It is a commonplace to think that populations feel ‘lonely’ and ‘alienated’ from society, but perhaps this diagnosis is more of a prefigured talking point than the description of the state of things. In our present, solitude and retreat is a scarce good, as the chatter of automatized languages and images revolve without a moment of pause. In a recent book, the vice-president of a major technological software company, in fact, argues that “mobilization” extends to all aspects of the temporality of social life, which makes his “technological security” system unavoidable for the very motion of living’s one life. This is why in this configuration, the notion of “creation” as poesis has waned, and its institutional inertia is increasingly delegated to machines and market values. Precisely, the promise of “Artificial Intelligence” all things considered is not just productivity growth, it is also grounded in alleviation of a postpoetic social bundle where every form of self-possession – writing and singing, reading and painting, just to name a few – are slowly replaced. And this “replacement” – which is the only true replacement of our epoch – is an absorption of our relation to our own excess of existence. 

This is what Kafka understood with outstanding clarity more than a century ago in his well known letter to Felice dated February 1913: “‘Writing means revealing oneself to excess … This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why even night is not night enough. I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar’s outermost door. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once” [1]. 

What does it mean that ‘writing means revealing oneself to excess’? For one, it does not mean to create a well crafted story or essay, but something much harder: to appropriate the relation with exteriority of life that makes the truth of writing to emerge, at least for a moment. This appropriation is what solitude guards and treasures, not as a “good” that can be administered and shared, but as a form of life where language and the idea connect in an instance of time. If the total mobilization of technology succeeds wiping this relationship, we should be reassured that the nocturnal excess of writing will be transformed into a white night of inert knowledge, which is contrary to the very practice of writing. One never writes what one “truly knows”; what attempts to write in order to know that which we did not know that already knew. And only this can be called a relation of excess. 

In her beautiful book A horse at night (Dorothy, 2022), the writer Amina Cain similarly says that: “To write, to do any kind of work well, I believe we must at least have a solitude of mind, a solitude of seeing. Of course there are those whole collaborate, but even then there must be moments of retreat. We retreat to read. We retreat to think….There is life that finds each one of us that one else should enter, lest they drive it off” [2]. The closure of the self-sufficient subject of technological mobilization is precisely the one that, by giving up his solitude and retreat that is constitutive of language, has ceased to have the creation and by extension the time of life. What is given up in the name of  a faustic “Intelligence” is the most sacred, the access to oneself. 

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Notes 

1. Franz Kafka. Letters to Felice (Schocken, 1988), 156.

2. Amina Cain. A horse at night (Dorothy, 2022), 35.