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Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLIII | Number 2 | 2022 | 7–39 | cc by-nc-nd 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.43.2.01
* ZRC SAZU, Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana, Slovenia | ORCID: 0000-0002-2374-1149 | 
 peter.klepec@zrc-sazu.si
Peter Klepec*
Caught in the Super-emergency
One of the most general observations about our contemporary age is that we live 
in a time of transition,1 for which various alternative terms have been proposed – 
from “interregnum” (Gramsci)2 and “the dialectic of standstill” (Benjamin) to 
“the great regression”3. There are many interpretations as to when this transi-
tion actually began, what it really means, and what it actually involves. There is 
also an almost universal consensus that this transition is not yet over and that 
no one knows for sure when it will end4 and where it will take us.
Recently, things have become even more complicated as several crises have 
emerged that overlap and reinforce each other. The problems and contradic-
tions of late capitalism have obviously taken their toll. It began with the climate 
crisis that was declared many decades ago and that we are all familiar with to-
day, without any appropriate countermeasures having been taken so far. The 
latter, however, is not the only crisis we have experienced in recent decades. 
The mere enumeration of the events that have marked the last three decades 
quickly confronts us with all that we have denied and swept under the rug, but 
also testifies that great changes are underway. Three decades ago, the Cold War 
ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of socialism 
1 This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy” and the research projects N6-0286 “Reality, Illusion, Fiction, 
Truth: A Preliminary Study” and J6-4623 “Conceptualizing the End: its Temporality, 
Dialectics, and Affective Dimension”.
2 See Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born, London and New York, 
Verso, 2019.
3 See Heinrich Geiselberger (ed.), Die große Regression. Eine internazionale Debatte über die 
geistige Situation der Zeit, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2017. 
4 Or, as Nancy Fraser put it recently: “The duration of this interregnum is anyone’s guess, as 
is the likelihood of its devolution into full-bore authoritarianism, major war, or catastroph-
ic meltdown – as opposed to ‘mere’ slow unraveling.” (Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism. 
How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do about 
It, London and New York, Verso, 2022, p. 156.)
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peter klepec 
(with the wars in Yugoslavia and Chechnya). Then, two decades ago, after Sep-
tember 11, the War on Terror erupted, with the subsequent wars in Afghanistan 
and Iraq. A decade and a half ago, when all this had not yet settled down, one 
of the worst economic crises of all time broke out, the economic crisis of 2008. 
A decade ago, after the Spring of Nations in 2011, two more wars broke out, one 
in Libya, the other in Syria. In addition, while the second Libyan civil war last-
ed six years, the Syrian civil war is still ongoing, eleven years thus far. All these 
wars, together with the economic and political situation in Africa and the Middle 
East, have led to a severe migrant crisis (in Europe and worldwide). Add to this 
the long-standing crises of politics, the state, democracy, authority, the welfare 
state, and many other modern institutions such as schools, universities, hospi-
tals, health care, prisons, and so on. Finally, given the two recent crises, the out-
break of the Covid-19 pandemic and Putin’s current war against Ukraine, a rough 
picture emerges. Against this background, it seems that the time of transition 
is gradually becoming a time of crisis, perhaps even the great crisis of our time.
Although the term “crisis” is used to describe all these phenomena, in reality 
they are quite different problems with different consequences and effects. The 
term “crisis” itself comes from economics and in the past we got used to the 
idea that economic crises are a normal part of capitalism and eventually pass. 
However, the most recent economic crisis, the 2008 crisis, not only came as a 
surprise to everyone, especially economists, but was also somehow different. 
Although some economists warned as early as the time of the 2008 economic 
crisis that arrogance – we know what the crisis is about, right?5– could be dam-
aging, no one even suspected what was coming. Today we know that the 2008 
crisis was devastating, some speak of the Great Recession,6 and others point out 
the lasting effects for the world economy and Europe in particular.7 Be that as it 
may, this crisis, together with the crises mentioned above, form an unprecedent-
ed situation. The crises accumulate and follow each other with incredible speed 
– faster and faster (faster than any alleged master conspiracy could even invent, 
let alone manipulate). They reinforce each other and now form a veritable crisis 
5 See Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time is Different. Eight Centuries of 
Financial Folly, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2009.
6 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. A. Goldhammer, Cambridge 
(MA) and London, Belknap Press, 2014, p. 472.
7 See Adam Tooze, Crashed. How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, London, 
Allen Lane, 2018.
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caught in the super-emergency
vortex. Nancy Fraser speaks in this context of “a general crisis of the entire soci-
etal order” and of an “epochal crisis”: 
Beneath the system’s tendency to precipitate an unending string of regime-spe-
cific crises lies something deeper and more ominous: the prospect of an epochal 
crisis, rooted in centuries of escalating greenhouse gas emissions, whose volume 
now exceeds the earth’s capacities for sequestration. The trans regime progres-
sion of global warming portends a crisis of a different order. Implacably cumulat-
ing across the entire sequence of regimes and historical natures, climate change 
provides the perverse continuity of a ticking time bomb, which could bring the 
capitalist phase of human history – if not human history tout court – to an igno-
ble end. To speak of an epochal crisis is not, however, to proclaim an imminent 
breakdown. Nor does it rule out the advent of a new regime of accumulation that 
could provisionally manage or temporarily defer the current crisis.8
The picture drawn so far is, of course, somewhat simplified, and there is much 
that could or should be discussed. Nevertheless, for our purposes here, it is suf-
ficient to recall this topic in order to put into context and perspective the ques-
tions that interest us here, namely, what urgency and emergency are. What we 
will try to show is how they define us all. The situation we face, described above, 
requires different conceptual weapons and different measures than those we 
have been using. On the one hand, everyone is aware that it is a difficult situa-
tion, and paradoxically, people talk about it all the time, but only to keep things 
as they are and to maintain the existing power relations. However, raising false 
hopes and illusions can be fatal. Things must be called by their right name, even 
if we are still searching for a suitable name for what is happening right now.
For this very reason, it is also important to point out that the term “crisis” is 
misleading in many ways. With its medical, legal, and moral undertones, it sug-
gests that problems are not political, and it implies that they can vanish. The 
term “crisis” assumes that crises come and go, as they are transitory in nature, 
that they follow one another in more or less regular cycles, and that they even-
tually end. More than that, it assumes that they gradually lead to greater pro-
gress and general prosperity rather than to greater decline or ruin. The term also 
suggests that the system itself is not the problem and that it does not have any 
8 Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism, pp. 16, 126. 
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peter klepec 
major internal contradictions or antagonisms. In this sense, we could say that 
the term crisis is a fetish. For Freud, a fetish is something that both admits and 
denies something – in Freud’s case, that something is castration; in our case, it 
acknowledges that there are some “problems” (or, in neoliberal parlance, “chal-
lenges”), but denies that they are serious problems, let alone antagonisms and 
contradictions. Combined with the optimistic ideology of progress and encour-
aged by the wisdom of the proverb “after the rain comes the sun again”, the term 
“crisis” suggests that bad things always end eventually or “in the end” (or, “in 
the final instance”). However, “the end”, the idea and concept of it, as Alenka 
Zupančič has recently shown in her book thereon,9 is conceptually and philo-
sophically a much more elusive category than it seems at first glance. The most 
persistent and fixed idea of “the end” is that “the new” always brings something 
better, or that when “the end” comes, the old bad things simply disappear or 
cease to exist. Briefly, the “spontaneous ideology” of “the end” is that it elimi-
nates chaos (for us) and (our) contradictions.
Both terms, i.e. “crisis” and “end”, therefore coincide in their false optimism of 
a happy ending. Such a fantasy (and its ideology) has accompanied us for a long 
time, announcing and accompanying various endings, “end times” and now the 
“times of crisis”. But what if the latter are permanent, or do not end in the ex-
pected way? What if they do not lead to a better society, as we are spontaneously 
accustomed to expect, but to a worse one? What if this movement “from bad to 
worse” does not stop, at least not in the near future? What if we remain trapped 
in it? And finally, yet importantly – what does any of this have to do with urgen-
cy and/or emergency? In this paper we will proceed in three steps. First, we will 
look at what urgency and emergency are in their simplest terms, then we will 
turn to the metaphor of imprisonment, which has been very common lately, to 
describe what is happening to us today, and finally we will briefly state what 
critical theory has to do with all of this.
Times of Emergency
Urgency and emergency concern our relation to time, which, however, is nev-
er free from society and power relations. For what is urgency if not a pressure, 
a constraint, a demand, a call to action in the shortest possible time? The term 
9 See Alenka Zupančič, Konec, Ljubljana, Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo, 2019. 
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caught in the super-emergency
itself suggests a biological, natural necessity, but it is always social in nature. 
