14,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
There is one fundamental thing that has changed in our societies since 1950: life has got longer. Over the last few generations, 20 or 30 years have been added to the duration of our lives. But after the age of 50, human beings experience a kind of suspension: no longer young, not really old, they are, as it were, weightless. It is a reprieve that leaves life open like a swinging door. The increase in life expectancy is a tremendous step forward that upsets everything: relations between generations, patterns of family life, the very meaning of our identity and our destiny. This reprieve is both exciting and frightening. The deadlines are getting shorter, the possibilities are shrinking, but there are still discoveries, surprises and upsetting love affairs. Time has become a paradoxical ally: instead of killing us, it carries us forward. What to do with this ambiguous gift? Is it only a question of living longer or living more intensely? To continue along the same path or to branch out and start again? What about remarriage, a new career? How to avoid the weariness of living, the melancholy of the twilight years, how to get through great joys and great pains? Nourished by both reflections and statistics, drawing on the sources of literature, the arts and history, this book proposes a philosophy of longevity based not on resignation but on resolution. In short, an art of living this life to the full. Is there not a profound joy in being alive at the age when our ancestors already had one foot in the grave? This book is dedicated to all those who dream of a new spring in the autumn of life, and want to put off winter as long as they can.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 308
Ähnliche
Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Epigraph
A Note on the Text
Introduction: The Unfrocked Priests of the Cult of Youth
Notes
Part I The Indian Summer of Life
1 Giving Up on Giving Up
The swinging door
Cold shower
Wisdom or resignation?
Notes
2 Staying in the Dynamics of Desire
Retreat or disaster?
The philosophical age
What shall we do with our twenty years (of additional life)?
Notes
Part II Life Always Begun Again
3 The Saving Routine
“It is enough to be” (Madame de Lafayette)
The splendor of the trivial
Here begins the new life
The two natures of repetition
The eternal rebirth
Swan song or dawn?
Notes
4 The Interweaving of Time
Live as if you were to die at any moment?
The old boudoir of the past
It’s always the first time
Become like children again?
Our phantom selves
Notes
Part III Late Love Affairs
5 Desire Late in Life
Asymmetries and expiry dates
The yoke of concupiscence
Indecent requests
Notes
6 Eros and Agape in the Shadow of Thanatos
Devotees of the twilight
The tragedy of the last love
The chaste, the tender and the voluptuous
Notes
Part IV Fulfill Oneself or Forget Oneself?
7 No More, Too Late, Still!
Lost opportunities
The round of regrets
Kairos, the god of timeliness
On the blank page of your future lives
Notes
8 Make a Success of One’s Life, and Then What?
I am I, alas
The three faces of freedom
A door opening on the unknown
Succeed, but not entirely
Not everything is possible
Notes
Part V What Does Not Die in Us
9 Death, Where is Thy Victory?
Monsieur Seguin’s Goat
Eternity in love with time
The luck to die someday?
“Love what will never be seen twice”?
The martyrs of endurance
The zombie in us
Notes
10 The Immortality of Mortals
What do bodily ills teach us?
The hierarchy of pains
Poor consolations
Just a moment, Mr Executioner
Eternity is here and now
Notes
Conclusion: Love, Celebrate, Serve
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 Giving Up on Giving Up
Pages
ii
iii
iv
vii
viii
1
2
3
4
5
6
198
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
199
200
201
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
202
203
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
204
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
205
206
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
207
208
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
209
210
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
211
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
212
213
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
214
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
215
194
195
196
197
Dedication
To the memory of my professor, Vladimir Jankélévitch, so eloquent, so elegant.
A Brief Eternity
A Philosophy of Longevity
PASCAL BRUCKNER
Translated by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal
polity
Copyright page
Originally published in French as Une brève éternité: Philosophie de la longévité © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2019
This English edition © Polity Press, 2021
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4432-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bruckner, Pascal, author. | Rendall, Steven, translator. | Neal, Lisa (Lisa Dow), translator.
