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Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.
Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation.
The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.
The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.
The late-modern animal laborans is equipped with an ego just short of bursting. And it is anything but passive. If one abandoned one’s individuality and dissolved into the life process of the species entirely, one would at least have the serenity [Gelassenheit] of an animal. But the late-modern animal laborans is anything but animalian. It is hyperactive and hyperneurotic. There must be another answer to why all human activities in late modernity are sinking to the level of mere laboring—and, more still, why such hectic nervousness prevails.
The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination.
Today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; “betweens” and “between-times” are lacking. Acceleration is abolishing all intervals [jede Zwischen-Zeit]. In the aphorism, “Principal deficiency of active men,” Nietzsche writes: “Active men are generally wanting in the higher activity . . . in this regard they are lazy. . . . The active roll as the stone rolls, in obedience to the stupidity of the laws of mechanics.”
Handke’s tiredness is not “I-tiredness”; it is not the tiredness of an exhausted ego. He calls it “we-tiredness” (15). I am not tired “of you,” as he puts it, but rather I am tired “with you” (26):
Tiredness is disarming. In the long, slow gaze of the tired person, resolution [Entschlossenheit] yields to a state of calm. The interval, in-between time, is a period of in-difference as friendliness: I have been speaking here of tiredness in peacetime, in the present interim period. In those hours there was peace. . . . And the astonishing part of it was that my tiredness seemed to participate in this momentary peace, for my gaze disarmed every intimation of a violent gesture, a conflict, or even of an unfriendly attitude, before it could get started. (29–30)
The depressive is tired from the constant “need for initiative.”
