Žarko Paić: Neoliberalism, Oligarchy and Politics of the 
Event: At the Edge of Chaos.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020.
ISBN: 978-1-5275-4478-9.
UDC: 141.7
If the task of philosophy has traditionally been defined as the task of thinking 
the time in which it takes place, then attempting to rethink the essence and 
modernity of the epoch in which we live today is a very challenging task. The 
question of human essence as a necessary pre-condition of any philosophy 
concerns, in fact, how one relates to oneself. In this sense, one of the most 
prominent Croatian philosophers, Vanja Sutlić, in his book Essence and 
Contemporaneity (originally published half a century ago), lapidary concludes 
that the basic task of contemporary philosophy is the thought of reaching 
into the historical composition of being human and being itself. To reach the 
essence of the modern world philosophically—that is the task of true thinking. 
Precisely in the wake of such a predicament arises the new book by Žarko 
Paić Neoliberalism, Oligarchy and Politics of the Event, symbolically subtitled: 
At the Edge of Chaos. In the wake of the abovementioned uneasiness regarding 
the determination of the contemporary world, Pai ć gives a very precise and 
unambiguous formulation: the title itself indicates that in order to understand 
today’s socio-political constellation, it is necessary primarily to understand the 
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techno-scientific set of information and communication technologies, and to 
grasp that they largely determine the postulates of modern politics.
In the effort to respond to this aporia, Paić critically refers to numerous 
contemporary theories of sovereignty, the spiritual crisis of Europe, the 
metapolitics of identity, and the post-history biopolitics, leading a dialogue 
with fundamental thinkers in comprehensive, studious, brilliantly argued, and 
multifaceted chapters, as well as reflecting on the 21
st
 century “philosophical 
classics”—from Kojève to Carl Schmitt, from Rancière to Badiou. As the 
author himself points out, this book deals with “an analysis of the effects 
of a global order that governs the environment through the logic of a self-
generated network. The system is, however, formally based on a framework of 
liberal democracy. But in reality, ideas of freedom are transformed into their 
opposite. Instead of establishing the power of a sovereign people, the rule of 
the corporative constituted elites is at work. ” This is precisely the main aspect of 
Paić’s reflections: if in many previous books the emphasis was on the technical 
character of human existence, the starting point here is the problem of freedom 
and the so-called political deficit, according to the model of a (Derridean-like 
articulated) “dehumanized desert:” “the uniformity of the technically shaped 
space necessitates the uniqueness of abstract time. ”
Here, Paić extensively discusses the idea and crisis of Europe, its 
political future during the reorganization of empires, the civil war, and total 
mobilization at a planetary level, political theology, and attempts to think 
events beyond the metaphysical “big story” regarding philosophy of politics 
for the new age, and oligarchic rule in the age of today’s networked societies. 
In this sense, contextualization, i.e., an analysis of the rule of corporate elites 
as a contemporary form of oligarchy, becomes crucial. Namely, if neoliberal 
capitalism is the result of techno-scientific advancement and dispensation 
of a liberated desire, it means that “the desire for wealth and power destroys 
all the spiritual virtues that modern humanity has set as the goal of its own 
meaningful action.” The context of a re-humanizing of the humanity has 
become archaic, rather than introducing us to the intricate social labyrinth 
of entropy that governs the network as a fluid term for a world, in which the 
fundamental philosophical question concerns how to think the difference 
between the political and politics, if action today is controlled by post-human 

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networks of rhizomatic capitalism, and in which politics has given rise to the 
pseudo-event media spectacle.
Starting primarily from Foucault’s insights on biopolitics, but also by 
deepening his analysis of the psycho-techniques of controlling desire and 
deconstructing criticism of political economy, Paić formulates the thesis that 
the oligarchic model of political and cultural governance today is the result 
of the ups and downs of mass political movements, which means that, in 
ultima linea, he rightly believes that in the age of transnational corporations 
and the cybernetic model of market management in today’s neo-liberal 21
st
 