Title: A brief eternity : a philosophy of longevity / Pascal Bruckner ; translated by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal.
Other titles: Brève éternité. English
Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity, [2020] | “Originally published in French as Une brève éternité. Philosophie de la longévité © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2019.” | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A brilliant philosophical reflection on the meaning of life after 50”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020023219 (print) | LCCN 2020023220 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509544325 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509544349 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Older people--Conduct of life. | Longevity--Philosophy. | Longevity--Social aspects.
Classification: LCC BJ1691 .B8513 2020 (print) | LCC BJ1691 (ebook) | DDC 128--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023219
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023220
Typeset in 11 on 13pt Sabon
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Epigraph
A bad life is more to be feared than death.
Bertolt Brecht
A Note on the Text
Chapter 10, “The Immortality of Mortals,” was taken from a talk given at the French Embassy in New York in November 2014, as part of a series of seminars organized by the Onassis Foundation.
Part I, “The Indian Summer of Life,” was published in no. 202 of the journal Le Débat in November 2018.
Here I explore in greater depth a reflection begun in La Tentation de l’innocence (1995; The Temptation of Innocence, 2000) and continued in L’Euphorie perpétuelle (2000; Perpetual Euphoria, 2010), Le Paradoxe amoureux (2009; The Paradox of Love, 2012) and Le Mariage d’amour a-t-il échoué? (2010; Has Marriage for Love Failed?, 2013), on the theme of beginning over, of unceasing resumption. Many echoes of these works will be found in this one.
INTRODUCTIONThe Unfrocked Priests of the Cult of Youth
In his autobiographical book The World of Yesterday (1942), Stefan Zweig tells how, in the Vienna of the late nineteenth century, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by a seventy-year-old sovereign surrounded by tremulous courtiers, public opinion held young people in suspicion. Woe to anyone who retained a boyish appearance: he would not find a job, and the appointment of Gustav Mahler at the age of thirty-seven as the director of the Court Opera was a scandalous exception. Being young was then a hindrance in all careers. Ambitious men had to look more aged, begin to get old when they were still adolescents, encouraging their beards by shaving every day, putting gold-rimmed spectacles on their noses, wearing starched collars, stuffing themselves into rigid clothes, forcing themselves to don a long black tailcoat and, if possible, to display a little plumpness as a sign of being a serious person. Putting on the vestments of old age when one was only twenty was the condition sine qua non of success. It was necessary to punish the coming generations, which were already penalized by a humiliating, mechanical education, to tear them away from their first faltering attempts, their scampish lack of discipline. A victory of the gravity that the honorable age has established as the only civilized behavior of humanity.
What a contrast with our own time, when any adult seeks desperately to display the outward signs of juvenility, wears unconventional clothes, long hair or jeans, when even mothers dress as their daughters do to erase any gap between them. In the old days, people lived the life of their ancestors, generation after generation. Now ancestors want to live the life of their descendants. People are adulescens at the age of forty, then quincados, sexygenarians, adventurers at seventy and more; with backpacks, ski poles in their hands and protective helmets on their heads, experts at Nordic walking go out to cross the street or public parks as if they were attacking Mount Everest or the Kalahari Desert, grandmothers on scooters, grand-dads on roller-skates or unicycles. A vertiginous authorized regression. The generational discord is as comic as it is symptomatic: between the young dandies crammed into suits like corsets and old children with silvery temples walking around in shorts, chronology is turned topsy-turvy.
In the meantime, values have been inverted: for Plato, the order of kinds of knowledge was supposed to follow that of ages: only someone over fifty could contemplate the Good. The leadership of his Republic was supposed to be reserved, by a sort of “tempered gerontocracy,”1 only for the elders, who were capable of preventing the anarchy of passions and guiding citizens toward a high degree of humanity. The exercise of power was connected with spiritual authority. It was Plato, long before F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button, who imagined, in his Statesman, that in olden days “dead elders emerged from the earth to live their lives in reverse,” returning to the state of newborns. Thus childhood was seen as the end of existence, a return to the point of departure after a long journey. The beginning was an end and the end was a beginning.
