By Fabio Vighi

When governments release politically explosive information, the explanation is almost always procedural: a law is passed, a deadline arrives, documents are reviewed, redactions are applied, publication follows. Officially, such choreography signals institutional health, transparency as proof of vitality. The release of the Epstein files has been presented in precisely these terms: Congress mandated disclosure; the Department of Justice complied; a statutory clock was observed. Yet what occurred in practice was not a single act of disclosure but a staggered unveiling. By the 19 December 2025 deadline, barely one percent of the files had been made public, with further batches released in waves thereafter. The effect was less cathartic revelation than serialized exposure – a drip-feed of scandal that kept outrage alive while deferring any real confrontation or resolution.

This teasing temporality inevitably provoked suspicion: critics pointed to political timing, media management, and strategic calibration of attention. But beyond questions of motive lies something more symptomatic. The carefully calibrated procedure resembles the cultural logic it purports to expose. What we witness is not bureaucratic caution but a system that sustains itself also through managed scandal, prolonging the spectacle of corruption as a substitute for structural renewal. In this sense, the staggered release matters much less as an administrative failure than as an index of a civilisation that has learned how to decline while simulating a long-expired vitality.

We live in a time of severe socio-economic contraction and corresponding spiritual anomie, where the system’s reproductive fatigue generates a plethora of what Antonio Gramsci called “morbid symptoms”: phenomena that do not herald transformation but function to mask societal decay. Libidinal investment in such phenomena tends to deepen subjugation, as moral outrage becomes emotional attachment while collective misery is reproduced through the very spectacles that appear to expose it. The Epstein files belong to this morbid landscape, not because they are unimportant, but because they dramatize and conceal systemic decline in one fell swoop.

The first point to stress is that these are not just “Epstein files,” but the archival trace of a civilisation that has systematically reproduced itself through organised forms of violence. Capitalism and sexual abuse are driven by the same predatory logic: the capacity to dehumanize others and exploit vulnerability for profit. Within such a system, the traits that make someone a successful billionaire are disturbingly adjacent to those that enable rape, paedophilia, and genocidal violence. To be clear, then, capitalism does not simply tolerate predatory personalities; it breeds them. In this sense, Epstein’s network functions as a metonymy for the human relations that a greed-driven civilisation promotes – a laboratory exposing the inevitable convergence of economic and sexual predation. What appears as aberration is, in fact, a magnified image of the “rules of the game”. The fundamental reason why the Epstein scandal should shock us is that it reveals, in concentrated form, the rotten core of the system itself.

There is, at first glance, some truth in comparing the millions of pages of Epstein-related documents to the encyclopaedic excess of the Marquis de Sade’s catalogues of transgression – a resonance reinforced by the widely reported detail that Jeffrey Epstein kept a copy of Sade’s Justine (the story of a twelve-year old ingénue exploited and abused by everyone she meets) on the desk of his Manhattan residence. The private jet routes, the infamous “Lolita Express,” the island compound, the transnational circulation of underage victims, Epstein and Maxwell’s methods for identifying and tormenting their prey – all of this undoubtedly carries a Sadean aura of ritualised elite libertinism.

But the Epstein files unveil something more specific. They reveal the technocratic and transactional form of what Jacques Lacan discerned in Sade: sadistic enjoyment organised as duty, libidinally charged exploitation routinised as procedure. As Adorno and Horkheimer argued before Lacan, Sade does not stand outside the Enlightenment (‘the philosophy which equates the truth with scientific systematization’)[i] but exposes its dark underside: reason reduced to calculation, and calculation hardened into organised brutality. Adorno and Horkheimer diagnosed the collapse of modern reason into domination, while Lacan added that this domination is sustained by jouissance.

If, then, Sade revealed the superego injunction of modernity (“you must enjoy!”), Epstein stands as its late-capitalist mutation. This is not merely a repetition of aristocratic decadence at the dawn of industrial modernity. It is something historically newer and more disturbing: the seamless integration of economic accumulation and sexual exploitation into the ordinary operating procedures of elite systems. Epstein represents a financialised degeneration of Sade’s universe: the merging of libidinal coercion and economic leverage in seedy networks where bodies, secrets, and capital circulate through the same closed circuits of power. His documented fascination with eugenics, transhumanism, and social engineering extends this exploitative logic toward a dystopia of technofascism in which life itself is reconceived as an asset to be strategically conditioned. Within this dark but dominant configuration, bodies function as collateral, secrets as instruments of control, and capital as the ultimate arbiter of visibility and disposability.

And yet, the very scandals that seem to expose systemic violence often function to redirect public anger toward individual monsters, leaving the underlying structures untouched – and in doing so, stabilising them. The spectacle of a few bad apples functions as a moral alibi, allowing the system that cultivates them to appear fundamentally sound. In the current phase of intra-civilisational breakdown, elite institutions no longer even attempt to improve collective conditions but instead specialise in managing exorbitant debt levels, stagnation, instability, and slow erosion. They are indeed highly competent at this task, having inherited decades of well-honed crisis-management practices. Meanwhile, productivity has turned into an abstract signifier, while wealth increasingly accumulates in high-risk and highly manipulated financial instruments that are completely detached from material production and everyday social life. Work, for growing numbers of people, is not only more precarious and structurally marginal to the functioning of hyper-financialised capitalist accumulation, but also increasingly emptied of social meaning.

