So, what makes us modern? We usually attribute this trait to our modern way of thinking. Just like industrialisation has liberated us from the feudal codes, transforming products into commodities, individuals into producers and consumers, such that everything that enters the flux of production passes by a necessary process of abstraction, so does our way of thinking pass necessarily by some sort of sterilisation, undoing the presumably necessary connections established by symbols and titles. Curiously enough, though, the category of modernity does not appear within the tradition of modern thought as a solution, as a sign of liberation, but rather as something deeply problematic. As soon as we have become modern, we were confronted with our own inadequacy in light of this new category, not merely as a relative and temporary “immaturity,” and neither as a mark of an immutable human condition, which is emptied through the process of abstraction, and rather concerning the way in which modernity seems to have invented its own barbarism. This does not just concern the new and unheard of monstrosities that were acted out in the name of progress, in the confrontation of the “rational” parts of humanity to those who stayed external to it. It’s as if modernity was born with the promise of a leap, of a qualitative change in our way of being and of living together, with the modern subject as a subject of history, and not merely the object of an immutable Destiny. And it is too easy to say that the modern subject is merely affected by some atavisms, some anachronistic residues that inhibit it from making the leap. And it is too easy to say that this incapacity is due to a human condition, with violence and domination encrypted into its DNA. Rather, it is a necessity that modernity would be a problematic category for modern thought, not as an unrealised potential, but as a dialectic inherent to abstraction itself.
It’s as if the abstractions of the early-moderns, geometrically tracing out to a virtual horizon, with all of their concern for infinities and infinitesimals, and universality applied back to the material and contingent, has, at a critical moment, realized a flesh of its own. After all, the easy localization of our not living up to the promises of modernity within DNA strands or a tragic human condition (a condition reliant for its sense upon a set of adjacent, non-human conditions) itself is a perfect abstraction. The stain needs a surface upon which to appear as stain. True, the story of ‘but for an all too human flaw’ is as old as Eden, but tangled within the infinite geometry of modernity’s abstractions it announces itself with a new aspect, given new extensions and powers. What was a mere stain, a cursed root, a tangled knot, a cracked pot, a disfigurement in a face, or a birthmark, to be read by soothsayers, or interpreted by poets in its singularity heavy with fate, becomes a variable = x in the webs of functions that churn the engines of history. Abstraction re-finds a circular time, now the ever present time of the universal, at the same moment as it unfolds the old circle into an infinite line. The atrocities of modernity aren’t the perturbations of vestigial organs and rhythms, they have their place assigned perfectly within the new geometry of the world; no more ‘outside’ of it than the atomic mushroom cloud is to fission itself.
Strange, then, the adventures of modern thought. The geometrical lines of flight become curbs, so that the horizon no longer appears as a sign of infinity, and rather as a limit hiding something – unattainable or even unbearable? -that keeps escaping us. And just like that, the modern subject reveals itself not as that abstract x condemned to its own limitless liberty, but as that annoying factor that, like when we align two mirrors, prohibits us to see infinity, which always lies behind our heads, and which we can only surmise by tilting the mirrors, and thus looking past what we had hoped to see.