THE THEOLOGY OF THE CODE: Luhmann, Leibniz, and the Forgotten Metaphysics of Distinction - Couverture souple

Blake, Noah

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798183987447

Editeur : Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

What if the most secular sociology of our age is a theology in disguise?

Niklas Luhmann built the most ambitious social theory of the twentieth century on a single, deceptively simple act: drawing a distinction. Law and crime, true and false, good and evil, included and excluded — for Luhmann, modern society is nothing but the endless processing of binary codes. His theory presents itself as cold, rigorous, and post-metaphysical: a value-free description of how society observes itself, purged of God, substance, and being.

The Theology of the Code argues that this self-image is an illusion — and that the illusion is the key to everything.

Tracing the binary back through George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — who in 1703 declared that the one is God and the zero is nothing, and called their combination an image of creation — Noah Blake reveals the buried theology inside the machine. Luhmann inherited a binary saturated with creation and quietly drained it of meaning, keeping the asymmetry of every code while deleting the God who once justified it. What remains is form without foundation, distinction without divinity, recursion without responsibility.

But the deleted ground does not vanish. It returns — as the silent preference of every code, as the relegation of the human being to the "environment" of a society with no room left for him, as the exclusion that calls itself mere observation. To recover the forgotten metaphysics of distinction, Blake shows, is also to recover what the code excludes: the human being who is not noise, the suffering that is not data, the claim that no system can register but thought must.

Rigorous yet gripping, The Theology of the Code reads systems theory against its own grain, drawing on the very latest scholarship to stage a confrontation between two visions of what it means to tell one thing from another — and to ask what we lose when we forget that every cut has a cost.

A landmark work of critical social theory for readers of Luhmann, Leibniz, political theology, and the philosophy of distinction.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798183987447
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 123
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg