to contest. This yields a further tension: the attempt to avoid universal claims can end by leaving the most operative universal of all untouched, namely the universality of global capitalist circulation. When the universal is rejected at the level of political ideals, it continues to function at the level of markets, logistics, finance, and technological standardization. The chapter’s polemic here is directed less against “identity politics” as such than against the depoliticizing effect of treating universality as an ethical danger rather than as a structural feature of the present.
The hologram figure now begins to do explicitly argumentative work. The chapter treats each political camp’s universal as a projection that contains the whole antagonism, yet in a way that cannot see itself as projection. The liberal universal of rights encodes within itself the market universal that undermines material equality; the nationalist universal of sovereignty encodes within itself the dependence on global systems that sovereignty presupposes; the religious universal of truth encodes within itself the political apparatus that sustains its universality. The chapter’s point is not that each camp is hypocritical, though it allows that hypocrisy often appears. The point is formal: the universal is accessible only through a partial collapse of the field into a determinate stance, and this collapse retroactively rewrites what “the universal” was. What counts as evidence and what counts as distortion is therefore itself stance-dependent. The chapter thereby ties its political theory back to its earlier treatment of collapse as symbolic event: a political declaration or act “measures” the social situation and changes the space of possible descriptions. A universal is not first given and then applied; it is posited as universal through acts that force particular content to stand for the whole.
This retroactive structure becomes especially visible when the chapter turns to the question of “rootedness.” The earlier discussion of Jews, Zionism, and the embrace of homeland motifs is used to show how a universal position can attempt to “heal” itself through particularization. The attempt is not described as simply illegitimate. It is described as structurally intelligible: if a position is experienced as lacking a proper place, it will be tempted to acquire place in a way that cancels the discomfort of non-identity. The chapter suggests that this cancellation is never complete. Even when rootedness is achieved institutionally, the universal remainder persists, returning as internal conflict, displaced guilt, or new forms of exclusion. Here the chapter’s logic thickens rather than expands: the universal is again defined by the persistence of the crack. The attempt to become fully particular, fully at home, repeats at the political level the attempt to become fully reconciled at the ontological level; the book treats both as impossible without remainder.
The chapter then prepares the transition to the next topic by insisting that universality is not merely ideological; it is technologically mediated. Global capitalism does not merely circulate commodities; it installs infrastructures that standardize time, space, attention, and decision. The book uses this as the bridge to its chapter on artificial intelligence. The question that governs the AI chapter is framed with the same structural discipline that governed the earlier cosmology chapter: does the emergence of AI amount to a new “absolute state” in which decision and meaning can be outsourced to an omniscient apparatus, or does it intensify the barred character of reality by generating a new field of opaque mediation? The text refuses both the utopian fantasy of AI as neutral solver and the dystopian fantasy of AI as demonic agent. Its guiding wager is that AI must be approached as a transformation of the symbolic order’s functioning, and that this transformation repeats, at another level, the logic of collapse and noncommutativity.
The AI chapter’s first decisive move is definitional. It treats contemporary AI primarily as pattern extraction from data, a statistical processing that can outperform human capacities in limited domains without thereby touching the structure of subjectivity. The text insists that intelligence in the strong sense involves negativity: the capacity to experience an inconsistency in one’s own coordinates and to be compelled to reconfigure them. A system that optimizes within fixed constraints does not exhibit this negativity; it does not encounter its own impossibility as impossibility. This line is not offered as a metaphysical proof of human uniqueness. It is offered as a diagnostic of what the book takes to be the Real of subjectivity: the subject is not an information processor plus consciousness; it is a crack that persists within processing, a gap that can be inhabited as decision.
At the same time, the chapter does not allow this distinction to become complacent humanism. It acknowledges that AI is already restructuring the conditions under which human negativity can be lived. When prediction, recommendation, and automated governance saturate the field, the subject’s experience of choice is altered. The chapter’s key claim here is that automation does not eliminate decision; it displaces it. Decisions migrate into training data, model design, institutional deployment, and the acceptance of outputs as authoritative. The noncommutativity motif returns in this migration: the order of interventions matters, because once an algorithmic regime is installed, subsequent “corrections” occur within a field already shaped by prior automation. An early choice to treat a domain as optimizable can foreclose later political contestation by presenting outputs as neutral facts. The chapter’s tension-sensitive register is clearest here: AI is treated simultaneously as instrument and as a change in the status of evidence, a change that can naturalize social relations while claiming to merely describe them.
The book’s earlier insistence that truth is engaged position reappears in a new guise: the claim “the model says so” functions as a pseudo-neutral truth that masks its conjunctural origin. The AI chapter therefore intensifies the book’s critique of the “big Other” fantasy. A society tempted to treat algorithmic systems as impartial arbiters repeats the deterministic temptation the book diagnosed in the block-universe reading of physics: the desire for an absolute state outside time and conflict. The chapter’s counter-claim is that the opacity of AI systems does not provide access to an absolute; it produces a new field of fetishization. The subject can become obedient to a machine precisely because the machine’s workings are opaque, thereby enabling the belief that a deeper rationality is at work. This belief is treated as structurally analogous to the belief in a subtle God: the guarantee is relocated into an inscrutable order.
