Atomization
Anthony van Dyck, The Lomellini Family, between 1625 and 1627
“Flaubert had a penchant for remote intimacy”
Frederick Brown
First, Nietzsche killed the Christian God pronouncing him deceased in his essay in 1882,[1] the two world wars and genocides that followed have rendered the faith in a benign supreme being who has intelligence beside the point. Living in 2025 in the United States and being from Georgia, it is impossible to believe in the state structure, the thought that the state has your best interest at heart and the right-wing broligarchy cares about anything else besides their financial stakes is a bit absurd.[2] Western inability to face Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialism in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus including the ruinous war in Ukraine, and the Russian recolonization of Georgia does not add positivity to our belief in the international or state structures. To put it bluntly, Trump and Putin killed the state or at least the civil spaces we have associated with being an integral part of the state.
Another death defining our time is brought on by our iPhones killing relationships or at least the way we used to interact. And family is our most fundamental, foundational relationship suffering from it.[3] Now, we are killing families in ways we do not even see with full clarity. Look at the grown-ups walking the streets of New York with their kids, how often do you see children walking without a phone in their hand? And what are we left with? It seems all that remains is an immense intellectual history and an uphill battle to raise our children within the cannons of a world that no longer exists; within the cannons that upheld traditions and values no longer relevant to our present.
In Honoré de Balzac’s The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, a sharp and well-written 1842 epistolary novel-length exchange of two young noblewomen one of the fathers explains to her daughter how the state lives only if the family institution lives. He professes that once the institution of the family is corrupted, the state also fails to survive. “Any country not founded in paternal authority has no guarantee of existence, for with that authority begins the ladder of responsibilities and subordinations, which runs straight up to the king… Every animal has its own instinct: man’s is the family spirit.”[4] Now, I am all for partnerships in the families, not paternal (and macho-centered) authorities, yet somehow this statement presses the right button. Compassion, values, and non-verbal education that are part of growing up in a family are somehow becoming rare and undervalued.
In our case, we also gave out on the family-God-state as a global society in the name of neoliberalism that now, in turn, has been pronounced dead because of its inability to deal with the pressing issues of immigration, health, education, and politics. What is to fill these voids? SM and algorithms catered to our weaknesses or IG emojis raising our kids?[5] On the one hand, it could be argued we are in a cycle of anarchy-dissolution-regrouping-new balance, on the other hand, we might say we observing the dissolution of the controlled society as described by Gilles Deleuze[6] and the emergence of new, hyper-modernized Big Brother entity. These two statements do not contradict each other, yet, somehow, I would rather choose Balzac’s time to live in if I could.
by Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani
[1] “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III, Section 125
[2] Carole Cadwalladr, “How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world,” The Guardian, January 2025.
[3] “The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965.”-Derek Thompson, “The Anti-Social Century,” The Atlantic, January 8, 2025.
[4] Honoré de Balzac, “The Memoirs of the Two Young Wives,” p.58. New York Review Books, New York 2018.
[5] e.g. watch “Adolescence,“ 2025 by Philip Barantini for example.
[6] “The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the pre-eminent instance of the enclosed environment.” Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control
.