State of the Art. Cutting Edge. Cultural Psychology and Addiction.
There is no thunder here. No dramatic fall. Transcendence did not explode; it receded. What remains is quieter and more demanding — a consciousness required to stabilize itself without appeal to heaven, myth, or ultimate guarantee. These essays do not rage against the loss; they inhabit its aftermath. The question is no longer whether transcendence can be restored, but how life proceeds when it cannot.
A Second Look Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass is often received as a religious horror story—a cautionary tale about fanaticism, blind faith, or the dangers of belief taken too far. Such readings remain trapped within a moral frame the series itself quietly abandons. Midnight Mass is not about the corruption of religion but about what religion…
To Begin an Answer to Nihilism The collapse of transcendence does not abolish ethical obligation. It abolishes only the metaphysical guarantees that once explained why obligation binds. What remains is obligation without justification—demand without promise, claim without cosmology. The biblical tradition does not resist this condition. It anticipates it. Nowhere is this clearer than in…
The Ethical Condition of Born Man If Born Man cannot return to religion without falsification, the ethical question becomes unavoidable: what, if anything, obligates him? The disappearance of transcendence does not abolish ethical demand; it abolishes only the forms by which obligation was once justified. What replaces religion ethically within our current situation is therefore…
The term Born Man is not chosen casually, nostalgically, or provocatively for its own sake. It is chosen because language itself has become part of the battlefield of appearance, and any serious attempt to think modern self-consciousness must reckon with that fact rather than evade it. The word man in Born Man is not a…
Religion as a Historical Form, Not an Eternal Option The contemporary call for a return to religion, or spirituality, is often framed as a corrective to modern nihilism, addiction, violence, and technological abstraction. Such appeals assume that religion represents a lost resource that might be recovered if belief were renewed, practice reinstated, or transcendence re-affirmed….
Technology, Born Man, and the Logic of Addiction Modern addiction cannot be adequately understood within moral, medical, or therapeutic frameworks alone, because it does not originate at the level those frameworks presuppose. Addiction is not a contingent pathology that happens to proliferate in modern society; it is a historically intelligible response to the completion of…
Frankenstein and the Collapse of the Unus Mundus before Modernity Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as a decisive cultural drama in which an older symbolic vision of unity—articulated by figures such as Gerhard Dorn and later psychologized by C. G. Jung—breaks down under the pressure of modern, implicitly Hegelian consciousness. The novel stages the…
The Will to Power is not Nietzsche’s doctrine — it is Nietzsche’s laboratory. The Will to Power must not be approached as Nietzsche’s philosophical system. It is not a finished doctrine, nor even a unified book in the conventional sense. It is, rather, a laboratory of thinking in extremis—a record of concepts under pressure, written…
Thunderbolts (2025) functions less as a conventional superhero film than as a cultural dream in which unresolved moral structures are staged rather than resolved. Beneath its surface narrative of antiheroes and state-sanctioned violence, the film quietly incorporates multiple historical and symbolic layers: a Dantean stratification of moral culpability, a post–World War II logic of “necessary…
Ressentiment, Bad Conscience, and the Addictive Superego David Fincher’s Se7en can be read as a cinematic enactment of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: a world in which morality has lost its life-affirming function and survives only as punishment, guilt, and compulsive cruelty. The film does not depict sin in a theological sense, but sin…