ABSTRACT
The ‘murder of God’ is the symbol of a fundamental shift in human history which at once unites that history and globalizes the world. This shift is the emergence of the global role of finance capital, which progressively expands its despotic sovereignty into a concealed, global neocolonial empire that is inserted into, straddles and mediates an ever-increasing quantity of human relations. Undemocratic and ideologically driven institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the G8 Summit effectively govern the world in line with the demands of capital. Three fundamental limits to human experience have eventually become manifest as a result of this shift: an ecological limit, beyond which environmental conditions are no longer capable of sustaining human life; a socio-economic limit, whereby the ultimate encompassing determinant of the viability of relations mediated through production is the interest of finance capital; and a psychic limit, whereby suffering can no longer be understood as subordinated to some higher end such as human progress by an ascetic ideal, but comes to take on an ultimate significance in its own right. We have at last arrived in the age of the universal.
