A Kafkaesque Age. Ascesis and Biopolitics

“The animal twists the whip out of its master’s grip and whips itself to become its own master.” Many have recognized a distinctive feature of our age in this false syllogism, in the blunder of mistaking emancipation for the willingness to whip oneself in sovereign autonomy. Many concepts already pertaining to the philosophical realm have been invoked in an attempt to understand this ostensible absurdum, this scandal of critical thought; some have described the mechanisms and the paradigm shift operated by ‘the New Spirit of Capitalism’, others have brought the term of ‘Voluntary Servitude’ back from early modernity. These are different sides of the same coin: the ‘New Way of the World’, the apical point of neoliberal governmentality.