The Political Vocation of Philosophy. Donatella Di Cesare
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fundamentally, such an outcome was part of its plans.
This was true already with the first electric city lights, a guarantee of security and a projection of success. The intense, brilliant lighting which spread across the universal supermarket seemed to fulfil this initial promise. The fight against darkness, blackness, the shadows, phantasms, mystery, the unknown, is the paroxysmal result of a stubborn and prolonged Enlightenment spirit which opened up a new sky: an atmosphere of disaster. Blanchot has emphasised the etymology of disaster:3 an expanse without stars, without the points of reference which would allow one to orient oneself. Even if there were stars, they would no longer be visible, for they are hidden by the artificial lighting that never turns off. Under that empty sky, the planetary shopping mall continues its tireless operations with its infinite variety of offers.
No obstacle seems to hold back the 24/7, if not human fragility itself. Capitalism eliminates all difference: between sacred and profane, between mechanical and organic. Already in his time, Karl Marx grasped this violent bid to knock down natural barriers. The 24/7 abolishes the boundary between light and darkness, day and night, activity and rest. Sleep, then, seems to be an outright affront to the incessant industriousness the market imposes; it appears an undue resistance to the adaptation which digital networks demand. The planet has sped up the pace, projecting itself, exultant, toward the non-stop – and existence ought to be no exception to this.
So, what is sleep, this ‘outside’ the world, this dark retreat from existence, in which the world itself pulls back, disappears for a bit, takes a pause? No, the long night of capital, lit up like daytime, cannot allow any pause, any absence. Especially because acosmia – the world’s temporary escape – is, at the same time, an illegitimate flight from the world, a dangerous interruption, an anomaly of the individual existence which, even just by sleeping, tacitly stands opposed to the law of the planetary non-stop.
It cannot be granted that sleep is a natural necessity. For that would be to accept this vast quantity of time being wasted, hours and hours lost in an irrecuperable void, from which no profit is drawn. All the other human needs – hunger, thirst, sex drive, not to mention love and friendship – have been reviewed and proposed in commodified versions. Hence this process must finally affect even sleep, the final frontier of human finitude. In open contrast with the 24/7 universe, sleep seems all the more scandalous – both because it is the trace of an almost pre-modern era which ought to have been overcome already, but also because it is the body’s tie to the alternation of light and dark, beating the rhythm of activity and rest. This is the alternation which capitalism wants to erase or, at least, neutralise.
This is visible also when one takes in the full sweep of the transhumanist project. This project no longer accepts unalterable natural givens; it takes every barrier for a challenge and has declared war even on the ultimate limit – death. For transhumanism, sleep becomes almost a new pathology, to be eradicated with new substances. It does so even if only to have the advantage of more time, which is ever more lacking in the third-millennium life-form. The attack on sleep thus seems almost legitimate.
Insomnia is a chronic condition for the inhabitants of the extra-temporal 24/7 universe – this routine of the always-the-same, the intensely illuminated artificial environment. This is not, however, only a matter of the insomnia caused by an alert wakefulness, full to the brim with responsibilities. It does not spring from the refusal to overlook – in the oblivion of sleep – the violence that shakes the world. It is not born of worry for the pain of others, of impotence in the face of disaster – as Levinas masterfully described.4 The appropriate term for this new insomnia is sleep-mode – that is, the setting for some technological device which is neither off nor on. It is sleep in a deferred or reduced form, harbouring a constant alertness made visible by the dim light of the screen. Into the darkness it insinuates a time protected from the night. Here prevails a lack of sensitivity, a denial of memory, a limiting of the faculties of perception, the impossibility of reflection. It is a prolonged trance state, a mass sleepwalking. In this almost inert half-sleep, in this pervasive torpor, is it possible to wake up again?
Notes
1 1. Novalis, ‘Hymnen an die Nacht’ (1800), in Werke, ed. G. Schulz, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1969, p. 41.
2 2. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso, 2014.
3 3. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.
4 4. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978; Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, Boston: Dordrecht, 1991.
4 The pólis: a calling
Rather than give a classic definition of philosophy, this book prefers to interrogate its intemporal element, put to the test by the demands of the time. This means that it proposes a political-existential reflection, or better, an existential and political reflection, on philosophy’s fate, on its role, on its potential in the era of technocapitalism and neoliberal governance.
Philosophy has always been harried, attracted, cajoled by two ruinous temptations. The first is that of closing in on itself, abstracting itself completely from the world. The second is that of completely casting off its own self, becoming absolutely other. Given that this has always happened, it would be bizarre to get carried away by assertions of ‘unprecedented’ developments. But these two temptations are today being conjugated in a double closure, perhaps even making their effects more powerful and intense.
What margin is there for thought, if it is gripped by fear at stepping into the outside – if what everywhere dominates is a diffuse exophobia? Where knowledges are handed over to calculation and to technologically assisted simulation; where procedures of simplification spread, peddled as truth-procedures; and where all understanding has its own place and performative function – then philosophy ends up being divested of its role. The sheer compactness of the saturated world demands a knowledge-regime which indulges it and remains within the prescribed limits.
If each ambit of knowledge is based on some problem, then philosophy poses a problem to the problems. It interrogates even the interrogator, knocking him out of his position, deposing him from his pulpit, and making him into the interrogated. The philosopher cannot escape this continual interrogation, which is, in a sense, a moment of splitting which takes the form of a question to the question.
Philosophy has forever been atopic; and in a world without an outside, it is dangerously out of place. A thinking-beyond, a vocation of the beyond, it seems unclassifiable, impossible to set within confines. Philosophy’s territory is a paradoxical one, deterritorialised and inhabited by atopia. In its decentring movement, philosophy emigrates toward an outside from which it turns order upside down. To think estranges – makes foreign.
This book travels a path which follows the two trajectories of existence and politics, and whose time is patterned by three Greek words: atopía, uchronía and anarchía. If, in their close connection they preserve their alpha privative – the tension internal to philosophy – with their synergy they bring the critical impulse out into the open. They let its promised explosive charge to filter out into the beyond.
Thus, in touching on a theme subject to a prohibition – a verdict almost beyond appeal – this book summons philosophy back to its political vocation. This vocation is understood in terms of a reciprocal relation, where philosophy is not only inspired by the pólis but aspires to the pólis. It is, therefore, a political vocation because its inclination is to be found in the pólis itself. Thus, philosophy is summoned to make its return, without ever forgetting that it is out of place and out of step with the times – particularly in the city. After a long absence in which it has lost its voice, philosophy is called on, invited to draw the community back into the light, to reawaken it. For no community can do without an alert philosophy keeping watch.
Heraclitus said as much, and Plato backed this up in his great political dialogue, the Republic. It is not enough to think as in a ‘dream’, ónar, in a dreamlike condition. The thinking