Omnia habentes. Notes on culture, malaise, and meaning

10 Jun, 2025

Edward Hopper, Morning Sun (1952). Columbus Museum of Art.

I. In 1908, Georg Simmel wrote that modern man faces a troubling situation: he lives surrounded by cultural elements that, while not irrelevant, no longer feel truly meaningful. This accumulation cannot be fully assimilated, nor can it be discarded, since it forms part of his potential inner development. To name this paradox, Simmel invokes a phrase rich in meaning: omnia habentes, nihil possidentes — “having everything, possessing nothing.” The expression inverts an old formula from early Christianity, later adopted by the Franciscans: nihil habentes, omnia possidentes — “having nothing, we possess everything.” Against that liberating poverty, the modern subject embodies its tragic reverse. He has everything, but possesses nothing. Abundance, instead of enriching inner life, ends up weakening the link with what is meaningful.¹

The tragedy, for Simmel, is that culture ceases to be a mediation between the subject and the world, and becomes an external, impersonal totality that imposes its own logic. What was meant to enrich now alienates. The expansion of culture does not guarantee its appropriation.

II. Some years later, Sigmund Freud offered a diagnosis just as structural as Simmel's, though focused on a different dimension: the psychic cost of civilized life. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he argued that to inhabit the symbolic order that makes social life possible, the subject must repress their most fundamental drives (especially sexual and aggressive ones).² This renunciation is not a one-time act, but an ongoing demand. It is the precondition for culture, and simultaneously, its inevitable source of suffering.

The cost is high. What is repressed does not disappear; it returns in the form of malaise. Culture fosters cohesion but undermines the subject from within, requiring them to give up part of themselves to sustain the social bond. In that loss, a core piece of psychic vitality is sacrificed.

Unlike Simmel, Freud does not dwell on cultural overabundance but on its prohibitive nature. Yet both share a fundamental insight: cultural “progress” is neither linear nor redemptive. It has a cost. The modern subject (immersed in signs, systems, structures, and regulations) is not only overwhelmed by the expansion of the objective, but also constrained by civilization's inner demands. Through excess or repression, what prevails is a form of dispossession.

III. Simmel and Freud's diagnoses resonate with contemporary social thought. Thinkers like Hartmut Rosa and Byung-Chul Han have updated (and often deepened) the tension between culture and appropriation.

Rosa sees the defining trait of late modernity as acceleration.³ Time overflows; social change, technological innovation, work demands, and daily routines all speed up. But this velocity creates a growing difficulty in establishing resonant relationships with the world. Experience becomes fleeting, and what is available turns unassimilable. Cultural complexity no longer excludes, as in Simmel's view. Now it's speed that prevents appropriation. What remains is a form of temporal alienation, where the subject moves through experiences without being able to dwell in them.

Han, for his part, describes a shift in the form of power. In place of a disciplinary logic that imposes limits from outside, today's logic of performance installs its demands within the subject.⁴ Self-exploitation replaces prohibition; voluntary hyperactivity takes the place of obedience.

IV. Simmel's contradiction (having everything, possessing nothing) takes on new forms under digital capitalism. In this regime, the relationship between people and cultural goods is defined not by ownership but by access. Listening to music, reading books, watching films, or playing games no longer means owning those things, but temporarily accessing them through platforms that regulate the relationship according to opaque and shifting terms.

Spotify, Kindle, Steam, Netflix do not offer objects, but licenses. They don't grant sovereignty over culture, but a restricted availability. DRM, adhesion contracts, and unilateral terms of service ensure that this supposed abundance comes with a radical loss of control. What appears as freedom of choice often amounts to infrastructural dependency.

Instead of ownership: subscription; instead of appropriation: rental. Culture becomes a closed, opaque, standardized, and surveilled interface; no longer a field of intervention.

Added to this is another layer of dispossession: that which operates on subjectivity itself. Platforms mediate access to content, but that is not their primary function. They also capture, process, and monetize the activity of users. Culture becomes a vehicle for data extraction, behavior modeling, and decision shaping. In exchange for functionality, the subject gives up attention, time, privacy, and/or agency.

Thus, access (presented as a solution to scarcity) intensifies the dispossession Simmel identified. Culture becomes at once unlimited and fragile. Abundant yet alien. What circulates cannot be made one's own. And the subject, though more connected than ever, finds themselves increasingly displaced.

V. The digital environment not only reorganizes access to culture, it redefines how it is lived and internalized. The transformation is double: it alters the devices through which symbolic content is reached, and it reshapes the psychic architecture of those who engage with it. In this regime, malaise no longer stems primarily from prohibition (as in the Freudian disciplinary model), but from saturation. The contemporary subject is not repressed, they are overstimulated.

