The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One

by Hanzi Freinacht

I relate to you as what Deleuze called a dividual, full of different parts, of different voices and drives working in different contexts. You are not only the rider of the elephant, your conscious and rational mind, but also the elephant itself, full of contradictory urges, ambitions, dreams, fears, doubts and hunger. To convey my message, I must sometimes speak to your rational mind, sometimes to the elephant itself, and sometimes to the relationship between the two. And you are even the very path that the elephant tramples, a path that other people have cut by teaching you this language, these values and habits. I sometimes write to other people than you specifically, and then take up your thread again. Sometimes I speak to others through you, beyond you as an individual person. I relate to you transpersonally, meaning that I meet you not as one single, rational individual, but as the cross-section of the beautiful and terrifying depths of your inner life and the conflicts and potentials inherent in the social, economic and cultural fabric of the digitalizing world.