Infinite Resignation

Futility is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists… When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or what doesn’t exist; sense and non-sense eclipse each other, and whatever you do ultimately leads to an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game.

—Eugene Thacker