The chapter on vocation then takes up the political and existential consequences of this displacement. Vocation is introduced as a mode of subjectivization that stabilizes contingency retroactively. The book treats the narrative “this was my calling” as a mechanism for turning a sequence of contingent collapses into a coherent trajectory. Vocation is thereby aligned with the retroactive constitution of origins: one becomes what one is by positing, after the fact, a line that makes earlier acts appear as steps toward a destiny. The text does not simply debunk vocation. It treats it as an ambivalent operator. On the one hand, it can justify social hierarchies by presenting roles as natural or essential; on the other hand, it can articulate fidelity to a task that exceeds immediate self-interest, allowing subjects to sustain commitment under conditions of doubt. The book’s distinctive contribution here is to refuse the fantasy that commitment requires certainty. It proposes instead that fidelity is possible only when the void of undecidability is acknowledged as internal to commitment itself. This allows the book to connect vocation back to its earlier account of ethical acts: the great act is not a comfortable realization of destiny; it is a decision undertaken without guarantee, a collapse that does not erase the superposed field of possibilities that haunts it.
At this point the main triadic architecture has achieved a provisional stabilization. The Universal part supplied the ontological schema of collapse, barred reality, and the need for incompleteness to preserve time. The Particular part forced barredness into finitude and exposed how philosophical categories can generate political temptations, especially when disclosure and destiny displace class and enjoyment. The Singular part has now shown how universality functions as antagonistic hologram and how contemporary technical regimes intensify the displacement of decision. Yet the book does not conclude by sealing this system. It adds “Variations,” and the text itself instructs the reader how to treat them: they are not appendices, they are systematic tests. Each variation replays a motif in another medium and observes what breaks, what survives, and what returns with altered valence.
A first variation takes up the time question again through a meditation on “frozen beauty,” explicitly engaging relational and Stoic themes as a way of thinking a universe described by time-symmetric laws while lived time remains irreversible. The point is not aesthetic commentary. The point is to show that the same tension reappears wherever one tries to reconcile a timeless formalism with temporal experience. The variation functions as a check on the earlier cosmology chapter: even if one adopts a relational picture, the experience of irreversible cuts persists. The book treats aesthetic “freezing” as a way of making the cut visible: a tableau holds movement in suspension while hinting at what exceeds it. This prepares the reader to see that “timeless” formalism is itself a kind of freezing, and that the question is what remains excluded by the freeze.
Another variation returns to universality, now under the claim that there is no substitute for true universals. The text tightens its earlier critique of localism by arguing that universals return as soon as antagonism is named. Attempts to evade universals by multiplying perspectives do not abolish universality; they often allow the most operative universals to remain unchallenged. Here the variation functions as a reinforcement and a complication: it reinforces the need for universals, yet it complicates their status by insisting that universals are not peaceful. They are names for conflicts that cannot be localized. The book thereby maintains the pressure that its own system generates: universality is necessary and dangerous, emancipatory and violent, and this ambivalence cannot be eliminated without losing the object.
A further variation turns to voice and sound, with an insistence on a remainder that cannot be integrated into meaning. The book uses the distinction between voice as carrier of signification and voice as a material excess to restage its concept of the Real in another register. The formal parallel is strict: structured music and structured speech require a leftover that both enables and disturbs structure. This variation is important because it prevents the earlier account of symbolic order from becoming too rationalistic. If the symbolic is treated as a network of signifiers whose failures produce the Real, one can still imagine a complete symbolic integration as an ideal. The voice variation works against this by showing that excess is not merely a failure; it is constitutive.
The variation on reconciliation then revisits the book’s earlier discussion of Hegelian reconciliation, now testing whether reconciliation can be conceived without metaphysical closure. The text’s internal answer is delicate: reconciliation is treated as an act that changes the binding power of an injury without erasing the injury. This allows the book to maintain its refusal of serene closure while still accounting for transformations that genuinely change the field. The point is again structural: an act can reconfigure the symbolic space, yet the Real remainder persists. Reconciliation becomes a collapse that does not abolish the prior superposition; it selects a new stance toward it.
The political variation on a “moderately conservative communism” performs another systematic test. It explores how emancipatory politics must contend with fragility of institutions and with the risk that reckless interventions can trigger catastrophic collapses. The variation’s provocation is that emancipation requires a respect for what is worth conserving, yet conservatism can contain a demand for fidelity to principles that exceed market pragmatism. The book does not offer this as an easy synthesis. It uses it to sharpen its notion of metastability: social orders are sustained by continuous fluctuation, and transformations occur through cuts that cannot be fully predicted. The variation thereby aligns political prudence with the book’s ontological motif: acting within a barred reality demands restraint without resignation.
