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by Gareth Price, CTO @ CorralData.

After the Demolition: What Philosophy Has Been Doing Since It Stopped Believing in Anything

The postmodernists dismantled the grand narratives of progress, truth, and reason. The generation that followed had to live in the rubble — what they built there is a toolkit for understanding the direction technology is taking us.

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In 1991, Jean Baudrillard published a series of essays arguing that the Gulf War did not take place.1 He did not mean it literally. He meant that the event Americans experienced — the CNN footage, the Pentagon briefings, the neat narratives of surgical strikes — had replaced the war itself. The representation had consumed the reality. The map had eaten the territory.

It was a provocation designed to infuriate. But it was also the logical terminus of a philosophical project that had been running for three decades. Between roughly 1965 and 1995, a generation of French thinkers — Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard himself — conducted the most sustained assault on Western intellectual certainty since the Reformation. They dismantled the idea that language transparently represents reality. They showed that institutions claiming to be neutral — universities, prisons, hospitals, governments — were shot through with power. They argued that the Enlightenment’s promises of progress, reason, and universal truth were particular stories told by particular people to justify particular arrangements of power.

By the mid-1990s, this work was absorbed. Its insights about power, language, and construction became starting assumptions rather than conclusions. But deconstruction is a demolition tool, not an architect. It tells you what is wrong with the building. It does not tell you where to sleep tonight. The philosophical generation that inherited this problem — the thinkers who have defined the past twenty-five years — refused to stop at diagnosis. They launched four distinct reconstruction projects in the rubble: a new account of how power works without grand narratives; an anatomy of how capitalism colonised inner life; a reopening of the question of what reality is; and a search for which institutions and ethical frameworks survive. What follows is a map of those four projects and the twenty thinkers driving them — with particular attention to why their work turns out to be the sharpest lens available for understanding our present moment, especially as it relates to technological progression.

A caveat before the map. Organising twenty-five years of continental philosophy into four tidy projects imposes a coherence that the thinkers themselves would resist. Žižek would object to being grouped with anyone. Brassier has explicitly distanced himself from speculative realism as a movement.2 The framing here is an editorial device — a way of making a large, tangled landscape navigable — not a claim that these thinkers see themselves as collaborators. The connections are real. The neatness is mine.

Power without a script

The most immediate inheritance was political. If there are no universal truths, no inevitable march of progress, no neutral ground from which to judge — then how does power actually work? And how do you resist it without the revolutionary certainties that Marx, or liberalism, or Christianity once provided?

Slavoj Žižek answered by turning Lacanian psychoanalysis into a political weapon. In his analysis, ideology functions perfectly well even when everyone sees through it.3 The Soviet citizen who mocked the party line in private and endorsed it in public was not free of ideology. Neither is the consumer who knows fast fashion is destroying the planet and buys it anyway. Cynicism is not the antidote to ideology. It is ideology’s most sophisticated operating mode.

Alain Badiou pushed in the opposite direction: toward a fierce reassertion that universal truths exist. They emerge through rare, unpredictable ruptures — Events, in his vocabulary — and the task of the political subject is fidelity to those ruptures.4 The French Revolution was an Event. So was the invention of twelve-tone music. Badiou’s system, built on mathematical set theory, is among the most formally ambitious philosophical constructions since Hegel. It is also, implicitly, a refusal to accept that postmodernism had the last word on truth.

Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe addressed the question that neither Žižek nor Badiou fully confronted: who gets excluded from the political order entirely? Agamben identified a figure he called homo sacer — bare life, stripped of political standing, included in the system only through exclusion.5 The refugee, the detainee, the stateless person. Mbembe extended this analysis to the postcolonial world, coining “necropolitics” to describe sovereignty that operates not by governing life but by dictating who is exposed to death.6 Between them, they mapped the zones where liberal democracy’s promises do not apply — and argued that those zones are not exceptions to modernity but its hidden foundation.

Capitalism in your head

The second reconstruction project addressed something the postmodernists had diagnosed but not fully traced: the colonisation of inner life by economic logic. Baudrillard had shown that signs had replaced reality. But the generation that followed asked a sharper question — what happens to the human subject when capitalism captures not just labour but attention, desire, creativity, and the capacity to imagine alternatives?

