Andante doloroso. Variazioni intorno a un saggio di Remo Bodei

This contribution aims to articulate some reflections from Remo Bodei’s 2012 essay «The Painful Mystery and Joyful Mystery of Obedience». The «painful mystery» of obedience is exemplified by Étienne de La Boétie’s category of voluntary servitude, for whom servitude —as Bodei affirms— is always a condition of suffering. Alongside this mystery, however, Bodei invites us to consider another mystery, the «joyful» one: that is, the hypothesis that servitude can be a pleasant and reassuring condition, as famously suggested by Kafka’s short story The Burrow. This mystery might explain why (in Kafka’s terms) people sometimes refuse to come out of the «burrow», choosing servitude instead of freedom. Starting from this alternative, this contribution focuses on two issues. Firstly, as far as the «joyful» mystery of obedience is concerned, it highlights a criticality: the fact that any hypothesis of a reassuring and pleasant dimension of obedience can be easily taken as an argument to justify and legitimize domination. The essay thus moves along a precise theoretical path: it tries to identify other possible alternative explanations (to why people do not come out of their state of minority) which do not require to admit the pleasantness of servitude. Secondly, the contribution reflects on Kant’s exhortation to emancipation («sapere aude!»), showing its unintended dominative implications: the exhortation to free oneself, we argue, could in fact turn into an injunction to get mimetic, to acquire the dominant habitus. In order to show this risk, we will consider another Kafka short story: A report to an Academy. At the same time, we will examine the studies on «new management» carried out by psychopathologist Christophe Dejours, where autonomy and freedom are vehicles of (self)exploitation. Not wishing, however, to reject the «sapere aude» exhortation in its entirety, the contribution proposes a positive rearticulation of it in terms of «scale» and «time». It does so through a reflection on Alexis de Tocqueville’s concept of «Cartesianism»: a theoretical proposal which, as we suggest, might help to reflect on many contemporary (and problematic) uses of the exhortation to «think for oneself».