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 of whoever is alert, awake, in fact proves to be something quite different (see the Republic, 476c). The waking vision, húpar, is the very characteristic of philosophy, its distinctive trait, to the point of becoming its symbol. One can spend one’s life asleep, or else awake and keeping watch. Those who do not philosophise doubtless do live. But their existence is diminished, their participation in politics compromised.
5 Wonder – a troubled passion
Philosophy is a Greek word. It is the product of a compound: phileîn, to desire, to have the ambition, to love; and sophía, which, even before meaning wisdom, indicates knowledge. First of all, savoir faire, practical abilities. Like those of artisans, of they who know how to build ships, to play musical instruments, to compose verse, but also the abilities of the legislator or politician. When democracy is making itself felt, multiple competences are needed to get by in the city. For instance, it is necessary to be able to speak well, to defend oneself, or to intervene in debates. Here a new figure crops up: the figure of he who not only possesses some knowledge but is also prepared to sell it. This is the sophistés, an expert in both private and public life, the master of rhetoric, who teaches for money and who – shading into a negative meaning of this term – turns out to be an impostor and charlatan.
Standing up against the sophists are those in the city who, precisely because they are considered expert and capable, risk being taken for sophists. Socrates was first among them. But there is a profound difference in their case: for they do not boast of having any knowledge which they do not. What inspires Socrates’ questions is what he desires, not what he has. A desire for wisdom? Not exactly. It is difficult to believe that, as some suggest, the Greek word sophía is etymologically linked to saphés, which means clear, manifest. Yet Socrates not only does not claim to possess anything – least of all the truth; he moreover confesses that his burning ambition is to arrive at clarity. This knowledge of not knowing is the aporetic beginning of philosophy. Lovers of sophía – Plato repeatedly insists – are they who are driven by the desire to access knowledge, rather than be left obtuse and uncultured by ignorance.1
The terms ‘philosopher’ or ‘philosophise’ appeared here and there already before Socrates, following the frequently recurring model of compounds with the prefix philo-. For instance, they appeared in a fragment from Heraclitus (B 35), in Herodotus’ histories (I, 30) as well as in the funeral oration that Thucydides has Pericles giving in memory of the soldiers who had fallen in the Peloponnesian war. ‘For we also give ourselves to bravery, and yet with thrift; and to philosophy, and yet without mollification of the mind’ (II, 40, 1).2
