If capitalism is both the absorber and amplifier of desire—fueling democracy’s libido—then expansion is not peripheral but constitutive.
Systems stretch to accommodate excess, yet this elasticity isn’t infinite. Overexpansion risks fragmentation: fringes become autonomous, forging counter-logics that mirror the center’s intensity, yet oppose its cohesion.
Paradoxically, containment strategies drive further diffusion (escape efforts or flattening of desire). Thus, the system may not snap abruptly but dissolve into pluralities of incompatible coherence unless they can be reabsorbed in time.
Crucially, the very mechanisms sustaining the system—growth, consumption, abstraction—are also corrosive, acidic. Retraction, then, is no remedy; it may hasten collapse.
We face a paradox: to persist is to risk implosion; to recede, disintegration.
–
–
–