While we are looking for some emancipatory ideas from our incarcerated hopes, all more or less molded by this desire to taste a certain re-enchantment of the world, everywhere around, it seems to me, lie only the scattered remnants of our disillusions and of our fatigue.
Is it time, perhaps, that weighs its duration, freezing these years in a kind of eternity? Perhaps our rage to live, after all these false starts, false contacts and false hopes, in a characteristic reversal of renunciation, cowers obediently like a rifle dog in the hollow of our beings, in us and against us, to to become “discouraged”, or quite simply to hibernate, in a withdrawal of survival, which we will soon pathologize.
It seems so distant to me, the delicious sensation of “being one” with a horde of unknown people, contained together in a place, in the street, in the theater or at the counter of a café. I miss the places of containment that balanced our lives, as you miss them too. I, too, would almost want to believe in a concept of “freedom” which, in a characteristic elevation of absolutism, would allow me to sit in the passenger seat of a huge ten-wheeler and let myself be carried , finally, convinced of having “THE” truth and of being “together”, in a blissful feeling of coherence.
But I only have my doubts, my existential loneliness which weighs down and my fatigue as a mother, as an “adult and vaccinated” citizen, as an employee who is neither sheepish nor gullible, only caught between this wish to find my life in three dimensions and that to protect a system which, if imperfect, remains the only one we have, for the moment.
Become one, let go, follow the movement that pushes us to embrace the world through the senses, dance, get drunk with strangers that we nevertheless recognize, feel the invisible tango of cities, settle in space between the bodies where another language unfolds, here are so many facets of existence that languish under our fatigue. Taking the world by the head, reasoning with each other, feeling on the good side of the people cannot be enough in the long run. The dryness of our impulses begins or continues to spread and will probably leave marks on our lives that will last well beyond this umpteenth wave.
A crucial gateway to our relationship with the world, the body — just like the way we inhabit it, think about it and present it to the world — is currently subjected to great deprivation, even when we enjoy good health, comfort and access to nature. In a logic characteristic of our time which sectors all the fields of experience by connecting them only by causal links, we have this tendency to consider the body only in its “useful” dimension, functional, allowing the balancing cocktails of neurotransmitters or the achievement of sports performance targets.
However, after almost two years of spending whole days on a flat screen, playing at disorganizing shots and widening the void between crossed bodies, it could be that we come to experience a form of feeling of being more or less “off”, on autopilot or “disconnected” from a vital momentum.
Whatever one thinks of it, the dimension of the body is much more structuring of our experience than what our rationalist societies let it be understood. In psychoanalytical thought, to name but one, we will think of Didier Anzieu and his “self-skin”, but also of the theorists of containment such as Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion, among others. First and last language of our existence, it is through it that we speak to others too, well before words and sometimes well beyond them.
It is the body as an interface with the rest of the world that has been undernourished for months, the body in its relational and expressive dimension, the one that becomes the bearer of parts of identity, of wounds that have not yet been literate, of breaths and tensions towards what wants to happen.
It is the body on a stage, which moves, breathes, screams or breaks, putting in representation at the same time a part of our pain, almost relieving us of it, while we receive it, seated near other bodies, capturing also their reactions, their reception of this other language between humans.
It is this body that my life lacks. And you ?
For February, I would like you to tell me about the pandemic body. While, already, a news feed presents me with such a close celebration of eros in its market logic, I would rather like us to tell the story of what our bodies are dying of, long before their real physical death, while that we are still reduced to bubble spaces, flat screens and distancing measures.