Panel: PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION - RELIGION AND SOCIETAL-CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION 2nd day



73_2.4 - THE WOKE AND THE BASED: A TRANS ANATOMY OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL AFFECTS

AUTHORS:
Ng Z. (Nanyang Technological University ~ Singapore ~ Singapore)
Text:
This paper proposes a conceptual reconstruction and critique of two primary, antinomian political affects in contemporary culture: the "woke" and the "based." These terms, which have entered widespread circulation in modern society and politics, encode recurring patterns of affects which are often implicated within specific political-theological systems of meaning. Whereas "wokeness" is often associated with the positing of the law (at the level of the social as "political-correctness," or, institutionally, as legislation and "cancellation"), seeking to enshrine justice in the socio-symbolic order, "basedness" is often associated with a vitalist realism that tears down constructed, legal fictions and reasserts the primacy of biological existence. Where "wokeness" sets up an Apollonian dream of social justice, "basedness" pursues a Dionysian relish in the resurgence of primordial life. The former tends toward a search for eschatological equality within the present world, the latter pursues a protological immanence of the human-being as biopolitical creature. "Wokeness" has now often been labelled a new "political religion" and likened even to "Gnosticism." "Basedness," on the contrary, has largely eschewed analysis. By situating the discourse on trans persons within this antinomian matrix, I seek to show how both the affective worlds of the "woke" and the "based" ultimately reduce the Christian notion personhood to, on the one hand, a "subject" abstracted from creatureliness, and, on the other, an "animal" emptied of the spirit. Returning to a theological anthropology that acknowledges the typological interval between creation and eschaton presents one resource for overcoming the antinomy between woke angelism and based animality. To do so, I propose a renewed understanding of "integral sex" following Jacques Maritain's conceptualization of the "integral human," developed notably during the time of the political religions of European communism and fascism.