So, urgency demands from us certain actions and deeds, it imposes on us a cer-
tain tempo or rhythm of our actions; it tells us what counts in terms of time. In 
its guise we are told what we must do, what is important (and what is not). In 
short, urgency mobilizes us, and it is worth remembering in this context that for 
Peter Sloterdijk (echoing Ernst Jüenger) our time is a time of “infinite” or “total” 
mobilization. Urgency urges, to speak like Heidegger, and interpellates us, as Al-
thusser would put it, but in doing so, we still have the more or less free choice to 
do (or to not do) what we are (more or less subtly) told. An emergency is another 
matter. In it, one does what is necessary (to avoid greater threats and dangers). 
An emergency knows no alternative, no free choice; one must submit to its call 
immediately, without reservation and without hesitation. In the case of urgency 
one would wonder or doubt what to do, while an emergency no longer allows 
this possibility.
An emergency supposedly follows the logic of the “thing itself”, at least in prin-
ciple. An emergency demands an immediate response to an ultimatum – hence 
the gradations and varying degrees of urgency: urgent, very urgent, most ur-
gent, extremely urgent, and so on. One is forced to follow the imperative of the 
emergency or perish. “Be quick or be dead,” as Iron Maiden put it. The pressure 
of the current state of emergency is relentless – not only is there virtually no dis-
tinction between urgency and emergency, every urgency is already an emergen-
cy, moreover, one emergency follows another without pause, the emergencies 
never stop and so their pressure never abates.
Contrary to appearances, emergencies are not about speed, quickness, acceler-
ation, or expeditiousness, but primarily about the lack of alternatives. In other 
words, our societies today are under immense dictatorial pressure from emer-
gencies of all kinds. Therefore, as Nicole Aubert suggests, we can speak here of 
“a perversion of time,”10 or, as Christophe Bouton claims, of the “dictatorial im-
position of time.”11 In a similar context, as early as 1993, Paul Virilio introduced 
the concept of the “tyranny of real time, which would no longer permit dem-
10 Nicole Aubert, La culte de l’urgence. La société malade du temps, Paris, Flammarion, 2003, 
p. 130.
11 See Christophe Bouton, Le temps de l’urgence, Lormont, Éditions Le bord de l’eau, 2013, 
p. 21.
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peter klepec 
ocratic control, but only the conditioned reflex, automatism.” He repeats this 
point in an interview with Philippe Petit published in 1996: “The tyranny of real 
time is not very different from classical tyranny, because it tends to liquidate the 
reflective capacity of the citizen in favour of a reflex action.”12 In other words, 
urgency compels us but still leaves the door open, but we have no alternative 
to an emergency. With it, we are literally thrown through a window – the short 
time we have left, the time that “passes” until you reach the ground, is perhaps 
the definition of an emergency. In other words, an emergency has no excuses; it 
leaves us no choice but to face its agenda. Therefore, what do you do when your 
“house is on fire,” as Agamben would put it?13 Be realistic and face the situation, 
do what is necessary – that is the message of an emergency.
It is worth noting that in English there is a difference between urgency and emer-
gency. The main difference is that in the latter case there is an immediate threat 
or danger to life, health, property, or the environment, while in the case of ur-
gency there is no such immediate threat or danger. However, a state of urgency 
can become an “emergency” if it is not managed and addressed properly, i.e. 
within a specified time, which is relatively short, of course. An emergency, then, 
is an unexpected and dangerous situation that requires immediate action and 
has important consequences, not only in terms of the immediate concrete dan-
ger one faces, but also in broader terms. As Elaine Scarry points out, the “im-
plicit claim of emergency is that all procedures and all thinking must cease be-
cause the emergency requires that 1) an action must be taken, and 2) the action 
must be taken relatively quickly. […] The unspoken presumption is that either 
one can think or one can act, and given that it is absolutely mandatory that an 
action be performed, thinking must fall away.”14
The choice is not only between action and between thought; it is also a choice 
that excludes any simultaneous or alternative action. An emergency is actual-
ly an exclusion of “whatever is not necessary”. Actually, it is not an exclusion, 
but a suspension at least for the time that the threat is real. While it primarily 
excludes or suspends doubt, hesitation, thought, reflection, and discussion, an 
12 Paul Virilio, The Politics of the Very Worst, trans. M. Cavaliere and S. Lotringer, New York, 
Semiotext(e), 1999, p. 87. 
13 See Giorgio Agamben, Quand la maison brûle. Du dialecte de la pensée, trans. L. Texier, 
Paris, Éditions Payot and Rivages, 2021.
14 Elaine Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency, New York and London, W. W. Norton, 2011, p. 5. 
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caught in the super-emergency
emergency not only commands a particular action, but also excludes certain 
other actions and, by extension, other future events. In the context of the eco-
nomic and political system, an emergency is not just something that affects a 
particular life or existence, but something that determines the entire society, the 
existence and the way the whole society functions. In an emergency, the society 
is actually given an ultimatum to act in a certain way. When everything becomes 
so urgent that the use of emergency procedures becomes generalized, there is no 
longer a temporal normality in the sense that an urgency or emergency is an ex-
ception to the norm. Today, in various sectors of society, an emergency has sim-
ply ceased to have the status of an exception and has become the rule, the new 
socially dominant norm that permeates all everyday life and discourse. When 
one emergency follows another, permanently, constantly and without interrup-
tion, we enter a permanent state of exception. This supposedly saves us from 
the impending destruction or catastrophe; however, it is also a catastrophe in 
its own right. Not only does it introduce a certain order and priorities, but it also 
prepares the way for the unleashing of even greater new emergencies. In reali-
ty, this process weakens our societies, common organizations, and institutions. 
How? By disintegrating and weakening them it simultaneously mobilizes us for 
a specific cause and action, which are often (mis)used for individual purposes, 
profits, and gains.
Because of all that, we can say that today we live in societies of a permanent 
ultimatum, societies of emergency. While some of this overlaps with the “poli-
tics of fear” that local and global authorities are engaging in to mobilize us all, 
it would be too simplistic to say that this is all for show. Some of the threats are 
real and not imagined. Of course, it is all for the sake of maintaining power and 
for private gain, as “conspiracy theories” keep trying to show, but things are 
not entirely simple and straightforward. On the one hand, a great deal of effort 
is made to cover up and disguise the real conspiracies and power, but on the 
other there is a certain logic that depersonalizes and naturalizes the situation 
so that the (capitalist) system itself is never questioned. In our societies, there 
is the appearance that there are no (visible, identifiable, recognizable) dictators 
or dictatorial forces. There are those who benefit from such a situation, but they 
tend to hide and camouflage themselves. Ultimately, the goal is to hide, dis-
guise, or erase any possible personal influence on what is happening. The rule 
of emergency makes all of this irrelevant because, by definition, things have 
always gone too far in an emergency – there is only time for an instinctive re-
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action. The (necessary) appearance is that this emergency rule is a natural or 
semi-natural necessity.
The spontaneous idea here is that it is time itself that puts pressure on us. Time, 
which is always something difficult to imagine and always something abstract, 
is best imagined as “passing time”, as a clock ticking, counting down the time, 
and thus exerting a certain pressure. The widespread image of a clock ticking 
down the final minutes or seconds serves this purpose – recall the image of the 
so-called Doomsday Clock invented by Eugene Rabinowitch just after WW II, 
which has been on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947. 
As Eva Horn points out, the Doomsday Clock 
indicates not only the feeling of imminent threat but also the irreversible nature 
of the new military technology – as irreversible as the course of time. What has 
been invented, as Günther Anders put it, cannot be uninvented: “Our age is the 
Last Age. The possibility of our self-extinction cannot be taken back and cannot 
end – except by the end itself.” In the over seventy years since its inception, the 
clock’s hands have oscillated between fifteen (1995) and two minutes to midnight 
(1953). The clock now not only indicates nuclear-threat levels, but also reflects 
dangerous technologies, political events, and, since 2007, factors contributing to 
climate change. It indicates a feeling that has revived in the modern age: the feel-
ing of living in the end times.15
Although the Doomsday Clock image was intended as a warning of nuclear war 
and a wake-up call to avoid it, it has become embedded in many other ideolo-
gies and representations over the years. At the individual level, such range from 
the academic slogan “publish or perish” to the pressure on midlife women with 
regard to the fact that their “biological clock is ticking”. Each of us perceives this 
pressure on a different level and experiences that the clock is ticking. As con-
sumers, we are constantly confronted with various tasks concerning what we 
have to do, try, see, visit, read, hear, taste, eat, drink, fuck, etc., etc. – before our 
bell rings, i.e. before we die. Alternatively, as Jonathan Crary puts it: “The abso-
lute abdication of responsibility for living is indicated by the titles of the many 
bestselling guides that tell us, with a grim fatality, the 1,000 movies to see before 
we die, the 100 tourist destinations to visit before we die, the 500 books to read 
15 Eva Horn, Zukunft als Katastrofe, Frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer Verlag, 2014, p. 79. 
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caught in the super-emergency
before we die.”16 The same is true at other levels: Nations, for example, fear be-
ing overtaken by time and their neighbours because they cannot adapt, reform, 
and modernize fast enough. Time is running out, as the saying goes.
