Freedom resides in the fulfilled time

While revolution often presupposes open conflict, in Revolution for Life, it is presented as a non-violent, long-term social interaction. Yet, it seems hard to imagine that violence could disappear from society altogether. What place does violence have in your concept of the revolution for life?

I wouldn’t say that I depict revolutions as necessarily non-violent. Rather, I insist that what makes them revolutionary, namely the establishment of truly new human relations, cannot be achieved by violence. The question of violence and non-violence is one of the philosophically most important issues of the present, and the future depends on how we answer it. Looking at it from within my own terminology, one might derive an instrumental criterion to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence. If violence serves the liberation from or the hindrance of oppressive ownership relations, we might say, OK – problematic, but inevitable. And yet, it’s not that simple. It’s not defined only by its end. We also need a more subtle phenomenology of violence. Instead of trying to categorically distinguish between violence and non-violence, we need to question every individual act of violence: Does it repeat the gesture of dominion? Does it posit other lives as superfluous? Or couldn’t it be something else, for instance, self-defense understood as self-preservation? We would thus see that non-violence, hard as it is to achieve, is never enough, especially not in the ecological crisis we are currently facing. We need to work towards life in an active way as well. Stopping individual instances of violence doesn’t prove very useful by itself: you might stop some, but the living conditions would worsen anyway, and traumas would remain unrepaired even for those who’d have managed to liberate themselves from oppression. That is why I am much more interested in adhering to the positive effort of rebuilding or healing social relations, and in working towards maintaining natural sustenance, even though I am aware that all this cannot happen in a cozy and pretty way. There will always be some level of violence, but not all existing violence is based on claiming the other to be at the total disposal of our will and power.

In both your books, Revolution for life and Bleibefreiheit, you pinpoint a certain paradox of our self-relations: we strive to work ourselves to death, and still, the fruits of our self-destructive effort feed primarily the capitalist system we serve. Where does this striving come from?

In the Revolution for Life, I characterize this self-relation as an ownership relation. The modern liberal self is expected to be a self-owner, and is supposed to seek freedom in certain types of individual sovereignty. This leads to the paradox: we find our sovereignty in a specific subject-object relation, but this kind of relation is completely unrealizable within the self alone. First, we cannot even tell where the subject ends and the object starts, and second, we never experience full control in our embodied life.

Historically, there have been externalized relations to objectified others, enslaved people, or people confined to the function of reproductive labor. But, the emancipated liberal subject is falling back on nothing but its self-ownership. Regardless of the latter’s inherent instability, in reality, such kinds of selves are partially disowned, nonetheless, because of wage labor. If you are employed by a tyrannical boss, it usually means that they own your time. That’s how you learn the hard way that the outcome of ownership is always despotism. – And what could be a better way to prove your precarious sovereignty than to kill yourself for work? At least, while doing this to yourself, you want to own yourself properly.

How does such violence manifest itself in interpersonal relationships? Can you give an example?

There is a similar dynamic at play in consenting to violent acts or relations. There are studies showing that sex, even sex considered liberated and feminist, has grown relatively more violent, up to the point of normalizing the act of choking, for instance. This isn’t just a male pornographic dystopia taking over. This is also the liberal feminist fetish with self-ownership. If you consent to aggression, you manifest your self-ownership. The logic behind this is that nobody except the owner can go that far. Paradoxically, feminism would then be associated with the perpetuation of sexual violence under the guise of manifesting one’s freedom.

I am emphasizing the ownership logic here to show how relevant it is for a full analysis of social relations. But of course, a lot of sacrificial overwork – and sexual compliance – are also driven by the competitive logic of capitalism. Competition is actually a euphemism in that context because the losers aren’t just on a lower rank as you would have it in an athletic competition. Capitalist competition decides who has to vanish, who is entirely superfluous. The fear of that fuels nearly everything in our world.

In your critique of capitalism, you underline the fact that the global market produces a lot of residual material. What the market does not accept as sufficiently attractive accumulates uncontrollably as dangerous waste. By analogy, we divide society into those who succeed and those who fail. Is failure an experience we should somewhat redeem?

On the one hand, the opportunity to fail safely would be a wonderful way of testing whether we’ve organized our society in a humane way. You could say: well, if we cannot fail safely with nuclear power, then we shall not have it! Similarly, you could assume that we shouldn’t have exclusive nuclear families, because if a member gets ill, there’s nobody to take his or her part in caring for others. So yes, a society that would allow for non-catastrophic failures would be better than the one we have now.

On the other hand, I am against a farfetched romanticization of failure. People usually associate it with the famous Beckett’s line, which encourages you to always fail better. I think it’s rather cruel. Basically, you send individuals to the blade, for failure often comes at a huge cost, and you may end up with trauma, broken bones, or even lost ecosystems. Such failure is not a game that you can start over from the beginning. What I am trying to point out in my analysis is how a capitalist commodity and property logic produces debris or devalued things, and thereby a specific kind of unworthiness. Capitalist waste doesn’t mean leftovers of ecosystems that are part of natural metabolism, i.e. leftovers that always feed something else. We’ve managed to build a civilization where leftovers or failures remain toxic for a long time. They might not be dangerous at present, but they definitely will be so in the near future. What we are witnessing today is not just a system failure. It is something much more dramatic, it is a systematic foreclosure of future life, and I don’t think we should ever reconcile with it.