The painted void variation returns to the metaphysics of nothingness, now insisting that void is always framed, textured, mediated. This repeats the book’s earlier insistence on a split void: the pacified void versus the puncturing contradiction. A monochrome expanse is never pure nothing; it is an arranged field that makes the viewer confront the conditions of seeing. In this way the variation functions as an aesthetic analogue to the book’s philosophical method: philosophy remains on the surface, with trivialities, yet discovers that the surface is structured enough to generate abyss.
The cinema monster variation, along with the variation on sexual superpositions, replays the logic of superposition and collapse in domains where identity is notoriously unstable. Monsters and sexual identities are treated as condensations of incompatible determinations that are forced into narrative or social stabilization. The text’s discipline here is to avoid romanticizing indeterminacy. Indeterminacy is shown to be structurally bound to contexts that demand stabilization. The “collapse” into a fixed identity is never final; the excluded possibilities persist as haunting remainder. In these variations the book’s unity becomes palpable: the same formal schema—multiplicity, cut, remainder—reappears across cosmology, politics, aesthetics, and sexuality, each time forcing the schema to take on a new burden.
Finally, the Leninist kitchen-maid motif is used as a compressed political emblem of improbable reversal. The elevation of a figure excluded from governance into the site of governance is treated as a paradigmatic collapse that exposes contingency of roles. The book’s insistence is again two-sided: the event reveals that social “necessities” were contingent; yet the event does not erase the past, and the new power remains marked by what it negated. This variation serves as a political echo of the Fall motif earlier used in the Universal part: the event constitutes what it negates as its presupposed past, and thereby rewrites the meaning of “what was.”
At the level of internal organization, the book’s concluding movement stabilizes its guiding tensions through a form of controlled antinomy rather than reconciliation. The Universal–Particular–Singular triad establishes a systematic claim, yet the Variations prevent that claim from hardening into a closed doctrine. The work attains unity by articulated recurrence: collapse returns as ontological, psychic, political, aesthetic; holography returns as a figure for universality’s distortions; finitude returns as Absolute Knowing and as vulnerability to derangement; the Real returns as remainder and as puncturing negativity. The book leaves unresolved, by design, the question of whether the quantum Real and the psychoanalytic Real are identical or only structurally analogous. It also leaves under strain the status of agency in a world saturated by algorithmic governance: the text insists on decision and act, yet it shows how decision migrates into infrastructures that can appear as destiny. The unity it achieves is therefore neither serenity nor fragmentation. It is a layered stratification in which each layer retroactively re-determines the others, producing a system that remains faithful to its own central claim: a materialism adequate to the present must accept inconsistency as positive, time as dependent on incompleteness, universality as conflictual, and agency as an act without guarantee.
The passage in which the chapter lingers on Haiti as an emblem of “failed state” performs a double displacement that is easy to miss if one reads it as mere topical commentary. First, it relocates the earlier theoretical distinction—universality as an antagonistic form of abstraction—into the concrete fragility of state power itself: the “failure” is defined neither by poverty alone nor by juridical irregularities in the abstract, but by the visible cracking of the apparatus that claims to unify a social field and to monopolize legitimate violence. Second, it makes this fragility reflexive by letting the example rebound onto states that ordinarily present themselves as paradigms of stability. The West Bank settler violence is introduced with a carefully chosen structural feature: the actions resemble those of a gang, yet they take place “in full view” of the army and police, and therefore acquire the ambiguity of violence that is simultaneously extra-legal and tacitly legalized. The figure of Itamar Ben-Gvir is not mobilized primarily as a moral shock; it functions as a node where this ambiguity is formalized, because the ministerial command over “law and order” is placed in proximity to a judicially established record of anti-Palestinian terrorism. In the book’s own terms, this is how universality becomes holographic: the universal claim of a state to embody legality and order is present in a particular deformation, one in which the state’s very claim is enacted through selective suspension of its own law.
The chapter sharpens this deformation into a general diagnosis: “failed state” ceases to be a label reserved for the global periphery and becomes a sliding scale that can be applied to the centre when ideological civil war, insecurity of public space, and the visible loss of monopoly over violence begin to define ordinary experience. Israel and the United States are named at this point with deliberate provocation as candidates on a “fast-track,” and the provocation is philosophically functional: it blocks any complacent distinction between a rational universal order “here” and pathological breakdown “there.” The book then stages the next displacement as a response to this confused situation: the search for an ideological form capable of maintaining social stability. Religion appears as the first candidate, and the text uses this appearance to demonstrate how a classical Marxian formula must be rewritten when the materiality of ideology is transformed.