We have developed a different view regarding this subject: for a century, ever since the catastrophe of World War I, which saw a whole age group vanish under the command of irresponsible generals, it has been maturity that is perceived as a fall, as if maturing was always dying a little bit.2 The abominable thing about war is that it reverses priorities and makes sons die before their fathers. It is then that the young become, with surrealism and May ’68, Rimbaud’s heirs, the reservoir of all promises, the very crystallization of human genius. “Never trust anyone over 30,” the American agitator and pacifist Jerry Rubin said in the 1960s, before he, too, became a prosperous businessman after turning forty. From this inversion arose a new attitude: the cult of youth, a symptom of ageing societies, the ideology of adults who want to combine all the benefits and the irresponsibility of childhood with the autonomy of adults. The cult of youth is destroyed even as it asserts itself: every day, those who sing its praises lose a little more the right to appeal to it, because they are getting old in turn. They transform an ephemeral privilege into a permanent title of nobility. The demolishers of one period become the outmoded of the next. The member of the avant-garde becomes an early candidate for the title of fuddy-duddy, the senile young man is transformed into a pensioner living off his senility. Even the baby-boomers, those fanatics of adolescence, end up becoming septuagenarians or octogenarians. The society of the youth cult is peculiar in that, far from being the triumph of hedonism, it is, from early childhood on, obsessed with senescence and tries to eliminate it through preventive over-medicalization. And its counterfeit eternal youth rings increasingly false as time goes on.
Up to the age of thirty, the human animal has no age, just eternity in front of it. For it, birthdays are amusing formalities, inoffensive scansions. Then come the multiples of ten, the list of decades – thirties, forties, fifties. Getting old is first of all just that: being put under house arrest in the calendar, becoming the contemporary of past periods. Age humanizes time but also makes it more dramatic. The sadness of toeing the line, having the common condition catch up with you. I have a certain age, but I’m not necessarily that age, I register a discrepancy between the representations associated with vital statistics and what I feel. When this discrepancy becomes massive, as it is right now, when in 2019 a Dutch citizen of sixty-nine files a complaint against the state because he feels that he is inwardly only forty-nine and suffers from discriminations at work and in his romantic life, we are witnessing a shift in mentalities. For the better and for the worse. People insist on living several times, in their own way. We no longer look our age because age has ceased to make us or break us: it’s just one variable among others. We no longer want to be permanently attached to our birthdate, our sex, our skin color, our status: men want to be women and vice versa, or neither one nor the other; whites think they’re black, old men think they’re kids, adolescents falsify their ages in order to drink alcohol or get into a disco; the human condition is leaking on all sides – we are entering into the era of liquid generations and ideas. We no longer want to yield to the intimidation of big numbers; we demand the right to move the cursor the way we want to. Recently naturalized in the tribe of quadragenarians or sexagenarians, we begin by rejecting its codes. Age is a convention to which everyone adapts with greater or lesser grace. It pigeonholes us in roles and postures that the development of the sciences and the prolongation of life make obsolete. Today, many people want to escape this straitjacket and take advantage of the moratorium between maturity and old age to reinvent a new art of living. In what might be called the “Indian summer” of life, the baby-boomers are in this respect pioneers; they created the road they are traveling. They invented youth, and now they think they are reinventing old age. People remain hale and hearty so long as their psychological age doesn’t coincide with their biological and social age. Nature may be our master, but it is less than ever our guide. We move forward resisting its ukases, because it constructs us only by destroying us, with majestic indifference.
