The New Social Media and the Glory: For a Theological-Political Criticism of the Functioning of Contemporary Liberal Democracies

The modern liberal democratic societies have represented themselves as the result of a necessary process of emancipation from the dimension of the sacred. This paper aims to problematize this “self-narrative”, by showing how these societies continue to be based on sacral systems which are indispensable to the functioning of the politic power. As Giorgio Agamben’s analyses about the genealogy of the “governmental power” have shown, the sacral assurance devices still persist when there is no more a theological-political system of legitimation of the sovereign. The ceremonial and liturgical elements prove to be fundamental precisely in modern democracies, where the sphere of the public opinion – as expression of the popular sovereignty – finds its significance only as source of acclamation and “glorification” of a politics which is actually anarchic. In this context, the development of “social medias”, like Facebook and Twitter, allows to reconsider Agamben’s research. The opportunity, offered by the net, to comment or to “like” every type of information contents, especially about politics, has created the illusion of a renewed possibility to be directly involved in decision-making processes: but this turns out to be only a system of acclamation and ceremonial assurance, that reaffirms the sacral inviolability of the governmental sphere. By crossing Agamben’s considerations with Guy Debord’s ones, then, it is possible to offer a new and unsettling interpretation of the modern “society of the spectacle”, whose mechanisms are not weakened but consolidated by the development of interactive systems: in this way, politics and “spectacle” end up by coinciding.