VOCATION AND ITS VICISSITUDES

There is no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment if revolution demands it

Dear Readers,

The text below is intended as a follow-up to an idea I began to discuss in a previous text, What if I Want You to Let Me Go.

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There is a notion (with a religious background, but nonetheless open to a materialist reading) which shows a way to make one’s life meaningful without falling into a trap of some higher power guaranteeing this meaning, that of vocation. In his Shattered, Hanif Kureishi notes that, much more than top specialist doctors, nurses are those who consider their job a vocation:

“In every town, in every city in the world there are hospitals that are full of nurses doing a devoted job. From the conversations I’ve had with the nurses, with whom I spend most of my days, and some of my nights – not having known any before – they consider their work to be a vocation, a calling, a whole way of life. They dress and undress me, wash my body, genitals and arse, cleaning everything. They brush my hair, change my dressings, feed and engage me in conversations; insert suppositories, change my catheter and brush my teeth, shave and transfer me from bed to chair – this is their everyday work. /…/ The nurses here are cheerful, they sing and make jokes, but they are not well paid. Wages are certainly lower in Italy than they are in the UK but they have been doing this for years and, as far as I can tell, want to carry on. One nurse told me he didn’t have a girlfriend because he was too exhausted from his work to sustain a romantic relationship.”[1]

Kureishi is perspicuous enough to immediately add that vocation and sexuality are not to be opposed – they can be in competition because they are both a vocation. Note also the profoundly theological Deleuzian remark that, in an authentic vocation, I don’t choose it but I am chosen by it: “There is also a sexual aspect to the notion of vocation, since such a choice, like sexuality, isn’t an option, but something you are inexorably drawn to. It chooses you, rather than the other way round.”[2]

We should take this parallel to its logical conclusion: if I fall passionately in love with a woman (or the other way round) and she is indifferent towards me or even finds me disgusting, love was still not my own free choice – my experience is that I was chosen to love her. But what if a vocation is a fake, not only in the obvious sense that there are vocations for an evil cause (Nazis, Stalinists and today’s religious fundamentalists also experience their terror as a vocation), but in a more refined sense: when I am effectively caught into the capitalist machinery, working for profit, it can make me even more efficient if I experience myself as pursuing a vocation (developing new products or whatsoever)?[3] Here one should shamelessly insist on the difference between an authentic vocation and a fake one, a difference which can be deployed through an immanent analysis: the vocation for an evil cause has to rely on an obscene underground of obscene enjoyment, and the vocation as a mask of capitalist activity also has to obfuscate its ultimate meaninglessness.