Byung-Chul Han’s answer is the “achievement society.” In his account, we are no longer disciplined by prohibitions (Foucault’s model) but driven by an internalised compulsion to perform, optimise, and produce. The result is not rebellion but burnout — more efficient than any external exploitation because the exploiter and the exploited are the same person.7 Franco “Bifo” Berardi arrived at a similar diagnosis from Italian autonomist Marxism: in “semiocapitalism,” the factory floor has been replaced by the screen, and what is being extracted is not physical labour but cognitive and emotional capacity.8

Mark Fisher crystallised the political consequence. “Capitalist realism,” as he defined it, is not an ideology you can debunk. It is the atmospheric condition of being unable to imagine any coherent alternative.9 Culture recycles its own past. Music, film, and politics are trapped in what Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future.”10 His suicide in 2017 tested his own thesis — that depression under capitalism is not a personal failing but a political condition.

McKenzie Wark and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun then traced the infrastructure. Wark identified a new ruling class — the “vectorialist class” — defined not by ownership of land or factories but by ownership of the platforms, protocols, and intellectual property regimes through which information flows.11 Chun showed how software itself is an ideological object: it produces not freedom but habit, sorting populations through homophily algorithms that reproduce segregation at computational speed.12

Shoshana Zuboff gave the entire formation its name. “Surveillance capitalism” — the extraction and commodification of human experience as raw material for behavioral prediction — is now the standard framework through which scholars and regulators understand the business model of the platform economy.13 Her study of the phenomenon identified a new form of power she called “instrumentarianism”: not Big Brother watching you, but Big Other nudging you — distributed, automated, radically indifferent to your beliefs, interested only in your observable behaviour.14

Éric Sadin, writing in French and almost unknown in the Anglophone world, pushed the diagnosis further. Where Zuboff focuses on data extraction, Sadin argues that the deeper crisis is the automation of judgment itself. AI systems no longer merely suggest; they assert truth and demand corresponding action.15 Silicon Valley’s project, in Sadin’s analysis, is not just economic but civilisational — a colonisation of human cognition that he calls “siliconization,” and that he regards, in the subtitle of his 2018 book, as the anatomy of a radical anti-humanism.16

Reality fights back

While one group of philosophers mapped how capitalism colonised the psyche, another reopened a question the postmodernists had declared closed: what is reality actually like, independent of human thought?

The question matters for AI in a way that is not immediately obvious. If philosophy cannot talk about what exists independently of human access, it has no framework for understanding a system whose internal representations are, by construction, inaccessible to the humans who built it. A large language model’s learned features are not observable through introspection or experiment in any straightforward sense. They withdraw from access. That is a metaphysical problem, not just an engineering one.

The speculative realist movement, launched at a single workshop at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2007, attacked this problem from its philosophical roots.17 Graham Harman argued that everything is an object, and that every object withdraws from every relation it enters.18 Your perception of a hammer never exhausts what the hammer is. Neither does the nail’s encounter with it. Quentin Meillassoux posed an embarrassingly simple challenge: if philosophy insists we can only talk about the correlation between thought and world, how do we account for a fossil that is 4.5 billion years old — a fact about a world that predated all thought?19 Ray Brassier took the implications of naturalism to their austere conclusion: the universe is heading toward heat death, meaning is a human projection, and philosophy’s task is not to console but to think nihilism honestly.20

Jean-Luc Nancy, who died in 2021, spent his career on a quieter but equally fundamental question: what does it mean to exist together when no shared ground — no God, no nature, no historical destiny — secures community’s foundation? His answer, that being is always already being-with, that existence is co-existence before it is anything else, provides a counterweight to the speculative realists’ focus on objects in themselves21 — and raises a question that AI makes newly urgent: can a machine that simulates sociality participate in the shared vulnerability that constitutes genuine co-existence?

What survives

The final reconstruction project asks which institutions, norms, and ethical frameworks survive the demolition — and which new ones are needed.