In reference to the Czech historical background, freedom of movement is the key right to uphold for many people. In Bleibefreiheit, you argue, however, that the freedom of movement is conditioned by the primary freedom to stay. Could you elaborate on this a bit?

Indeed, it is completely legitimate to fixate on freedom of movement, especially for those who are locked in, or, as the case may be, locked out from other parts of the world. But I’m not sure if making mobility the conceptual core of freedom is useful. There is something really odd about describing the mobility of people who flee from worsening conditions, and often under dramatic circumstances, as the privilege of freedom. It is even more absurd for me as a white European to decide whether other people should have the right to move, and to posit it as though I was granting them an immense privilege. The line of thought should run the other way around: I have this absurdly rare privilege of freedom to stay, now, how can I extend it, so that those who have partly lost that freedom due to tyrannical government or ecological catastrophe are at least granted the freedom to stay elsewhere? The freedom to stay does not mean the freedom to stay wherever you are, but the freedom to stay anywhere where you can continue living freely.

Where do we stand on securing such freedom? And how do we prevent the protection of the freedom to stay from turning into the limitation of the freedom to leave?

One of the horrors of the current migration regime is that even the people who manage to change places, usually under huge risks and sacrifices, are not allowed to stay. What’s more, migrants often face horrible racism and deportation fantasies of the societies they arrive in, as well as a fatal lack of social services. This is why I claim that if the freedom of movement is worth anything, it presupposes the freedom to stay. And since we are witnessing the historical moment when the habitable areas on the Planet literally shrink, it seems to me that the freedom to stay is currently a more demanding issue to secure. The test of the freedom to move is asking: “Can I go, or not?” And the proof of someone’s freedom to stay cannot be simply saying “Don’t go!”, for that would be just another form of coercion. For the freedom to stay, there must always be the possibility of staying. And there is a bigger promise that should go along with it: whoever is on the move, they shall be either sustained on their journey, or welcomed to stay wherever they arrive.

In Bleibefreiheit, you seek an alternative for the form of social relations in the idea of fulfilled time. How does freedom relate to living a fulfilled life? And how do you deal with the human tendency to reside in ownership relations?

I think freedom really consists of the fulfilled time. But, what is a fulfilling time? I don’t simply mean happiness, although happiness certainly matters. What I rather mean is the possibility of immersing in free relations. One way of getting to a richer understanding of what fulfilled time means is to be negative: fulfilled time is the negation of dominion. It overcomes the oppressive foreclosure of a lifetime. From there, we can ask: Does this relationship allow me to carry on living, start anew, sustain myself? This is how we can try to find out whether our situation is violent in a way analogous to ownership, or not.

Then, there is another important kind of freedom, which is the right to withdraw from collectivity. A lot of people use property as a shield behind which they hide their need for such withdrawal. And if we want to change the centrality of property in our social order, we also have to take seriously this reluctance to sociability. Some people simply might want to be part of a community, and some not. Take the pandemic: some were miserable at times of social distancing, some were happy. Each person shall have the possibility to consider how to spend their time in a fulfilling way, and to feel safe whether that means to live alone or within a community. Isolation depends on social order no less than social participation does. To be able to stay home, you need a home, running water, food delivery, and so on.

You also write that in order to experience the fulfilled time, it is necessary to come to terms with one’s own finitude, even to long for it in some sense. But isn’t it rather the immortality and boundlessness that one yearns for? Why should we long for finitude?

First, for me, it is very important not to shut down the striving for infinity. I believe that freedom is our prime desire, and also that it requires a certain promise of infinity. Something fully of the world that points beyond it. However, we need to orient this desire in the correct direction. I don’t think this means we should fantasize about infinite accumulation or immortality. Indeed, some tech billionaires do have exactly these fantasies, but most people don’t. It’s true, though, that our cultures, which were so shaped by doctrines of the immortality of the soul, tend to deny death. Our time-blind notion of freedom makes us deny the fact that we are finite. So while I defend the value of infinity, I also deem absolutely crucial that we acknowledge our finitude.

How to achieve such acknowledgment? Do you have any recommendations?

