For J,Whatever the weather—



We are not really without hope. The mere fact that we exist, that we conceive and want something different from what exists, constitutes a reason for hope.

—Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (1933)

May I be alive when I die.

—D. W. Winnicott, Unfinished Autobiography (1971)



INTRODUCTION: THE WAY IN

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN written in the heat and chill of its moment. It begins with the first UK pandemic lockdown in March 2020 and then takes us forward to barely two years later, when Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had just begun. As I write these pages, war has broken out in the heart of Europe, shattering the illusion, partly fostered by the pandemic, that the world is united in the struggle against needless dying. Such unity was in any case a myth, honed to Western privilege and blindness, as the slew of wars across less newsworthy continents—from Yemen to Syria to Ethiopia—so clearly testifies. One of the most difficult aspects of these past years has been to square what felt at the start like a new global solidarity in response to the pandemic with the inequalities which slowly, or not so slowly, rose to the surface of public life, exposing the brute vulnerability of the subordinate, marginal, oppressed and the poor. No amount of common purpose has been able to thwart the power of wealth and status to determine who lives and who dies—whether in the guise of big pharma blocking patent waivers on Covid-19 vaccinations, or the surge in domestic violence, or the daily threat of racist killings on the streets. The pandemic struck like a force of nature, but, like the climate catastrophe, it also laid bare just how far nature is a plaything of human whim.

And then, as Russia’s violence in Ukraine ratcheted up on a daily basis, the world found itself faced with the megalomaniac tyranny of state boldly proclaiming its capacity to destroy the world. When violence takes the form of tanks on the street, we can no longer assign it to the heavens. One of the strangest and most perverse gifts of war is its capacity to shred any delusion that death is somehow random and innocent of human calculation. Instead, death belongs at the heart of the very legal authority to which we have been appealing to subdue it. In reality, death is always stalking among us, at once the starkest measure of unjust social arrangements, the prized monopoly of statecraft, and a reminder of the limits of human power.

What do you do with death and dying when they can no longer be pushed to the outer limits of your lived experience or dismissed from your conscious mind? How do you live with death or rather how do you ‘live death’—a formula which might seem at first glance to defy understanding—when death comes too close, pervading the air you breathe? In what follows, ‘living death’ will appear as something of a refrain, a reminder that to think of death as an avoidable intruder into how we order our lives, especially in the West, is an act of defiance that is doomed to fail. In the thought of the philosopher 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.

Perhaps, then, if those limits were acknowledged, the world would look less murderous. Killing is one of the most effective, but also desperate and self-defeating, ways of warding off one’s own death (a fantasy demonstrated by the need of serial killers to kill over and over again). For Putin, being president for life is not enough. He is aiming for the stars. The goal to finish off Russia is ‘centuries old and unchanging’, according to pro-Kremlin news host Dmitry Kiselyov. In the words of Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Mykhed, Russia is a country that ‘lives by the holy conviction that it will exist for ever’. It is in the name of ‘eternal Russia’ that missiles rain down on Ukraine (even if the Western powers had up to this war preferred to treat Putin as a rational technocrat with whom they could do business). Dictators always believe—or rather act as if they believe—that they are invincible, although somewhere they know this to be a lie. Which is why they respond to every sign of possible failure—a forty-mile convoy of Russian tanks, which Ukraine could never match, grinding to a halt in the early spring mud at the outset of the war—by lashing out even more. Like warriors, what invading armies want, Weil writes in perhaps her most famous essay, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, is ‘everything’. ‘They forget one detail, that everything is not within their power.’ For the Russian people, any victory will be hollow. They will be left with the death bowl of their dreams.

