A Manifesto for Slow Thought

Vincenzo Di Nicola, Aeon — In 1986, in Rome's most famous square, Piazza di Spagna, a McDonald's restaurant opened at the foot of the Spanish Steps. This invasion of cheap, American fast food into the heart of Rome stirred sensitivities. One of the protesters was Carlo Petrini, a left-wing Italian journalist, who initiated a movement called "Slow Food"¹. Petrini emphasized local products, biodiversity, and, above all, the pleasure found in authentic Italian taste. By the late 1990s, this idea gradually evolved into the idea of Cittaslow² or "Slow Cities," which itself became part of a larger cultural paradigm known as the Slow Movement. The Norwegian philosopher, Guttorm Fløistad, captures the pulse of the Slow Movement well in the following text:

The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.

The Slow Movement, insofar as it advocates for "slowness in human relations," seems conservative, but the reality is that it constructively invites us to value local cultures, whether in food, agriculture, or by emphasizing the preservation of slower, more life-appropriate rhythms against the accelerating, digital, and machine-driven pace of technocratic society (which Neil Postman in 1992 called Technopoly, where "the rate of change is increasing" and technology reigns). In fact, this movement is more protective than conservative, like a protective layer against predatory multinational corporations in the food industry that, from agriculture to architecture, destroy local artisans. By virtue of the faith the Slow Movement has in our basic needs, and above all the "need to belong" to a place, this movement establishes in each locality a kind of contemporary community (a convivium)³ that responds to its own time and place, while expanding organically as communities articulate their specific needs for belonging and maintaining cohesion against the onslaught of backroom state bureaucracy and multinational interests.

In the same tradition as the Slow Movement, I too wish to declare my manifesto for "Slow Thought" here. This is the first step towards a kind of "Evental Psychiatry"⁴, which relies on the central concept of the event in the thought of the French philosopher, Alain Badiou, and offers a new foundation for ontology; that is, how we think about being or existence. The event is an unexpected rupture in our everyday world that opens up new possibilities for us. Every event has three conditions: that something happens to us (purely by chance, not by fate or determinism), that we assign a name to this occurrence, and that we remain faithful to it. In Badiou's philosophy, we become subjects through the event. By naming the event and maintaining fidelity to it, the subject emerges as a subject for the truth of the event. "Being-there," as found in traditional phenomenology, is not enough. My proposal for "Evental Psychiatry" both explains how we become trapped in our everyday world, and what creates change within it and makes new things possible for us.

پس از مرورِ روشمندِ معنای رخداد، قصد دارم به توضیح و روشن‌سازی اندیشۀ آهسته طی هفت بند بپردازم:

۱. نشانه‌های اندیشۀ آهسته عبارت‌اند از پیاده‌روی‌های سقراطی، مواجهۀ چهره‌به‌چهرۀ لویناس، و مکالمه‌های گفت‌وشنودی باختین این سه فیلسوف برای حل معماهای فلسفی اغلب به صورت روشمند و محتاطانه از رهیافتی کُند و کسل‌کننده استفاده می‌کنند. سقراط وقتش را صرف قدم زدن در میدان‌های آتن باستان می‌کرد و با پرسش‌هایی که سادگی آرامش‌بخشی داشتند وارد مکالمه‌های فی‌البداهه با مردم می‌شد. امانوئل لویناس، که از نظر زمانی به ما نزدیک‌تر است و یک یهودی اهل لیتوانی است که از هولوکاست در فرانسه جان به در برده، تأکید می‌کند که انسان بودن یعنی مواجهۀ چهره‌به‌چهره، مواجهه‌ای که در آن نحوۀ برخورد ما با هم مهم‌ترین چیز است و سایر امور زیر سایۀ آن قرار می‌گیرند. میخائیل باختین، متفکر روس، ادبیات را به عنوان گفت‌وشنود یا مواجهه‌های ارتباطی تحلیل می‌کند، حتی در با خود حرف زدن یا تک‌گویی‌های درونی که در آن‌ها همیشه یک دیگریِ ضمنی وجود دارد که گوش می‌دهد و پرسش‌هایی طرح می‌کند. هر سه فیلسوف در این نکته اتفاق نظر دارند که اندیشیدن نوعی فعالیت ارتباطی است -که با قدم زدن در میدان‌های شهر و در گفت‌وشنود چهره‌به‌چهره از سرعت آن کاسته می‌شود.

