Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Unmaking of Reality: A Philosophical Anatomy of the Trumpian Self

Unmaking of Reality: A Philosophical Anatomy of the Trumpian Self

Gichuru, Eutychus Ngotho

Paperback

Political Biographies

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ISBN13: 9798180536709
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 74
Weight: 0.24
Height: 0.15 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Unmaking of Reality, by Eutychus Ngotho Gichuru, dares to propose that Trump's presidency is a philosophical challenge, that Trump is posthuman: not a human person with a narcissist disorder, but a posthuman condition that calls into question the foundations of the Western understanding of self, truth, and reality. Gichuru does not want to psychologise the subject, nor does he want to offer yet another critique of American populism. He insists that the Trumpian subject has no self, only performances of self that are endless. That he does not have any truth but weapons. And that he does not make use of his aggression, but his aggression is aesthetic. His violence, in other words, does not seek an end. His violence has no intention and cannot be reasoned with.

The audience does not look for the political message in his rhetoric; instead, they seek out the spectacle. He provides the performance. Trump gives his audience what they most want from a politician: someone to reflect back to them who they are, the resentful and the marginalised. Using a wide range of texts from philosophers such as Baudrillard, Nietzsche, Arendt, and Debord, he explores the way Trump has devalued human self and agency, and how he collapses the distinction between performance and self, frontstage and backstage, and shows how he uses language not to communicate, but to exercise power over us. He shows how he ushers in Baudrillard's hyperreal, where the copy always comes first, and where the map precedes the territory. Gichuru is not offering some obituary for democracy, but rather he is offering us some conceptual tools to help make sense of our epistemological crisis and the end of history, and in so doing, to help us break the mirror and reclaim our humanity by returning to the real, which is what is difficult, to reclaim a common space where truth and self might yet matter.

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