The educational meaning of tiredness: Agamben and Buytendijk on the experience of (im)potentiality

Abstract

In this article, I go deeper into the educational meaning of tiredness. Over and against the mainstream view that tiredness is an impediment for education, I show that this phenomenon is intrinsically meaningful. My arguments are based, first, on a detailed phenomenological analysis of tiredness, as proposed by Buytendijk. Tiredness can be defined as the point where lack of willpower and lack of ability become utterly indistinguishable. Second, I turn to Agamben’s genealogy of the will, which shows that willpower was invented in order to control a more original, but also more arcane sense of what it means to be able to do something: (im)potentiality. I argue that tiredness, as analysed by Buytendijk, is a state of (im)potentiality. As such it has the power to interrupt the contemporary ordering of society and of the realm of education, which is fully predicated upon individual wilful self-commandment. More positively speaking, tiredness has an important educational value in that it grants the opportunity of beginning anew with the world. This article is also an attempt to show how phenomenological work and genealogical approaches can inform one another.

Keywords:

• Tiredness
• (im)potentiality
• Buytendijk
• Agamben

Notes

1. One of the reasons why Buytendijk’s work might offer this possibility of taking phenomenology into post-structuralism, is that he is interested in phenomena that are usually not of interest to mains-stream phenomenology: tiredness, but also sleep, hunger, thirst and lability. With this, Buytendijk inscribes himself in a strand of phenomenological research that goes back to Merleau-Ponty (2012) and his stress on the primordial role of the body (over pure consciousness). However, Buytendijk’s approach also differs markedly form Merleau-Ponty (he actually draws more from the early writing of Levinas). Merleau-Ponty is only interested in the body in so far it is a source of giving meaning to ourselves and the world: as Nancy (2008) has shown, the body is only interesting for the Merleau-Pontian phenomenologist in so far it can do what only our consciousness was supposed to do before the body had been discovered (cf. Vlieghe 2014a). Over and against this, Buytendijk is interested in the body as such: the phenomena he analyses, are those where the intentionality of the subject collapses, where the control over our giving meaning to the world falters. These moments of desubjectification are the most interesting ones for understanding what it means to be human. And, here, interesting connections with a genealogical approach can be made.

2. This is the discipline which tries to answer Kant’s (1982) famous fourth basic philosophical question, ‘What is man? [sic]’.

3. If we would just look at the physiology of muscle tissue, it wouldn’t make sense to do more effort. When the muscle is ‘tired’ (but we can only say this in a metaphorical sense of course), it means that it needs a certain time span of complete inactivity in order to retrieve enough energy in order to function again adequately (cf. Buytendijk 1974, 113–114).

4. In that sense it is very correct, as D’Hoest and Lewis (2015) claim, that exhaustion means the impossibility of tiredness. Exhaustion is, so to speak, a limit situation to which tiredness tends, but once this limit is reached, tiredness disappears. We will say I want to, but I cannot. However, I can but I don’t want to is not part of the experience of exhaustion.

5. Tiredness is not just a state that passively affects us: it is a way of being in which the world (and in this case: we ourselves in the word) is disclosed (cf. Buytendijk 1974, 117). This is close to Sartre (2001) when he argues that emotions are not biological impulses that interfere with consciousness, as much as actively constructed framings of the world, which cause the world to be disclosed in a particular sense. Being-in-love or being-angry means first and foremost that the world appears in a particular way to us.

6. Mind again that in exhaustion, subjectivity is regained in a particular way: even though we cannot, it is clear that we would if we could. As such intentional control is safeguarded (even if in a negative sense).

7. At the same time this history shows that there have been various (successful and unsuccessful) attempts to take control over anthropogenesis. In this process particular ways of defining ourselves as human got naturalized and petrified. Agamben refers to these articulations of the human with the terms ‘machine’ and ‘apparatus’.

8. As such I will not go deeper into the writings of the earliest Christian writers, from Paul to Saint-Augustine, who also played a decisive role in this genealogy of the will. See Agamben (2011b).

9. Cf. Tyson Lewis’ critique of the value placed on willfulness since modernization (Lewis 2013). Interestingly, in a criticism of Deleuze’s well-known text on societies of control, Agamben (2011a) makes clear that the most important menace of today’s societal order is not that we are restricted in our willpower, i.e. in our freedom to do what we can, so much as that we are narrowed down in our ability not to do what we can. Power today doesn’t restrict us in what we can do. On the contrary, it continuously enhances our possibilities. And so, its core target regards no longer our possibilities, but our im-potentiality. We are left free to do whatever we can, but by being left free in such a way, we are no longer free not to actualize these possibilities. We are no longer allowed to remain in touch with our im-potentiality, and so there is no longer a position to take outside the order of the given – and to resist it. Otherwise stated, the desire to actualize one’s potential is no longer a force of transformation: it has become naturalized and just contributes to the continuation of the established order of things. Our desire for self-realization reaffirms the way in which our individual and collective lives are structured, and therefore the very possibility of escape, emancipation and freedom is menaced.

10. Referring to a related, but different phenomenon, some have claimed that laziness can and should be an antidote for the current societal order. See for instance Stengers (2011).

11. This is not fully in line with Buytendijk’s analysis, as he also deals at other places with tiredness in a quite instrumental way, for instance when he discusses the ‘desired’ and the ‘healthy’ fatigue (the anticipation of a welcome, earned and ‘pleasant relaxation’) (Buytendijk 1974, 119).