۲. اندیشۀ آهسته زمان و مکان خودش را خلق می‌کند اندیشۀ آهسته فراتر از مرزهای جغرافیایی‌ـ‌سیاسی است (یا چنان که در عنوان جنبشی دیگر آمده «اندیشیدن بدون مرز» است) و نمی‌توان آن را به صورت زمانی تعریف کرد و مثلاً گفت «معاصر» یا «مدرن» است. اندیشۀ آهسته، که به محدودیت‌های زمانی ۳۰ثانیه‌ای در برش‌های رسانه‌ای و چرخه‌های ۲۴ساعتۀ اخبار تن نمی‌دهد، از نظر زمانی نامتقارن است، یعنی ترتیب زمانی ندارد، بلکه با منطق آهستۀ اندیشه تنظیم می‌شود. در تأویل یا تفسیر تلمودیِ یهودیان از متون مقدس اصطلاحی وجود دارد به نام پیلپول^۵ که به معنای یک روش پرسش‌وپاسخ است که در آن ممکن است یک پاسخ در بابل باستان برای یک پرسش اخلاقی که بعدها و در جایی دیگر در اندلس زمان مسلمانان شکل گرفته ظاهر شود. پیلپول ساختاری گفت‌وشنودی دارد، اما نه مطابق گاهشماری تاریخی یا حرکات اتفاقی زبان عوامانه و عامیانه، بلکه به واسطۀ اصول مباحثۀ فلسفی.

در کتابم با عنوان نامه‌هایی به یک درمانگر جوان^۶ (۲۰۱۱) داستانی را گفته‌ام که این ایده را تأیید می‌کند. داستان دربارۀ استادم در دانشکدۀ پزشکی است، جوئل اِلکس، که بعد از ۴۰ سال استاد فلسفه‌اش را که اهل لیتوانی بوده در بیت‌المقدس ملاقات می‌کند. استاد، که گهگاه سرش را از کتابش بلند می‌کرده، سلامی به شاگرد قدیم خودش می‌کند، بعد از هولوکاست و تأسیس اسرائیل و کلی جنگ، و می‌گوید: «اوه، جوئل، دارم افلاطون می‌خوانم، تو هم با من می‌خوانی؟» اندیشۀ آهسته نیز مانند پیلپول و گفت‌وشنودِ ارتباطی زندگی خودش را دارد.

۳. اندیشۀ آهسته هیچ ابژۀ دیگری به جز خودش ندارد اندیشۀ آهسته تقلیدی از نوعی نگاه به زندگی است، در این نگاه ما از یک اکنون نامطمئن و صعب‌العبور که وجه مشخصۀ آن سرعت است بی‌محابا به سوی آینده‌ای ناپایدار هجوم می‌بریم و دست به مخاطره می‌زنیم. اندیشیدن، مثل زندگی، هیچ وقت کامل نمی‌شود، امکانی است که هیچ‌وقت خودش را تمام نمی‌کند، همان طور که جورجو آگامبن در ۱۹۹۶ در مقاله‌ای راجع به فلسفۀ کودکی نوشته است:

لاتینی‌ها تعبیر بی‌نظیری داشتند به صورت vivere vitam [زندگی را زندگی کن]، که در قالب vivre sa vie, vivere la propria vita [زندگی خودت را زندگی کن] به زبان‌های رومانس مدرن انتقال یافت. نیروی گذرایی کامل فعل «vivere» [زندگی کردن] را باید در اینجا بازیافت؛ نیرویی که هرچند ابژه‌ای ندارد (و این یک تناقض است!)، اما هیچ ابژه‌ای نیز به جز خود زندگی ندارد. زندگی در اینجا یک امکان است، یک پتانسیل که هرگز خودش را در وقایع و رخدادهای زندگی‌نامه‌ای تمام نمی‌کند، چون هیچ ابژه‌ای به جز خودش ندارد. این یک درون‌ماندگاریِ مطلق است که با این حال حرکت و زندگی می‌کند.