The critique of Karl Marx’s “opium of the people” proceeds by an internal differentiation rather than by rebuttal. The text concedes that radical Islam and Christian fundamentalism can indeed function as opium in the familiar sense: a dream-space that offers a false confrontation with capitalist modernity while leaving intact the devastation wrought by global capitalism. Yet the book refuses to let this concession settle into the standard secular liberal disdain for religion. It introduces two additional “opiates,” and the move is structurally telling: one is “the people” itself, invoked as a fuzzy populist dream that obfuscates antagonism by promising a substantial unity; the other is opium literally, the chemical management of affect, from sleeping pills and antidepressants to hard narcotics. The argument here is not a moralism about decadence. It is a claim about how social power becomes immanent to psychic economy. Where earlier ideologies offered narratives, identifications, and prohibitions, the contemporary situation increasingly “outsources” emotional regulation to chemistry, so that control is exercised not only through opaque institutions but through an intimate modulation of anxiety, excitation, depression, and sleep.
This is one of the chapter’s most important moments of conceptual migration: “outsourcing” is not merely a sociological metaphor. It becomes a bridge concept linking the earlier analysis of universality (abstraction as lived fact) to a new object: the abstraction of affect into manipulable variables. The text makes the stakes “double and contradictory” in an explicitly dialectical way: chemical intervention can dampen shocks and enable survival under unbearable conditions, and it can also become the mode in which unbearable conditions are normalized by rendering their psychic symptoms manageable. In other words, the same intervention can function as aid and as integration into domination. What counts as “evidence” of the social order’s violence shifts accordingly: the violence no longer needs to appear primarily as overt repression; it appears as the background demand that subjects remain operational, stabilized, and affectively governable.
From this point the chapter returns to universality with an altered burden. The earlier discussion of the Zionist attempt to “have its cake and eat it”—to embrace rooted statehood while maintaining a claim to universality—has already indicated that universality, once materially operational, will not be pacified by any return to organic belonging. Now the book introduces a different register of the same problem: desperate searches for ideological stability (religion, populism) and chemical stabilization (drugs) become ways of suturing the cracks that universality itself produces when it manifests as global market integration and internal state fragility. The chapter’s method remains constant: it does not treat these as independent phenomena. It treats them as different inscriptions of a single antagonism, each a local “projection” of the whole that distorts it in a determinate way.
The subsequent turn to political strategy—negotiations, violence, and the conditions under which “peaceful” outcomes occur—makes this formalism explicit through the vocabulary the book has been cultivating from quantum theory. The chapter’s exemplary cases are the rise of African National Congress in South Africa and the civil rights victories associated with Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States. The argument is sharply formulated: negotiations succeeded because they were accompanied by a “superposed” ominous threat of armed struggle. Peace, in this sense, is not simply the negation of violence; the possibility of violence remains inscribed in the negotiated result as its condition. The book’s point is not to celebrate violence. It is to formalize the way a field of possibilities is constrained by a threat that may never be actualized, and to show that the eventual “collapse” into a peaceful settlement retroactively reorders the status of the alternatives that made it possible. The earlier universal thesis—collapse posits its own prehistory—thus returns at the level of political causality: the peaceful outcome is retrospectively read as the rational path, yet it is intelligible only against the background of the unrealized alternative that the establishment feared.
This political “superposition” then becomes a bridge to historical anthropology and to the book’s attempt to de-naturalize the narratives by which modernity is retroactively justified. The appeal to David Graeber and David Wengrow, alongside their The Dawn of Everything, is staged as an exemplary “quantum superposition” of early civilizational possibilities. The interest is not simply that alternative forms existed. The interest is that an authoritarian line and an “anarchist” line can appear, for a time, as co-present possibilities within the same social formation, engaged in a struggle for predominance. History, then, is not narrated as a single teleology in which capitalism or state centralization was “already” implicit. It is narrated as a field of branching paths where the victorious path later writes itself as necessity. When the chapter invokes Fredric Jameson’s thought that many stories are ultimately stories of a Fall—from organic society to chaotic modernity, from medieval Catholic unity to Protestant individualism—it does so to mark the ideological temptation: once a Fall narrative is adopted, one begins to dream of an “alternate modernity” that would preserve organic community while attaining modern freedoms. The reference to John Milbank and to the theological lineage he mobilizes (Aquinas through Eckhart, Cusa, and Kierkegaard) functions here as a symptom: the dream of a Catholic modernization is one attempt to resolve the tension between universality and belonging by positing a harmonious synthesis. The book’s deeper commitment, however, continues to block such serenity. Universality, for it, remains constitutively conflictual; belonging remains haunted by exclusion; reconciliation remains marked by remainder.
The move into the next chapter—on artificial intelligence—therefore does not represent a change of topic so much as a change of medium in which the same structural tensions are now enacted. The opening on BlackRock is strategically chosen: capital’s universality is here rendered as an institutionally concentrated, discretely operating power that touches “every aspect of our daily lives.” The book anchors this claim with determinate quantitative markers—assets under management “nearly $10 trillion,” positioned in relation to the GDP of all but two countries—because it wants the universality of capital to appear as an objective fact rather than a rhetorical suspicion. Larry Fink is introduced as the figure through whom the corporation’s public self-description (sensitivity to climate change, racism, public health) can be held against the structural effects of investment activity and governance practices. The mismatch is not treated as mere hypocrisy; it is treated as a form in which universality operates today: a universal discourse of responsibility coexists with a universal mechanism of value-extraction that produces localized devastation.
