nocturnal knowledge – Infrapolitical Reflections

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.

Notes

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

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

Whenever a professional politician today evokes the ‘soul’ one must be immediately suspicious, as it tends to be an automatic lullaby for “national unity” or a dormant metaphor in a flowing stream of empty chatter. What could the soul mean to anyone – say, those millions that have now for the second time voted fairly and squarely Donald J. Trump to the Executive branch of the national government – only capable of giving attention to a series of onomatopoeic pop-words that are now ingrained in the linguistic acoustics of the American lexicon (“Bitcoin”, “Tiktok”, “Woke”, “Prime”, and the list could go on). The ongoing catastrophe is first and foremost within the texture of language, which is ultimately why it is also an ethical decomposition in which all other spheres of practical action (first and foremost, politics) amount to business as usual with its corresponding rhetorical bravura.

Suggesting continuity might perhaps be an understatement: it is now a business that does not need any sumptuous or veiled mediation; refracted upon its own absorption of its hyperproduction of fiction, the defeat of the communitarian salvation of Calvinism can only be expressed as a self-serving an ongoing destruction and self-annihilation. True, it could be claimed that ‘Americanism’ has always been this; the only difference is that today, already well into the century, it moves in a vector that directly rejects the world while making a full fledged program of its own making. Only a Society that has become fully moribund can celebrate its own death and decomposition; while the emancipated and well scripted villains of the act now have no shame but to reveal how the ultimate object of their conspiracy was the obliteration of the Earth.

“It is the time of the assassins”, TJ Clark writes echoing Henry Miller’s unjustly forgotten book on Rimbaud and the legitimation of the social bond, in which the homo homini lupi discloses itself from any all possible contact in the metropolis solely dependent on ad hoc hyperproduction of justifications required to fully commit to the illusion of legitimate action. Only that now the time of the assassins is perhaps an uncanny dark night of those without souls, as in the deranged characters of a McCarthy’ novel: they are willing to kill and be killed; they are beyond any contact with language, and “what do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? I’ve thought about it a great deal” [1]. And indeed, there is nothing to say and nothing to face: in the soulless dark night there are only hunters and those that are hunted; there is integration or pulverization; there is killing and there is humiliation before an ever increasing legal nexus coordinating the acquiescence of force. But perhaps this is the real arcana of the American soul that is only shimmering through in all of its glory.

Someone like D.H. Lawreence definitely thought so when writing about the novels of Finimore Cooper: “[The white american] lives by death, by killing the wild things of the air and earth…All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the flooring into lust is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted” [2]. But in our days it has begun to melt, to fragment, and decompose in a heavy storm of pain and despair. And it continues to stand in the long winter of American civilization (the castle of Frozen is the allegory of the epoch) that now finds itself at the epochal threshold of the end of growth, only left with rampant nationalist impulses of self-affirmation that can only deepen the nihilist tonality of anguish and self-destruction, and the emergence of the bizarre as Jamie Merchant notes in his recent Endgame (2024).

In his Reflections on America (1958), Jacques Maritain maintained that the spiritual patrimony of Americanism is that of being “bruised souls”, a community that came into being by double exclusion (hunted by their religion and rejected within a national polity), which in turn allowed to be compassionate to human suffering, and thus the hidden meaning of the wound was to be seeing in the “role played by immigration and poverty suffered in the Old World” [3]. Hence, for Maritain the condition for the healing soul of America resides in its opening to ongoing suffering of migrants, the dispossessed, and those in exodus from the psychic pressure of a social metabolism gone sour in every subject of civilizational decay as Erich Unger had proposed in his Politics and Metaphysics (1921).

It comes to no one’s surprise, thus, that the decomposition of the American soul departs from the overt opposition to migration, as a figure of the grazing over the Earth, that must be vanquished and condemned by a planetary gnosticism undergoing in front our eyes. The Chrisitian modern state enters in this way into a concrete and visible process of artificial desecularization showing that “the Christian relation to the State…is in mad hostility to all of them, having in the end, to the destruction of them all. […]. And it is, simply, suicide. Suicide individual and en masse” [4].

The stakes are extremely clear: it is for the bruised and the brute (some have called it the barbarians, proprietors of strange tongues, keepers of the clandestine lacunae of language) to retreat from the fictive proliferation of appearances, the artificialization of reason that can promise success as the ultimate pinnacle of self-destruction. Inclined beneath the shadow of archaic Penia, the bruised and incurable souls might not find redemption in the American wasteland, but they will land somewhere between language and world. Not a program but a moving conviction.

Notes

1. Cormac McCarthy. No Country For Old Man (Vintage, 2005), 8.

2. D.H.Lawrence. “Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels”, in Studies in Classic American Literature (Thomas Seltzer, 1923), 92.

3. Jacques Maritain. Reflections on America (Scribners, 1958), 84-85.

4. D.H. Lawrence. Apocalypse (Penguin Books, 1995), 148.