Transparency as Secular Eschatology in Dave Eggers’s Dystopian Novel The Circle

Abstract

The Circle by Dave Eggers (2013) has been the subject of scholarly analysis largely as a fable of digital surveillance and a critique of transhumanists’ fantasies about achieving human perfection, as well as a warning against the corporate takeover of referendum processes, but these readings miss the novel’s most profound structural logic. Drawing on Karl Löwith’s argument that present-day ideologies of progress are secularized expressions of Christian eschatology (Löwith, 1949; Chorell, 2021), Eric Voegelin’s discussion of the “immanentization of the eschaton” (Voegelin, 1952), and resources from Carl Schmitt’s political theology (Schmitt, 2005) and Frank Kermode’s poetics of ending (Kermode, 1967), the article develops the thesis that The Circle’s principle of total transparency is best understood as a secular eschatology. By means of close reading, the article demonstrates that Eggers systematically translates the grammar of Christian salvation history to a technological framework: a fallen world where there are secrets and “lies,” conversion and confession through the ritual of “going clear,” redemption of suffering through the exposure of suffering, the elimination of death through perpetuation of data, and an ultimate “Completion” (the company’s term for the event) that is also an immanent eschaton of “eternal light” that offers “peace” and “unity” (Eggers 2013, p. 490). Thus, the horror of The Circle is therefore theological more than merely political, and in achieving the eschaton within history, The Circle creates the totalitarian finality that Löwith and Jayne Svenungsson cite as a hazard of immanentizing the end. Recontextualising total transparency as a form of secular eschatology situates The Circle in the intellectual history of secularization and thus provides a new perspective regarding contemporary digital dystopia.