Vacua Vita

Joseph Randolph
Non-Fiction - Philosophy, Culture, Aesthetics
800 pgs.
2024
Hardcover

What happens when critique consumes the very structures of meaning it was meant to clarify? What remains after suspicion becomes law?

VACUA VITA is a ferocious and formally exact collection of essays diagnosing the collapse of symbolic, moral, and intellectual life under late-stage modernity. Written in rigorously argued, architecturally precise prose, it excavates the systems beneath cultural exhaustion—from the performative churn of online outrage to the algorithmic hollowing of art, desire, memory, and forgiveness. Blending sacred inquiry, systems theory, literary criticism, and first-order philosophical argument, it charts decline while staging the process of disintegration in real time.

Across essays on suspicion, envy, exhaustion, ecology, trauma, art, and digital life, VITA builds a portrait of a civilization unable to recognize sincerity, reward truth, or metabolize ambiguity, its interpretive frameworks collapsed into self-reinforcing noise. Yet the work advances beyond critique. Its second section leaves the cultural frame entirely, entering a register where formal logic, poetics, theology, and the numinous gain primacy—an act of fidelity to thought, form, and the irreducible conditions of meaning. The final movement turns outward again toward literature, where disintegration refracts through specific texts and where the work of form becomes the last site of coherence.

For readers of Simone Weil, Byung-Chul Han, René Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, and the late writings of Michel Foucault, VITA delivers a structural reckoning that rejects compliance, demands attention, and offers, in place of consolation, a rarer gift: clarity with courage.