end-of-history

Those in the System, would like us to share their belief that all the changes [we are witnessing] are not connected: they are simply anomalies, isolated symptoms to be treated or preferably ignored, before the all-powerful Western capitalist patriarchal model goes on to ever greater heights and grander ejaculations. Most are numb to it, caught in fear, denial or resistance.But we, Burning Woman, know this process intimately. Amongst Burning Women and Men, there is a fierce, quiet knowing that these are both the death pangs of the old, and the birthing pangs of the new.

I thought of the fate of Descartes_ famous formulation: man as __aster and proprietor of nature._ Having brought off miracles in science and technology, this __aster and proprietor_ is suddenly realizing that he owns nothing and is master neither of nature (it is vanishing, little by little, from the planet), nor of History (it has escaped him), nor of himself (he is led by the irrational forces of his soul). But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being.

Fukuyama__ thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a __erminal beach_ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche__ most prescient pages are those in which he describes the __versaturation of an age with history_. __t leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself_, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, __nd subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism_, in which __osmopolitan fingering_, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche__ Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.