How can people experiencing an existential crisis imagine emancipation?

What is it about?

Salvaging Modernity: A Social Contract for the Age of Permacrisis builds on the ideas presented in my previous book, Empty Suffering (Routledge, 2022). My starting point is a diagnosis of times: since the ‘utopian energies’ of modernity have become exhausted and the prospects for progress – be it democratization, control over nature, material accumulation, or liberation – has been called into question, the late modern individual is forced to inhabit seemingly unchangeable structures that cause social suffering. As social suffering is transformed into illness and psychopathology within the frames of medicalisation and psychologization, the technologies promising to ease the suffering mainly remain medical (or 'self-medicalising') ones. In the absence of anything better, those affected drift with the tide and try to survive by relying on the 'pain relief techniques' offered to them. These include not only drugs intended to treat illness and mental distress, but also the products of an economic, cultural and political complex that enables countless forms of distraction and escapism. In my view, this vulnerable contemporary subject, teetering on the brink of physical and mental collapse while relying on painkiller technologies, should be seen as the starting point for critical theories of late modernity. Accordingly, the question of emancipation should be formulated as follows: how can an individual struggling in a structural-existential trap imagine overcoming those structural paradoxes that entrap them? The problem poses several challenges, and not only because the structural paradoxes themselves are difficult for individuals to grasp. The real difficulty stems from the fact that simply ‘dismantling’ the structures of modernity is not a viable option for those actors who receive the painkillers necessary for survival from the same structures that cause their suffering. It is not surprising that it is ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, because capitalism – and the social, cultural, and political structures that complement it – offers material and existential painkillers to treat the suffering it causes. The acceptance of these material and immaterial painkillers reinforces and sustains the paradoxical structures. Moreover, rejecting them is not a matter of ‘choice’, since there is no room for autonomous decisions in states of pain and imminent mental breakdown.

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Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Why is it important?

In this book, I explore the theoretical possibilities for resolving this structural-existential paradox. I analyse situations where different social, technological, and discursive structures cause social suffering along with the difficulties of reflecting on them and the ambiguous, reluctant attempts of overcoming them. In terms of interpersonal relationships, I analyse the structures of latent (mimetic) violence, naturalized cruelty, and lack of solidarity; at the level of technology, I analyse tools that provide existentially rigid, potentially addictive, intellectually and ethically emptied satisfaction and comfort; and at the level of discourse, cynical narratives that justify paradoxical constellations and mechanisms that deconstruct the space for mutual understanding (that could transcend individual interests and authoritarian power structures). These are some of the key structures that constitute the social environment of individuals struggling in the late modern existential trap. Each chapter starts with a diagnosis and ends with practical conclusions. The proposed ‘social contract’ (incorporating particularistic morality such as Lévinas’ concept of the face, or Derrida’s concept of hospitality into the universalist moral principles) summarises these conclusions by outlining critical-emancipatory praxes that confront structural paradoxes, while also taking into consideration the subjects’ existentially and phenomenologically narrowed agency. These narrow subjectivities must raise the questions within their everyday life: What is worth saving, what can be saved from modernity? How can paradoxical structures be localized in everyday life, what are their consequences, and what can be done about them? These are the main questions of ‘salvaging modernity’. This book is by no means a hopeful enterprise – but at least it provides a realistic and minimalist critical-existential program. It is about the possibility of salvaging what can be saved from agency within the constraints of the contemporary structural-existential setting. The proposed emancipatory-critical praxes can be expanded gradually, sporadically, in a networked way, so as to avoid the pitfalls of a forced, totalitarian elimination of modernity.

Perspectives