In this way, the general impression given is that the real problem is time, this 
abstract entity, and not our social, intersubjective, or class relations, with their 
problems, antagonisms, and contradictions. The problem, however, is not time 
itself, but the form in which it appears. For this reason, emergency is also often 
confused with speed. Although speed is the key, as Virilio would point out,17 the 
speed per se is not the problem. As Christophe Bouton shows in his work18 – one 
must distinguish between urgency/emergency and speed. The formula is not “I 
do not have time”, but “I do not have enough time”. While we can have the speed 
without the emergency, the latter presupposes a threat that must be avoided. 
Bouton therefore claims that Virilio is wrong because speed is neutral, it is what 
we do – the solution to the problem of emergency is not to slow down, to praise 
slowness, as Hélène L’Heuillet recently proposed.19 Boutuon even asserts “My 
common thread is that there is no emergency per se: emergency is a highly so-
cialized time, constructed by Western societies according to procedures estab-
lished over centuries.”
It is true that an emergency is a threat that requires the fastest possible response 
and maximum mobilization – but who or what decides what a real threat to so-
ciety is? What are the priorities here? If anything, the recent Covid-19 pandemic 
has shown that things can be turned upside down literally overnight. What the 
dominant ideology has long told us was absolutely impossible has suddenly be-
come possible. It is precisely these incredible reversals, of which there have been 
quite a few, that have contributed to the rise in “conspiracy theories”. Moreover, 
to the widespread realization that we have often been subjected to such “tricks” 
and “reversals” of the ruling ideology in the recent past. Once again, who de-
cides what a threat to society is? The threat must be as convincing and realistic 
16 Jonathan Crary, 24/7. Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London and New York, Verso, 
2014, p. 60.
17 Speed is the key to not only power, but also wealth. The adage that time is money should 
be taken literally – as Michael Lewis has shown in his book Flash Boys, those who were 
faster at high-frequency trading on the stock market were also richer.
18 See Bouton, Le temps de l’urgence, pp. 31–34.
19 Hélène L’Heuillet, Éloge du retard, Paris, Albin Michel, 2020, pp. 15–21.
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peter klepec 
as possible, and this is achieved through fear, anxiety, and panic. The so-called 
“politics of fear” began already in the early 1990s, i.e. in the period after the fall 
of the Berlin Wall, which – ironically – fell precisely in the name of overcoming 
the fears of the Cold War. In one form or another, the politics of fear have con-
tinued for several decades now. The logic is cheap, but effective: if we do not 
follow the logic imposed on us by emergency/necessity, we will be destroyed. 
The conclusion from this is military in nature and simply continues the old Cold 
War logic: if we do not defend our way of life, the others will destroy us. This, 
of course, leaves us no time for the problems, the questions, the contradictions 
that our way of life, which we defend with all our might, actually causes in the 
first place. The problem is not only the forced way of acting, but also the choices 
that are repressed, pushed aside, or made impossible.
In this way, it seems that someone, a group of people, elites, conspirators, or a 
conspiracy is cleverly manipulating the situation. However, perhaps the great-
est “cunning of reason” of history is precisely that despite many actual conspir-
acies, manipulations, and lies, the great manipulator does not really exist. Rath-
er, every deceiver is ultimately deceived him- or herself. In our current situation, 
it is clear that there are players and financial speculators who benefit from it, 
but the “cui bono” interpretation cannot apply unreservedly here. The game has 
become too complex, too irrational, and has long been beyond the control of the 
players. Of course, there are many interests at play, lots of money, power, spec-
ulators – it is not that hard to figure out “cui  bono” and “cui malum”, who has 
the most to lose here. Even if there are interests and conspiracies, the strange 
situation we are in now cannot be explained by conspiracy theories. The latter 
are still ultimately far too rational and assume that “someone” is actually con-
trolling the situation. Nevertheless, the problem is that in reality there is no one 
in control – this time there really is no pilot flying the plane.
What should we call this strange situation, characterized by a chaotic mix of 
actors, agents, factors, events, and emergencies, with their unpredictable log-
ic? We propose to call it the Super-emergency. The Super-emergency is primar-
ily the name of a situation that is out of control and feeds on our own antago-
nisms and contradictions. The Super-emergency, then, is the name of an entity 
or subject that does not really exist. It is the name of a logic of a situation that is 
neither a logic in the strict sense of the word, nor a logic of anyone or anything 
in particular. It is also a name for the blurring of the line between urgency and 
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caught in the super-emergency
emergency – every urgency immediately becomes an emergency, one emergen-
cy following another without pause. The Super-emergency, then, is something 
additional, unwanted, superfluous, even surplus, and yet something that comes 
across as first-class, first-rate, something superior. It supposedly comes out of 
nowhere and yet imposes its own primary importance. It has a dictatorial char-
acter and follows one of the most important principles of neoliberalism, the one 
propagated by Margaret Thatcher: “There Is No Alternative” (TINA). The rule 
of the Super-emergency seems to be a blind necessity guided by a higher, cruel 
Providence, but still just Providence. Through it, we are not only compelled to 
act and wait as we do, but we are inevitably convinced that it is impossible for 
us to act otherwise, and that this seems to be the most reasonable and sensible 
thing to do at any given time.
The Super-emergency seems to come out of nowhere, and yet it is a result of our 
unresolved antagonisms and contradictions. They beset us unbearably, precise-
ly in the guise of the very Super-emergency, and yet because of it, due to the ev-
er-new emergencies, we cannot address them – even if we intend to deal with 
them directly, we simply do not have the time to deal with them, since we have 
to deal with the Super-emergency. The latter is then the name of the constant, 
direct intrusion and imposition of ever-new emergencies, for the ultimate re-
placement and override of already existing emergencies. In its power (i.e. to be 
more urgent than the existing most urgent emergency), the Super-emergency 
keeps pushing forward. With it, time is not only “out of joint”, it is downright 
adrift. The Super-emergency coincides with what we called in the introduction 
the “vortex” of crises, and it takes place against a specific historical, political, 
economic, and cultural background. Although on the one hand it cannot be un-
derstood without it, on the other, it is not its logical or natural consequence. The 
paradox is that the Super-emergency acts in the name of urgency and necessity, 
that it presents itself in the name of a super-power once attributed to God (“Im-
mensa potestas” in Descartes), and yet, paradoxically, it is itself nothing neces-
sary or essential.
As a dictatorship without a dictator, it dictates a certain tempo and rhythm of 
action, but this is different in different temporal situations. In other words, it 
is different in cyclical time and in linear time. Nicole Aubert, in her work that 
deals with many aspects of urgency and emergency, points out that “in the cycli-
cal vision of time, the emergency does not exist, or at least does not exist in the 
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peter klepec 
same way as in linear time.”20 Nevertheless, things are a little more complicated. 
We have already mentioned that today’s crises are of a different nature. Thus, 
although our modern capitalist society has long since left behind cyclical time 
in the strict sense, until recently it was still possible to speak of a cyclical occur-
rence of crises. Capitalism, then, is not just the rule of linear time, but a combi-
nation of different times. Aubert’s argument is problematic for us here in at least 
three respects. First, it is questionable whether cyclical time really knows no 
urgency or emergency. Even in so-called primitive societies, natural phenome-
na such as earthquakes or solar eclipses can herald the end of the world or the 
end of cyclical time, requiring some action, not to mention other disasters such 
as plague and war, which no society can ignore. Another question is whether 
the difference between cyclical and linear time explains the difference between 
pre-capitalist and capitalist societies, since the latter in fact combine versions 
of both linear and cyclical time. Third, what is crucial for us here, urgency itself 
appears in different ways in linear time. Not only are there different criteria, 
thresholds, at which urgency becomes emergency, but there are different types 
of urgencies and different types of emergencies.
