TOO CLOSE TO RETURN

Abstract

This article offers a philosophical analysis of the loss of navigation as a specific regime of contemporary public violence, in which exclusion occurs not through open conflict or rupture, but within a zone of illusory proximity to a goal, consensus, or completion. Publicity increasingly functions not as a route – structured by distances, corrections, and the possibility of return – but as acceleration, where the path appears almost completed, the outcome guaranteed, and the need for orientation rendered excessive. In this regime, language loses its navigational function and becomes a signal of momentum: it compresses the distance between perception and decision, movement and halt, trust and the abdication of responsibility. Violence no longer appears as an event nor requires recognition; it emerges as a side effect of inertia, premature certainty, and the voluntary delegation of navigational freedom.

Cancel culture is examined as one symptom of this broader disorientation. Exclusion here is enacted not through argumentation or moral judgment, but through the declaration of deliberation itself as redundant. Responsibility is dispersed across procedures, collective reactions, and algorithmic amplification; navigational freedom is handed over “for safekeeping”, not under coercion, but within a horizon of apparent clarity and safety. In this zone, public violence arises not despite the feeling of proximity, but precisely because of it: stopping is perceived as disruption, and return as increasingly unlikely.

The theoretical framework brings together analyses of symbolic violence and linguistic power, performativity and discursive normalization, the sacrificial mechanism, critiques of acceleration and the loss of horizon, algorithmic publicity, and practices of space and movement. Within this framework, the article traces a transformation of public experience through three mythological figures: delegated freedom (Aeolus, where the “right” wind allows the map to be set aside), instantaneous absorption (the Laestrygonians, where a safe harbor collapses into a trap without interval), and the voluntary abandonment of return (Circe, where transformation appears as comfortable normalization and logos is replaced by function).

The central analytical concept is the zone of being “too close to return” – a space in which proximity to the goal dulls vigilance and inertial movement becomes more dangerous than the storm itself. Odysseus’s polytropic capacity is opposed to this logic as the ability not to mistake the first island for Ithaca and to preserve the possibility of turning where safety seems self-evident. The conclusion argues that a philosophical analysis of lost navigation functions as a form of critical resistance, restoring distinctions between movement and acceleration, proximity and return, trust and the abdication of responsibility.