APAvar: Rose, Jacqueline (2023). The Plague: Living Death in Our Times. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Link: https://worldcat.org/en/title/1374903661
page 5:
In the thought of Simone Weil, it is only in admitting the limits of the human that we will stop vaunting the brute illusion of earthly power, as if we owned the world we live in.
page 17: (writing about Simone Weil)
Thought can be revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, but in so far as it goes beyond the world as known and seen, it is always the enemy of domination. Like love, thinking is 'corrosive' for the social order.
pages 18 - 19:
One of the things The Plague conveys is how, in the very moment we appear to be facing the grimmest reality, we might also be deluding ourselves. Counting is at once a scientific endeavour and a form of magical thinking. It can be a means of confronting and bracing the onslaught and, at the same time, a doomed gesture of omnipotence, as system for classifying and bundling the horror away. What exactly are we being told every day when the figures are announced, rising consistently, dropping slightly, increasing again--other than we cannot get a grip on what is happening? We take the measures that are there to be taken, adequate and inadequate according to where and who we are. And we wait.
page 57 - 59:
In a relatively unknown section of Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, written in 1915, Freud describes the birth pangs of ethical life arising when man (sic), as yet unsullied by civilization, confronted the mix of emotions -- despair, rage, hatred and pleasure -- that he experienced in the face of death, especially towards those he loved most. ... Out of this mix arises the first ethical commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill': 'It was acquired,' he writes, ' in relation to dead people who were loved as a reaction against the satisfaction hidden behind the grief for them; and it was gradually extended to strangers who were not loved, and finally even to enemies.' But, he observes, with an eye to the unfolding war, such an embrace of everyone, enemies included, has been lost to so-called 'civilized man', together with the 'vein of ethical sensitiveness' that accompanied it.
When teaching Freud, I use these lines to convey to students that, at decisive moments, he was far less ethnocentric than is often assumed. But what makes these thoughts so relevant today is the implied message, one that is barely audible at a time when the exile of the psyche to the outskirts of existence -- like death in the time of Walter Benjamin -- is the unshared secret of the hour. Only if you admit your ambivalence even towards those you love most is there the faintest chance that you will reach out across the world to everyone, including your putative enemies: to China, for example, a country the Western world is now being told to hate; to black men being mown down on the streets; to the citizens of another country which, in the race for Covid-19 vaccine, may just be ahead in the game; to all those who are also suffering, whether from war or pandemic, or, like everyone else, simply from the fact of being human.
page 72:
'The evolution of civilization,' Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents, 'is the struggle for life of the human species.'
page 82:
There is a limit to how much we can psychically tolerate. This remains the fundamental insight of psychoanalysis, never more needed than today.