In what sense? The urgency of our present emergency is not that we are in too 
much of a hurry in this “crazy world” today, that we are racing and rushing in 
our alienation from ourselves, from each other, and from nature. In short, the 
problem is not the acceleration that comes with modernity and capitalism. In 
fact, as Hartmut Rosa has shown, there are different kinds of accelerations in 
modern society. The Super-emergency is not simply the result or effect of what 
Rosa calls the intertwining of the three main types of acceleration, namely tech-
nical acceleration, the acceleration of social change, and the acceleration of the 
rhythm of life, leading to what Rosa calls the “circle of acceleration” or some-
times the “spiral of acceleration.”21 Nor is the problem what Giddens calls the 
experience of a “runaway world” combined with globalization trends. The ur-
gency imposed by the Super-emergency is of a different kind. It represents the 
clash, the fallout of several different logics, even of several different urgencies, 
of several different antagonisms. It is a name for their repression and denial in 
the Freudian sense. This does not mean that it pretends that these antagonisms 
20 Aubert, La culte de l’urgence, p. 190.
21 See Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. J. Trejo-Mathys, 
New York, Columbia University Press, 2013, pp. 162, 185, 194, 311. 
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caught in the super-emergency
do not exist or that they have disappeared; on the contrary, it tries to resolve 
them; however, in a failed or false way, or better put: it solves them so that they 
remain unsolved. Many antagonisms have been created by the reign of neolib-
eralism, of which we do not know exactly whether it is alive or dead.22 It is rath-
er “undead”, as Žižek would put it, and it is precisely as the living dead that it 
leaves a dangerous and persistent legacy of its principles and the antagonisms 
it has created. In addition, since, of course, the Super-emergency can never ad-
dress them properly, let alone save them in such a false way, they are its eternal 
alibi. The Super-emergency is thus the name of the “eternal” displacement of 
the antagonisms of our society and of the capitalist system. 
In other words, the Super-emergency must be understood against a particular 
background and context, but it cannot be reduced to it either. The reasons are 
complex and cannot be attributed solely to the urgency of various acceleration 
processes. Historical, technological, economic, and cultural reasons and antag-
onisms, which would have to be joined by several others, such as geostrategic, 
political, and systemic ones. As Wallerstein and Arrighi showed a long time ago, 
capitalism forms a world system, and its longest cycle, which began five hun-
dred years ago, is now unstable. However, there are also some other important 
processes that have recently failed, or rather started to fail without really failing 
completely. The dictatorship of the Super-emergency is triggered by events that 
are unwelcome and undesirable to most (e.g. crises, wars, climate change, the 
rise of authoritarianism and inequality in the world) and that seem impossible 
to prevent or stop. These events follow one another without pause and with in-
credible speed, but the main problem is not speed; the problem and the solution 
to it are not acceleration or deceleration. The problem is the social and econom-
ic conditions under which such a mixture, such Super-emergency, can arise at 
all; the problem is the way in which the class struggle manifests itself today.
One of its manifestations is also a special mood, which is dominant today. For 
Christophe Bouton, every emergency as a social situation is accompanied by a 
certain atmosphere, mood,23 and he speaks in this context about a “climate of 
22 See Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2011; 
Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Never-Ending Nightmare. The Neoliberal Assault on 
Democracy, trans. G. Elliot, London and New York, Verso, 2019. 
23 There is, of course, no room here for a fuller discussion of this topic, which is quite com-
plex and related to issues that at first glance seem unrelated – for example, Heidegger’s 
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peter klepec 
emergency.”24 Following Bouton, we claim here that the Super-emergency, too, 
is accompanied by what we call the “mood of nightmare”. Since we have re-
cently written about it at length elsewhere,25 we will here only briefly present its 
general idea. In the narrow sense, a nightmare is a traumatic or anxious dream, 
i.e. a dream in which something extremely unbearable appears to the dreamer, 
while in the broader, colloquial sense, it describes a dire situation in which one 
is trapped and from which one cannot escape. A nightmare is always traumatic 
and unique. Every person and every social class have a unique, one-of-a-kind 
thing or idea that is the worst or most unbearable for them. For this reason, 
nightmares are usually given a special adjective, such as “Darwin’s nightmare”, 
“every parent’s nightmare”, “every artist’s nightmare”, and so on. The night-
mare is on the other side of our desires, our dreams, and our fantasies. It embod-
ies our worst fears; it is a situation that you fear the most. It is something you 
would most like to avoid – if you knew what you did not want, how to do it, and 
of course, if you had a choice. It is often accompanied by another adjective, the 
superlative of the word bad – “the worst”: “Even in my worst nightmare, I would 
not imagine/think/wish/desire....” Moreover, a nightmare is associated with 
something that drags on, that keeps repeating itself and will not and cannot 
end. At least, that is how it seems when we are trapped in it. Worse, it is charac-
terized by a sense of stagnation, even stasis (a word that has many interesting 
meanings), as if one were in a torture chamber. Not only does the suffering not 
stop, but it also gradually and progressively becomes more intense. Hence the 
“real” nightmare “mood”: when we already think that something worse than 
what is happening can no longer happen, or that the nightmare will finally stop, 
we experience a surprise – something new appears and the aggravation occurs. 
As if the nightmare is the embodiment of Murphy’s Law, which states that if 
something can go wrong, it will. Therefore, a nightmare is the case of a situa-
tion where if it can get worse, it will get worse. This gives rise to another funda-
mental dimension of nightmare: something that seemed impossible yesterday 
introduction of Stimmung in his work Being and Time (1927) and his later discussions on 
this topic. Heidegger is well aware of the connection between mood and necessity, for he 
claims: “Die Not nötigt in der weise der Stimmung.” (Martin Heidegger, Grundfragen der 
Philosophie. Ausgewählte »Probleme« der »Logik« [Freiburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 
1937/38], Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 45, Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1984, p. 159.) 
24 Bouton, Le temps de l’urgence, p. 19.
25 See Peter Klepec, “Covid-19, das Unheimliche in nočna mora”, Problemi, 58 (9-10/2020), pp. 
111–139.
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caught in the super-emergency
is not only shamelessly enforced today, but becomes the standard of normality. 
Something that seems to belong in the realm of dreams and fantasy suddenly 
appears in reality, further blurring the line between dream and reality. A night-
mare makes the adage true: truth is stranger than fiction. Therefore, there are 
four main features that characterize a nightmare: trauma or dread, confinement 
or suffocation (recall here the rallying cry: “I can’t breathe!”), the unending or 
never-ending, singularity or uniqueness. As already mentioned, the nightmare 
mood is a privileged mood of this frenetic “stasis” that accompanies the “end 
times”, which here we call the Super-emergency.
The Prison-House of the Super-emergency
Although the Super-emergency is something that constantly extorts speed, it is 
also characterized by stagnation, even confinement. This is also one of the rea-
sons why it seems so natural to us today to speak of arrest, imprisonment, or en-
trapment – the history of the metaphors of confinement is actually quite long.26 
It was particularly prominent during the pandemic “lockdown” or “confine-
ment”, which is not particularly surprising. The metaphor of prison, of course, 
has various shades, nuances, and levels – from being locked in a claustropho-
bic place to a situation in which we find ourselves against our will. Deleuze, 
for example, once remarked that “[i]f you are trapped in the dream of the oth-
er, you are fucked.” Catherine Malabou, in her recent article “Life and Prison”, 
highlighted “the fact that the most important and profound contemporary phil-
osophical texts devoted to the issue of life practically always comprise, in their 
very core, a reflection on the prison, on what it is to live in prison. As if life was 
the privileged victim of philosophical concepts as well as the privileged victim 
of language, of language’s fascism.”27 
One of the texts Malabou mentions in this context is Fredric Jameson’s In the 
Prison-House of Language,28 published fifty years ago. Alhough Malabou does 
not go into detail, the details about Jameson’s use of a carceral metaphor are 
26 See Monika Fludernik, Metaphors of Confinement. The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy, 
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
27 Catherine Malabou, “Life and Prison”, E-flux, 10 October 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/
architecture/ confinement/351041/life-and-prison/, accessed 5 August 2022.
28 Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and 
Russian Formalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
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peter klepec 
quite interesting. Why? Because they do not really exist. Alternatively, as Emily 
Apter recently remarked, 
it is hard to underestimate the impact of the master trope of the prison-house on 
literary theory, and yet nowhere in the text [Jameson’s] is it directly addressed. 