From this starting point the book threads AI into the analysis by focusing on the infrastructures through which capital now governs: algorithmic systems that convert social life into data streams, risk profiles, behavioural predictions, and automated decision procedures. The reference to BlackRock’s Aladdin system appears here as emblematic rather than merely factual: it condenses the book’s claim that “control” no longer needs to look like sovereign command; it looks like the management of portfolios, risks, and probabilities in a globally entangled field. This is where the earlier quantum vocabulary returns with altered necessity. The author has already insisted that the quantum universe has no neutral standpoint outside indeterminacy and symbolic distortion. In the AI chapter, the analogue becomes social: there is no neutral standpoint outside the infrastructures that pre-structure what counts as evidence, what counts as a reasonable decision, what counts as risk, and what counts as safety.
The text’s explicit anxiety about “permanent conversation” with AI is not framed as technophobic lament; it is inserted as a symptom of a more general displacement of reasoning. The worry is that the externalization of thought may reach a threshold where it no longer resembles writing as a tool that extends memory; it begins to replace the process of inference itself. The chapter uses this worry to clear away two “boring obsessions”: the question of whether AI will serve us or dominate us, and the fantasy of a balanced “green transition” that would allow society to keep its cake and eat it. The book then sharpens the field into two “serious options”: radical de-growth, associated with Kohei Saito, and a technological surrender associated with Eric Schmidt, where the wager is that AI will solve the problems (including environmental ones) that AI-driven development intensifies. The structure of this opposition is itself dialectical in the book’s sense: each option treats the present as a crisis of universality that demands decisive reconfiguration; neither can be assimilated into incremental reform without losing its core.
The chapter’s philosophical pivot within the AI discussion returns to the problem of thinking. The book repeatedly refuses the question “can AI think?” when it is posed as a metaphysical puzzle about inner consciousness. It instead treats “thinking” as bound to negativity, to the capacity for a subject to encounter an inconsistency in its own coordinates and to reorganize desire and meaning under the pressure of that inconsistency. This is why the AI chapter remains inseparable from the earlier account of the “night of the world” and the Real of madness: if the subject is constituted around a crack that threatens derangement, then thinking in the strong sense includes the capacity to endure that crack as such rather than to stabilize it through optimization. The book does not deny that AI systems can outperform humans in pattern recognition and inference. It insists that this outperformance can coexist with a missing dimension: an immanent relation to failure that is not reducible to error-correction within a fixed objective function. In this way, the AI chapter continues the book’s campaign against an “absolute state”: an AI that would become the neutral solver is treated as the contemporary form of the deterministic fantasy that time and freedom were earlier rescued from.
When the following chapter on vocation opens with the dedication to the people of Tristan da Cunha, the gesture is not an eccentric travelogue. It functions as a model of political possibility that is maximally unglamorous: a tiny island community, forcibly evacuated by a volcanic eruption, choosing to return despite the lure of developed capitalism, and doing so within a communal structure where land is owned in common and solidarity overrides competition. The comparison with Bhutan—dismissed in the text through the phrase “dictatorship of happiness”—serves to distinguish two forms of ideological stabilization: one is the managerial imposition of happiness as national metric; the other is a practical form of communal life that persists without being packaged as moral spectacle. The vocation chapter uses this case to reopen the question of commitment under conditions where the universal field of capitalism presents itself as the only reality. Vocation becomes the name for a fidelity that cannot be justified by the calculus of self-interest, yet also cannot be grounded in a metaphysical destiny without reproducing the Heideggerian temptation the book has already dismantled.
Here the book’s earlier themes converge. Vocation, in its classical form, promises a reconciliation between inner essence and external role. The book treats such reconciliation as a retroactive narrative operation: a sequence of contingent decisions and constraints is re-written as the unfolding of a calling, thereby stabilizing a subject’s identity. Yet it simultaneously treats vocation as potentially emancipatory precisely when it assumes contingency and persists without guarantee. The “hunger to be something” that will later be named in the conclusion is already operative here as a structural drive: the subject seeks determinate form, yet every determination is haunted by what it excludes, and fidelity is therefore not the elimination of doubt. It is endurance of doubt as the condition of commitment.