An intellectual autobiography as much as it is a manifesto, this book deals with one question only: the length of life. It focuses on middle age, beyond fifty, when we are neither young nor old but still have an abundance of appetites. In this interval all the great questions of the human condition arise: do we want to live a long time or intensely, to continue along the same path or go off in another direction? What about remarrying, or starting a new career? How can we avoid the weariness of living, the melancholy of the twilight years? How can we get through great joys and great pains? What is the strength that keeps us afloat despite bitterness or satiety? These pages are dedicated to all those who dream of a new spring in the autumn of life and want to put off winter as long as they can.
Notes
1
Michel Philibert,
L’Échelle des âges
(Paris: Seuil, 1968), p. 63.
2
Here I refer the reader to the first part of
The Temptation of Innocence
(New York: Algora, 2000), where I analyze the metamorphoses of old age and the West’s overestimation of childhood and immaturity.
PART IThe Indian Summer of Life
CHAPTER 1Giving Up on Giving Up
Growing old is the only way we’ve found to live a long time.
Sainte-Beuve
What has changed in our societies since 1945? This fundamental fact: life has ceased to be short, as ephemeral as a passing train, to borrow a metaphor from Maupassant. Or, rather, it is simultaneously too short and too long, oscillating between the burden of ennui and the glitter of urgency. It stretches into endless periods or flashes by like a dream. For the past century, the human species has been prolonging things, at least in rich countries, where life expectancy has increased by twenty to thirty years. Destiny has granted a leave, varying in length depending on sex and social class, to everyone. Medicine, “that armed form of our finitude,” as Michel Foucault called it, accords us an additional generation – an immense advance, because this desire to live fully is accompanied by a recession of the threshold of old age, which began, two centuries ago, at the age of thirty.1 Life expectancy, which was thirty to thirty-five years in 1800, increased to forty-five to fifty in 1900, and each year we are gaining three additional months. One girl out of every two born today will live to be a hundred. Longevity affects everyone, starting in childhood: it concerns not solely those who are reaching the end but people of all age groups. Knowing at the age of eighteen, as “millennials” do, that one might live for a century completely upends the conception of education, careers, the family and love affairs, making life a long, winding road that dawdles along, wanders, allows failures and repeated attempts. Now we have time: no point in hurrying to marry and procreate at twenty, to complete one’s education too soon. We can pursue several educations, several occupations, several marriages. Society’s ultimatums are less ignored than they are circumvented. We thereby acquire a virtue: indulgence toward our own hesitations. And a challenge: the terror of facing choices.
The swinging door
Fifty is the age when the brevity of life really begins. The human animal then experiences a kind of straddling. Formerly, time was movement toward an end; whether spiritual perfection or accomplishment, it was goal-directed. Now an unprecedented parenthesis has been opened between these two periods. What precisely is this parenthesis? A reprieve that leaves life open like a swinging door. An amazing advance that upsets everything, relations between generations, the status of salaried workers, marriage, the financing of social security, the cost of care for the old and infirm. A new category appears between maturity and old age: that of “seniors,” to use the Latin term,2 people in good physical condition and often better off than the rest of the population. It is the time when many people, having raised their children and performed their conjugal duties, get divorced or remarried. This change does not affect only the Western world: in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the decline in fertility is accompanied by the ageing of the population without the material conditions of this fact having been thought through.3 Everywhere, public authorities are considering putting this fraction of the population back to work until the age of sixty-five or seventy. Old age is not the lot of only a small number of survivors; now, it is the future of a major part of humanity, with the sole exception of the American white working class, which is undergoing a worrisome increase in mortality.4 By 2050, on a global scale, there are supposed to be twice as many old people as there are toddlers. In other words, there is no longer one but several old ages, and the only one that deserves that name is the one that immediately precedes death. We have to carry out a more refined division of the order of generations.