This is curious given that the book was written at a time when the prison was such 
an important crucible of the civil rights and Black Power movements […] From 
the standpoint of theory already prevalent at the time, prison-house must be po-
sitioned in relation to Michel Foucault’s project, itself informed by the French an-
ti-psychiatry movement forged in the 1950s by François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, 
Jean Oury, Georges Canguilhem, and a bit later Félix Guattari.29 
Even more unusual and strange is that the text Jameson uses as a motto, 
Nietzsche’s thought on language, in its original does not even use the word pris-
on-house. As Apter in her text extensively shows, the word was added in the Eng-
lish translation of Nietzsche’s notebooks from 1886-1887. In German, Nietzsche 
speaks about “sprachlichen Zwang,” constraints, compulsions, coercions of lan-
guage: “Wir hören auf zu denken, wenn wir es nicht in dem sprachlichen Zwange 
tun wollen, wir langen gerade noch bei dem Zweifel an, hier eine Grenze als Gren-
ze zu sehen.” Jameson uses the following English translation: “We have to cease 
to think if we refuse to do it in the prison-house of language; for we cannot reach 
further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.” The 
same fragment was translated by Walter Kaufman as follows: “We cease to think 
when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language; we barely reach the 
doubt that sees this limitation as a limitation.”30 Another English translation, 
William Bittner’s alternate translation, reads: “We cease thinking when we no 
longer want to think within the constraints of language, we just manage to reach 
the suspicion that there might be a boundary here.” It is not only that Jameson 
used the wrong translation, but, as Apter points out, his “lack of explicit reflec-
tion on the book’s prison trope – whether as institution or episteme – is espe-
cially curious given that so much of the book consists of a sustained critique of 
theory that lacks ʻself-consciousness of the object with which it is concerned’.”31 
29 Emily Apter, “The Prison-House of Translation?”, Diacritics, 47 (4/2019), pp. 52–53.
30 Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, R. Bittner (ed.), Cambridge (MA), 
Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 110 (Fragment 5 [22] under the heading “Fundamental 
solution.”). Cf. also Apter, “The Prison-House of Translation?”, pp. 54, 69. 
31 Apter, “The Prison-House of Translation?”, p. 54.
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caught in the super-emergency
Without going into too much detail, we can say that Jameson simply used what 
he thought was the most appropriate. What he probably wanted to emphasize in 
the first place was a certain constraint and entrapment, the feeling or mood that 
“we can’t get out”. Here we are not concerned with what this means in the strict 
sense for his theses on structuralism or on language, but only with the moment 
of “being trapped”, which has a strict parallel with what we above described as 
a “nightmare mood”. 
Nevertheless, there are many other parallels, of course. Without defending 
Jameson too much, it must be said that Nietzsche uses the carceral metaphor 
quite a few times in Writings from the Late Notebooks; he was quite fond of 
speaking of imprisonment or confinement – once he speaks of Dostoevsky be-
ing surrounded by criminals in prison, another time he speaks of the prison of 
the madhouse, he also speaks of man being imprisoned “in an iron cage of er-
rors,” and so on. In short, carceral metaphors abound in Nietzsche. Not only in 
Nietzsche, of course. Metaphors that speak of imprisonment and prison are, as 
mentioned earlier, ubiquitous in literature and in our everyday lives. One of the 
most popular authors today, Yuval Harari, in his best-selling book Sapiens, also 
used it. On one occasion, he says: “There is no way out of the imagined order. 
When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact 
running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”32 In addition, if 
Jameson seemed pessimistic (at least as regards language), Harari seems much 
more so – all we can do is exchange one prison for another. Therefore, obvious-
ly the use of the carceral metaphor is widespread.33 There are many reasons for 
this. One of the reasons, but not the only one, is certainly a political one. Today 
the vast majority of people are no longer slaves, servants, or serfs, all over the 
world the great majority live in (some kind of) democratic regimes (whatever 
that means), and yet we consider ourselves less and less truly free. The more 
we are free, the more we feel enslaved, subordinated, subjugated, subjected, 
32 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, London, Harvil Secker, 2012, 
p. 133.
33 Another example of a modern bestseller would be Tim Marshall with his two books: 
Prisoners of Geography. Ten Maps that Explain Everything about the World, London and 
New York, Scribner, 2015, and The Power of Geography. Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of 
Our World, London and New York, Scribner, 2021.
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peter klepec 
trapped in a certain version of freedom, and no wonder that, as our contempo-
rary Frank Ruda claims, we would have to abolish freedom itself.34
If we return here briefly to Jameson again for a moment, some other reasons 
why he speaks of prison should be mentioned – one of them is surely that he is 
above all a Marxist. Moreover, even if, half a century later, there are fewer and 
fewer examples of Marxists in the world, Jameson remains one to this day. Why 
is Marxism relevant for us here? For Marxism, namely, it is fundamental to elim-
inate everything that enslaves or subjugates the man, the woman, the worker – 
in short, all the oppressed and exploited. In other words, Marxism is the thought 
and practice of emancipation. Emancipation, however, means not only empow-
erment or liberation, but also “liberation from”, not only liberation from a high-
er authority (the act of liberating a child from parental authority), but also from 
any visible or “invisible hand” (to refer here to an infamous metaphor of Adam 
Smith, which was used, by the way, by him only twice). The invisible hand refers 
of course, at least for us here, to the Super-emergency. Indeed, one of the ety-
mological origins of the word emancipation is “ex manu capere”, which literally 
means, “to seize from another’s hand”. In other words, emancipation means to 
problematize the existing distribution of the places where we are socially fixed 
and distributed: “emancipation means leaving the conditions that have been 
imposed on us.”35 
How are we deprived of our freedom, or, to use Rousseau’s opening phrase from 
The Social Contract: “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” – how 
does this happen? What are the modalities of unfreedom36 today for those who 
are neither prisoners nor captives? We could discuss this at length, but there 
will never be enough space to do it properly anywhere. Perhaps critical thought, 
indeed all of philosophy since its beginnings, has grappled with this question. 
Recall Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, for which Malabou asserts in her text 
“Life and Prison” that “philosophy, as Plato so forcefully demonstrates with the 
34 See Frank Ruda, Abolishing Freedom. A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism, Lincoln 
and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 
35 Jacques Rancière, Penser l’émancipation. Dialogue avec Aliocha Wald Lasowski, Paris, 
Éditions de l’aube, 2022, p. 103.
36 Recall that the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary enlists the following synonyms or near-syn-
onyms for “unfreedom”: dependence, heteronomy, subjection, captivity, enchainment, 
enslavement, immurement, imprisonment, incarceration, internment, subjugation. 
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caught in the super-emergency
cave, begins in prison.” Not only in philosophy, but, as we have seen above, in 
many popular models of thought today the metaphor of the prison is used – one 
can add any number, from the “prisoner’s dilemma” in economics to the cultur-
al look and ideology of being “free”, “out of the box”, and “cool”.37 Not to men-
tion that philosophy has “evolved” or “advanced”, if one may say so, since Pla-
to. While for Michel Foucault, a convinced Nietzschean, in his work Discipline 
and Punish, the question of the prison is perhaps the central problem of our mo-
dernity, uniting philosophical, political, ethical, institutional, and architectural 
problems in a single model, for Giorgio Agamben, who follows Foucault in many 
respects, a much more severe diagnosis is appropriate – not prison, but concen-
tration camps – “as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (in-
sofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception)” appears “as the hidden 
paradigm of the political space of modernity.”38
The issue here is not which of the two, if either, is right. Rather, we wish to call 
attention to a shift that affects the institution of the deprivation of liberty itself. 
It is a complex shift, but for the purposes of this paper, we will highlight only a 
few points. Put simply, it is a shift from prison as a particular and specialized in-
stitution, to a general prison that is no longer a prison in the proper sense and, 
above all, no longer has the visible or physical characteristics of a prison – flesh 
and blood guards, walls, cells, uniforms, time regimes. It is, so to speak, a shift 
toward a different kind of imprisonment and detention that coincides with other 
major changes of capitalism. In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault won-
dered where the modern institution of the prison came from. Foucault was deal-
ing with the problem of the prison around the same time that Jameson’s book 
was written and for him prison goes together with other modern disciplinary 
institutions, such as the army, the school, and the factory, and they all function 
according to the same pattern and principles. Foucault calls all that “discipli-
nary power” and the best model for him is the (Benthamian) model of the pris-
on, the panopticon. Hence Foucault’s term panoptism for a model of power that 
was about to be replaced or supplemented with another kind of power, which 
Foucault did not realize at the time. There are different names for this “newcom-
37 See in this context Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool. Business Culture, Counterculture, 
and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1997.
