Committing to the Simulacrum: Negative Theology and the Ontological Crisis of the Political Event under Platform Capitalism

Abstract

This article explores the philosophical and theological implications of artificial intelligence within political communication, focusing not on technological functionality but on the ontological, ethical, and symbolic transformations it enacts. AI no longer operates merely as a tool of mediation but as a structural reconfiguration of political subjectivity, agency, and discourse. Drawing on the work of Jean Baudrillard, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Giorgio Agamben, the paper argues that AI functions as a simulacrum of participation, supplanting political will with predictive modeling, transforming truth into statistical probability, and replacing deliberative agency with interface-driven feedback. Central to the article is the analysis of contemporary political imaginaries as radically ambivalent: utopianism and techno-eschatology converge in platform capitalism to neutralize the Event in Badiou’s sense. AI’s predictive infrastructure forecloses the ontological surprise necessary for political rupture, thereby simulating futurity while eliminating messianic time. At stake is not merely the instrumentalization of political discourse but the annihilation of the very conditions under which political truth can emerge. Yet even within this saturation, the article locates residual theological motifs—errors, glitches, ruptures—that escape systematization and open a field of negative political theology. Ultimately, the article proposes that resistance in the age of algorithmic governance must take the form of fidelity without referent, of silence, interruption, and refusal to participate in the liturgy of feedback. In the face of a simulated totality, the possibility of the Event survives only as a structural glitch—a theological excess irreducible to computation, and thus the last site of political hope.