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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Since the beginning of the 21st century, global warming, terrorism, the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine have created a widespread feeling that the world is an increasingly dangerous place. In response to this situation, it is understandable that many people are inclined to retreat to the safety of their home - the last refuge and safeguard against the savagery of the outside world. But the home is not just a shelter: it is a space that supplants and replaces the world, a wired cocoon that gradually renders any journey to the outside world superfluous. From our couch, we can enjoy remotely the pleasures once offered by the cinema, the theatre and the café. Everything, from food to love to art, can be delivered to your door. Armed with a smartphone and a Netflix account, why would anyone risk life and limb to venture out to the cinema? Compulsory confinement, the nightmare of the pandemic years, seems to have been replaced by voluntary self-confinement. Fleeing from the cities, working remotely, relinquishing travel and tourism, we risk becoming reclusive creatures that cower at the slightest tremor. In this witty and spirited book, Pascal Bruckner takes aim at today's voluntary seclusionism and the self-inflicted atrophy that comes with it, tracing its philosophical contours and historical roots. It is no longer the tyranny of lockdowns that threatens us but rather the tyranny of the sofa: will the slipper and the dressing gown be the new symbols of tomorrow's world?
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface: The Oblomov Hypothesis
Notes
1 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse . . .
Notes
2 The Bankruptcy of Eros?
Notes
3 Forbidden Travel?
Notes
4 Is a Banal Life Worth Living?
Notes
5 The Bovarysme of the Cell Phone
Notes
6 Cave, Cell, and Bedroom
Notes
7 The Beauty of One’s Own Home
Notes
8 The Torments and Delights of a Life in Shackles
Notes
9 The Land of Sleep: Hypnos and Thanatos
Notes
10 Digital Wonderland or the Triumph of Slouching?
Notes
11 Diderot’s Dressing Gown
Notes
12 Those Who Have Deserted Modernity
Notes
13 Weather Sorrow
Notes
14 Existential Defeatism
Notes
15 The Extremists of Routine
Notes
Conclusion: Fall or Transfiguration?
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Triumph of the Slippers
On the Withdrawal from the World
PASCAL BRUCKNER
Translated by Cory Stockwell
polity
Copyright Page
First published in French as Le sacre des pantoufles. Du renoncement au monde © Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2022
This English translation © Polity Press, 2024
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, 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: 978-1-5095-5952-7 – hardback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023941413
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavors 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
Dedication
For Eric and the little devils
Epigraph
“Worse than the noise of boots is the silence of slippers.”
Max Frisch
PrefaceThe Oblomov Hypothesis
Oblomov is a landowner living near St. Petersburg in the middle of the nineteenth century. An honest and upright man, he nonetheless suffers from a natural penchant for inertia. He lives less in his house than on his couch, less on his couch than in his immense oriental robe, and less in his robe than in his “long, soft, wide”1 slippers. His body is flabby, his hands are chubby, and his movements are all marked by a graceful softness: Oblomov lives lying down most of the time. For him, walking and standing are interruptions of the time he spends in his bed or on his sofa: “When he was at home – and he was almost always at home – he lay down all the time, and always in the same room, the room in which we have found him and which served him as a bedroom, study, and reception-room.”2 Oblomov is the very model of the man who is at once overworked and pusillanimous, for whom simply thinking about what he has to do is a kind of torture:
As soon as he got up in the morning and had taken his breakfast, he lay down at once on the sofa, propped up his head on his hand and plunged into thought without sparing himself till at last his head grew weary from the hard work and his conscience told him that he had done enough for the common welfare.3
Simply writing a letter takes him weeks, even months, and requires a complex ceremony. Every decision carries a huge psychological cost. His deceptively docile valet Zakhar neglects his work and leaves the house in an unspeakable state of disorder. Some days, Oblomov forgets to get up, opens one eye at about four in the afternoon, and says to himself that anyone else in his place would have already gotten through a lot of work. At this prospect alone, he feels overwhelmed and goes back to sleep. As a little cherub, Oblomov had been overly pampered by his parents, who coddled him like a fragile plant. Indeed, his life had begun with a movement of fading away: “From the very first moment I became conscious of myself, I felt that I was already flickering out.”4
When his friend Stolz introduces him to a young woman, Oblomov panics. He is terrified by the mere idea of sharing his life with a wife, going out into the world, reading newspapers, and living in society. He falls in love with the charming Olga, who is responsible for making sure he doesn’t fall asleep during the day; he goes for long walks with her, but cannot bring himself to take the next steps in their relationship. She teases him, tries to get him to stop napping, and reproaches him for his bumbling and for not being more daring. She calls him a coward, and is driven to despair by this man who even refers to himself as an “old shabby, worn-out coat.”5 Weighed down by pressure, constantly overwhelmed by tiny activities that he never has time to complete, Oblomov ends up leaving her. At the age of 30, he’s still getting ready to “start his life.”6 Such is the illness he suffers from: abulia, sleepiness, and procrastination.
