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To heighten productivity, the paradigm of disciplination is replaced by the paradigm of achievement, or, in other words, by the positive scheme of Can; after a certain level of productivity obtains, the negativity of prohibition impedes further expansion. The positivity of Can is much more efficient than the negativity of Should.
The attitude toward time and environment known as “multitasking” does not represent civilizational progress.
The term vita contemplativa is not meant to invoke, nostalgically, a world where existence originally felt at home. Rather, it connects to the experience of being [Seinserfahrung] in which what is beautiful and perfect does not change or pass—a state that eludes all human intervention.
The modern loss of faith does not concern just God or the hereafter. It involves reality itself and makes human life radically fleeting.
This is it.
The general denarrativization of the world is reinforcing the feeling of fleetingness. It makes life bare. Work itself is a bare activity. The activity of bare laboring corresponds entirely to bare life.
Only by the negative means of making-pause [Innehalten] can the subject of action thoroughly measure the sphere of contingency (which is unavailable when one is simply active).
Today’s achievement-subject deems itself free when in fact it is bound like Prometheus.
The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself.
Industrial disciplinary society relied on unchanging identity, whereas postindustrial achievement society requires a flexible person to heighten production.
