Anyone dealing with the complex organizations of our time and their metropolitan lexicon has long been familiar with the concept of awareness. A condition where the individual, detaching from sensation, perception, or practice, cognitively possesses information regarding their behavioral responses. A knowledge of what is happening while experiencing it. A valuable asset for CEOs[1], who, beyond the paternalistic rhetoric that animates them, aspire to the reproduction of meditated dynamics (thus more controlled than spontaneous), capable of determining that management capacity that legitimizes the allocation of power and induces any resource to work on themselves, in the event of a future managerial and leadership opportunity. An individualizing and empowering practice for the control of a performance that, needless to say, will speak of us, our life, and our value more than our “dwelling in the world” can now say. A paradoxical evolution of a concept that, instead, foresaw, in meditation, the acceptance of dwelling and made spontaneous living controlled.
But, being men by nature more archaeologists than seers, we will return in these paragraphs to the origins of the concept, hoping that dismantling the semantic stratifications will bring forth a more vivid than new sense of the term. With The Adventure, a booklet that philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes as a manual for traversing life, a fragment of Heraclitus becomes known again, for which “ēthos anthropō daimōn,” or “character is for man the demon” or, more simply, “character, for man, is his destiny.” What is at stake in this reflection on character, understood as a mode of connection between life and work, in an inseparable intertwining of chance and necessity, is – for Agamben – the configuration of our demon as destiny, for which the outcome of our life can only coincide with what we could not escape, being inherent, innate, habitual. Tracing back to the origins of Agamben’s own thought (because – as Caproni teaches – being oneself is always returning to oneself in a place where one has never been), this narrative represents the narrative evolution of a dense and demanding philosophical study, as only youthful instances can be, a study that has significantly to say about the shift in meaning undergone over the years by the concept of awareness.
In a reflection that goes from Heidegger indebted to Hegel, Agamben grapples with the thought of the Absolute, understood, in various declinations, as “thinking according to one’s own.” Only thinking within oneself allows one to think “absolutely”; because, dwelling in oneself, one inhabits those lacerations and divisions that, far from sharpening the idiocy of one’s character traits, allow one to find oneself in the other, to finally return to oneself. In a perspective so new and so archetypal that it kept Ulysses, by sea or by mind, ten years away from Ithaca, existential experience – like the Absolute – is nothing but the entrance of thought into one’s own, that is, the acquisition of an attitude (which becomes a habit) to appropriate oneself, to dwell tirelessly and peacefully within oneself. The ethical appropriation of oneself, which, in its problematic universality, is often brought into philosophical consultation, is well exemplified – among others – by Innocent Smith, the hero protagonist of Manalive. In a scenario where the binary conflicts of impulses are staged through the various characters, Innocent emerges as the only protagonist capable, not only of overcoming the opposition between faith and belief (or habit and choice), but also of merging into a single self the constraint of matter and the will of free will. It is no coincidence that this process of appropriation – or incarnation of a form of life – is perceived by Innocent as a journey: the only character capable of playing, without acting, himself, the protagonist explains his individual movement in the declination of an original exile, now turned pilgrimage:
This circular path I walk is the unbeaten path. I truly believe in escaping; I am a revolutionary. But don’t you realize that all these leaps, destructions, and escapes are nothing but attempts to return to Eden… to something that was already ours? […] Don’t you realize that a man is willing to throw everything up in the air and do somersaults just to find home?
Beyond the paths of appropriation, between the recomprehension of fractures in absolute thought and the habitual dwelling of the self within itself, the asynchronous intertwining between Hegel and Heidegger highlights an unresolved current aporia. And this intertwining is essential to Agamben, because in an access to the “own” that is the most difficult thing to think for philosophers, as for humans in life, he can propose a third, potential exit life, given by the equation of ethics and character. But can an attitude be ethical? And, again, why does the demon assume a destined character?
The return to oneself for which, dialectically, completeness is achieved in returning to oneself after a departure, in an – almost divine – understanding of oneself in impropriety, configures thought as the historical delivery to the Absolute. At the same time, the dwelling of man in his own self, following an appropriation of an inherent difference, defines the human experience par excellence – the Ereignis, to put it in Heidegger’s terms – in terms of the habitual reproposition of a laceration and a division that determines, even fortuitously, destiny. In both terms of the aporia, the “own” – a laceration, a division, a loss, an abandonment, a destiny, a choice – remains the limit of thought, the boundary within which our linguistic experience is identified. In short, whether historical or dialectical, the movement of the self outside itself and, subsequently, within itself brings back to an unknown “own,” in a sphere of unconscious knowledge.
Only an immanence that has taken measure of its boundaries, to the point of accepting all the possible shadows that our psycho-physical territories foresee (think of the unfortunate explorations of Kafka’s surveyor!), allows knowledge to turn into awareness. The return to oneself and the constitution of one’s dwelling imply, in fact, a deep will for everything that has happened, because – being with us – it could not have not happened. Beyond the metaphysical impossibility of embracing a programmed process for which we are responsible or accused, but never adventurers, the corporate discourse, reversing cause and effect, imagines the control of action as a programmatic phase and never as trust in the event. In an indistinction of docility and willfulness, of episode and event, of marginality and liminality, contemporaneity knows how to make good use of this “awareness.” But what speaks of the love for one’s form-of-life has, instead, nothing to do with the lucidity of one’s performative action.
[1] CEO, Chief Executive Officer, is translated into Italian as Amministratore Delegato. Being the highest role within the corporate organization, the CEO reports directly to the Board of Directors (elected by the shareholders) and thus represents the position of greatest operational responsibility.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Agamben, G. (2022). The Adventure. Turin: Einaudi.
- Agamben, G. (2022). L’avventura. Torino: Einaudi.
(2005). “*If. The Absolute and the Ereignis,” in The Power of Thought. Vicenza: Neri Pozza. - Caproni, G. (2003). The Seed of Weeping. Milan: Garzanti.
- Chesterton, G. K. (2007). Manalive. Turin: , p. 200.
- Heraclitus. (2007). Fragments. Edited by G. Reale. Milan: Bompiani: fragment B119DK.
- Heidegger, M. (2001). What is Metaphysics? (trans. P. Chiodi). Milan: Adelphi.
- Hegel, G. W. F. (2010). Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. E. De Negri). Milan: Bompiani.
- Kafka, F. (1994). The Castle (trans. A. Marinari). Milan: Mondadori.
- Nietzsche, F. (2011). The Gay Science (trans. M. Montinari). Milan: Adelphi: aphorism 341.
Curriculum
Evelina Praino holds a PhD in moral philosophy from the Sant’Anselmo University in Rome, with a specialization in Italian Theory and, in particular, on the figure of Giorgio Agamben. Interested in the application of philosophy in complex organizations, she has been engaged for several years in teaching and training activities, as an Invited Lecturer of Argumentative Writing and Business Writing at the Pontifical Salesian Universities of Turin and Rome and as an Olympic Trainer in the field of communication. She is currently responsible for disseminating the results of excellence research and impactful scientific communication at Luiss University in Rome. Among her publications: The Use of Self. Archaeology of the Form-of-Life (2023) and Individuality at the Margins of the Neoliberal Empire (2021).