Socrates thought that philosophy is what can teach us to be good mortals. In Bleibefreiheit, I quite humorously disagree with his solution, because it gets rid of finitude. Instead, I argue for a certain implicit value of the moments and encounters that make up our existence and for the fact that we can appreciate them better when we accept that we are finite. If our time to live freely is naturally limited, we have to insist on having freedom throughout even the most ordinary and mundane moments of our lives. At the same time, it would be depressing if the notion of freedom was restricted to a lifetime, even tragic for those who die a bit younger. Therefore, we need to reintroduce certain ideas of infinity by discussing the questions of fulfilled time: the potentiality of action that opens up an endless number of possibilities, in which infinity instantiates in different ways. In the realm of our material embeddedness, I call this infinity the tides of ecosystems, or the endlessly interconnected metabolic cycles. These are the processes of regeneration, and they are much larger than we are. Yet, it is a completely secular thought, which I am implying here. A scientific one, actually.

But when a loved one dies, we grieve because the particular life has ended. The fact that we are part of the cycles of nature seems to be a rather poor consolation.

Yes. From another perspective, and unlike many ecological thinkers, I am very wary of reconciling with finitude too easily. The loss of a beloved individual is always unbearable. But, we may take our mourning as a test of life’s quality: if we take the death of the deceased as their liberation, it often means that they suffered from excruciatingly oppressive relations, or that the care for them was held under unsustainable conditions, or that they were so much dehumanized that their lives simply ceased to be grieveable. We are not vegetables to be composted. It shouldn’t be enough of a consolation for us that people will become part of the earth. When you love, you want that particular other, not a handful of soil.

Speaking of love, for many people it is something quite intimate, while in your recent book, you plead for an anonymous love as an ideal of mutual caring. What do you mean by that?

 First, I would say that even when it comes to intimate love we can love about the beloved what we don’t know about them. There is always a bit of anonymity in love. We stay in relations to engage with the particularities of the concrete person – either known, or unknown. Regarding the issue of love, I relate myself to the work of the brilliant German-British feminist philosopher Sophie Lewis, who proposes to radically socialize relations of care, and to abolish the family as we know it, which privatizes care. While I share a lot of Sophie’s critique of the family, I simultaneously hesitate to conclude that a utopian society should fulfill all needs on a collective level. In a free world, we might still decide that we want a very particular other to love and care for, because we want to fulfill their specific needs. At the same time, it doesn’t always have to be like that, and in fulfilling other kinds of needs, we can be completely indifferent to others. Consider someone who manufactures my bike. I can say that I don’t care who makes it, I just want my bicycle. And that’s fine! When I write books, I write them without knowing who’s going to read them, which is fine too. And yet, the quality of any work changes if you trust that what you do fulfills the needs of someone else. You don’t just do it for our own enrichment or mere survival, you do it because it makes sense. So, there is a certain kind of love in this as well, but it’s neither intimate nor personalized. In Bleibefreiheit, I define love as a way of sharing time without losing it, and ideally, so that new time emerges from it. You can think of the time you spend making a bicycle as though you were helping someone to get somewhere faster. In other words, you contribute to fulfilling the time of an anonymous other. Anonymous love basically means the same thing as solidarity.

Does it mean that anonymous love is to be seen as a kind of challenge for humanity? What do we want, or what should we want to achieve with it?

I think we will only know what we want in terms of care and sexuality once we have a society where it’s truly possible to fulfill all those things anonymously. And then it might turn out that some people really do want to stay with one person all their life, that they want to mostly care for the child they themselves gave birth to, and if that’s their need, then a free society shall help fulfill it. But right now, we have no way to tell. No mother, or very few mothers would give up their children, and it’s because they know that if they did, their offspring wouldn’t be taken good care of. From the other point of view, most children of a young age have the fantasy of living with their best friend’s mother rather than with their own. It’s a total taboo to speak about it publicly, even though such a possibility might eventually enable the mother to pursue some projects of her own. She could write a book or do anything else if she knew that her child was to be taken good care of. I imagine that in the free world, there would be institutionalized forms of social care, guaranteeing that these needs would be met. 

It is indeed completely justified that some people are allergic to such kind of feminist talk about abolishing family. Yet, I believe that the reason behind it usually is, that they cannot imagine any alternative other than an eventual abandonment of the family.

The prevalent social ideal is still very much that we manage everything independently and for all to see. Relying on others or hiding in anonymity is expected to be labeled as cowardice or defeatism. Is anonymity important for the functioning of democratic systems?

As for what sustains democratic engagement, I believe again that we need to think about time. Specifically about the time required to conduct democratic procedures, but also of democracy as an order that grants you time, that allows for a greater fullness of time which consists in the chance to govern ourselves freely together. All in all, we may need a revolution for the life of democracy, which is not just about overthrowing the oligarchs and autocrats but also about doing the actual work of repair. As for anonymity, I think you only fulfill the potential of democracy once you harness the wonderful richness of learning from a multiplicity of viewpoints. You encounter them with different people in real-life experiences, but also in voices raised anonymously. I don’t think you always need to see the face. But you always need to allow one other to save the face. Actually, the very definition of reason is that there are safe ways to change your position – learning is another term for that. We need to build democracy on that experience and not just understand it as a majority rule where everyone has a fixed opinion, where power can be quantified in the majority, and where you simply either win or lose.