Death of The Subject In The Modern World And Manifestation Without Truth As A Struggle For Existence; Exhibition

Abstract

At the beginning of the modern period in the West, positive aspects of modernity, such as freedom, welfare, industrialization, scientific progress and technological advancements, were underlined, while the potential side effects of the contemporary modernity were overlooked. When the side effects of modernity started to emerge in the nineties, the Enlightenment thinkers suggested that modernity could have no side effects and, even if it did, those side effects could be eliminated through the means provided by modern life. In the nineties, the restrictive, standardizing and binding side effects of modernity, which consequently caused the alienation of men, began to make their presence felt to an unignorable extent. The extreme standardization imposed on people by capitalism, the production method of modern life, resulted in the disappearance of individual differences by time and the appearance of highly resembling individuals, which led to a kind of alienation in the sense of growing distant from the varietal characteristics of human. Such a self-alienated individual, the subject of whom is dead, has embarked on a struggle for existence. However, the self-alienated individual struggles by using the tools of capitalism and by remaining within the modern life, which turns the struggle into a show, rather than a true struggle. In brief, the individual’s reaction to the “as if” life imposed by the modern life appears as an “as if” reaction. This study focuses on the modern life’s process that involves creating resembling individuals and killing the subject, and the consequential “as if” life of the individual as a struggle for existence at the end of that process; false appearance (exhibition).