ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the experience of the ’modern’ emerged by substituting the Christian ethos of life with the ethos of the void as the logic of formless subversion. Key to this development was the multiplication of the ’derivative self’ whose kinetic energy is ’self-interest’, or the insatiable desire for self-aggrandizement through the absorption of the void into the inner self. Exploring the links between faith, reason, form and participatory ontology, the chapter illustrates how the process of divinizing the void can be traced back to the split between reason and faith effected by the rise of modern philosophy, gradually replacing a subject oriented towards Imitatio Christi and the divine, with a subject whose central experience of life is the void. The discussion then moves on to the rise of modern politics by looking at the French Revolution as a perpetual ritual passage, providing the frame for a state of permanent transition and the political consecration of the derivative self. The void becomes now symbolized and replicated through modern democracy’s empty place of power and its formless, limitless sacred.