“When you don’t know what to live for, you live anyhow – from one day to another. You are glad the day is over, that the night has come, and in your sleep you can expunge from your mind the wearisome question why you have lived this day and are going to live the next.”7 Unable to love, to travel, or indeed to take any action at all, he soon stops going out, and sinks down into his pillows until he’s submerged by them. His tenant farmer and his relatives shamelessly rob him, stealing the meager resources of his harvest. When he finally moves to smaller lodgings, and falls for his landlady and her lovely white arms, he continues to be swindled, this time by his landlady’s brother.
Behind its comedic appearance, Oblomov is a poignant description of the impossibility of existing. The more the hero sleeps, the more he needs rest. Having never known great joy, he has also avoided great suffering. He has kept within himself the light that was searching for a way out – the light that “consumed itself inside its prison house”8 before being extinguished. Since his desires were never matched by his abilities, he has never forged ahead, because forging ahead “meant to throw the capacious dressing-gown not only off his shoulders but also from his heart and mind.”9 He ends his life by simply settling down “quietly and gradually into the plain and spacious coffin”10 that he has made for himself, with his own hands.
Notes
1
Ivan Goncharov,
Oblomov
, trans. David Magarshack, Penguin, 1954, p. 14.
2
Ibid., p.14.
3
Ibid., p. 71.
4
Ibid., p. 183.
5
Ibid., p. 184.
6
Ibid., p. 62.
7
Ibid., p. 231.
8
Ibid., p. 184.
9
Ibid., p. 186.
10
Ibid., p. 466.
CHAPTER 1The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse . . .
Why think about Oblomov today? Because, minus Netflix and the internet, he was the hero of our lockdowns, and will perhaps also be the hero of the post-lockdown era: the man or woman in bed, during this existence in a hover to which we were constrained for two whole years, was us – was you. The pandemic was a moment of simultaneous crystallization and acceleration, one that consecrated a historical movement that long predated it: the triumph of fear and the paradoxical enjoyment of a fettered life. The pandemic made going into quarantine (whether voluntary or forced) a possibility for everyone, a refuge for fragile souls. Goncharov’s novel is perhaps less a portrait of the Russian soul, as Lenin lamented, than a premonition addressed to all of humanity – a literature not of entertainment but of warning. The great books are the ones we read and reread because they shed light on events that they seem to foreshadow, events that come about long after their publication. There are at least two traditions of Russian literature: one of resistance to oppression (Boris Pasternak, Vasily Grossman, Varlam Shalamov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Svletana Alexievich), the other of despair and fatalism, and these traditions mirror and respond to each other. One offers unparalleled examples of courage in the face of abomination, while the other focuses on resignation in the face of destiny, or even love of servitude (Dostoyevsky’s genius was to reconcile them). In both cases, their ability to enlighten remains unrivaled.
In addition to the tedious tragedy that it represented for billions of people, the Covid emergency has led to a vigorous rekindling of the debate between caution and daring, between nomads and homebodies, between pioneers of the world outside and explorers who remain indoors. The twenty-first century, which began with the September 11, 2001 attacks, continues today with the threat of climate imbalance, the persistence of the coronavirus, and finally the war declared by Russia on Ukraine and Europe – all calamities that foster what we might call the Great Withdrawal. This accumulation of misfortunes has permanently traumatized a younger generation that was raised, in Western Europe at least, with the gentleness of peace and promises of well-being. This generation is in no way ready to face adversity. The end of the twentieth century was a period of openness, from both the standpoint of morals and that of travel. That era is over: the closing of minds and spaces is well under way. We now have space tourism for millionaires but, for most, crossing a border or even leaving one’s own home has become problematic. Covid has fallen like a providential star on a Western world that no longer believes in the future and assumes the coming decades will do no more than confirm its collapse. The virus has crowned all these anxieties with the terrible seal of possible death. Yet all it did was reveal our ways of thinking.
The two dominant ideologies in the West today – declinism on the one hand, and catastrophism on the other – have at least one thing in common: they both speak thelanguage of survival. The things that compete for our fear today present themselves as absolute priorities, but there is also a competition between visions of the end of the world, which, rather than cancelling each other out, combine nicely: we have the choice between dying as a result of disease, extreme heat, attacks, or enemy bombs. To parody one of Churchill’s quips about the Balkans: for the last 20 years, we have been subjected to more history than we can consume. Our time is an exciting one, no doubt, but painfully so.
In this regard, how many people experienced the return to normalcy as a shock? At first, they found the prohibitions restrictive; later, they found the lifting of these prohibitions distressing. Won’t they miss the nightmarish imprisonment that they wholeheartedly cursed when it was decreed? They are like those prisoners who, once released, sigh as they reminisce about the bars of their cell – prisoners for whom freedom has the bitter taste of anxiety. They’re ready to seize upon any excuse to cloister themselves once more. Their bedroom and house are microcosms that suffice in and of themselves, so long as they are kitted out with the latest technology. Voluntary self-confinement in the face of a dangerous world – the dungeon without walls, chains, or guards that people freely choose – should be feared far more than lockdowns imposed from above. The jailer is in our own heads. This period of life in slow motion has sanctioned an impressive easing of social constraints: limited contact, restricted outings, gatherings cut short, work from home, absent bosses, life in a bathrobe or pyjamas, authorized sloppiness, splendid regression. The disruptive or tempting Other has disappeared or been kept at a distance. Some experienced this cooping-up as a form of pleasure: the curfew, the muzzle-like mask, the safety precautions, and the “two-meter society” annoyed us, but it also gave us boundaries. We went from claustrophobia, the fear of confinement, to agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. The pandemic worried us, but it also freed us from a greater worry: the problem of freedom. It is possible that this freedom will acquire, in the years to come, the bitter taste of a memory or of a chimera.
