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 recursive, rigorously argued prose, it excavates the hidden architecture of our 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 metaphysical analysis, it does not merely describe decline. It stages it.
Across essays on suspicion, envy, identity, exhaustion, trauma, art, and digital recursion, VITA builds a devastating portrait of a civilization that can no longer recognize sincerity, reward truth, or metabolize ambiguity—because its interpretive systems have collapsed into self-reinforcing noise. But the book does not remain in critique. Its second section, POST-WORK, POST-WORLD, turns toward the question of symbolic and cultural repair—offering concrete, unsentimental proposals for how meaning, form, and moral attention might be reclaimed. Its final section departs from the cultural frame entirely, entering a metaphysical register where logic, poetics, theology, and the sacred are not merely defended, but valorized. What emerges is not resolution, but a formal act of fidelity—to thought, to form, and to the irreducible conditions of human meaning.
This is not a collection for passive readers. It demands attention. It refuses compliance. And it offers, in place of consolation, a rare gift: clarity without cowardice.
For readers of Simone Weil, Byung-Chul Han, René Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Giorgio Agamben, and the late writings of Michel Foucault, VITA is not commentary but diagnosis—a metaphysical autopsy of a culture that no longer knows how to read, forgive, create, or believe. It stands at the intersection of theology, systems theory, and cultural criticism, not to participate in the discourse, but to expose the recursive structures that have made discourse itself incoherent.
Where others gesture at collapse, VITA anatomizes it. Where most cultural essays perform alignment, it refuses legibility. This is not a book of reactions or positions. It is a structural reckoning—an intervention written not to please, persuade, or platform, but to name what can no longer be named within the dominant grammar of interpretation.
