Everyday life includes possibilities for withdrawing from, defending against,
its own aliveness to the world, possibilities of, as it were, not really being there,
of dying to the other’s presence. The energies that constitute our aliveness to
the world are, in other words, subject to multiple modifications and
transformations.
(Santner 2001: 9)Some commentators would, I think, like to understand boosting this out-of-
jointness as part of a more general rediscovery of piety – or even epiphany – often
heralded as part of a move to a ‘post-secular spirituality’ (e.g. Goodchild 2002;
Gumbrecht 200 4 ; Braidotti 2006). Sometimes following on from Deleuze’s
thoughts on ‘becoming-imperceptible’ in which extinguishing the self allows all
kinds of unexpected futures to be opened up and drawn strength from. This is
‘reversing the subject to face the outside’ (Braidotti 2006: 262), thus boosting
potentia: in Jamesian terms it is the jump towards another world. Whilst, hardly
surprisingly, I am sympathetic to the general direction of travel, this is too grand
and seductive a vision for me. I would prefer to see a multiple set of projects
concerned with the construction of an orientation to the future, the development
of ‘an anxiety about the future which is analogous to Orwell’s anxiety about the
loss of the past and of memory and childhood’ (Jameson 2005: 23), which is, at
the same time, the development of a method of hope (Miyazaki 200 4 , 2006). In
more conventional philosophical terms, this might, I suppose, be thought of as a
flourishing of potential in act,^42 not in the sense of the realization of some proper
form, but rather as a departure from what is – a potentiality that is brought into
being only as it acts or exists in the interstices of interaction. But I would also
prefer to see it in another way, as an attempt to re-gather the ethic of craftsmanship,
a means of composition and channelling which involves bringing together
discipline and concentration, understanding and inspiration, in order to bring out
potential: a different model of homo faber, if you like, working both for its own
sake and as part of a community of ability.^43 At the same time, this ethic, following
on from a long line of thinking which has tried to overcome nihilism and determine
the conditions for an affirmation of life, can be seen as a means of celebrating the
joyous, even transcendent, confusion of life itself (Reginster 2006).
Isn’t this something to have faith in? The stuff of life, the astonishing, resilient,
inventiveness of it all? The extravagant iridescence in the wings of butter-
flies. The minute convolutions of Henle’s loop in the human kidney, ‘like the
meanders in a creek’. The song of the Albert’s lyrebird, which takes it six
years to learn and segues the phrasing of every other bird in the Queensland
bush. At times, the gratuitousness of creation, its sheer wild playfulness, can
only be understood as a kind of unscripted comedy.
(Mabey 2006: 19 7 )Finally, I want to broach the topic of space again. For substantive rather than
narrow disciplinary reasons, space looms large in what follows. That said, I start
Life, but not as we know it 15