Still, the Freudian analogy remains powerful. If civilization once demanded drive renunciation in exchange for safety and order, digital capitalism demands continuous attention in exchange for access. What was once prohibited is now demanded. Malaise arises from excess, not lack. It no longer comes from the outside, it is internalized and self-imposed.

Han describes this mutation as the shift from the obedient subject to the performance-driven subject. An individual who exploits themselves in the name of autonomy. The result is a drained, anxious, hollowed-out subjectivity. Rosa, for his part, shows how social and technological acceleration prevents grounding. The faster experience moves, the harder it becomes to appropriate. Culture, under this logic, becomes a continuous flow without sedimentation.

To this dynamic of saturation, we must add the erosion of cognitive sovereignty. A more silent, yet no less profound, layer of dispossession. As Juan Ruocco points out, in an environment saturated with stimuli designed to capture and modulate attention, the subject gradually loses the ability to direct their own thought; to decide what to dwell on, what to internalize, what to discard. Besides accessing a culture they cannot fully inhabit, they also lose their ability to govern the flow of their own consciousness. Contemporary malaise thus no longer only affects objects or relationships. It touches the very core of psychic life.

This new type of malaise (defined, as we've seen, more by overload than repression) reframes the Simmelian structure of dispossession. It's no longer just about lacking what one desires, but about being unable to sustain what one already has. Unlimited access does not ensure appropriation. It multiplies exposure but erodes interiority. Subjectivity becomes fragmented, dispersed, unable to gather, process, or connect. The paradox remains: omnia habentes, nihil possidentes. But its material and technical conditions have changed. What Simmel described as a mismatch between objective culture and inner life now appears as a short-circuit between total connectivity and subjective disconnection.

VI. In the face of this contemporary malaise, the writings of Pope Francis can be read as a symbolic and political intervention that revives central elements of the Franciscan tradition. His choice of name was already a statement. From the outset of his papacy, Francis has embodied a spirituality grounded in care, restraint, detachment, and fraternity; openly opposing the logic of accumulation and disposability that defines today's order.

This stance becomes concrete in his critique of the dominant cultural model. In Laudato Si' (2015), Francis denounces ecological devastation, but also questions the technocratic paradigm and the instrumentalization of nature. It is, in part, a disconnection between means and ends. Contemporary culture, he argues, has severed fundamental bonds (with the environment, with others, even with oneself). What appears as an ecological crisis is also, and above all, a spiritual and cultural crisis.

In Fratelli Tutti (2020), this critique extends into the social realm. Francis proposes an ethic of fraternity as an alternative to competitive individualism and the performance-driven logic. What's at stake is more than a new political pact; it's the reconstruction of a vital bond with the common. In response to the fragmentation of experience, he calls for a culture of encounter, of proximity. Perhaps even of slowness.

This critical spirituality is a form of symbolic reappropriation in a time when access to culture no longer guarantees meaning. Its strength lies in reintroducing categories that have been displaced by contemporary acceleratiom (care, waiting, rootedness, community). In a world saturated with stimuli and stripped of interiority, the task is to recover the conditions of livability.

From this perspective, the Franciscan position serves as a counter-image to the Simmelian subject. He does not have everything, but he is ready to possess what matters. He questions culture without denying it. He seeks to make it livable again.

VII. To recap, the formula omnia habentes, nihil possidentes still holds critical power today. Like Freud's diagnosis of civilization's malaise, it reminds us that progress does not guarantee fulfillment, nor does cultural expansion automatically generate meaning. Through excess or repression, what often results is a dispossessed subjectivity; unable to make its own what surrounds it.

In the present context, this dispossession takes new forms. The logic of digital access, the acceleration of social rhythms, and the constant saturation of stimuli have deepened Simmel's paradox. What was once forbidden is now ungraspable. What was inaccessible has become evanescent. And the result is a fragmented subjectivity; displaced, ungrounded, with neither time nor space to appropriate what it lives.

In this context, I don't believe Pope Francis's legacy proposes a return to the past. Rather, it suggests another way of being in the world. An ethical and spiritual reappropriation of culture that, without denying access, reconnects it with meaning.

The open question (more existential than theoretical) is whether we can still create conditions for experience to regain depth. For access not to exclude appropriation. For culture to once again offer the possibility of grounding. In an era that multiplies what is available and diminishes what is inhabitable, perhaps critique must incorporate an ethical gaze (maybe even a spiritual one) that reopens the question of meaning.

— E.

#culture #francis #freud #han #malaise #meaning #rosa #ruocco #simmel #subjectivity