Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay reads ‘The Buribunks’ as a biopolitical parody of the Hegelian dialectic. Schmitt tells us that the essence of the Buribunk is the fact that they keep a diary. For the Buribunks, this is a means of realising reason in History and through it, they become the instruments of World-Spirit. Yet the ‘noble realm’ that emerges when the Buribunks overcome the Master-Slave relationship looks more like the world of biopolitical management that we find in Foucault, than the victory of freedom and equality that, according to Hegel, characterises the post-historical state. I also argue that Schmitt's story speaks directly to some of the fundamental problems of our digital era: like the Buribunk, the digital subject enables an apparatus of surveillance by voluntarily recording the minute details of their life; the vast archive this produces then deprives the subject of the comforts offered by the myths of progressivism.
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