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 precise collection of essays diagnosing the collapse of symbolic, moral, and intellectual life under late-stage modernity. Written in rigorously argued, architecturally exact 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 theology, systems theory, literary criticism, and first-order philosophical argument, it does not merely chart decline; it stages the process of disintegration in real time.

Across essays on suspicion, envy, exhaustion, ecology, trauma, art, and digital life, VITA builds a devastating portrait of a civilization that can no longer recognize sincerity, reward truth, or metabolize ambiguity because its interpretive frameworks have collapsed into self-reinforcing noise. Yet the work does not remain in critique. Its second section leaves the cultural frame entirely, entering a register where formal logic, poetics, theology, and the sacred are not only defended but given primacy—an act of fidelity to thought, form, and the irreducible conditions of human meaning. Its final movement turns outward again into literature, where collapse is refracted through specific texts and where the work of form itself 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 refuses compliance, demands attention, and offers, in place of consolation, a rare gift: clarity without cowardice.