Vacua Vita

Joseph Randolph
Non-Fiction
800 pgs.
2024
Hardcover

VACUA VITA began as an analysis of Mark Anthony Cronin’s 2024 novel THE INCOGNITO DETECTIVE, but quickly morphed into something far more ambitious: a sprawling critique of the cultural and spiritual desolation wrought by late capitalism. In its 800 pages and 102 essays, the work spans four sections—culture, film and TV, literature, and philosophy—each confronting the dystopian landscape we inhabit with a mix of intellectual rigor and raw, unsettling insight. While the culture section remains relatively accessible, offering a critical lens on everything from pop culture to higher education, the book’s breadth deepens as it expands into the more complex terrains of philosophical discourse, where it remains relentlessly demanding.

At its core, VACUA VITA interrogates how the machinery of spectacle has co-opted our deepest crises, pacifying even the most profound existential cataclysms through the algorithms that govern our emotions and desires. Identity, once a complex negotiation of personal history and social belonging, has been hollowed out, commodified into a marketable simulacrum. The book examines how the commodification of everything—from grievance to authenticity, from the self to the experience of victimhood—renders human life little more than a series of exchangeable, performative acts. What is left in the wake of this commodification is a surreal, almost nightmarish detachment from the lived experience.

From Costco to Christian mysticism, the Hawk Tuah Girl to Heidegger, and Joyce’s fetishes to consciousness as recursive entropy, VACUA VITA assembles a fragmented and often irreverent collage of thought, crossing disciplines with the fluidity of a mind unwilling to adhere to the sanitized boundaries of academic orthodoxy. It charts the ways in which the cultural and intellectual products of the West have devolved into mere instruments of capital, each one feeding into a network of consumption, surveillance, and mimesis. Human beings, now complicit in their own alienation, are caught in a loop of imitation, rivalry, and perpetual dissatisfaction, forever adjusting their desires to the rhythms of the market.

Yet, even amid this often scathing critique, VACUA VITA refuses the comfortable trap of nihilism, instead gesturing toward a potential redemption: the reassertion of genuine self-actualization in a world where even the self has been co-opted. The book suggests that, while the commodification of experience may dominate our era, there remains the possibility for an orientation toward something more authentic—an invitation to reclaim the deeper, spiritual dimensions of existence that capitalism strives to obscure.