Genealogy of the Post-Bound Society: Power, Freedom, and the Crisis of Limits in Late Modernity

ABSTRACT Contemporary societies are increasingly characterized by the erosion of normative limits, the acceleration of technological power, and the fragmentation of moral and political reference points. While influential diagnoses such as Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity, Ulrich Beck’s risk society, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of political truth, Michel Foucault’s theory of power, and Michael Sandel’s critique of the unencumbered self-illuminate important aspects of this condition, they do not fully conceptualize the civilizational collapse of constitutive limits. This article introduces the concept of Post-Bound Society to describe and interpret this emerging historical configuration. The objective of the article is to reconstruct the intellectual genealogy of the post-bound concept and to clarify its dual structure as both a diagnostic of structural illimitation and a normative project of conscious ethical re-limitation. Methodologically, the article adopts a hermeneutic genealogy, interpreting three symbolic figures—Paul Celan (loss of height), Albert Camus (ethics of measure), and Sapper Camember (the absurdity of boundlessness)—in light of a contemporary civilizational diagnosis articulated in a 2025 lecture by Dominique de Villepin at the Sorbonne. The article’s contribution is threefold: it proposes a conceptual framework for understanding structural illimitation, introduces the notion of moral de-verticalization, and develops the idea of sovereign self-limitation as the ethical foundation of a reconstructive political paradigm termed the Post-Bound Society.