The Political Vocation of Philosophy. Donatella Di Cesare
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the immanence and reinforces the closure.10 Only a logic of the impossible would be able to deviate and dislocate it. To pre-empt the future in order to avoid it: the regime of saturated immanence is the closed world of a preventative police, a temporal prison where farsightedness crosses over into a clairvoyance that tries to ward off any change. This world has already escaped its shadow. It is condemned to the imperative of the day, to the exhausted torpor of the extended alarm, to the tireless half-sleep of a light that never goes out, in a diurnal virtuality that knows no night.
Notes
1 1. Peter Sloterdijk, Globes. Spheres Volume II: Macrospherology, New York: semiotext(e), 2014.
2 2. Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late Modern Temporality, Aarhus: NSU Press, 2010.
3 3. Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
4 4. Frédéric Neyrat, Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism, New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
5 5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
6 6. Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
7 7. Isabelle Stengers, Au temps des catastrophes. Résister la barbarie qui vient, Paris: La Découverte, 2013.
8 8. Slavoj Žižek, Demanding the Impossible, Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
9 9. For accelerationist positions, see, for instance Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Acceleration and Capitalism, Winchester: Zero Books, 2014.
10 10. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Winchester: Zero Books, 2010.
2 Heraclitus, wakefulness and the original communism
Since its debut, philosophy has paid particular attention to the theme of wakefulness, to the point that wakefulness becomes the symbolic representation, the perspicuous metaphor, that preceded philosophy even before it had a name. Wakefulness is the mysterious surging of an inner light that marks a re-emergence from the night. It is the force of being re-summoned, the wonder of the life that stands up again, the return to the self. Philosophy is, first of all, this.
It was Heraclitus who separated the flaring of the day from myth, setting it up as a metaphysical category. He was called ‘the obscure’ because of his enigmatic and oracular style. Thus began the adventure of thought guided by the light of the lógos. It articulates the world, which becomes cosmos, unfolding in an uninterrupted transcendence of its own narrow, meagre range, toward an ever more vast, elevated and common sphere.
Very little is known about Heraclitus’ life. Ancient biographers attributed him a royal descent. Diogenes Laërtius says that ‘He was above all men of a lofty and arrogant spirit.’1 This almost disdainful attitude owed to a dispute with his fellow citizens, whom he sharply rebuked for the exile imposed on his friend Hermodorus after the failed democratic revolution. Ephesus, an Ionian city at the border between the Turkish coast and the European sea, was not yet Athenian. But there was no lack of tensions. Resentful, Heraclitus distanced himself from political life and rejected the request to lay down laws for the pólis, which he now considered governed by a bad Constitution. He retired to the temple of Artemides, where, as legend has it, he set down his great book, subdivided into three discourses: the first on everything, the second on politics, and the third on theology. Someone later gave this work a title which entered into widespread use: Perì phúseos. It is almost as if Heraclitus had written a treatise on phúsis, on nature understood as the principle and substance of all things. Aristotle helped to entrench this vision – a misleading and reductive one. Yet there also exists an ancient tradition, further embodied by the Stoic Diodotus, according to whom Heraclitus’ book had nothing to do with nature, except at a few points, and instead focused on political themes: perì politeías.
Moreover, it is not hard to recognise, against the numinous backdrop, the political-tragic inspiration of Heraclitus’ thought in the over 120 extant fragments of his work. The man who speaks here is not so much the explorer of the cosmos as the severe guardian of the city, the interpreter of the pólemos – that conflict, the ‘father’ of all things, which reigns over everything (B 53). The quarrel in the pólis is projected onto all reality in order to scrutinise the foundations of the law that governs it, to connect together in its unity all that is apparently scattered and multiple, to grasp the palíntropos harmoníe, the ‘discordant harmony’ of opposites (B 51). The city offers the paradigm for interpreting the world.
Perceiving the one in everything that is differentiated: this is the great merit of Heraclitus, recognised as the forerunner of the dialectic. As Hegel wrote: ‘Here we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic.’2 Yet, one should avoid any distortion of historical perspective here. The harmony of opposites – the enigmatic bond of which Heraclitus speaks – is not a speculative unity, but rather the unexpected passage through which the one incessantly changes into the other: life and death, day and night, wakefulness and sleep, summer and winter, peace and war. This vision has wrongly been ossified in a doctrine of perennial becoming, of fluidity, that pánta rheî of which there is no trace in the fragments from Heraclitus. He does, indeed, speak of the river ‘we enter and do not enter, we are and we are not’ (B 49a) – but only in order to emphasise the constant replacement of its ever-different waters. Unsurprisingly, it is the flame – which survives by transforming itself, which changes depending on the airs with which it mixes – that visually renders the harmonious concord among opposites.
Nothing can escape this law, not even the names which shed light on oppositions. Heraclitus was first in that line-up of thinkers who looked to language in order to understand reality. The hidden harmony which governs the cosmos is harboured within the lógos, which everything must happen in accordance with. This is an eternal and universal law, able to regulate becoming, which is not a blind plunge but rather a knowing move back and forth, from one opposite to the other.
But who will want to listen to the lógos? Who will want to listen to it, in its enigmatic ambiguity? This is Heraclitus’ question – and it already contains a warning. Deaf, absent, almost numbed, prey to flows of dreams and particular opinions – far from what is ‘wise’, sóphon – mortals draw away from listening. They live closed in on themselves, as if they were dreaming, prisoners of their own private existence, of their suffocating small-mindedness. Hence the denunciation of idiocy, which in Greek is etymologically related to property – idiótes derives from ídios, ‘one’s own’. It is, then, impossible to reach what is ‘common’, koinón. Heraclitus uses the Ionian form xunón, which through a play on words arrives at xùn nôi, that is, at noûs, ‘with reason’ (B 114). Not only is intelligence common, but that which is common is based on intelligence. This is not a matter of immediate intuition, but rather of the knowledge that orders the cosmos, which is articulated and combined in the lógos. An idiot is he who refuses to listen, who remains in the isolation of the night, cutting himself off from participation in the common day and the common world. Thus rings out the sentence passed by Heraclitus: ‘The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own’ (B 89).
As night and day follow one after the other, they beat the rhythm of time; but unlike what Hesiod imagined, they are not separate. Rather, they are a single whole, even if they alternate as opposites. But neither passes over into the other – for they remain distinct. Night and day point beyond themselves: they are indices, or rather symbols. The oppositions multiply. While the ultimate polarity of life and death appears enigmatically in the background – will there be a return, from death to life? – darkness and light summon sleep and wakefulness. The first metaphysician of light, Heraclitus represented the day as wisdom spreading out from the lógos, which makes common in the light. Wakefulness is the prelude to philosophy.
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