Jürgen Habermas, now in his nineties, has been fighting this rearguard action for six decades. His answer — communicative rationality, the norms of truthfulness and sincerity built into the structure of language itself — remains the most substantial defence of Enlightenment reason available.22 But AI poses the most fundamental challenge to his framework since its inception: discourse ethics presupposes speakers capable of sincerity, and a language model that produces persuasive utterances without any capacity for sincerity may corrode the communicative infrastructure on which deliberative democracy depends.

Charles Taylor complements Habermas by asking where modern identity comes from and whether the secular age can sustain the moral frameworks that give life meaning without their original religious scaffolding.23 Immanuel Wallerstein, who died in 2019, insisted that none of these questions can be answered without understanding the world-system: the global division of labour that has been producing core and peripheral zones since the sixteenth century.24 Development and underdevelopment are not stages but structural positions. Bruno Latour, who died in 2022, reframed the entire problem by asking how facts are assembled through networks of human and non-human actors — and in his final years, turned that analysis toward the climate crisis.25

Luciano Floridi occupies the newest position in this landscape. He argues that information deserves the same foundational status in philosophy that language held for the twentieth century.26 His concept of the “infosphere” — the total informational environment in which we now live — and his framework for AI ethics directly shaped the EU AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence.27 His most consequential claim is that AI represents “agency without intelligence” — the capacity to act without the capacity to understand — and that governing this unprecedented divorce is the central ethical challenge of the century.28

The thread

What unites these four projects — and distinguishes this philosophical generation from the postmodernists who preceded them — is a shared refusal to stop at diagnosis. The postmodernists showed that the emperor had no clothes. Their successors have been trying to build something to wear.

They do not agree on what that something looks like. Badiou’s militant fidelity to truth is nearly incompatible with Brassier’s rigorous nihilism. Habermas’s defence of communicative reason sits uneasily with Han’s argument that communication has itself become a mechanism of exploitation. Floridi’s constructive governance frameworks and Sadin’s oppositional critique represent fundamentally different responses to the same phenomenon. These are genuine disagreements, not different angles on a consensus.

But the disagreements are productive. They are all responses to the same underlying condition: a world in which the grand narratives have collapsed, capitalism has colonised inner life, the boundary between human and non-human agency is dissolving, and the institutions built to govern an industrial society are being overwhelmed by an informational one.

Artificial intelligence is the crisis that makes all four projects urgent simultaneously. It is Žižek’s cynical ideology operating at industrial scale — everyone knows the hype is overblown, and the investment continues. It is Han’s achievement society stripped of its last friction — when the machine can always produce more, the self-exploiting subject loses even exhaustion as an excuse to stop. It is Harman’s withdrawn object made literal — a system whose internal representations are inaccessible even to its creators. It is Wallerstein’s core-periphery dynamics reconfigured around compute and data. It is Habermas’s nightmare — persuasive utterance without sincerity. It is Floridi’s agency without intelligence, demanding governance frameworks that do not yet exist.

The postmodernists gave us the tools to see through the stories power tells about itself. The generation that followed gave us the tools to understand what happens when the stories stop working and the machines start deciding. The question now is whether anyone with the power to act is paying attention.

References

  1. Baudrillard, J. (1991). La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu. Galilée. Translated as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (P. Patton, Trans.). Indiana University Press, 1995. ↩

  2. Brassier, R. (2011). “I am not a speculative realist.” Interview with Brassier in Mackay, R. (Ed.), Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. re.press. ↩

  3. Žižek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso. The formula “I know very well, but nevertheless…” is borrowed from Octave Mannoni via Lacan; Žižek’s contribution is its application to ideology as a structural mechanism rather than a failure of knowledge. ↩

  4. Badiou, A. (1988). L’Être et l’Événement. Seuil. Translated as Being and Event (O. Feltham, Trans.). Continuum, 2005. ↩

  5. Agamben, G. (1995). Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Einaudi. Translated as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford University Press, 1998. ↩

  6. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11 ↩

  7. Han, B.-C. (2010). Müdigkeitsgesellschaft. Matthes & Seitz Berlin. Translated as The Burnout Society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press, 2015. ↩

  8. Berardi, F. (2009). The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (F. Cadel & G. Mecchia, Trans.). Semiotext(e). ↩

