The Global Ontology of Separation

Abstract

Like alienation or commodification, separation is a figure that we have inherited from the Marxist tradition to describe the logic of capitalism. Yet in globalization this critical figure has come to define the conjuncture in more central and immediate ways. Fred- ric Jameson already pointed at this shift in the early 1990s when he remarked that “the logic of separation may have become even more relevant for our own period, and for the diagnosis of post- modernism, in which psychic fragmentation and the resistance to totalities, interrelation by way of difference and the schizophrenic present, and above all the systematic delegitimation described here [regarding the contemporary rejection of metadiscourses and ontological truths], all in one way or another exemplify the pro- teiform nature and effects of this particular disjunctive process.”