The vocation chapter tightens its initial exemplary scene—Tristan da Cunha as a collective refusal of “the temptation of developed capitalism”—by immediately refusing to sentimentalize it. The island’s communally owned land and family farming are presented as a model only insofar as they reactivate a capacity the book insists has never disappeared: practical solidarity that persists even where the reigning ideological reflex trains subjects to perceive only self-interest. This is why the transition to “vocation” is methodologically decisive. Vocation is introduced as a way for a life to acquire determinate meaning without importing a supervising metaphysical guarantee; the chapter marks the term’s religious background, then stresses its openness to a materialist reading. The crucial shift is that meaning is located neither in private “self-realization” nor in a higher authority, but in a compulsion that can be articulated as “I cannot not do this,” even when the work is hard, unpleasant, and poorly remunerated. The long quotation from Hanif Kureishi’s Shattered is deployed with a very specific function: nursing is presented as the privileged contemporary site where vocation appears without romantic inflation, in the intimate exposure to bodily need, indignity, and dependency, and in the persistence of care where payment and prestige fail to supply motivation.
From here the chapter presses two consequences. First, vocation cannot be reserved for “higher” creativity; it cuts across the hierarchy of social esteem. Second, vocation shares a structural feature with sexuality: it “chooses” the subject. The chapter explicitly endorses this reversal of agency, characterizing it as “theological” and “Deleuzian,” and it uses it to block the liberal image of meaning as a voluntary project. In the same gesture it warns against the narcissistic misreading of vocation as personal “pleasure,” staging the contrast with a famous athletic testimony of feeling divine pleasure while running, and answering it with a physicist’s quip directed at Albert Einstein: the point is to resist a perverse scene in which a transcendent agency guarantees enjoyment. The chapter’s materialist ambition emerges at this exact juncture: vocation is not a proof of human goodness, and it does not license an anthropology of natural altruism. The chapter explicitly refuses this; it instead contests the utilitarian axiom that human nature is basically egotist, and it cites Sigmund Freud to maintain an unstable duality: subjects are “far more immoral” than they believe and “far more moral” than they know. The chapter then makes this duality operational by naming envy and resentment—acting against one’s own rational interests because the other’s displeasure matters more—as the core of what it calls “evil,” thereby relocating evil from calculation to enjoyment.
This relocation prepares the chapter’s most important internal distinction: authentic vocation versus fake vocation. The text refuses the easy objection that vocation can be evil because terrorists and totalitarians can experience themselves as “called.” It accepts this, then insists that the distinction remains necessary and can be drawn immanently. The vocation for an evil cause, it claims, relies on an “obscene underground” of enjoyment; the vocational mask of capitalist activity has to obfuscate its ultimate meaninglessness. This is one of the points where the book’s broader system can be seen working inside a local topic: the Real (in its Lacanian sense) is repeatedly linked to surplus enjoyment, and the chapter uses that linkage to sort genuine commitment from ideological pseudo-commitment without appealing to external moralism.
The long discussion of Krzysztof Zanussi’s The Perfect Number then performs a second test of authenticity. The film supplies an apparently simple solution: a young scientist refuses inherited wealth so that he can remain poor and faithful to his work in quantum physics, and this is presented as a contemporary version of freedom as “recognized necessity.” The chapter accepts that this can “work,” then complicates it by showing how the film’s parallelism between the wealthy businessman and the dedicated scientist risks collapsing vocation into a closed self-relation in which there is no space for a loving “we.” The book’s skepticism is directed against the film’s implied moralization, as if love were simply the external corrective to vocational obsession. The text insists that love and social engagement can themselves be vocations, and it refuses the framing of a “choice” between Cause and love. What replaces the choice is a paradox: an authentic relationship between love and Cause requires the capacity to endure their heterogeneity without forcing their harmony.
This paradox is sharpened through a classical melodramatic lesson drawn from King Vidor’s Rhapsody: the man proves love by showing he can survive without the beloved, even preferring mission or profession to her at the decisive moment. The chapter does not present this as cynicism; it uses it to articulate a structure of desire in which love, when elevated into the Absolute, cannot be posited as a direct goal, and therefore appears as “grace,” a by-product that arrives without being demanded. The same structure then governs the book’s portrait of revolutionary couples: the couple’s intensity is sustained precisely because each partner is ready to abandon the other if revolution demands it, while remaining fully devoted to each other in rare moments. The chapter’s historical illustration—the Bolshevik milieu, with a parenthetical reference to Vladimir Lenin and Inessa Armand—is important for its formal point: the public revolutionary Cause and private erotic passion remain radically disjoined, and this disjunction is not experienced as antagonistic because the gap is acknowledged. The chapter names the temptation it avoids with the German term Gleichschaltung (forced coordination into uniformity): the desire to enforce unity between intimate passion and social life.
At this point the chapter shifts—without abandoning vocation—into a meditation on belief, because vocation’s “chosen-ness” risks sliding into metaphysical guarantee. The scene from John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl is staged as an ethical confrontation: the committed fighter seeks reasons that would make betrayal intelligible, and the horror is that the betrayer “believes in nothing.” The book’s point is neither to romanticize fanaticism nor to equate commitment with fundamentalism. It insists that a human life becomes worth living only by surpassing animal need and interest through full commitment to a Cause, while simultaneously holding that authentic commitment remains aware of its subjective character. The chapter explicitly anchors this in the most extreme figure of abandonment—Christ’s cry of forsakenness—because it wants a faith that includes the possibility of faith’s collapse. It then follows a trajectory of “liberating Christ” associated with Raffaele Nogaro: Christ functions as a vanishing mediator, present where there is love between humans, and the priority of love for the neighbour replaces the command to love God as master. Faith thus becomes less a doctrine than an existential engagement, a praxis that can persist even through doubt.
