The Voice Over

It seems to me that this is another way to simplify the situation, to make it two-dimensional—here is the evil empire, there is the rest of the world. This scheme does not account for another “we,” maybe the most important one: the 14 or 16 percent of the country whose existence even official sociologists cannot deny.¹³ No matter how many million people and names fall under this category, they cannot be discounted, nor added to the monolithic majority, if that even exists. Here is a useful exercise: always remind yourself of the fractional, granular, unfinished character of any monolith—and that by discounting those who live here, you remove from the battle map the flags of cities that have not yielded. Are we (here we can focus on ourselves and remind ourselves who we are and what exactly we’re worth) so easily ignored? The attitude toward

those who stayed often resembles that toward the defenders of a fortress under siege: we expect not just bravery but also asceticism from them, as if the thoughts and actions of ordinary life do not befit them.

This is a mechanism from the field of psychoanalysis, here affecting too vast a territory. Given: a force majeure, which hangs over one’s head like a heavy stone, only leaving enough room for the bare necessities—for fast action, for brief affect, for clambering between today and today. The elimination of “tomorrow” (of the corridor and steady ground under one’s feet), the rejection of future prospects are, strange as it may seem, not the worst results of this setup. The worst is something else: life with a discredited, half-cancelled tomorrow can make any today seem doubtful. The present becomes guilty, desecrated. It gets displaced onto the territory of the past and starts looking for mirrors and analogies, so that it is less solitary while under attack (since the attack is inevitable, it can at least lean on previous experience, know that someone else went through this, that it’s not alone). It tries to turn its horror into fuel, to use it for movement. But there is no future and there is nowhere to go—the vagrant affect moves from person to person, around the circle, like a hot potato that no one is able to or wants to hold on to.

But what if this situation, hard as it is, depends on me, and I am expected to do something different? The willingness to admit that everything is hopeless comes way too easily these days—like a scream that switches on the second the elevator lights go off. What if another kind of modality is needed—and the point is not in knowing how to die (“oh how gloriously we will die,”¹⁴ the past suggests) but in intending to

live, not dropping the future like a coat into someone else’s hands?

I miss this modality in today’s air, and I wish it could be procured, distilled, dispensed in pharmacies. What is important now is to find a logic that would be compatible with life; that would work to affirm the everyday but wouldn’t turn into an improvised op-ed along the lines of “vote for N”; that would work to change who’s in power and wouldn’t want monastic self-immolation from us.

This brings to mind Theodor Adorno’s famous F-scale. This 1950 test of one’s ability to resist (or give in to) the temptations of totalitarian thought seems quite old-fashioned today. The test consists of statements like “the majority is always right” or “society should be cleansed of any kind of ill health” and asks you to agree or disagree. Now these statements would be seen as belonging to a very specific system of ideas—roughly speaking, fascist ones—before the sensors of agreement or disagreement go off. But there is another set of questions there that causes one to wonder upon first reading: Why is this here? I mean an assortment like “grit one’s teeth and keep going,” “turn away from an unbearable situation and keep living,” “find in oneself the strength to be joyful no matter what.” These might seem like the ordinary mantras of everyday courage that are offered to us for this or that reason. What’s wrong with them?

The point, it seems, is the very ability to turn away from suffering, no matter if it’s one’s own or someone else’s. The key is the voluntary refusal to see/acknowledge, the ability to turn off the mechanism of empathy at will: the thing that sets apart those who close their eyes and walk on from those who turn around to look (like Orpheus and Lot’s wife). The capacity to survive is certainly a feature of the first group. Today it is important that those who, whether they like it or not, belong to the second group, find a way to live without keeping their eyes tightly shut.