Cursed Empires

Abstract

In the article, the author uses a philosophical understanding of an oath to interpret an artwork, and then uses this interpretation to criticize modern polities as cursed empires. The narrative is presented in four steps. It begins with a short presentation of Mark Lilla's and John Gray's diagnosis of the Anglo-American ideological crisis, in which liberalism is modified by cultural politics which to both writers looks like a revivalist religion. Lilla and Gray metaphorically use the word "curse" to explain the new ideological constellation determined by the phenomenon called "woke". The second part presents Agamben's understanding of the relationship between an oath and a curse, which is used to interpret David Lynch's film Inland Empire in the third part. The author tries to show that the film deals with an original idea that a work of art can break a curse. In the fourth part, the author uses the idea of cursing and uncursing to criticize the West for failures in the war in former Yugoslavia, during the migrant crisis, and in the ongoing reappearance of "radical evil" in Gaza. The argument is constructed with a help of Greil Marcus' idea that polities can curse themselves if they fail to live up to their ideological promises. The author concludes that the EU and the USA failed to live up to their alleged founding principles and became cursed empires. The cultural war in which they find themselves seen from the perspective of magico-religious domain in which the oath and the curse originally appeared is not metaphorically a curse but literally the payment for the sin of omission.

Keywords

• David Lynch
• Giorgio Agamben
• Greil Marcus
• Mark Lilla
• John Gray
• curse in politics