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The Political Vocation of Philosophy
Donatella Di Cesare
Translated by David Broder
polity
Originally published in Italian as Sulla vocazione politica della filosofia © 2018 Bollati Boringhieri editore, Turin
This English edition © 2021 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3943-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Di Cesare, Donatella, author. | Broder, David, translator.
Title: The political vocation of philosophy / Donatella Di Cesare ; translated by David Broder.
Other titles: Sulla vocazione politica della filosofia. English
Description: English edition. | Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | “Originally published in Italian as Sulla vocazione politica della filosofia, 2018 Bollati Boringhieri editore, Torino.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book seeks to redefine the purpose of philosophy for our times. Faced with the saturated immanence of the world, philosophy is summoned to return to its original vocation and, after a long absence in which it lost its voice, it is called on to reawaken the community and protect the life we share in common”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020041699 (print) | LCCN 2020041700 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509539413 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509539420 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509539437 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Political science--Philosophy. | Philosophy.
Classification: LCC JA71 .D48213 2021 (print) | LCC JA71 (ebook) | DDC 320.01--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041699 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041700
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[P]hilosophy should not prophesy, but then again it should not remain asleep.
Martin Heidegger1
So our city will be governed by us and you with waking minds, and not as most cities now which are inhabited and ruled darkly as in a dream.
Plato2
1 1. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 178.
2 2. Plato, Republic, 520c, trans. Paul Shorey.
1 The saturated immanence of the world
There’s no longer an outside. Or at least, that’s what the final stage of globalisation looks like. Up till the modern era, the inhabitants of the earth star meditated on the cosmos, turning their eyes to the open sky in admiration, amazement, wonder. The cosmos’s boundless face was, nonetheless, a shelter, for it protected them from the absolute exteriority to which they felt exposed. Yet, when the planet was explored far and wide – circumnavigated, occupied, connected, depicted – a tear opened up in the cosmic sky, and the abyss opened up above them. Their gaze got lost in the icy outside.
This was an unprecedented challenge. The invention of the globe was the history of a ‘spatio-political alienation’.1 The external exercised a magnetic force, simultaneously both attracting and repelling; it was the otherness that had to be reduced, dominated, controlled. Even in that era, there were philosophical models. The cosmic-speculative sphere which had long inspired conjecture, intuition, ideas, was supplanted by the Copernican revolution. Thanks to this revolution – in which even the furthest limits fell one after another – anthropocentrism was proclaimed with great energy. Through complicated rotations and oscillations, the wandering star pursued this course for centuries – but without being able to escape its fate.
At the dawn of the third millennium, globalisation can be considered complete. It has proven to be the ultimate result of an uninterrupted monologue conducted by the world’s propulsive force – a force majeure, an unstoppable force, almost a principle of reason. All grounds for criticism would thus prove superfluous. One can analyse the global situation. But no more than that. For the first time, philosophy would appear to have been checkmated by the axiom of actuality.
How can there be philosophy in a world without an outside? An attentive diagnosis will find that the globe’s ontological regime is that of a saturated immanence. Immanence ought to be understood in the etymological sense of that which remains, which persists as itself, always within, without an outside, without exteriority. A static, compact immanence: there are neither splits nor voids, neither escape routes nor ways out. This is a spatial and temporal saturation.
This may be surprising. For is this not the world of absolute flows, of capital, of technology, of media? Information, fusion, density follow the convulsive beat of a dizzying acceleration. And, indeed, all this takes place under the sign of inevitable progress. But this is merely the semblance of a world trapped in the