38 Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2017, 
p. 102. 
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peter klepec 
er”, from “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello) to Post-Fordism 
and neoliberalism. The latter emerged in the name of solving economic prob-
lems (inflation), but eventually “expanded to become a comprehensive world-
view, and has not been just a doctrine solely confined to economics.”39 Neoliber-
alism openly advocated openness, freedom, free exchange, and the free market. 
Although its main enemy was socialism and the (a certain kind of) State, neolib-
eralism appeared precisely against the model of power that Foucault analysed 
in his work on prison. Neoliberalism coincides with another kind of power (and 
that Foucault was somehow aware of since he gave lectures in the late 1970s on 
it, but this is a long story in itself), the kind that Deleuze defined in his text “On 
the Society of Control”. In this wide-ranging and prescient text, Deleuze first 
notes a general breakdown of all sites of confinement – such as prisons, hospi-
tals, factories, schools, and the family. According to Deleuze, all of these institu-
tions are now in a state of permanent reform, and so societies of control take the 
place of societies of discipline. Whereas in disciplinary society one enters and 
leaves an institution in which one is confined for a certain period, in the society 
of control there is an endless postponement (constant change). Deleuze claims 
that disciplinary societies have two poles: signatures, which stand for individu-
als, and numbers or places in a register, which stand for their position in a mass. 
In control societies, on the other hand, it is no longer the signature or the num-
ber that matters, but the code: codes are passwords that provide access to a lim-
ited space. Instead of the analogue language in disciplinary societies, the digital 
language of control consists of codes that indicate whether access to a particular 
piece of information should be allowed or denied. Moreover, whereas discipli-
nary man produced energy in discrete amounts, control man undulates, moving 
among a continuous series of different orbits. Whereas the old sovereign soci-
eties worked with simple machines, levers, pulleys, and clocks, and the newer 
disciplinary societies were equipped with thermodynamic machines, control so-
cieties work with a third generation of machines, information technology, and 
computers, where the passive danger is noise and the active one is piracy and 
viral contamination. This technological development is, according to Deleuze, 
more deeply rooted in a mutation of capitalism. This mutation is widely recog-
nized and can be summarized as follows: capitalism in the 19th century was con-
centrative, focused on production, and property-oriented. This made the factory 
39 Phillip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, London and New York, Verso, 
2013, p. 56. 
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caught in the super-emergency
a place of confinement where the capitalist owned the means of production and 
perhaps other similarly organized places such as hospitals and schools. Capi-
talism in its current form, however, is no longer focused on production, which 
is often moved to remote parts of the Third World, even in the case of complex 
operations such as textile plants, steelworks, and oil refineries. It is focused on 
metaproduction. It no longer buys raw materials or sells finished products: it 
buys finished products or assembles them from parts. What it wants to sell are 
services, and what it wants to buy are activities. It is a capitalism that no longer 
focuses on production, but on products, that is, on sales or markets. Therefore, 
it is essentially dispersive, with factories giving way to businesses. The sales de-
partment becomes the business centre or soul of the company and marketing is 
now an instrument of social control and production: such control is short-term 
and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unlimited, while dis-
cipline is long-term, infinite, and discontinuous. In a sense, Deleuze summariz-
es the transition from disciplinary society to control society: “A man is no longer 
a man confined [enclosed], but man in debt.”40 Alternatively, as Hélène L’Heuil-
let puts it: “time has become the modus operandi of control.”41
This entire transition took some time for the changes in the political, social, 
and economic landscape to take full effect. Many critics, including Foucault, 
did not see that the nature of the prison (as well as other rigid institutions like 
the school and the factory) had changed in the meantime, corresponding to the 
transition from disciplinary power to a society of control. Of course, this tran-
sition has not been as smooth as Deleuze expected. Jonathan Crary makes the 
following critique, which is relevant to our issues here: 
As influential as Deleuze’s text became, it is clear with hindsight that disciplinary 
forms of power did not disappear or become superseded, as he maintains. Rath-
er, the continuous forms of control he identifies took shape as an additional layer 
of regulation alongside still functioning and even amplified forms of discipline. 
Contra Deleuze, the use of harsh physical confinement is greater today than at 
any time previously, in an expanding network of deliriously panoptic prisons. 
His evocation of open, amorphous spaces without boundaries is belied by the 
40 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations. 1972-1990, trans. M. Joughin, New York, Columbia University 
Press, 1995, p. 181.
41 L’Heuillet, Éloge du retard, p. 34.
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peter klepec 
brutal deployment of walled borders and closed frontiers, both of which strategi-
cally target specific populations and regions. Also retrospectively, it can be noted 
that Deleuze did not address the intensifying overlap between control society and 
consumer society’s proliferating manufacture of individual needs, far beyond the 
products and commodities that were obligatory even in the 1970s. Nonetheless, in 
affluent sectors of the globe, what was once consumerism has expanded to 24/7 
activity of techniques of personalization, of individuation, of machinic interface, 
and of mandatory communication. Self-fashioning is the work we are all given, 
and we dutifully comply with the prescription continually to reinvent ourselves 
and manage our intricate identities. As Zygmunt Bauman has intimated, we may 
not grasp that to decline this endless work is not an option.42
The prison in the classical sense of the word is a secluded place with walls, uni-
forms, guards, and a special regime. The essence of the prison is not only that 
the prisoners are locked up in a separate environment and subjected to the rules 
that prevail there, but above all that time is robbed from them, time is taken 
away. The punishment consists in being thrown into prison for a certain peri-
od of time and paying with what is most precious to people – their time. In this 
context, it is not unimportant that “being imprisoned”, means “serving” or “do-
ing time” in English. Alternatively, as is nicely put by Michael Hardt in his essay 
“Prison Time”: “By an indubitable logic, then, the paradigm for punishment is 
the loss of this most precious asset that all possess equally: time.”43 
The dilemma of us humans, finite beings, is that our time (on earth) is limited 
and therefore priceless to us. We value above all free time, time for ourselves, 
we value above all the time in which we can do what we want. Free time. In 
which we can even do nothing. Or whatever we want. Even to think or to philos-
ophize, for which, as Aristotle already knew, one must have free time. Therefore, 
to think the dilemma of time, we need time. We are free or unfree to the extent 
that we freely dispose of our free time. The time we have to spend to ensure our 
existence, our physical survival, and our needs is not our free time. Even Benja-
min Franklin recognized a connection between time and value – time is money, 
he said. Since human labour creates value, that value has a common equivalent, 
42 Crary, 24/7, p. 72. 
43 Michael Hardt, “Prison Time,” Yale French Studies (special issue Genet: In the Language of 
the Enemy), 91 (1997), p. 64. 
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caught in the super-emergency
money. If we have to work part of the time to earn a living, then we are not free 
for at least part of our time. For this reason, emancipatory thought since Marx 
has pointed out that we are prisoners of capitalism. Not only because “capital-
ism is fundamentally about time,”44 but also because capital is above all the 
master of time. Alternatively, as Hardt puts it: “Power in our society is above all 
power over our time.”45 
Perhaps only two brief remarks. The first relates to reflections on common time, 
the second to the increasing scarcity of time and the transformation of leisure 
into working time. As the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou re-
marked:
[it] is very striking to see that today we are practically bereft of any thinking of 
time. For just about everyone, the day after tomorrow is abstract and the day be-
fore yesterday incomprehensible. We have entered a period of a-temporality and 
instantaneity; this shows the extent to which, far from being a shared individual 
experience, time is a construction, and even, we might argue, a political construc-
tion. For example, let us briefly reconsider the ‘five-year plans’ that structured 
the industrial development of the Stalinist USSR. If the plan could be celebrated 
even in works of art, such as Eisenstein’s film The General Line, it is because, over 
and above its (doubtful) economic significance, planning designates the resolve 
to submit growth to the political will of men. The five years of the five-year plan 
are much more than a numerical unit, they are a temporal material in which the 
collective will inscribes itself, day after day. This is indeed an allegory, in and by 
time, of the power of the ‘we’. In various ways, the entire century saw itself as a 
constructivist century, a vision which implies the staging of a voluntary construc-
tion of time.46 
The other side of this process, the flip side of our inability to comprehend collec-
tive action and time planning, is the privatization of our time. The latter takes 
many forms, of which we will mention only two here: the privatization of our 
common time in the debt economy and the colonization of our free time with 
the rise of digital capitalism. Maurizio Lazzarato’s thesis on the “debt economy” 
44 Bouton, Le temps de l’urgence, p. 219.
45 Hardt, “Prison Time”, p. 65. 
46 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. A. Toscano, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007, p. 105.