Who could have foreseen that this experience of being behind closed doors would, by and large, be viewed charitably – almost as a long vacation – by a substantial number of those who lived through it? Many argued in favor of what one might call a sporadic lockdown or a conditional opening. Countless people in France and other European countries no longer wish to return to the office, instead dreaming of a simple life in the midst of nature, far from the noise of cities and the upheavals of History. The end of carefree living goes hand in hand with the triumph of negative passions. We now define ourselves by subtraction – we want to consume less, spend less, travel less – or by opposition, by what we are against: we’re anti-vax, anti-meat, anti-voting, anti-mask, anti-nuclear, anti-vaccine-passport, anti-car. Meanwhile, in medicine, the term “negative” – not being infected by AIDS or the coronavirus – has taken on a salutary meaning, while “positive” has become synonymous with potential suffering. Unbeknownst to us, the pre-pandemic world was already in its death throes when Covid began. It’s true that, since the lockdown ended, bars and restaurants have been taken by storm; impatient crowds are champing at the bit to live again; frenzied tourists are pouring in to experience something new, even if it means flooding train stations and airports; people are protesting in solidarity with victims of war – and this is a good sign. Life means excess and profligacy or it ceases to be life. But the pandemic gave a strategic advantage to the forces of stunting. Our future hinges on the tension between these two camps.
Our opponents – hateful slavophiles, radical Islamists, Chinese communists – denounce Western decadence, viewing it as the dominance of minorities coupled with unbridled materialism and the progress of unbelief. Many of us have long since formulated this diagnosis, but in a balanced way. Neither the recognition of the struggle of women and homosexuals, nor the weakening of blind faith, nor the guarantee of a certain level of comfort are in themselves factors of decline: on the contrary, they are marks of civilization. One can criticize the excesses of emancipation (as in the case of wokeism) without renouncing it. Who would want to live in Vladimir Putin’s Holy Russia or in an Arab or Muslim country under Sharia law – not to mention Xi Jinping’s totalitarian China? But it is true that the legitimate protection we enjoy in Western Europe, and especially in France, often degenerates into chronic dissatisfaction, a hand-out mentality that is always disappointed: whatever the State does, it is never enough, and the help it provides makes us weaker and leads us to mistake annoyances for tragedies. The proliferation of rights is accompanied by an equal decrease in duties, opening the door to endless demands. I am owed everything, without having to give anything back in return. Just look at the protests, and indeed the riots, of those who objected to the pandemic measures. In the name of freedom, they insisted on being allowed to do what they wanted when they wanted, while also demanding that public authorities look after them if problems arose. Leave me alone when everything is fine, take care of me when it’s not. The modern patient is an impatient patient who is irritated by the limits of medicine (“incurable” is the only truly obscene word in our vocabulary), but also suspects it of having ill intentions or of being backed by shady financial interests. The more the progress of science accelerates, the more exasperation grows in the face of its flaws and delays: we cure so many diseases, so why can’t we cure them all? From a simply rational standpoint, it is astonishing that so many citizens have risen up in rage against the very thing – vaccination – that was supposed to save them (or at least protect them), going so far as to assault or even threaten to kill doctors and nurses. Some people were so relentless that they continued to curse vaccines at the very moment they were dying in hospital beds because they refused the injections that would have saved them. Better dead than vaccinated!
The pejorative way we speak of “the pre-pandemic world” – as if it had been a depraved era – suggests that the pandemic was seen by many as an ordeal of moral purification. The asceticism and even puritanism of some camps found their prejudices confirmed by this ordeal. Some will always feel best in the streets, in packed trains: these are people driven by the instinct for discovery and the hunger for horizons. But a different tendency could come to prevail if the hydra of fear wins out: the triumph of enclosed spaces and those who huddle within them. When people feel disenfranchised because of the way the world is moving forward, there is always a strong temptation to fall back on what is most familiar. “It may not be much, but I make do with what I have” – such was the petty bourgeois wisdom of the twentieth century. Far from disappearing, the pandemic will be normalized as we integrate it into our list of everyday nuisances. It will remain just virulent enough to worry the anxious, and not quite deadly enough to disturb the carefree. But it’s only one item in the long list of misfortunes that afflict us, and it drags behind it the hideous litany of all the other sorrows.
The mood of our time is that of the end of the world: from armed conflicts to natural disasters, everything seems to demand the suspension of travel and a corresponding retreat into small communities while we wait for the curtain to fall. It would be absurd to deny these real problems, but the only response we ever find for them is fear and reclusion. The words spoken in Davos in 2019 by today’s main purveyor of collective panic, Greta Thunberg, are revealing in this respect: “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”1
