Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture

From Revelation to Recursion: Reading the Apocalypse as Systemic Diagnosis

Filippo Scafi — 2026-10-16

The article approaches the Apocalypse of John not as prophecy, but as a symptomatology of social systems. The apocalyptic symbols—particularly the Four Horsemen—are not taken as allegories to be deciphered or as objects of philosophical truth, but as diagnostic figures that make it possible to read recurring patterns of crisis (war, economic inequity, plagues, messianisms). In this sense, the work moves within a non-philosophical perspective: the concepts of Ricoeur
(the symbol that gives rise to thought), De Martino (crisis of presence, cultural apocalypses), Foucault (the productive function of discourses), and Bion (the container function) are not summoned to ground a system, but treated as theoretical materials to be recombined within an immanent dispositif. Applied to Luhmann’s systems theory, this operation shows how the Horsemen can be read as threshold markers of social persistence. In a contemporary key, they map technological messianisms, permanent wars, global inequalities, and the biopolitics of health and climate. The Apocalypse thus emerges not as an epitaph, but as a critical grammar of crisis: a recursive container that transforms the anguish of the end into an object of thought, while remaining exposed to the risk of normalizing catastrophe when captured by logics of power.

Mad Black Noneism: Nick Land, Capital, and the Singularity as Noneist Emergence

Martin Dempsey — 2026-10-16

This article formalizes the negative ontology underlying Ray Brassier’s description of Nick Land’s “mad black Deleuzianism,” with particular attention to how Fanged Noumena functions within formal logic as noneist and dialetheic objects. Unlike classical Eleatic arguments that sought to eliminate paradoxes of nothingness by denying their logical validity, Graham Priest’s dialetheism embraces some contradictions as valid. Dialetheism holds that some statements can be both true and false simultaneously, representing a fundamental shift from the classical principle of non-contradiction toward paraconsistent logics capable of accommodating true contradictions.

The article demonstrates how non-existent logical objects interact through negative attribution—the process by which entities are defined by what they are not, their conceptual boundaries marked through absence rather than presence. This framework allows for a systematic account of how noneist objects can bestow qualities upon existent objects, destabilize categorical boundaries, and generate new relations. By situating these operations within Land’s accelerationist thought, the article argues that abstraction functions as a noneist operator: a logical mechanism that organizes reality through productive gaps and absences rather than positive determinations.

We shall see how non-existent logical objects interact and come into being; possess and bestow attributes via negative attribution; how such noneist objects possess the ability to bestow qualities upon the existent and noneist logical objects they interact with and border; how they can cause other noneist objects to come into non-being; and in so doing offer a potential framework for addressing (or at least discussing) a merger between both dialectical and emergent, immanent, accounts of change and occurrence

In supplementing Land’s system with Priest’s noneist and dialetheic logics, the article provides a more rigorous formal apparatus for analyzing accelerationism’s central claims. Capital, in this account, emerges not as a merely economic or technological phenomenon, but as a noneist operator functioning within historical and ontological processes. It is described as the Entity that retroactively engineers its own conditions of possibility, manipulating past and present through the negative attributions of absence, debt, and abstraction. By drawing these connections, the article aims to clarify Land’s accelerationism as a mode of noneist emergence, situated at the intersection of logic, ontology, and political economy.

“I want to, but I lack desire” : The green energy transition caught between expectations and possibilities

Jana Tsoneva — 2026-10-16

In this article, I present results of a nationally representative survey on attitudes toward the Green transition in Bulgaria, which we conducted in 2023 as part of the project “Public Capacity for a Just Green Transition” (KП-06 Н55/13). The survey focuses on four groups of questions concerning climate change, social justice, expectations from the new transition, and the public agenda. Based on these, I draw predominantly pessimistic conclusions about both the Green transition and the transition to liberal democracy preceding it, showing how the experience of the latter inevitably colors the former. I analyze the gap between possibilities and expectations for the new transition with reference to Jacques Lacan’s theorizing about the difference between need/demand and desire.

About Gilles Grelet’s latest book and all related

Katarina Kolozova — 2026-10-16

It is not an easy task to write a review of anything written by Gilles Grelet, and it is an even harder one when attempting to write an academic review of his Theory of the Solitary Sailor published by Urbanomic in 2022. Grelet invites complete honesty when engaging with him, your most vulnerable naked “self” (whatever that might be). This is a prerequisite to meaningfully engage with both Gilles the man and the author Gilles Grelet, Doctor of Philosophy and a sailor of many years.