Politics After the Repair Illusion - World-capability, Ontological Displacement, and the Boundary of Abstract Simulation

This paper argues that the political order of the past decades rested on a fundamental error: the assumption that the world is, in principle, repairable. International institutions, interventions, and governance models operated under the implicit ontology that political interventions are reversible, translatable, or integrable. This assumption is not merely optimistic, but empirically, historically, and ontologically false. Political actions can produce ontological displacements: irreversible thresholds beyond which former realities are no longer addressable. After such enactments, there is no “return” – neither institutionally nor morally. Repair then no longer functions as healing, but as the consolidation of a transformed world that has often lost its own capacity to be sustained. Drawing on 9/11, the Iraq War, and current geopolitical threshold cases in connection with the threat of occupying Greenland by U.S. President Trump, the paper shows that the failure of political order is not primarily strategic or normative, but epistemic. Abstract institutions simulate responsibility without being able to bear it. They operate in a state-based manner and remain structurally inaccessible to the embodied suffering of individuals. On this basis, the paper develops a new framework of political responsibility that takes not institutions but world-capability as its measure. Politics after the rightward shift – and after Trump – cannot consist in a mere restoration of institutions. It must acknowledge that not every exercise of power is repairable and that responsibility ends where worlds are irreversibly destroyed or displaced. Political responsibility does not begin with governance, but with the refusal of enactments whose price can no longer be borne.