I am dreaming a lot right now. Often nightmares that bring me back to the world of my childhood as a little Jewish girl, hunted down and hidden, from village to village, in the heart of the Cévennes Mountains. At night, the same panic overwhelms me, as if I relive the threat of an enemy looking for me to kill myself, without my knowing why. During the day, I find this insolent blue sky and, as before, strategies to survive.
To survive, however, is not to live. To live would be to act, to resist, to invent, to imagine. The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed us into passive, terrorized subjects whose conduct is dictated to us. Despite its shortcomings and lies, the state, patriarchal and paternalistic, flanked by representatives of the medical power has become the only remedy. It imprisons us for our good; it tells us so, and what can we do but believe it? The alternative becomes to believe the rumors or tales circulating. So here we are deprived of our faculty to judge and develop collectively in a real debate that would not go through the constraint of distance communication which distorts and prevents any real exchange. We ruminate; we ask ourselves questions. Certainly articles abound, adding words to words. Men especially—sometimes also women but in fewer numbers, for many of them have to manage daily life—give us pedantic analyses intended above all to mark their place in the media space. I was very hesitant to write, so as not to add to this verbose accumulation.
As a sociologist, I wonder about the use of figures that come to us all day long and that make us tremble. I summon the basic data of the profession. I find the benefit of percentages. Why not relate the number of sick and dead to that of the population? Why not compare them to the “normal” morbidity rate—that is to say, those that are habitual and regular during the same period of time? Why not quantify the side effects of confinement and compare the rate of deaths from the viral attack to those on the rise such as victims of feminicides or that of old people in retirement homes whose absence of their loved ones has taken away all taste for living?
Why, when it comes to the countries of the South, not to relate the death rate from COVID-19 to that of deaths from other pathologies? Why not evaluate, because the very simple statistical models, for sure, allow it, the number of those who risk dying of hunger if we persist in confining them? The demonstrations and revolts that are occurring here and there, during which those whose daily meals are provided only by often informal activities and now prohibited by containment decisions, show that the collective intelligence of the “damned of the earth” has integrated this dimension.
We know the sad political answer to all these questions. The pandemic has highlighted the fact that our globalized political and economic system is just a colossus with feet of clay. We are confined because we would be unable to be treated if we fell sick in large numbers. Our so-called democratic states would lose all legitimacy since they have increased their repressive violence everywhere under the pretext of insuring our security. Here they are at the foot of the wall. The line between essential protection and total control, with the establishment around the world of states of emergency of rarely specified duration, is fine and fragile. This situation where we can neither consent nor refuse is as anxiety-provoking as all the contradictory injunctions with which we are supposed to comply.
Another sad political answer comes from our seeking our security and, incidentally, that of others. We can therefore only allow ourselves to be confined. But our rulers, too, have confined themselves politically because they are brutally forced to convert to the dogmas of the welfare state. They find themselves trapped in their promises. For our part, we only have to hope that they will hold them, if only for fear that the anger that has been contained for too long will explode violently from one point to the other of the planet.
Government promises remain unclear and do not constitute actual goals. Collectively or individually we are deprived of projects, unable to imagine a future beyond the few days that lie ahead. To live as a fully human person is to project oneself. Organizations of the left and of the far left buttress their convictions and their programs. Their proposals, when they reveal them, are, however, only repetitions of speeches from the past. Their imagination has been lacking for a long time. Yet they have the merit of clinging to what made them exist.
As for individuals, deprived of these great scansions of time that were the calendar—the social rhythms of work, leisure, breaks—they have before them only an indeterminate present. We have to hold on at all costs, alone or with children or a companion (or companions) whom we love, that is certain but which we find it increasingly difficult to bear. We have to hold on, wondering if, in our usual stores we will finally find eggs or toilet paper and make do with it. We try in vain to get these famous masks now mandatory, or those sanitizing gels which we are told we cannot do without. We adapt as best we can to the brutal transition from a society of overconsumption to an environment of semi-scarcity, where the expense of pleasure is absent, except to let off steam on online sales sites that will deliver we don’t know when. And then we have to pretend that we are not endangering the health of the delivery people, or that of this big box cashier the other day, who was handling “essential” items that I had just bought with torn gloves.
For a long time I rebelled against the maxim of Descartes who, in The Discourse on Method, called for changing his desires rather than the order of the world, which he tried to do himself. Confinement forces me to give Descartes a reason. If we don’t silence our desires, hug those we love or end up on a café terrace, we will be floored by depression. I think of Rosa Luxemburg, who, in 1917, from the bottom of her prison wrote to Sophie Liebknecht, to marvel at the plaintive son of a bird that she sees and hears from her cell, and whose name she has found: a Eurasian wryneck [un turcol]. We will probably find our plans and our desires when we emerge from our house arrest. And we will find somewhere else.
Because if we have lost the ability to project ourselves, like those who are sick with COVID-19 lose smell and taste, we have lost our elsewhere. Obliged as we are to be able to justify each of our outings, our life unfolds on a single stage, without a backstage, in what becomes a society of control by others: the police, neighbors who easily transform into informers, and the co-confined. I sometimes wonder, in the form of a joke, whether I should now comment on adulterous couples. We are not only confined in our houses or in our tiny dwellings that are so many cages but also stripped of that which gave thickness to the social bond: the meeting, the gesture, the look, the smile. With a mask, there is no more smiling (or at least smiling seen), this ritual mimicry by which we soften; there is little, but it seems so far away, our relationships with others. Real relationships, not the ones we maintain via the telephone and so-called social networks, have increasingly become purely instrumental. The exchange of a sentence gets to the value of a gift. How can we bear the illness or death of loved ones when we are forbidden to go to their bedside, to attend their funeral? With confinement we are transgressing the fundamental rites that mark humanity.
What often surprises me is the ease with which we, first of all, comply with all these constraints and all these restrictions. The only order that is necessary is that of the preservation of bodies. Bodies, however, are not equal. The pandemic confronts us with the paradox of a one and fundamentally divided world. It reveals both all the networks that circulate from one corner of the world to another but also the depth of inequalities, between the North and the Global South, as well as within the most favored countries. Because this time, it is death that strikes in a direct and visible way; COVID-19 sends the figures to us, those who are confined living lives that are not, the images of those who do not even have the right to this ersatz life which we support as best we can, because we know very well, we who have the privilege of being protected, that better days await us.
Translated by Lewis R. Gordon
Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun
A survivor of Shoa (the Holocaust), Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun is Professor Emerita of Political Sociology at the University of Paris Diderot-Paris 7. A globally renown intellectual, she is editor of Tumultes, an interdisciplinary journal focusing on contemporary political thought. She has been a member of the National Interdisciplinary Network on Gender and a member of the French Commission for UNESCO, where she was also vice-president of its Social Sciences Committee. She is a recipient of the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award.