But brevity is also a factor of intensity and explains some people’s feverish efforts to devour their remaining days, hastily trying to repair their failures or prolong what they have experienced. That is the advantage of countdowns: they make us eager to seize each passing moment. After the age of fifty, life is supposed to be requisitioned by urgency, possessed by an inexhaustible variety of appetites5 – especially since we can be carried off at any time by an illness or an accident. From the fact that I exist now, “it does not follow that I must still exist afterward,”6 wrote René Descartes. The uncertainty of tomorrow, despite medical progress, is no less tragic than it was in the seventeenth century and does not attenuate the precariousness of every new dawn. Longevity is a statistical truth, not a personal guarantee. We are making our way along a ridgeline that allows us to see the panorama on both sides.
Here we must distinguish between the future as a grammatical category and the future as an existential category; the latter implies a continued existence that is no longer contingent but wanted and desired. The former is undergone, the latter constructs; the former involves passivity, the latter conscious activity. Tomorrow it will be cold or rainy, but, whatever the weather, I will set out on the journey because I have decided to do so. One can remain alive very late, but does one still exist, in the sense in which Heidegger distinguished the being that consists in itself from the existent that projects itself forward?7 For a man, “the heaviest burden is to live without existing,” said Victor Hugo, more simply. What should we do with these extra twenty or thirty years that we have inadvertently acquired? There we are, like soldiers who are about to be demobilized and are enlisted for other battles. Basically, the chips are down, the time for settling accounts seems to have come, and yet we have to go on. Old age constitutes a paradoxical consolation for those who are afraid to live and who tell themselves that, over there, at the end of a long road, lies the Promised Land of Respite, where they can stop struggling and set down their burdens. Indian summer, that new, late autumn season, unprecedented in history, contradicts their hopes. They wanted to retire; they have to go on.
This reprieve, which is a priori empty of any content, is simultaneously exciting and alarming. The harvest of additional days has to be used. “My progress is to have discovered that I am no longer progressing,” Sartre wrote in 1964, in his autobiography Les Mots.8 He was then fifty-nine years old and confessed that he was nostalgic about “the young intoxication of the mountain climber.” Is that where we still are, half a century later? The deadlines are getting shorter, the possibilities more limited, but there are still discoveries to be made, surprises and exhilarating love affairs to be had. Time has become a paradoxical ally: instead of killing us, it carries us; it is the vector of anguish and bliss, “half-orchard, half-desert” (René Char). Life lingers on, as do those long summer evenings when the fragrant air, exquisite food and convivial company make everyone want to prolong the magical moment and never retire to sleep.
Longevity is not a simple addition of years; it radically changes our relationship to life. First, it allows several diachronic humanities to cohabit on earth with different references and memories. What does a man who is almost a century old, who has known the period after World War I, World War II, the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, have in common with a child born in an environment of interconnected screens and hyper-technology? What do I have in common with myself, the man I used to be and the man I have become? Nothing more than an identity card. Chronologies collide with one another without being connected in any obvious way, and references diverge, creating real problems of translation between older and younger people: they no longer speak the same language. Longevity disarms incompatibles: today, it is possible to be one thing and another. A man can be a father, grandfather and great-grandfather, an old man and an athlete; a woman can be a mother and the bearer of her daughter’s and her son-in-law’s child. Methuselah is everywhere, but it’s a petulant Methuselah: a man can procreate up to the age of seventy-five and engender a new child at the same time that his eldest gives him a grandchild, so that the uncle or aunt might then be forty years younger than their nephew or niece, and his youngest child half a century younger than his elder brother. Science allows veritable temporal permutations; lineages intertwine rather than succeeding one another, like the cables of a telephone switchboard; family hierarchies are overturned, and an abyss opens up in front of us and sweeps away all landmarks. If by chance centenarians were to become the majority, they would consider septuagenarians spoiled brats and cry: “Oh, these young people, they don’t respect anything!”
