Ubik illuminates what is at stake for the human reimagined as human capital through these transitions, an alienation that expands beyond Joe’s struggles with his apartment door to encompass the deformation of the boundaries of reality itself as he investigates in a world whose ontological foundation has become fluid—commodities are regressing into earlier instantiations of their core use value, and the plot never entirely confirms for us whether it is Joe or his employer who exists in the state of cryonic suspended animation after bodily death that the novel names half-life.
The son of Man, the son of God gives us a sign that, once more, he is not only at odds with but opposed to the structures that administer (a certain kind of) life and death.
Sometimes referred to as “population control,” other times “better breeding,” eugenics has been seen as a religious solution to social ills, and sometimes a new religion unto itself.
This conversation between Adam Y. Stern and Adriana Alfaro Altamirano joins current debates about authoritarianism and biopolitics, “charismatic authority” and “survival,” through the theological-political lens of ‘imitatio Christi.’
In Esposito’s most explicit political theology work, he is concerned with re-working, or rather destabilizing, the essence of political theology.
