<b>Spirituality at the End of the World: An Essay on Technology, Transindividuation and Orientation in the Light of Pharmacology and Insurrection</b>

<p dir="ltr">Political spirituality extends the politics of revolution to include psychic-libidinal as well as material-economic transformation. The goal of this monograph is to examine the role technology plays at the intersection of these two dimensions. The challenges of revolutionary politics, even when conceived as a collective spiritual adventure, must be posed through the relation revolutionary movements bear to their own techniques as well as to the technical systems that support the structures they seek to leave behind. In chapter one, political spirituality as a revolutionary project is unpacked through the work of Drucilla Cornell, Stephen Seely, and Sylvia Wynter; I argue that political spirituality begins by problematizing <i>transindividual orientation</i>, and by engaging these authors with insights from the philosophy of technology, especially that of Yuk Hui and Gilbert Simondon, I argue that such orientation can and should be grounded in an understanding of technology. Chapter two explores how technology conditions the invention of new spiritual traditions and orientations through an analysis of Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacological account of transindividuation, with special care given to the way specific orientations and ideas rely on technologies for their support and circulation. The tendency of technological evolution to scramble these orientations, as Stiegler demonstrates, is also the precondition for the hegemonic meta-stabilization of specific genres of transindividuation. Chapter three analyzes insurrectionist forms of spirituality which I develop through a minor tradition of American pragmatism known as philosophy born of struggle. By examining how such an orientation is produced and sustained, I extend Wynter’s insights to argue that modes of spirituality that invent and cultivate an orientation of resistance depend on a kind of disorientation which makes the self-regulating processes of systems of oppression explicit. Stiegler’s pharmacological understanding of technics can be reappropriated to think anew the meaning and measure of progress through the decay of regimes of violence.</p>