Phenomenology of the Capitalist Eternisation

Written between 2021 and 2025 in Berlin and Pavia, João Romeiro Hermeto's Phenomenology of the Capitalist Eternisation develops a Marxist process-ontological critique of contemporary capitalist consciousness. Beginning from his postdoctoral research at Freie Universität Berlin, Hermeto identifies the "perpetual present" as capitalism's fundamental mode of temporal domination-an ahistorical social condition that disables transformation by destroying collective memory. Through close readings of philosophical, aesthetic, and ideological expressions of the current epoch, he analyzes how culture and thought are reshaped to fit capital's eternal now. Engaging thinkers from Marx, Hegel, and Lukács to Debord, Losurdo, and Jameson, Hermeto argues that capitalism reproduces itself by colonizing temporality-by replacing historical consciousness with a constant spectacle of the present. The book ranges from the philosophy of art and media to political theology, ecology, and intellectual property as mechanisms of control over knowledge production. At once philosophical and political, this study is a call to recover a dialectical sense of history-to reignite the capacity for collective imagination and social change within a world that declares itself eternal.

Written between 2021 and 2025 in Berlin and Pavia, João Romeiro Hermeto's Phenomenology of the Capitalist Eternisation develops a Marxist process-ontological critique of contemporary capitalist consciousness. Beginning from his postdoctoral research at Freie Universität Berlin, Hermeto identifies the "perpetual present" as capitalism's fundamental mode of temporal domination-an ahistorical social condition that disables transformation by destroying collective memory. Through close readings of philosophical, aesthetic, and ideological expressions of the current epoch, he analyzes how culture and thought are reshaped to fit capital's eternal now. Engaging thinkers from Marx, Hegel, and Lukács to Debord, Losurdo, and Jameson, Hermeto argues that capitalism reproduces itself by colonizing temporality-by replacing historical consciousness with a constant spectacle of the present. The book ranges from the philosophy of art and media to political theology, ecology, and intellectual property as mechanisms of control over knowledge production. At once philosophical and political, this study is a call to recover a dialectical sense of history-to reignite the capacity for collective imagination and social change within a world that declares itself eternal.