Ends for a political phenomenology

¶1. The essential ideological motor of capitalism is the groundlessness of the subject. Where the subject lacks a common denominator with his or her peers, he or she is free to subsist independently of them and entirely for himself. Yet this is a self-directedness without content, as that which stands in itself for consciousness has been destroyed. How? Without the predicate of a common source or common standing for consciousness, all movements thereof are by the singular consciousness in himself and for himself. But, because what is for that consciousness has no origin except consciousness, what lies at the bottom of consciousness is only itself and nothing further. Because of this emptiness of self-identity, consciousness moves spasmodically in whatever direction it chooses on a moment to moment basis, the totality of its choices dependent on nothing.

¶2. It is such groundlessness that warrants the emptiness of consciousness in itself. Thus, while the choices are made purely for consciousness, this consciousness has nothing to it, and thus the choices are made for nothing at all.

¶3. Out of such emptiness a vacuum emerges, the likes of which those with power can manipulate according to such power. Having essentially a kind of being at their disposal, they can create the conditions for the fulfillment of consciousneses in subjects whose essential content is nothing. By filling this nothingness in their own spasmodic ill-directed fashion, those with sovereignty over being essentially reproduce it, and themselves, in further groundlessness.

¶4. This is an ideological motor precisely because the subject is a question for ideology as such. Indeed, where ideology is the thought-structure of a culture, there is no locus for the consideration of the subject in such a structure and for such a culture. Therefore, we are entirely justified in our supposition: the ideological motor of capitalism is the groundlessnes of the subject.

¶5. What remains to be done, then, but to ground the subject and to bring it under the aegis of reason? This is the task of a political phenomenology, where politics makes reference to man’s being as zoon politikon, or social animal, and phenomenology makes reference to the logic of appearance, or the movement of consciousness towards and against what presents itself as ready-to-hand for it. Through such a project, the ideological motor of capitalism can be clogged, and all can fall into place as only reason could order it. The spasmodic incoherence of money, resource, and groundless being (itself a cultural contradiction!) can then be collapsed, and man himself can be made real and actual.

¶6. What is the spasmodic movement of man towards nothing, from nothing, and in nothing? It is none other than death in process, the likes of which is the antithesis of life so far as it is tantamount to reason. For what is reason but the serial-responsive process to phenomena, the logic of appearance? Where there is no logic of appearance, there is no life. Isn’t capitalism, then, a system of death?