ABSTRACT
Though, of course, each one of these examples requires a detailed analysis, in a general perspective one can say they all illustrate, in the domain of the political, the experience of radical finitude which is so typical for modernity and its technical condition. Modernity supposes to have limitless capability of solving all problems faced, till all at once, it is forced to face the limits of this very limitlessness. Then, in some symptomatic events, it unexpectedly faces the inherent boundaries of its technical all-powerfulness. It more
precisely faces the limits being the very effect of its limitless omnipotence. Able to dominate whatever it met, at times, modernity’s technical power realizes how unable it is to dominate precisely its limitless capacity to dominate. Here, the clearest example to be put forward is the twentieth-century experience of the nuclear threat: as if, creating nuclear weapons, we had remained blind to their capability to destroy the entire world, including ourselves. This kind of omnipotence’s impotence which is characteristic of late
modernity’s technical condition can be observed in the field of the political as well. Capable of creating a totally new society, modern man forgot to notice himself in this very creation and ran the risk of ending up with a totalitarian political order in which none of its citizens was able to have a properly free and creative life. And why not apply this condition of ‘finite infinity’ to our modern ethical
capacities, to our moral and social intention to make this world a better place to live? We are technically able to actualize the global good, but we are capable as well of using the same ability as a weapon of terror and destruction. How often did the twentieth-century programmes of reorganizing society in a more just and ethically better world not turn into oppression and other kinds of social disaster? Modernity’s technical, ethical and socio-political experiences force us to
question the most basic suppositions underlying our relation to the world (including to ourselves). The question we face is: given the fact that we are technically able to manipulate or even create whatever we want, what, then, does it mean that we do not see we are at the same time enabling the destruction of all there is, including ourselves? In that sense, it is far from being senseless to ask what the ‘we’ underlying
the omnipotent self-destructive capacity exactly means. Or, to put it in a more formal way: from which point do we, moderns, relate to reality, including ourselves? What makes this point to be the point from where we, at the same time, could make and destroy ourselves? In other words, what is the subject of that finite/infinite power of ours? What is the subject of that capacity to blindly destroy itself, i.e. the subject it is? Or, which amounts to the same thing, what is the subject/bearer of that power that meets its finitude in its very infinite?