  9. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books. The phrase draws on Jameson’s remark that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” which Fisher attributes to both Jameson and Žižek. See Jameson, F. (2003). Future city. New Left Review, 21, 65–79. ↩

  10. Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books. The phrase “the slow cancellation of the future” appears throughout and draws on Berardi’s After the Future (AK Press, 2011). ↩

  11. Wark, M. (2004). A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press. The class analysis is developed further in Wark, M. (2019). Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Verso. ↩

  12. Chun, W. H. K. (2021). Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. MIT Press. On software as ideological object, see also Chun, W. H. K. (2011). Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. MIT Press. ↩

  13. Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs. The concept was first articulated in Zuboff, S. (2015). Big Other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. Journal of Information Technology, 30(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5 ↩

  14. Zuboff distinguishes instrumentarian power from totalitarian power in Part III of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, drawing on Arendt’s analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Skinner’s radical behaviorism in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). The phrase “Big Other” is introduced in the 2015 Journal of Information Technology article. ↩

  15. Sadin, É. (2018). L’Intelligence artificielle ou l’enjeu du siècle: Anatomie d’un antihumanisme radical. L’Échappée. The concept of AI’s “alētheic power” — its claim to disclose truth — draws on Heidegger’s analysis of alētheia. For English-language analysis, see Sutherland, T. (2025). Technocritique and its limits: Éric Sadin on human dignity in the face of artificial intelligence. French Cultural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558251358691 ↩

  16. Sadin, É. (2016). La Silicolonisation du monde: L’irrésistible expansion du libéralisme numérique. L’Échappée. The subtitle of the 2018 work — “Anatomy of a Radical Anti-Humanism” — deliberately rewrites Jacques Ellul’s La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle (1954). ↩

  17. The workshop “Speculative Realism” was held at Goldsmiths, University of London, on 27 April 2007, organised by Alberto Toscano. The four participants were Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. Audio recordings are archived at backdoorbroadcasting.net. ↩

  18. Harman, G. (2002). Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Open Court. For the accessible statement, see Harman, G. (2018). Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Pelican Books. ↩

  19. Meillassoux, Q. (2006). Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence. Seuil. Translated as After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (R. Brassier, Trans.). Continuum, 2008. ↩

  20. Brassier, R. (2007). Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Palgrave Macmillan. ↩

  21. Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Être singulier pluriel. Galilée. Translated as Being Singular Plural (R. Richardson & A. O’Byrne, Trans.). Stanford University Press, 2000. See also Nancy, J.-L. (1986). La Communauté désœuvrée. Christian Bourgois. Translated as The Inoperative Community (P. Connor et al., Trans.). University of Minnesota Press, 1991. ↩

  22. Habermas, J. (1981). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Suhrkamp. Translated as The Theory of Communicative Action (T. McCarthy, Trans.). 2 vols. Beacon Press, 1984–1987. ↩

  23. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Harvard University Press. On modern identity, see Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Harvard University Press. ↩

  24. Wallerstein, I. (1974–2011). The Modern World-System. 4 vols. Academic Press / University of California Press. For the accessible introduction, see Wallerstein, I. (2004). World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Duke University Press. ↩

  25. Latour, B. (2017). Où atterrir? Comment s’orienter en politique. La Découverte. Translated as Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (C. Porter, Trans.). Polity, 2018. On fact-construction, see Latour, B. (1991). Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. La Découverte. Translated as We Have Never Been Modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard University Press, 1993. ↩

  26. Floridi, L. (2014). The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford University Press. The foundational work is Floridi, L. (2011). The Philosophy of Information. Oxford University Press. ↩

  27. Floridi’s AI4People framework, launched at the European Parliament in 2018, was adopted by the EU High-Level Expert Group on AI and shaped the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI (2019). See Floridi, L., Cowls, J., Beltrametti, M., et al. (2018). AI4People — An ethical framework for a good AI society. Minds and Machines, 28(4), 689–707. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-018-9482-5 ↩

  28. Floridi, L. (2023). The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: Principles, Challenges, and Opportunities. Oxford University Press. The formulation “agency without intelligence” appears throughout; the argument is that AI divorces the capacity to act from the capacity to understand, creating an unprecedented governance challenge. ↩