It is no accident that Agamben elaborates on the concept of living one's own life in an essay on childhood, for this is crucial to how we view childhood, and a challenge to what I call "developmental thinking."^۷ We must challenge the concept of development at all stages of life; we must find another conception of life's flow that is not based on speed or its milestones.

Agamben, as one of the commentators on Michel Foucault, proposes to us the reflective life as care of the self, a theme that, as it happens, appears in Foucault's later writings, when he himself was grappling with death due to AIDS. Living one's own life, vivere vitam, gains profound significance in Gabriel García Márquez's autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale^۸ (2002), a book translated into English by Edith Grossman in 2003. García Márquez wrote this book while also contending with a potentially fatal illness. It is true that in the title of this book, living is a transitive verb embodied in the goal of writing, but for Márquez, writing is a way of living life, his focal act, which one might say is his way of thinking. In 2009, when it was claimed that he had stopped writing, he countered it thus: "Not only is this untrue, but the only thing I do is write." Slow thought, like vivere vitam in Latin, has no object except that, like life itself, that object is embodied in the focal acts that allow us to live more fully in a timeless now, freed from the burden of an incomplete past or the fruitless promises of a redemptive future.

۴. Slow thought is porous In his memorable essay on Naples, co-written with Asja Lacis, Walter Benjamin describes the city as porous:

Definitive matters are avoided. No situation appears intended to last forever, no form or role declares "thus and not otherwise." [...] One can scarcely discern where construction is still underway and where dilapidation has begun. For nothing is congealed. Porosity is the product of [...] a passion for improvisation, which demands that space and opportunity be preserved at all costs.

If we assume that Neapolitan culture is an apparatus (in the Foucauldian sense, that is, a device for structuring society), then Benjamin's "porosity" is the name he gives to this apparatus, due to his particular way of seeing it, and due to the organizing principle that links his gaze with a communicative act (the essay on Naples/porosity):

Porosity is the inexhaustible law of this city's life, reappearing everywhere. A fragment of Sunday is hidden in every day of the week, and how much weekday there is in this Sunday!

Slow thought is a porous way of thinking that is non-categorical, open to possibilities, and allows individuals to adapt spontaneously to the exigencies and vicissitudes of life. Italians have a name for this: "l'arte d'arrangiarsi,"^۹ whose meaning goes beyond "making do" or "getting by," signifying the art of improvisation, a way of using available resources to create a solution. The porosity inherent in slow thought opens the way for potential responses to human predicaments.

۵. Slow thought is playful This clause means, above all, that rules may be broken with serious thought. Slow thought discards the rulebook, just as Johan Huizinga, in his masterful study Homo Ludens,^۱۰ quotes Erasmus: In my opinion, it is not at all necessary to do in schools what you do in a game of cards or dice; it is not the case that any transgression of the rules spoils the game. On the contrary, in a scholarly debate, proposing a novel idea should by no means seem unconventional or risky.

This is precisely a reflection of Badiou's philosophy of the event, which explains innovation; that is, the entry of new things into the world. In his Second Manifesto for Philosophy^۱۱ (2011), Badiou states bluntly: "A philosophy that is not daring is nothing." Slow thought, in its playful audacity, knows no limits. Neither time nor tradition can rein it in. The "play" or suppleness of slow thought means not only that rules can be broken, but also that a rupture in thought is possible. This rupture is the refusal to accept what Milan Kundera, in his essay "Sixty-Three Words"^۱۲ (1998), calls "the non-thought of received ideas."

Huizinga calls play "an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives" in a beautiful display of words, seeing play as an activity between the acts of a play or an opera, "separate from 'ordinary life'," which "transcends current reality and steps into a higher order." Play creates a rupture in our lives. Slow thought, in being playful, is not opposed to seriousness, but rather has its own particular meaning of seriousness. Slow thought, like children's play, is self-chosen and voluntary; there is no duty involved, and it can be suspended and postponed at any time. Play creates its own time, rules, and order, and is a model for slow thought. Slow thought, like play, is accompanied by folly, but is not foolish. In Huizinga's study, play has no biological or moral function—it is neither a physical necessity nor a moral duty. No material gain results from it, nor can any "profit be derived from it."

