through europe

Featuring thinkers such as Theodoros ‘the Godless’, Hegesias ‘the Death-Persuader’ and Aristippos the Elder a.k.a. ‘the Royal Dog’, the Cyrenaics have always been the most vilified and neglected among the many philosophical schools of the Hellenistic age. Initiated almost informally by Aristippos the Elder, one of the companions of Socrates, the Cyrenaic school found its structure only two generations later at the hands of Aristippos’ grandchild, Aristippos the Younger. Unlike the majority of philosophical movements of the time, which sprung mostly in Athens or in the coastal part of modern Turkey, the Cyrenaics take their name from the North-Eastern area of today’s Libya. Perhaps because of their distance from the increasing dogmatism of Platonic/Aristotelian Greece, the Cyrenaics promoted a sophisticated form of ultra-hedonism which sounds remarkably free and audacious even to our postmodern ears.

 

The only modern myth is the myth of zombies—mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason.

- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 

 

The zombie is the point at which power’s domination, the domination of the state and of capital in all its shades - subjective, existential, epistemological, even ontological - has entered so completely into our communities that the unquestioning automaton is the most recurrent and common form-of-life to be encountered. It is the point at which subjectivity has been so deeply infested by the love of power, the micro-facism that is diffused across the global bio-political mass, that life only appears as a half-death, an existence the potential forms of which are predetermined, prelimited, constrained. The images of loved ones appear, but terrify; intimacy gives way to disgust, and those who break free of their cages of isolation, who demand to reclaim life from its half-death, are confronted by the utter terror that surrounds them.

 

Like many other viral videos on Youtube, this liberating, mildly choreographic effort to say “goodbye” to a despotic boss made me release more depressant toxins that it apparently did to other million viewers.

The story behind it is now a popular fabula: Marina Shifrin, 25, was employed by “an awesome company” (her words) that produces animation videos. “For almost two years”, she explains, “I’ve sacrificed my relationships, time and energy for this job”.

It’s 4.30am and she’s still at work. It doesn’t seem to be an exception.

She positions her camera in strategic spots, looking straight into it with her thick glasses, then she unexpectedly starts to dance around the office, lonely yet glowing. “I quit”, is the caption flashing multiple times under her moves.

Resistance

Humans seem to be inescapably bound to a position of double pressure. On the one hand, they are constricted by the limits of the mortality of their flesh, and by the finitude of the resources which surround them. On the other, they endure the weight of a system of abstract thoughts which, as well as ‘lifting’ them above the mortal world, also threatens them with sets of impossible demands. It is within this structure, I believe, that we should understand the meaning and practice of resistance.

At the same time stuck and enhanced by these two invisible neighbors, human life unfolds as constant negotiation between them. In its struggle to resist the pressure of mortality, and in their quest for what we could define synthetically as ‘health’, humans employ their ability for abstract thought. This is what is at heart, for example, of the development of science, technology, art and philosophy, but also, and most importantly, of politics.  Perhaps it is politics, understood as the management of all available resources with the aim of enabling the enjoyment of life, above any other human practice, that constitutes our way of resisting the uncanny proximity of death.