Tyrannic Modernity, Schizophrenic Vassalage: The Global Southern Ready-Made State

Description

Abstract (English)

This book delivers a fundamental critique of the category of ‘Occidentalism,’ arguing that its contemporary revival in scholarship constitutes an epistemic fabrication. This fabrication functions to pathologize situated critiques from the Global South, thereby preserving asymmetric North–South epistemic relations and obscuring a deeper historical pathology.
To diagnose this pathology, the book constructs an interdisciplinary theoretical framework centered on the figure of the Schizophrenic Vassal State. This political form is produced by two core mechanisms: the Ready-Made Modernity Paradigm—the massive export of concluded Northern institutional and epistemic forms as universal solutions—and Vicarious Conditioning—the psycho-social process whereby subaltern elites internalize a mimetic desire for recognition by observing rewarded Northern models. The cumulative outcome is Ethical Schizophrenia, a fractured collective consciousness severed from its own ethical sovereignty.
The argument is demonstrated through a series of interlocking case studies that trace, via a method of traceability, the devastating effects of this global disorder: the philosophical misrecognition of Japan’s Kyoto School (Chapter II), the historical anatomy of Ottoman–Turkish mimicry (Chapter III), and the (post)colonial mirage of the Arab world (Chapter IV), where the state becomes a guardian of colonial legacies. The book culminates in a typology of pathological statehood (Chapter V), revealing a spectrum that extends from the anxious performer to the silent captive of the rentier cargo-cult.
The analysis achieves its full contemporary urgency in its final movement, where the theoretical framework is projected onto the digital age to diagnose the emergence of Algorithmic Vassalage. Here, the schizophrenic vassal state evolves into a new, silent captivity enforced by the data colonialism and black-box AI of the Cloud Empire. This epilogue argues that the foreclosure of ethical sovereignty is now being perfected not by geopolitical hegemony alone, but by privatized, algorithmic infrastructures that annex human life itself, representing the terminal stage of the Ready-Made Modernity Paradigm.
By integrating diagnostic political theory, psychoanalysis, and intellectual history through a method of traceability, the book demonstrates that the Schizophrenic Vassal State is not a series of local failures but the defining global pathology of our time—a pathology that culminates in the silent captivity of algorithmic vassalage, where ethical sovereignty is foreclosed not by geopolitical force alone, but by the black-box architectures of the Cloud Empire.

Table of contents (English)

Table of Contents

• Preface: The Fabrication of Occidentalism

  [Introduces the core thesis: ‘Occidentalism’ as a polemical category that obscures the real pathology of the schizophrenic vassal state produced by the Ready-Made Modernity Paradigm.]

• Introduction: The Machinery of Dependence (17 pp.)

  [Outlines the book’s entire theoretical framework. Defines the key concepts: Schizophrenic Vassal State, Ready-Made Modernity, Vicarious Conditioning, and Ethical Schizophrenia. Presents the overarching argument and methodology.]

• Chapter I: The Machinery of Dependence: Vicarious Conditioning and the Sterilization of Ethical Sovereignty (65 pp.)

  [Builds the detailed theoretical model. Anatomizes the tripartite failure of elites (Transcultural, Developmental, Patron). Explores the psychoanalytic substrate (Eros/Thanatos) and the dynamics of escalation that lock in the pathology.]

• Chapter II: The Philosophical Misrecognition: Japan’s Kyoto School and the Overcoming of Modernity (20 pp.)

  [Examines the Japanese case as a ‘nation with history.’ Argues that the complex philosophical project of the Kyoto School was a sovereign, if fraught, attempt to ‘debug’ modernity, which was reductively mislabeled as ‘Occidentalism’ by Western discourse.]

• Chapter III: The Historical Anatomy: Ottoman-Turkish Mimicry and the Withheld Third Pillar (99 pp.)

  [Traces the genesis of the schizophrenic vassal state through centuries of Ottoman reform. Analyzes the escalating mimetic performance for Western recognition. This performance was perpetually and structurally withheld, cementing a fundamental rupture between state and society, then unpacks the rebellion of the Intimate and the unmaking of the Occidentalist fantasy as a social response of contemporary Turkish recovery.]

• Chapter IV: The (Post)Colonial Mirage: The Arab World and the Plea for a Guarantee (52 pp.)

  [Analyzes the terminal pathology of the (post)colonial condition empirically. Diagnoses the ‘manufactured state,’ the ‘anxious archive,’ and intellectual sterility as a sociology of sterilization and knowledge production to provide a hermeneutical definition of the terminal symptom of this system: the abject ‘plea for a manufacturer’s guarantee’ seen in the squares uprisings of 2019.]

• Chapter V: Genealogies of Vassalage: A Typology from Anxious Performance to Silent Captivity (29 pp.)

  [Synthesizes the case studies into a definitive spectrum of dependency. Contrasts the Schizophrenic Vassal State, the Manufactured State, and the Rentier Cargo-Cult State. Argues that the rentier model represents the silent, terminal stage where the struggle for recognition is foreclosed by allocative logic.]

• Conclusions: Beyond the Cargo Cult (9 pp.)

  [Returns to the core claim, summarizing how the fabrication of ‘Occidentalism’ obscures the real violence of Ready-Made Modernity. Points toward the necessity of indigenous recovery and ‘quarrying stone from one’s own bedrock.’]

• Epilogue: The Silicon Cargo Cult: Algorithmic Vassalage and the Cloud Empire (11 pp.)

• Appendices

  Appendix I: Glossary of Key Concepts

Notes (English)