Just as play helps the child arrive at an understanding of itself, according to Huizinga, the individual, through the use of a mask or other means, creates a society of their own, separate from the common world. In play, there is something masked and veiled that is neither clear nor obvious. But although play is not serious or logical, it creates its own rules, order, and logic. Slow thought seeks to grasp the rules, order, and logic of play, to remove its mask, and to decode it.

There is a kind of family resemblance between slow thought and other movements in the history of thought. Laurence Sterne, in his novel Tristram Shandy^۱۳ (1759-1767), deliberately fills his story with a multitude of digressive events and deviations from the main narrative path, often with a satirical aim. John Milton, the seventeenth-century poet, states in a famous sonnet: "They also serve who only stand and wait." Edmund Husserl, in 1913, defined the phenomenological epoché as: bracketing experience, suspending judgment. Levinas speaks of fatigue and weariness as resistance to existence, and of delay as "the impossibility of beginning or ... the accomplishment of beginning." Agamben, the philosopher of indistinction and indifference, loves Bartleby's^۱۴ refrain: "I would prefer not to." Jacques Lacan, in his lecture on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (1844), speaks of the "letter in waiting"; a letter that, despite being displaced (eventually/by chance/incidentally), reaches its destination. Jacques Derrida deconstructs deferral and delay to the point where not only does it not reach its destination, but it never even intends to travel, because there are many points of departure. Slow thought evokes the word resistance, but not in the psychoanalytic defensive sense, rather in the sense of lingering and postponement.

Slow thought has repeated the mischief that defines it in various forms, from deviation and indifference, to bracketing and suspension, to deferral and delay, hesitation and fatigue, to displacement and lingering. What all these have in common is shilly-shallying, tarrying, waiting, and demanding reflection before belief and clarity before action.

۶. Slow thought is a counter-method for thinking, not a method of thinking, because it liberates, releases, and frees thought from the constraints and nightmares of tradition.

A 2014 editorial in the Irish Times advocates for the introduction of philosophy into Irish secondary schools and argues against “attempts to eliminate time for reflection,” attempts whose complete summary can be found in the “slogans of our techno-consumerist age”: Just Do It, move fast and break things, YOLO¹⁵ (You Only Live Once). Slogans that tell us “act now, think later.” Against a “consumer society [that] constantly seeks to eliminate time for reflection,” philosophy is proposed as “a counterweight against this culture of rapid action.”

The problem is that in “rapid action” it is assumed there is a surefire way of doing things and a kind of uniformity that we can accelerate through effort. Just as fast food works for some meals and not for others, we too must approach time-consuming matters with openness, both to preserve things that have come to us from the past and are valuable, and to spend time creating new approaches to the present. The main point here is multiplicity, plurality, and diversity, which are time-consuming.

Wittgenstein says: “There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.” The most famous and radical philosopher of the twentieth century did not establish a philosophical system for himself because he hoped to cure the disease of philosophy in himself (and in us). That Wittgenstein speaks of therapy is important because he compared the work of philosophy to the work of medicine or psychology: “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.”

When I say that slow thought is an anti-method, my statement aligns with that thought of Wittgenstein’s published after his death in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology¹⁶ (1980), where he concludes:

What we learn in philosophy is trivial; philosophy teaches us nothing new, it is science that does that. But to actually see all these trivial things together is infinitely difficult, and immensely important. Philosophy is in fact seeing trivial things together.

Let us look at this statement in a broader philosophical perspective. In the works of Badiou and Richard Rorty, a distinction can be made between two types of philosophers. Rorty calls them systematic philosophers and edifying philosophers, but Badiou calls them philosophers and anti-philosophers.

(In Rorty’s view) systematic philosophers and (in Badiou’s view) true philosophers set about building systems of thought and often construct their own materials (methods) for their philosophical edifice. Thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Giambattista Vico and Giordano Bruno, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant and Husserl, are all systematic philosophers. Others address edifying questions (Rorty) or attempt to question established systems of thought (Badiou’s anti-philosophers). Rorty calls this group of thinkers “therapeutic rather than constructive.” Badiou’s anti-philosophers are figures such as Saint Paul, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and his follower Lacan, and Wittgenstein.