The chapter then makes a technical distinction crucial for its argument: belief versus faith. Belief concerns propositions beyond knowledge; faith is a subjective commitment. The text develops the paradox that authentic faith excludes fundamentalism and also excludes cultural relativization. This is where the chapter’s polemical flair is philosophically functional. It analyses “cultural Marxism” as a right-wing target and as a term redeployed by an “orthodox Communist Left,” using the shifting use of the term to show how ideological universality is fought over by competing camps. Then it introduces “cultural Christianity” through a concrete Vatican case: a 2024 Note from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, approved with assent of Pope Francis, allowing devotion linked to Medjugorje without declaring the supernatural status of apparitions. The chapter’s attention to wording is deliberate: the Note’s reasoning is read as an effects-based calculation—positive fruits outweigh “negative and dangerous effects”—and the book aligns this with a nihil obstat logic (no doctrinal obstacle), a censorial pragmatics in which truth recedes behind social utility. The comparison to Enlightenment scepticism (with its private atheism and public religion-as-social-control) is used to name a structural temptation: religion retained because ordinary people “need” it. The chapter then intensifies the same point with an anecdote about a blind censor in Iran after the revolution, using it as a figure for censorship focused on effects rather than content, and suggesting that the Vatican’s stance risks a similar displacement.
The discussion of “cultural Christians,” including Richard Dawkins, functions as a foil for what the chapter calls authentic Kierkegaardian turmoil. The book invokes Søren Kierkegaard to mark a faith that refuses self-transparency: one can only “believe that one believes,” accepting the absurdity internal to belief. This is coupled with Murder in the Cathedral and its warning against doing the right thing for the wrong reason, which the chapter provocatively “turns around” to stress the danger of believing one fully knows one’s own right reasons. The internal pressure generated here is consistent with the book’s earlier ontology: the subject never coincides with its reasons; sincerity is structurally unreliable; every commitment operates against the background of possible loss.
The chapter then stages the Fall as the point where freedom and evil become inseparable. It cites G. W. F. Hegel’s remark that the serpent did not lie, and it uses Richard Wagner’s Parsifal formula—only the spear that inflicted the wound can close it—to formalize a dialectical reversal: cognition, the principle of spirituality, both generates evil and becomes the medium through which the “injury of separation” is healed. The Good emerges only through the experience of choosing evil and becoming aware of the inadequacy of that choice; sin and repentance become structurally constitutive. The chapter intensifies this through the traditional felix culpa motif (the “fortunate fault”), invoking Augustine of Hippo to make the claim that God brings good out of evil, then pushing further: God must bring evil out of itself so that freedom can be discovered. Within this frame, the chapter criticizes a pastoral theological move by Pope Francis concerning the Lord’s Prayer line about temptation, treating it as a failure to grasp the dialectical structure the chapter has reconstructed.
The political consequence of this theology becomes explicit near the end of the chapter, where the text turns to the war in Ukraine and the rhetoric of “peace” in Europe. The chapter frames the choice as a displaced one: Ukraine’s refusal to accept occupation is read as choosing between life without humiliation and a threatened survival without symbolic identity, while Western “peaceniks” are accused of projecting their own risk calculus onto Ukraine. The name of Viktor Orbán appears as an emblem of this displacement. The chapter’s final intensification is philosophical: it reads the conflict as “spirit against spirit,” as mutually exclusive visions of what a human being is, then returns to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo prophecy of “spiritual warfare,” and aligns it with Alain Badiou’s The Century, mediated through Osip Mandelstam’s poem The Age. The figure of the wounded beast condenses the book’s diagnosis: the twentieth century’s voluntarist attempts to force history “face to face” produced unprecedented violence without the promised New Man, and the twenty-first century risks a resurgence of “barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods.” The chapter ends by naming the “two deaths” in Lacanian terms—symbolic death (loss of symbolic identity) and biological death—as the true horizon of contemporary choice. This ending retroactively redefines vocation itself: vocation becomes legible as the form a subject gives to life when the absence of any higher guarantee is accepted and nonetheless endured as the condition of fidelity.
From here the book’s Variations take over as systematic torsion devices rather than decorative appendices. The first variation begins with Carlo Rovelli’s claim that basic reality is composed of events rather than things, a “pure flux” of becoming, and it immediately tests the temptation to link this to Gilles Deleuze’s pure becoming “without being,” whose temporality sidesteps the present by being always “forthcoming and already past.” The variation uses this linkage to sharpen the book’s earlier time problem: a flux ontology risks dissolving the decisive cut, so the question becomes how an evental becoming can yield determinate historical sequences without reinstalling a metaphysical substrate.