So what is truly disturbing about the Epstein files is how perfectly they fit the depressed historical condition we inhabit. If crisis has been normalised as the basic grammar of governance, then scandal has become our primary mode of libidinal expression – a displaced theatre for intensities that no longer circulate in our lived social space. Emotionally and libidinally, the figure of the hypersexualised predator is the ideal symbolic object for a radically desexualised age where desire, seduction, and the intimacy of sex itself have been evacuated from life and outsourced to screens in the forms of pornography – whether explicit or metaphorical. The smartphone, in this sense, functions as the ultimate libido-killer. What it evacuates returns as compulsive outrage directed at curated images of elite obscenity. Sex is everywhere around us – we are literally bombarded by sexualised signifiers – except, of course, where it belongs. Under conditions of screen addiction, what disappears is the very space of secrecy, fantasy, symbolic distance, and chance encounters through which desire once operated. Far from rupturing the system, then, the Epstein scandal completes it, offering a hyperreal image of excess in a world where the joy of lived intensity has long been hollowed out.

Paradoxically, the Epstein files allow senile capitalism to fake vitality, a libidinal energy vanished from its mode of production. Obscenity here is not accidental but elevated to a simulated and ubiquitous infrastructural role. In the past, political systems resorted to spectacles of excess only sporadically; today, such displays are orchestrated continually, demonstrating an unbroken capacity for affective control. Culture wars, elite scandals, threats of geopolitical escalations, moral panics, and bouts of hysterical self-victimisation now compose an unbroken “stream of systemic consciousness” demanding total emotional investment. Each event is sold as the defining crisis of the moment, thus temporarily reorganising collective attention while deferring recognition of long-term structural decay. Why confront the collapse of political economy when millions of pages of Epstein files await immediate consumption? Proliferating wiki-style archives convert court documents into consumable outrage: by indexing names, flights, photos, and degenerate acts, they transform systemic depravity into endlessly scrollable scandal.

In Jean Baudrillard’s terms, these files circulate as pure simulation, effectively divorced from most people’s struggle of everyday experience and any practical capacity to transform it. As such, they sustain the numbing illusion of moral engagement while the system’s decay remains invisible and out of reach. What is more, they are perfectly bipartisan. The Epstein files produce industrial quantities of scandals for everyone, left and right alike – Noam Chomsky, Bill Clinton, Peter Mandelson, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Donald Trump, liberal and conservative elites across the spectrum – making outrage politically unbiased. This is a spectacle that transcends divisions while being perfectly irrelevant to the decay it theatrically mimics. Bread and circuses never disappeared – they became an industry.

Under emergency capitalism, spectacle performs three essential stabilizing functions.

First, it manages attention. Economic stagnation is slow and abstract. Financialization is technical. Debt refinancing, productivity and labour market decline need to remain concealed. Elite criminal scandal, by contrast, is narratively perfect: it provides identifiable villains, moral clarity, and endless symbolic detail. Public discourse gravitates toward what is emotionally legible, not what is structurally critical.

Second, it manages legitimacy. When systems cannot deliver shared prosperity but work only for a narrow elite, they must deliver some kind of accountability. Even if structural dynamics remain untouched, the performance of exposure signals that the system is capable of self-correction. The spectacle of punishment substitutes for structural change.

Third, it manages fear. Spectacle transforms diffuse systemic anxiety into targeted moral panic. Instead of asking why the system itself is imploding, populations are encouraged to focus on individual corruption, cultural enemies, or shocking criminal networks. The system appears threatened by outsiders, not by its own internal exhaustion.

What emerges is something darker than simple distraction: a creeping form of social amnesia. The obscenity lies in the symmetry: a system that increasingly relies on financial manipulation, asset inflation, and debt engineering to simulate economic vitality produces spectacles that are equally excessive, equally detached from social reality, and profoundly numbing. While capitalism insists it is still productive, the obscene spectacle it unleashes insists that something meaningful is still happening. Meanwhile, the material foundations of the “work society” continue to erode. Automation displaces labour faster than ever. White-collar work is increasingly fragmented or algorithmically managed. Entire generations struggle to enter the labour markets through insecurity and anxiety. Productivity gains concentrate into capital ownership rather than wage growth. While, predictably, Trump’s tariffs do nothing against an out-of-control US trade deficit.

In this context, scandal cycles begin to resemble a kind of assisted social death. They do not name catastrophic collapse, but progressive anaemia. Institutions remain operative, elections continue to take place, markets appear to function. But the underlying social organism loses resilience; it loses its shared purpose, the expectation that the future will be better than the present.

This results in a feedback loop in which increasingly obscene spectacle becomes necessary to stabilize an increasingly bankrupt “new normal”. The deepest obscenity is not the scandal itself. It is the insistence, repeated endlessly through institutional language and media ritual, that everything is fundamentally still working. If this is the phase we have entered, the defining political question will be whether societies can learn to recognize these spectacles as symptoms of systemic exhaustion. Because the ideological endurance of declining systems lies in its ability to convert decline itself into an endless series of emotionally absorbing events. And if that is true, then the real danger is not sudden collapse. The real danger is a civilization that learns how to fade while believing it is still doing fine.

Notes

[i] Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997 [1944]), p. 82.