This is the reprieve: the provisional omission of the dénouement, a fundamental uncertainty. Life is no longer an arrow that moves from birth to death but a “melodic duration” (Bergson), a multi-layered structure of superimposed temporalities. Rather than dream of time suspended (“Ô temps, suspends ton vol!,” Lamartine asked. “How long?” Alain retorted), we now receive an unexpected gift. To enjoy a supplement is to cease mourning, like people with AIDS who have been saved at the last minute by antiretroviral therapy. The executioner has delayed the fall of his axe. The development of human life is exactly opposite to that of a whodunit: we know the end, we know who the killer is, but we have no desire to denounce him; on the contrary, we do everything we can to avoid unmasking him. As soon as he appears, we beg him: stay hidden; we still need many more years before finding you. The last chapter of a book can be as exciting as the earlier ones even if it recapitulates them.
If the privilege of youth is to remain undefined, it does not know what is going to happen, whereas that of Indian summer is to cheat with the conclusion. It is the age of wavering between grace and collapse. After fifty, insouciance is over, everyone has become more or less what he was supposed to become and now feels free to continue as he is or to reinvent himself.9 Maturity aggregates in a single person dissimilar universes that post-maturity will mix up again, like a particle accelerator. An unprecedented adolescence, a belated puberty, as many people have emphasized: at the age of decline, it is no longer so much a matter of choosing one’s life as it is of perpetuating it, changing its direction or enriching it. How to make good use of this remainder? “This is the first day of the rest of your life,” the Anglo-Saxons say. The rest starts on the first day, but then it resembles opulence and later contracts. Time is like love in Plato, the child of poverty and abundance; it is the indispensable maturation, the fecund expectation that burgeons, but also erosion, exhaustion. To get old is to enter into the order of calculation: everything is limited, every passing day reduces our options, forces us to make choices.
But the fifty-year-old’s paradoxical adolescence will not lead to any superior reason. Claude Roy speaks magnificently of “this way that life has of not finishing its sentences.” It is human not to finish one’s sentence, to leave it cracked open like a window. It is other people who will close it by inserting a period, not without arguing about our fate. In a famous book Kierkegaard distinguished three stages along the road of life: the aesthetic stage, that of immediacy; the ethical stage, that of moral requirement; and the religious stage, that of achievement.10 The discussion is stimulating, but who could still divide his itinerary into three parts as distinct as the outline of a dissertation? Existence is a perpetual introduction to itself and remains so to the end; there is no gradation. We are at home in time only at the cost of being constantly expelled, thrown out of the present. We are long-term homeless people.
Cold shower
This fundamental deception remains: it is not life that science and technology have prolonged, it is old age. The real marvel would be to keep us at the gates of death in the condition and with the appearance of a thirty- or forty-year-old adult, hale and hearty, or to settle us forever in the age of our choice. Even if so-called life extension technology is working on this, through a series of treatments, surgeries and research on cells and mitochondria,11 we are far from being able to achieve it. These sabbatical years are a poisoned gift: we live longer, but at the price of being ill, whereas life expectancy in good health has ceased rising.12 Medicine has become a machine for fabricating handicaps and dementia.13 We’re being given twenty years of already worn-out life! We’d like to keep our preferred face, the one we chose among all those that evolution has accorded us, or get it back with a few strokes of the scalpel. Getting old is tolerable only if one remains decent in body and mind.
The fear of ageing thus increases as life gets longer and ageing old age gets further off. This fear appears earlier and earlier, begins in adolescence. Girls of twenty have their eggs frozen, begin plastic surgery, having their noses, lips, breasts and buttocks reshaped at the threshold of life. Surgery is becoming the obligatory accessory of a whole generation that dreams of metamorphoses at the risk of creating a humanity of clones. The anatomy received is not the anatomy dreamed of, and the anatomy dreamed of is never satisfied with the anatomy seen. Skin is never tight enough, re-densified or re-pulpified enough, the breasts never lifted enough, the cheekbones never prominent enough. The fear of not being in conformity is established at the end of infancy. The slightest sag requires a lift. So many ills have been conquered: we are astonished that they cannot all be immediately conquered. To the classical calamities is added that of not being able to overcome misfortune. The amazing advances in medicine make us imagine the virtual disappearance of adversity.