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peter klepec 
shows how debt has become the basis of the social through the reign of neoliber-
alism and how it restructures individuals, the state, and society. For Lazzarato, 
debt is transversal, cutting across all of society and all power relations. This 
means that it is not limited to the economic, the political, or the social. Crucially, 
the debt relationship robs us of our own future. Alternatively, as Lazzarato puts 
it: “The debt economy has deprived the immense majority of Europeans of what 
was already weak political power, a power conceded by representative democ-
racy. It has deprived them of a growing share of the wealth that past struggles 
had wrested from capitalist accumulation. And, above all, it has deprived them 
of the future, that is, of time, time as decision-making, choice, and possibility.”47
The other important process today is the colonization and privatization of time, 
which affects not only workers’ time and working time, but also all our time, es-
pecially our so-called “free time”. Since Marx, workers have been demanding an 
eight-hour workday; today we are confronted not only with the fact that working 
time has become almost unlimited and flexible, but also with the fact that it ex-
tends to what we used to call our free time, the weekend, the holiday. Today, par-
adoxically, our free time, our (in)activity in our own free time is something that 
produces value and surplus value. Free time has actually become a value-creat-
ing activity and, in this sense, work. Today, we do not even need a special institu-
tion to stay in or to be locked into – we are, so to speak, enslaved and locked into 
our own homes. “We are doing time” there, at home, so to speak. All our free time 
has become working or labour time. Even when we express ourselves online, we 
are actually doing work. The World Wide Web is not only a platform for the ex-
pression of feelings and affects, but also a huge tool for the evaluation and valor-
ization of affects. In their work Le Web affectif,48 Camille Alloing and Pierre Julien 
have pointed out that affect is something that circulates and must circulate, and 
that it is, of course, primarily for profit. In this context, they put forward the the-
sis of the “affective proletarian” who produces value through his affects but is not 
paid for it. In a sense, of course, today we are all “affective proletarians” who are 
not paid for our work – which is not real work strictly speaking. Moreover, even 
if “modern progress” consists in the fact that we are “no longer in prison”, we re-
47 Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of an Indebted Man, trans. J. D. Jordan, Los Angeles, 
Semiotext(e), 2012, p. 2.
48 See Camille Alloing and Julien Pierre, Le Web affectif. Une économie numérique des émo-
tions, Bry-sur-Marne, INA Éditions, 2017.
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caught in the super-emergency
main bound by the fundamental logic of prison – which consists in the fact that 
our time, our future, is taken from us. In addition, here the question of urgency 
and emergency arises again, but from a slightly different angle.
What Is to Be Done With the Super-emergency?
The question of urgency has been a constant companion of politics and philoso-
phy since its beginnings. Its relevance and meaning for us today is undoubtedly 
complicated; it has a long history and many important dilemmas and dichoto-
mies. For the sake of simplicity, however, we select here three unsurpassable 
milestones that continue to shape this issue today. First, there is a problem of 
an urgent political action exemplified in the figure of revolution. The French and 
American Revolutions as two seminal events that put such issues on the politi-
cal agenda. Then there is the October Revolution with its repetitions, partisans, 
opponents, and failures. Lenin created one of the most iconic images related 
to this question in his 1903 work “What Is to Be Done?”, which is a literal rep-
etition of the same title of a 1863 essay by Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, 
a 19th-century Russian revolutionary democrat. That title, throughout the 20th 
century and to this day – rightly or wrongly, is another question – has summed 
up the essence of Marxism. To act here and now, the call “Hic Rhodus, hic sal-
ta!”, has always been the motto of Marx and Engels. This call is still relevant 
today, in our time of counterrevolution, and outlines the dilemma of urgent po-
litical action as well as urgency or emergency. Above, we tried to make a rather 
simple thesis: because we are trapped today in a certain logic, which we have 
called the Super-emergency, we are trapped in a perpetuation of the same, and 
this not only steals our own individual and personal time, but also deprives us 
of any common future. The revolution, which no one knows what it might look 
like today and whether it is still feasible or possible, thus continues to shape the 
question of the urgency of political action here and now. In this context, howev-
er, the question “What is to be done?” is not only a call for immediate political 
action, not only a call for revolution, but also a call to reflect in our time on the 
relevance, meaning, purpose, and utility of theory (of the revolution) as such.
As Boris Groys emphasizes, any 
theory confronts us with the paradox of urgency. The basic image that theory of-
fers to us is the image of our own death – an image of our mortality, of radical fini-
FV_02_2022-zadnja.indd   31 10/03/2023   11:08
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peter klepec 
tude and lack of time. By offering us this image, theory produces in us the feeling 
of urgency – a feeling that impels us to answer its call for action now rather than 
later. But at the same time, this feeling of urgency and lack of time prevents us 
from conceiving long-term projects; from basing our actions on long-term plan-
ning; from having great personal and historical expectations concerning the re-
sults of our actions.49 
However, if theory and philosophy privilege contemplation, it also at the same 
time hates passivity. Therefore, for Groys, every 
secular, postidealistic theory is a call for action. Every critical theory creates a state 
of urgency – even a state of emergency. Theory tells us that we are merely mortal, 
material organisms – and that we have little time at our disposal. We cannot waste 
our time in contemplation. Rather, we must act, here and now. Time does not wait 
and we do not have enough time for further delay. In addition, while it is of course 
true that every theory offers a certain overview and explanation of the world (or 
explanation of why the world cannot be explained), these theoretical descriptions 
and scenarios play only an instrumental and transitory role. The true goal of every 
theory is to define the field of the action we are called upon to undertake.50 
All of the above reasons, including those mentioned by Groys, are also – at least 
for us – the main reasons for a certain need of intellectuals, especially in the 
twentieth century (from Nietzsche, Adorno, and Heidegger, to Derrida and Ag-
amben), to “catastrophize” the situation. It is a need to exaggerate, to shock, 
which is supposed to “wake people up”. This task is dubious in its nature and in 
reality, shocking people all the time actually numbs them. The truly pessimistic 
and black portrayal of the present therefore not only failed in its basic purpose, 
but also has at best provoked mocking comments, like the “Hotel Abyss” style 
of thought, a style that paints the blackest picture of the present for someone 
who has all the benefits at his or her disposal. In other words, the fate of theory 
and philosophy, which, as the famous 11th thesis of Marx states, should actualize 
or realize itself, not to mention the difficulties with revolution – its failures and 
counter-revolutions in the West and its reversals in the East, along with its final 
infamous demise – led to what Slavoj Žižek describes as follows: 
49 Boris Groys, In The Flow, London and New York, Verso, 2016, p. 33. 
50 Ibid., pp. 28–29.
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caught in the super-emergency
A favored exercise of intellectuals throughout the twentieth century – which can 
also be taken as symptomatic of what Badiou calls the ‘passion of the Real’ (la 
passion du reel) – was the urge to ‘catastrophize’ the situation: whatever the actu-
al situation, it had to be denounced as ‘catastrophic’, and the better it appeared, 
the more it solicited this exercise. Heidegger denounced the present age as that 
of the highest ‘danger’ of the epoch of accomplished nihilism; Adorno and Hork-
heimer saw in it the culmination of the dialectic of enlightenment in the admin-
istered world; up to Giorgio Agamben, who defines twentieth-century concentra-
tion camps as the ‘truth’ of the entire Western political project. […] So I am tempt-
ed to propose a radical reading of this syndrome: what if what the unfortunate 
intellectuals cannot bear is the fact that they lead a life which is basically happy, 
safe and comfortable, so that, in order to justify their higher calling, they have to 
construct a scenario of radical catastrophe?51 
Žižek later even named this strategy the “Hölderlin paradigm”: 
More generally, the entire Judeo-Christian history, up to postmodernity, is deter-
mined by what one is tempted to call the ʻHölderlin paradigmʼ: ʻWhere the danger 
is, grows also what can save usʼ (ʻWo aber Gefahr ist wächst das Rettende auchʼ). 
