the global web mark out the same orbits, following an ever-identical and repetitive movement. It is not that there is any lack of chaotic spirals, of tumultuous swirls. But they do not upset the constant rhythm of these absolute flows, which is irremovably fixed, secretly immobile. Speed collapses into stasis, acceleration ends up in inertia. It is like running on a treadmill in order to avoid slipping backward. Everything changes – yet, fundamentally, nothing truly does. Inertial change is the brand of the synchronised globe.
‘Saturated immanence’ refers to the asphyxial present of a world which, basing itself on the belief that it cannot be harmed, claims to have immunised itself against the ‘outside’.3 Thus it has swallowed up, banished, destroyed, all that is other to itself. It is driven to do this by an overbearing immunological impulse: namely, the impulse to remain intact, to go on and on, whole and unscathed. All the negative powers have been summoned up in order to combat vital negativity, to pre-empt any change, to shoo away any alteration, to neutralise any loss. The immunological impulse was there in the past, too. But today, thanks to technology, it has discovered unprecedented forms.4 In its saturated immanence, the globe of absolute flows is a monument to this impulse.
What’s the point of foraying into the glacial, deathly beyond? Even to pose the question is the victory of exophobia – an abyssal fear, a cold panic, horror for whatever is external. This angst grips and stifles thought. How could one imagine any alternative? Any taking of distance, any interruption, is passed off as vain and impossible, even before it starts being denounced as a terrorist threat. One can dream only internally, within the regime of saturated immanence, in which dreams often transform into nightmares. The bitter acknowledgement that ‘There is no longer an outside’ has coloured even the most radical thought of recent years.5 Thus the hyperrealist refrain ‘There is no alternative!’ – the mocking and sorrowful summa of the present era – has ended up as a cruel and incessantly realised prophecy.
It is no mystery that the discourse on the ‘end of the world’ is taken so seriously.6 Such discourse takes its cue above all from the empirical sciences: climatology, geophysics, oceanography, biochemistry, ecology. Humanity’s fall into catastrophe seems imminent. The near future – unforeseeable because it is completely other – is instead consigned to the scenarios portrayed in filmic drama or messianic visions. The Promethean cry risks being suffocated in an apocalyptic death-rattle. What is, at least, clear is that the late-capitalist world is the world of planet-wide ecological collapse. The fusion between techno-economy and biosphere is plain for all to see.7
‘Anthropocene’ is the name for that geological epoch in which humans look on near-impotently at the devastating and deadly effects of this asymmetrical fusion, in which nature has been eroded to the point of disappearance. Yet, the violence of this intrusion would not have been possible without the implacable, incandescent sovereignty of capital. But, in the contemporary imaginary, it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Here lies the enormous discrepancy between scientific understanding and political impotence. At this point, capitalism has occupied the entire horizon of the thinkable. And it has done so by absorbing every hotbed of resistance within the imagination, by erasing every exteriority prior or posterior to its own history. It is as if before capitalism there was only the gloom of the archaic; after it, only the darkness of the apocalypse.
For humanity trapped in saturated immanence – in that windowless globe of advanced-stage capitalism, where very little human remains – it is, nonetheless, possible to conceive of a ‘transhumanism’. This is the latest techno-gnostic dream of immortality, whether it is to be realised through cryogenic hibernation or by transferring identity into software. This is a dream yearned for by a species which could disappear at a stroke. May the posthuman survive, at least!
Internally, everything is supposed to be possible – but outside, nothing is. The question should then be posed of what ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ mean, if in the techno-scientific context – even the most futuristic one – there is no limit that holds, while in the political context all prospect of change is precluded a priori by the ‘No’ put up by the market.8 You can become immortal, but you cannot escape capitalism.
The world of saturated immanence is the world of the global-capitalist regime, the claustrophobic space oscillating between the non-event – the steady flows of liberal democracy – and the imminent planetary collapse. As the different fronts take form they divide those who look to a hyperbolic acceleration that would bring capitalism to self-destruction, from those who hope to stop the speeding locomotive by pulling the emergency brake.9 After the Apocalypse, the Kingdom.
Capitalist realism reiterates 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
