Writer's Diary
5/4/26
My days need more structure than they currently have, and maybe that’s impossible because my schedule is so heterogeneous.
And yet, if I had homogeneity, I would resist it, probably.
I would just like a few weeks to finish all the books that I’ve started but not finished that haunt my apartment.
Maybe the central, if covert or hidden, idea of modern politics—modern in the sense of politics since 1600 or so—is that individuality is not sovereignty. Individuality, individualism, is a proxy for the sovereignty assumed or absorbed by the state or the company.
I did a lot of wonderful socializing this past weekend, but now my body feels sluggish, like it’s fighting off getting sick, which it probably is.
Robert Esposito writes in Biopolitics and Philosophy, “The idea of the impossibility of a true overcoming of the natural state and that of the political emerges in opposition to the modern conception derived from Hobbes that one can preserve life only by instituting an artificial barrier with regard to nature, which is itself incapable of neutralizing the conflict, and indeed is bound to strengthen it. Anything but the negation of nature of the political is nothing else but the continuation of nature at another level, therefore designed to incorporate and reproduce nature’s original characteristics.”
We’re at the beginning of a new feudal culture where culture happens in courts and is a function of the patronage of the very wealthy, and this is not entirely, I would say, a bad thing; it may be the only answer to banal institutionalism.
A reader commented on my last entry that we’re reading fewer books year over year because the algorithm gets better at feeding us content tailored to our exact interests, and that seems exactly right to me. If I’m on X and I want to read about an NBA game—the first NBA game this year, by the way, that I watched in its entirety from start to finish—then suddenly, subtly, I get pulled into NBA content for the next few days. There are many examples of this.
Esposito writes—in response to Foucault’s idea that “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question”—that “biopolitics is illuminated by the twilight of something that precedes it, by sovereignty’s advance into the shadows.”
We don’t see or feel, but we can maybe sense, the complex presence that limits our sovereignty, the mechanisms of power that control our bodies; we are made to live for, and by, power. We are living at the behest of power, and we die at the behest of power. We are subjects because we are subjugated to many layers of surveillance, to many means of extraction of energy, time, and money.
It is not consoling to think that we’re alive only as battery packs to power some larger system.