Futures foreclosed : resignation as the affective condition of late capitalism

This thesis argues that resignation, as an affective experience, operates as a structural and political condition in late modern societies, produced by capitalism’s systematic erosion of the common world that sustains plurality and action, rather than as a merely psychological state. Resignation manifests in contemporary phenomena such as declining birth rates, educational disillusionment, political withdrawal, and social isolation, understood here as interconnected expressions of a broader closure of the future and a retreat from the spaces of community building rather than as discrete or isolated symptoms. Far from constituting a passive or neutral response, resignation is shown to be both an effect of neoliberal capitalism and a condition that reinforces it, rendering subjects vulnerable to authoritarian tendencies and the hollowing out of democratic life. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, the thesis reframes resignation as a crisis of worldlessness rather than as individual pathology, challenging psychologized, individualistic accounts of contemporary despair. Although resignation appears pervasive and structurally entrenched, the concept of natality designates a fragile and uncertain possibility of interruption: an opening through which action may reappear and a common world may be provisionally reconstituted under conditions of profound political exhaustion and hopelessness.