century there is no basis for a “revolution” or subversive upheaval, because 
the disappearance of the notion of society also disintegrates the solidarity 
of class and social actors. This is also the main backbone of this book, with 
many erudite chapters meandering through. For the issue of freedom, it is 
crucial to reflect on “political theology, ” that is, to transform all metaphysical 
categories of sovereignty into concepts of the political work of autonomous 
human freedom, while it is self-evident that the author’s primary interlocutors 
are Foucault and Carl Schmitt, to whom he devotes a whole chapter on the 
logic of the state of emergency and catechetic of history within political 
theology. Certainly, the more careful reader will quickly notice that many of 
the constituent themes and theses are present in Paić’s earlier books—e.g., the 
problem of culture as ideology and multiculturalism, art in the age of digital 
anti-humanism, the dominance of spectacle in the time of the collapse of the 
metaphysical structure of the world—, but this also deepens with a whole new 
set of topics: the re-articulation of the political and the general thinking of 
politics in the entropy network.
As in the previous books, from the Posthuman Condition, through 
Freedom Without Power, all the way to the Third Country, Totalitarianism, 
and, finally, the grand project of the Technosphere in five volumes, one of the 
most important achievements of this book is the consciousness about the 
creation of a new categorical apparatus, because the essence of man can no 
longer be determined upon the classical humanist tradition of philosophy, and 
here we necessarily return to some of the congenial insights from the already 
mentioned Sutlić’s book. Paić is aware that without transcending the classical 
interpretive framework, not only can we not describe the world we live in, but 
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we cannot even philosophically articulate it. That is why this book is also a sort 
of a “manual” for how to navigate through the distribution of technological-
political power, where the source of power comes into play with the question 
of the limits of human freedom. And precisely this freedom is “powerless:” by 
losing its ontological meaning to politics, it also loses the foundation of that 
universally political one. The only remaining solution is to establish a theory 
of an upcoming event beyond all metaphysical differences in contemporary 
history, a “futurological opinion” beyond the desubstantialized utopia.
The logical question that arises primarily here is: what are the real 
alternatives to de-politicization and re-politicization? Politics is, as Paić rightly 
points out, the constant risk of freedom, the risk of taking responsibility for 
changing the situation and, in general, of making sense in the time of the 
collapse of the global order. But without the illusions of human power, the 
reach of democracy, sovereignty—“all that remains is to think political and 
politics beyond the small stories of micro-utopias and the macropolitics of 
identity. ” In earlier argumentation, the author put it determinedly: “It is time 
for the politics of events of absolute freedom.” It is precisely this event that 
“neither happens fatefully nor is owned by the subject of radical change in the 
world.” Namely, the logic of the world-historical progress of the cybernetic 
system of governance and the new way of legitimizing capitalism in the 
21
st
 century unequivocally leads to the suspension of fundamental ideas. 
Modernity policies include freedom, equality, justice, and solidarity. Paić is 
also quite right in insisting that this is not merely a formal defense of human 
and civil liberties, because it politically no longer allows the condition for a 
new theory of action—it is essentially a matter of choice itself; not at the end 
of history, but at the end of historically ubiquitous patterns of social change.
In this context, the concept of events as defined by the author has nothing 
to do with the attempts to open up the space of opportunity in the aesthetic, 
political, and ethical realms (starting from Deleuze to Badiou) or to think 
the “second beginning,” as was the case in Heidegger’s thought. Therefore, 
the event must be thought beyond all mysticism of coming in terms of hope 
and expectation of a salvage return to the sources. Pai ć is aware that in his 
theoretical attempts it is not easy to build a new matrix or a new platform of 
power to counter the technosphere, which is not a defeatist move at all, but 

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a very clearly articulated awareness that the thinking of the political “today” 
should be freed from false belief in the Messianic deliverance and from the 
autonomous action of the monstrous power of the technosphere “which 
reduces everything” human “to the applications, functions and structures of 
the inhuman.” The oligarchic power of the elites in modern times is almost 
evenly distributed across the global order, regardless of political differences 
and cultural values. That is why we are talking about the network of power, 
in which the fundamental problem is that “the politics of oligarchy and 
meritocracy as a post-democratic struggle to preserve privileges in the frozen 
state of elite rule over social classes is happening as an ethical-legal consensus 
on the permanent reforms of the same. ”
In conclusion, this book is a true philosophical reflection upon the proper 
meaning of politics and freedom, upon the classic idea of the common good, 
the idea of a society in which freedom, equality, and justice have power. In the 
wake of Derrida’s writings, Paić accurately observes that this process of the 
deconstruction of politics is all that remains of the great history of Western 
metaphysics. The aforementioned philosopher Sutlić allegedly said on one 
occasion: “If a man can no longer be a Casanova or a Don Juan, he can become 
a good engineer and sleep with his machine,” which is not only a witty and 
humorous, but also a gloomy summary of the state of affairs in today’s world, 
the world as technosphere that is both our “essence” and “contemporaneity.” 
Paić‘s significant book, with a highly articulated philosophical categorical 
apparatus, addresses this problem with crystal clearness and precision.
Tonči Valentić
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