Vacua Vita

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

VACUA VITA is a long-form philosophical work examining contemporary conditions of interpretation, judgment, and meaning-making. Written under conditions of intellectual and informational saturation, its first movement investigates how critique has shifted from methodological tool to habitual stance, and how interpretive practices operate as automated procedures within economies of attention, moral signaling, and digital mediation. Through sustained argument across essays addressing envy, suspicion, exhaustion, labor, ecology, trauma, digital immortality, necropolitics, algorithmic governance, mimetic theory, and networked life, the opening section develops an internal analysis of these systems by inhabiting their logics, allowing structuring incentives to become visible in practice. Its method aligns with traditions of immanent critique, pursuing social and interpretive forms to the point where internal contradictions become legible on their own terms.

VITA’s second movement gathers essays approaching the contemporary crisis of meaning from adjoining fronts: formal, cognitive-scientific, technological, theological, and poetic. One essay begins from semantic paradox and incompleteness (Yablo’s sequence, Tarskian undefinability, Gödelian limits, Derridean deferral), clarifying how truth-conditions and semantic grounding resist self-stabilization, and why traditions of apophasis and negative theology remain philosophically serious under logical constraint. Another reframes cultural and media theory in the technical grammar of predictive processing and active inference, translating Stiegler and Simondon into analyses of hypermassified temporal environments, population-level prior alignment, infrastructural inference, and algorithmic governance, where industrial and platform systems configure attention, desire, and action by shaping environmental and mnemonic conditions. A third turns to language as apparatus of capture, reading figures such as Iblis and Māra alongside Foucault and Gnostic traditions to argue that discourse furnishes both medium of subjectivation and boundary of resistance, and that poetry—understood as a disciplined staging of linguistic failure—marks a limit-practice where speech exposes its inability to secure presence, truth, or exteriority. Across these essays, the sacred appears as constraint rather than doctrine: regimes of deep commitment, temporal protection, and zones of withdrawal that preserve plural forms of life against totalizing systems of optimization and interpretive control.

The final movement turns to literature as a site where form, temporality, and institutional conditions of reading converge. These essays examine how poetic and narrative composition operate as instruments for staging consciousness in time, and how contemporary media ecologies—platform circulation, attention metrics, institutional craft regimes, and professionalized accessibility norms—reconfigure literary form toward legibility, extractability, and emotional immediacy. Against this backdrop, the section reconstructs modernist difficulty as cognitive and ethical fidelity: sentence-time, rhythmic constraint, and formal design serve as means of restoring language’s capacity to register mind-in-world. Readings of Joyce, Pound, Zukofsky, H.D., Trakl, Dickinson, Whitman, Faulkner, Rimbaud, Pessoa, and the novelistic tradition from realism through modernism develop a theory of literary labor as structurally alienated under regimes of commodified circulation, where artistic autonomy entails economic and institutional precarity, and refusal of instrumental legibility becomes formal principle and social position. Across these essays, literature appears as an attentional ordeal: a practice of time-bound submission to formal constraint through which meaning becomes something undergone rather than extracted.

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