“Ageing will soon be a thing of the past,” read a magazine headline in 1992.14 Incredible news. If at that point the end of old age was already just a question of time, if we succeed in putting it off, turning back the biological clock, then the ultimate enemy, death, should soon be defeated. First we have to cure the mortal illness that is life, because the latter stops someday. We remain split between the fear of decrepitude and the mad hope of a miracle: the unreasonable certainty, thanks to the latest scientific developments, that we have overcome disease and death. We childishly dream of being spared, despite and against everything, and that the laws of longevity will finally be revealed – thanks, for example, to epigenetics or the DNA sequencing of supercentenarians.15
That is how we must understand the contemporary rebellion against death, of which transhumanism remains the main standard. Different kinds of modifiable inevitabilities are less and less often distinguished – slowing physical deterioration, prolonging life, inexorable inevitabilities, finitude and death. Death is no longer considered the normal end of a life but a therapeutic failure to be immediately corrected. The time will come when people are scandalized to learn they are dying, certain that the progress of research, within a few years, would have made it possible for them to live on. We are the victims of bad timing; the period owes it to us to cure us. Modernity has dangled before us the possibility of control over the living, of a “second creation” that would no longer owe anything to the vicissitudes of nature. It will no longer be these ambitions that seem crazy to us, but the delay or the obstacles to their realization. We have succeeded in “making the difference between the ideal and the real intolerable” (Marx), an attitude that can lead to reformative action or sterile recrimination.
By making longevity an absolute norm, civilization renders senility, the loss of capabilities and dependency more inadmissible. An unbearable observation: we continue to grow old and die. The fabulous promises made by the transhumanists, who want to remodel life with the help of biological engineering and artificial intelligence, have turned out, for the time being at least, to be agreeable speculations – Faust rewritten in digital language. They should be accused, not of being Promethean, but of not being Promethean enough. They have taken over communism’s radiant future, but on scientific bases. It is the same consolation, the same dream of omniscience and omnipotence over oneself and over the world. For them, it is the body, “that anachronistic carapace,” that has to be liquidated and remodeled in a new technological genesis.16 We were flesh and viscera; let us become cyborgs and silicon. We are really clinging to the intersection of two mentalities: one classical, which assigns a destiny to each age, the other more recent, which rebels against this fatalism and wants to push back frontiers, improve the human being. This engineering seeking to remodel us, to augment us, arouses both our skepticism and our admiration. Transhumanism and biotechnologies elicit as much hatred as they do mad hopes. But, if they allow scientific research to move forward, why condemn them a priori and not show ourselves more pragmatic with regard to them?17 We are promised that, before the middle of the century, research on senescent cells will allow us to reach the age of 150. Why not? We will no longer be there to see it, but good luck to our descendants.
We were promised eternity next year; grief-struck minds actually mourned the death of death, and we registered the gap between the ambitions declared and the results recorded. The inevitable has not been abolished, it has been put off: in Germany and Japan, more diapers are sold for the elderly than for babies! Let us not add to the distress of getting old the absurdity of denying its sadness or promising its abolition. Our power, which is both considerable and risible, is to delay its effects, to slow the damage: this margin is the space of our freedom. Without taking into account that, at this time of life, the black hole of depression often stalks the firmest characters. An improvement of the status of the elderly can be expected not only from progress in research but also from progress in mentalities.
However that may be, the body does not lie; the body commands. It tells us: the future is still possible, but on my conditions. If you don’t respect me, you’ll pay dearly for it. Starting at the age of forty-five, medicine explains to us, the human being lives with a gun to his head. It is up to him to delay the shot or pull the trigger. Here we must distinguish between the inherited body and the experienced body, which is above all a vulnerable body, constantly patched up, like an old, elegant sedan that breaks down and that we obstinately repair until the next accident. There comes a time when health consists in moving from one illness to another, without illusions, when healing is slower and convalescence longer, which avoids the dangerous predominance of a single pathology and divides up the threat among several of them.