The present moment appears as the lowest point in a long process of historical 
decadence (the flight of Gods, alienation …), but the danger of the catastrophic 
loss of the essential dimension of being-human also opens up the possibility of a 
reversal (Kehre) – proletarian revolution, the arrival of new gods (which, accord-
ing to the late Heidegger, alone can save us), etc.52 
Of course, Žižek is right when he points out the special enjoyment we all have in 
observing this world of ours, which is not only afflicted by one crisis after another 
and goes from “bad to worse”, but has also passed the critical point of impend-
ing catastrophe. The latter, however, has already occurred. Here it is Žižek, again, 
who emphasized the role of the contemporary ideology of cynicism and denial, 
so well described by Octave Mannoni – “I know very well, but...” throughout vir-
tually all of his work. Add to all this “the politics of fear” and you get a mixture 
of despair and terror reminiscent of what we described above as a mood of night-
51 Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek, Polity Press, Cambridge 2004, pp. 
48–49.
52 Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil. Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, 
London and New York, Verso, 2014, p. 344.
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peter klepec 
mare. The fact is that the constant awakening of fear and threat can dissipate 
and exhaust. Even the founder of the Doomsday Clock, Eugene Rabinowitch, de-
plored the strategy of his movement: “While trying to frighten men into rational-
ity, scientists have frightened many into abject fear or blind hatred.”53
In the end, we get a mixture that Badiou nicely described as follows and which 
nicely fits our topics of urgency: 
Today we endure the marriage of frenzy and total rest. On the one hand, propagan-
da declares that everything changes by the minute, that we have no time, that we 
must modernize at top speed, that we’re going to ʻmiss the boatʼ (the boat of the 
Internet and the new economy, the boat of mobile phones for everyone, the boat 
of countless stockholders, the boat of stock options, the boat of pension funds, I 
could go on…). On the other hand, all this hubbub cannot conceal a kind of pas-
sive immobility or indifference, the perpetuation of the status quo. This is a type of 
time upon which the will, whether collective or individual, has no grip: an inacces-
sible amalgam of agitation and sterility, the paradox of a stagnant feverishness.54
Even before the current pandemic, “the neoliberal glorification of competition, 
constant conformity, and ‘personal improvement’ triggered has created an epi-
demic of mental suffering. In the United States, mental suffering is more Amer-
ican than Coca-Cola.”55 In this sense, Berardi speaks of the (capitalist) economy 
as a “Prozac economy.” The latter is not a specifically American characteristic, 
but something inherent to capitalism as such. As Laurent de Sutter has shown 
in his book Narcocapitalism, all capitalism “is, necessarily, a narcocapitalism – 
a capitalism that is narcotic through and through, whose excitability is only a 
manic reverse of the depression it never stops producing, even as it presents it-
self as a remedy. [...] Narcocapitalism is the capitalism of narcosis, that enforced 
sleep into which anaesthetics plunge their patients so as to unburden them from 
everything that prevents them from being efficient in the current arrangement – 
which means, work, work and more work.”56 
53 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, New York, Viking, 2018, p. 311.
54 Badiou, The Century, pp. 105, 106. 
55 Franco ʻBifoʼ Berardi, The Second Coming, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2019, p. 53. 
56 Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism, trans. B. Norman, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2018, pp. 
43, 44. 
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caught in the super-emergency
No wonder, then, that intellectuals call the situation catastrophic, because it is 
catastrophic! Here we should introduce a logic that Žižek also uses frequently in 
his works – an x looks like an x, but we must not deceive ourselves, it is actually 
an x! Žižek refers here to the well-known joke of the Marx brothers: “You remind 
me of Emanuel Ravelli. – But I am Emanuel Ravelli. – Then it’s no wonder you 
look like him!” Today, radical action is called for because the situation demands 
it – and the situation is indeed catastrophic.
It has long been known that the coming decades will be decisive, and futurolo-
gists have known this for a long time. Futurology relies heavily on a pattern that 
combines observation of the present and past trends with the identification of 
the new. Any knowledge of the future assumes that similar conditions that have 
occurred in the past will occur again in the future. This notion relies on the ex-
trapolation of what exists – but remains blind to more than just our orientation 
and disposition to action. Alternatively, as Derrida put it: the future comes in two 
forms: the French term futur is something that relies on what is already there in 
some sense, while avenir is what will happen and what cannot be known in ad-
vance. In other words, predictions and forecasts are one thing; actual history is 
another. Or, as the appropriate saying for our time goes, truth is stranger than fic-
tion. Much of what has happened even futurologists could not predict... 
On the other hand, it is true that futurologists in particular have known for a 
long time that the carbon stocks that drive today’s mode of production will soon 
be exhausted and that we will find ourselves in a difficult situation. For them, it 
was no secret that in the future we will have to deal with the climate crisis and 
the switch to other means of production because the reserves of gas, oil, and 
coal will simply be exhausted:
The challenges we face for near and long-term futures have been called a crisis 
of crises. They range across the gamut of socio-cultural, geo-political, and envi-
ronmental domains. Bearing in mind that all these challenges are complex and 
systemically interconnected, this chapter offers multiple starting points for fur-
ther dialogue. Futurists discuss the grand global challenges from a variety of per-
spectives. James Dator calls them the ‘Unholy Trinity, Plus One’. Dator’s Unholy 
Trinity is the end of cheap and abundant oil; multiple environmental challenges; 
and global economic and fiscal collapse. Dator’s Plus One is lack of adequate gov-
ernment intervention. Jorgen Randers claims that a sustainability revolution is 
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peter klepec 
under way, but that it will take most of this century to complete. He identifies five 
big issues, which are inextricably linked with the sustainability revolution and its 
likelihood of success. His big issues are the end of capitalism, the end of econom-
ic growth, the end of slow democracy, the end of generational harmony, and the 
end of a stable climate.57 
Awareness of the urgency of action against climate change is now widespread. 
Even if we, we as humanity, have reached and signed the Paris Agreement, even 
if there is general agreement that urgent action is needed, something always 
comes up and prevents or postpones the actual implementation plans. This 
“something” is not only at the level of subjective or particular evasions or trick-
ery, but also at a more “objective” level. The introduction of new situations (e.g. 
in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine) introduces a com-
pletely new group of unpredictable and uncontrollable actors who act according 
to an autonomous, unpredictable self-will. Although there was (once) unity and 
will on climate change, there are now divisions again, and the question is when 
the moment of urgent collective action will come again. If ever. Here we have the 
most fundamental level of the current paradoxical situation – even when some-
thing is urgent, even when there is an emergency, something even more urgent 
immediately emerges. We lacked time, but now we lack it even more; we lack it 
in an even more urgent sense of the word. We have no time, and yet we never 
get around to it; something seemingly more urgent keeps getting in our way, it 
keeps popping up. It is as if we are trapped, locked into a certain logic of time, 
that dictates a constant and random, ever-new emergence of emergencies, to the 
point of a perpetual reign of the Super-emergency.
There is an urgent need for action, perhaps more urgent than ever. This is now 
widely known and generally accepted, at least as far as climate change is con-
cerned. However, even when there is agreement on the need for urgent action, 
something always comes up and prevents or postpones the actual implemen-
tation plans. We have called this “something” the Super-emergency, which al-
ways leads to a paradoxical situation – even when something is really urgent, 
even when there is an emergency; something even more urgent immediately 
pops up. We lacked time, but now we lack it even more, we lack it in an even 
57 Jennifer M. Gidley, The Future: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 
2017, p. 116. 
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37
caught in the super-emergency
more urgent sense of the word. We have no time, and yet we never get around to 
it; something seemingly more urgent keeps getting in our way or keeps popping 
up. It is as if we are trapped in a certain logic of time that dictates a constant 
and random, ever-new, emergence of emergencies, to the point of a perpetual 
reign of the Super-emergency.
Therefore, it is not only urgent to think about and deal with urgency and emer-
gency per se, but with their particular deviation, even perversion – the Su-
per-emergency. Even if we do not have time to think and act differently, as our 
leaders, the media, and propaganda keep claiming (“now we do not have time 
to hear, discuss, exchange opinions, talking”58; now is not the time to “philoso-
phize, now is the time to act”59), we should insist on it. Or, as Žižek emphasizes 
in his text “Die populistische Versuchung”: “The very urgency of the present 
situation can in no way serve as an excuse – it is precisely urgent situations that 
are situations of time for reflection [Nachdenken].”60 And action, radical action, 
of course. With the aim of recuperating our common future. As Daniel Innerari-
ty pointed out: “The most pressing matter for contemporary democracies is not 
to accelerate social processes but to recuperate the future. The future must once 
again be granted a privileged space on democratic societies’ agendas.”61 In other 
words, what we have tried to show here is that what is really urgent and neces-
sary for us now, today, is to free ourselves from this yoke of emergency in which 
we are imprisoned and which we have here called the Super-emergency.
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