Modern institutions behave as if humans are sovereign choosers. This essay argues that "agency'' is not a discovered fact but a load-bearing fiction required by Enlightenment modernity to operate courts, markets, and liberal politics. Beginning from lived coercion rather than seminar metaphysics, the essay reframes agency as differential responsiveness shaped by material, temporal, relational, epistemic, somatic, and juridical conditions. A decolonial survey demonstrates that non-Western and subaltern traditions have long treated selfhood as relational, processual, or illusory, converging with contemporary critiques from neuroscience, phenomenology, and social theory. The proposal is not fatalism but a non-binary model of agency as gradient capacity—more or less responsiveness within constraints—supporting ethics of maintenance and politics of condition stewardship over retribution and moral theatre. The conclusion situates this reframing within Dis-Integrationism: if there is no sovereign self, then systems premised on aggregating such selves cannot cohere without fictions, and we should stop pretending they do.

👉Full Essay: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17276732

👉 Anti-Enlightenment Project: https://zenodo.org/communities/antienlightenment/