Ehrenberg’s depressed, normless actor is the endpoint—a subject "free" to self-exploit, drowning in optionality but paralyzed by the void of no shared horizon of meaning.

Thought, language, and material conditions are co-produced and co-distorted.

What psychoanalysis once called projection is, historically speaking, foundational. It does not simply distort perception—it produces reality. At both institutional and interpersonal levels, we co-generate the people we fear or dominate. As Mader writes, this is our thought and unthought generation and cultivation of other human beings.

If we are to take communicative ethics seriously—not as an academic exercise but as a political and moral imperative—then we must start by securing the material and epistemic conditions of communication. Only under such conditions can the world be named truthfully, and only through that naming can it begin to change.