The second variation opens with a political-philosophical provocation: Giovanni Gentile is described as a self-proclaimed Hegelian whose “actualism” is profoundly anti-Hegelian, culminating in an immanentist idealism that finds its highest realization in the Fascist nation-state and even in co-authoring a doctrine with Benito Mussolini. The function is diagnostic: the variation shows how “Hegelian” language can be refunctioned into a spiritualization of the state that cancels antagonism by positing state and individual as one substance.
The third variation explicitly names “Observation and the Act,” presenting quantum mechanics as the tension between wave oscillations and experienced reality, with collapse as the passage into ontology’s domain of “what is.” The variation then ties ontology itself to a performative dimension through John Searle’s notion of indirect speech acts: ontological assertion conceals the performative power by which declarations bring about the social reality they describe, a misrecognition that leads toward the Lacanian hypothesis of the “big Other.” The act here becomes the hinge that joins quantum collapse, symbolic institution, and political declaration.
The fourth variation returns to reconciliation through Hegel’s “beautiful soul” and “hard heart” pages in the Phenomenology of Spirit, explicitly connecting them to contemporary moralism and “Cancel Culture,” and using Hegel’s claim about moral judgment as envy “cloaked” in morality to articulate reconciliation as the moment when judgment admits complicity. The pressure point is named rather than smoothed: the variation itself asks how horrors such as genocides and total camps could be “repossessed by spirit,” indicating that reconciliation cannot be treated as a cheap formal gesture without generating ethical scandal.
The fifth variation, “Moderately conservative communism,” begins from a contemporary argument by Michael Millerman that Aleksandr Dugin is a legitimate heir to Martin Heidegger, and treats this as a key to Russia’s spiritual-political trajectory. The variation’s internal interest lies in how Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein is translated into civilizational particularism: each civilization has its own Dasein rooted in collective spirituality, with the Russian form tied to narod and the Volk motif. The “moderation” in the title thereby reads as ironic and strategic: communism’s conservatism concerns the preservation of shared forms of life against capitalist dissolution, while reactionary conservatism can adopt pseudo-revolutionary voluntarism, producing the hybrid “spiritual warfare” the vocation chapter had already diagnosed.
The sixth variation turns to the void through Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, insisting on how later homages attempt to “cancel” the original painting’s traumatic impact by brightening colours and moving background buildings closer, thereby reducing the distance that, in the original, functions as a voidal gap. The argument is formal: the void is not a simple absence; it is composed by spacing, tonality, and distance, and it returns whenever aesthetic “repair” tries to neutralize it.
The seventh variation moves into cinema by insisting that appearance belongs to reality and that, beyond the usual split between appearance and reality, there is a split internal to appearance itself between “true” and “false” appearance, corresponding to a split in reality. This is staged against the “Rashomon” motif of multiple subjective perspectives, which the variation treats as an insufficiently radical relativization because it leaves intact the fantasy of a reality “in itself” distorted by viewpoints. Monsters become privileged here because they can embody the internal splitting of appearance, the way something appears as more real than reality.
The eighth variation opens with a satirical “history of philosophy rewritten through sex,” beginning with Descartes and moving through Baruch Spinoza and David Hume, and it uses this provocation to reintroduce “sexual superpositions” as a field where identifications and desires do not add up into coherent unity. The point is less shock than formalization: the sexual field exhibits the same structure of incompatible determinations that demand a stabilizing cut, while leaving a remainder that continues to disturb any stabilized identity.
The ninth variation returns to political form through Hegel’s advocacy of constitutional monarchy, the charge of conformism (including Karl Marx as the sarcastic critic), and Klaus Vieweg’s attempt to show, in Hegel’s own terms, that the syllogistic justification of monarchy would support a democratic conclusion. The kitchen-maid motif, evoking Leninist egalitarian provocation, is then set up as a stress-test for whether modern state form can accommodate radical egalitarian reconfiguration without collapsing into either bureaucratic fetishism or charismatic sovereignty.
The conclusion, “The hunger to be something,” finally names the logical schema that has been operating throughout. It claims that Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and quantum mechanics share a paraconsistent orientation: they work with inconsistency in a controlled manner, refusing the “explosive” principle that contradiction yields triviality. This explicit logical framing retroactively clarifies why the book repeatedly refused closure and insisted on remainder. The “hunger” is then legible as the subjective correlate of paraconsistency: the drive toward determinate being that persists inside inconsistency, binding life to commitments that have no guarantee, and binding politics to acts that can never be justified by a neutral standpoint. I can continue by reconstructing, with closer textual granularity, how the conclusion turns this logical frame into an account of subjectivity, historical agency, and the book’s final stance on the relation between inconsistency and emancipation.
Simon Gros 
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