Following my philosophical research on trauma and the event, I consider genuine, system-building philosophers to be philosophers of the event, who open up possibilities (in thought and life) for us. Anti-philosophers, on the other hand, are philosophers of trauma and the abyss, who close down possibilities for us. What these share is a rupture that is perceived as a pause, a discontinuity, or an interruption. When the rupture becomes a trauma/abyss, it is not necessarily clinical trauma as conceived in psychiatry or psychoanalysis, but rather the trauma of cultural studies which, precisely as understood in the anti-philosophical tradition, is neither systematic nor constructive but deconstructive and, unlike clinical trauma, requires no intervention whatsoever.

There is another category of thinkers whom I call methodologists. These are thinkers who offer us new tools for thinking. They cannot easily be placed within the dualistic classification of philosophy/anti-philosophy or system-building/edifying philosophers. Aspects of Nietzsche's thought, for instance his genealogy, seem to me to be a methodology. Wittgenstein, according to Badiou, was an anti-philosopher, but it is clear that Wittgenstein saw himself as a great methodologist who shunned philosophical systems and, by explaining language-games, was able to dissolve certain philosophical problematiques. From this perspective, the best view one can take of Derrida is also to say that he was a methodologist who presented a set of extraordinary insights into language, culture, and thought through concepts such as pharmakon¹⁷, dissemination, and repetition. Foucault and his greatest commentator, Agamben, are also methodologists. Foucault offers a set of methodologies—genealogy, archaeology, and problematization¹⁸. Agamben refines Foucault's archaeology—the Foucault whose genealogy he traces back to Nietzsche and Freud—and transforms it into a more purified methodology he calls philosophical archaeology. Furthermore, Foucault presents the concepts of the dispositif or apparatus, as well as the concept of the "care of the self," as methodologies for research, thought, and action.

Slow thought is a counter-method and a counterpart to anti-philosophy. Just as there are philosophers and anti-philosophers, we also have methods and counter-methods. In this sense, we can consider slow thought an edifying philosophy and an anti-philosophy, the very manner of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Derrida for examining the tools and methods of thought in order to illuminate genealogies (Nietzsche), liberate us from problematiques (Wittgenstein), and reveal the hidden, obscure, and disavowed roots, meanings, and effects of words (Derrida).

7. Slow thought is cautious Wittgenstein, in a wonderful philosophical lesson that is like a joke, reproaches philosophers for rushing their thoughts:

Question: "What does philosopher X think of philosopher Y?"

Answer: "Don't rush, there is time."

Socrates' fundamental objection to the smooth-talking Sophists of Athens was precisely this. The Sophists taught Athenians the art of rhetoric, how to defend themselves effectively, but Socrates spoke cautiously and slowly, even with hesitation, and (in the short term) could not defend himself against the charge of corrupting the youth of Athens. But history has rendered its own judgment on those accusations.

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Endnotes: • This piece was written by Vincenzo Di Nicola and published on February 27, 2018, under the title “Slow Thought: a manifesto” on the Aeon website. The website Tarjomaan published it on August 15, 2018, under the title “A Manifesto for Slow Thought”, translated by Mohammad Ebrahim Baset. •• Vincenzo Di Nicola is a full professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal. His education has covered various fields, including psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy. He is currently working on a book titled Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Science, the Humanities, and Neuroscience.

[۱] Slow Food [۲] Cittaslow [۳] convivium [۴] psychiatry of the event [۵] pilpul [۶] Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community [۷] developmental thinking [۸] Vivir para contarla [۹] arrangiarsi [۱۰] Homo Ludens [۱۱] Second Manifesto for Philosophy [۱۲] Sixty-Three Words [۱۳] Tristram Shandy

[۱۴] Bartleby: The character from one of Herman Melville’s most famous short stories, who would respond to any request from his boss by saying he would prefer not to. [Translator].

[۱۵] YOLO: An acronym for the phrase You Only Live Once. [Translator].

[۱۶] Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology [۱۷] pharmakon [۱۸] problematicisation

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