We need a different mental dispensation, one that does not flatten the world to its own worst contours but rather bends and moves against the grain, following the most sinuous, risky and creative pathways of the mind. Can we imagine a world in which the deepest respect for death would exist alongside a fairer distribution of the wealth of the earth so that each individual has their share? How can we ensure that death, as much as life, is given its dignity? How to honour the nameless Covid-stricken corpses burning in the night on the streets of Indian cities, or the woman in Kyiv spooning the shards of glass from her shattered balcony window while her building, its foundations blasted to pieces, teeters on the verge of collapse? These images are just two of the many that have haunted me over these past years, raising questions to which I return repeatedly in what follows. What can we ask of the polity in apocalyptic, plague-ridden times, when the worst of such times has manifestly arisen out of the decisions of the polity itself? What can we ask, or rather what should we be asking, of ourselves?

As a school pupil studying Albert Camus’s The Plague, I never imagined that one day—more than half a century later—I would find myself returning to the novel along with hundreds of thousands of other readers the world over. I was seeking guidance through the pandemic, a reality which up till then I had firmly assigned to a bygone age (in fact, the novel was published two years before I was born). Nor did this belief stem simply from the prehistoric ring which attaches to the very idea of a ‘plague’: black death, bubonic plague, the plagues of Egypt. In fact, Camus takes the Second World War as his analogy for the plague, overlaying two drastic histories, one of which, the war, shadowed my early life at the same time as being rarely, if ever, spoken about. Reading his novel gave me perhaps my first glimmer of understanding that something can be shrouded in silence and press even harder on everyday life as a result. It taught me how cleverly defensive and self-blinding are the capacities of the human mind. Perhaps the most difficult thing to acknowledge is the fact that, however inexplicable the arrival of a plague or pandemic might feel, however indiscriminately death-dealing, it is part of history, something which human societies and those who make up their number bring upon themselves.

* * *

This book therefore opens with Camus’s novel. If it felt—still feels—so disturbingly relevant to Covid-19 and its aftermath, this is because it recounts a form of disaster which requires almost super-human vigilance if it is ever to go away (for that reason Camus thinks it never will). ‘We are all carriers’ (‘pestiférés’), states Tarrou, one of the central characters in the book. We are all complicit in so far as each one of us turns a blind eye to death and dying every day, including death in our own name, that is death in the hands of the state (Tarrou’s father was a judge who sent criminals to execution). In the modern Western world, people are prone to treating death as everyone’s problem but their own—hence the joke, cited by Freud, where the husband blithely says to his wife: ‘When one of us dies, I will move to Paris’ (the ultimate throw-away line). What is the relationship between such careless denial of death, not to speak of its barely concealed hostility, and the flagrant precision with which death spreads across the earth? Writing in 1940, at the outset of the war, the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott suggested that the hardest path for the individual to follow ‘is for him to see that all the greed, aggression and deceit in the world might have been his own responsibility, even if in point of fact it is not’ (his emphasis). Everyone is accountable or should behave as if they were. Pandemics threaten to bring—or should bring—to the forefront of human consciousness, the extent to which we are all responsible for each other. Pandemics can strike at any time but, as Camus suggests with startling foresight, they only do so when the putrefaction of a neglectful, arbitrary and inhuman world breaks through the defences which serve to hold that world unjustly in its place. The two realities of history which to date people have never been prepared for—both of which have come crashing into our daylight hours over these past years—are, he states without hesitation, plagues and wars. What more might have been done to prevent them? It will always remain something of a mystery how, as they go about their daily business, people manage to smother and sweep the harshest realities out of their heads.

Every year the Vienna Freud Memorial Lecture is held annually on Freud’s birthday, 6 May. When the 2020 lecture, which I had been invited to deliver, had to be postponed due to Covid-19, it made perfect, although somewhat disquieting, sense that Monika Pessler, the Sigmund Freud Museum’s Director, suggested it should be moved to 23 September, the day he died. Given the situation in which we found ourselves, it seemed right that the theme of death, which had tracked Freud’s thinking while undergoing monumental upheavals in the course of his work, should be the subject I would talk about. Because of Covid travel restrictions, I delivered the lecture livestreamed from the Freud Museum in London in a room with no audience. I was to stand between two couches, one immediately recognizable as the couch which, since the opening of the museum, had always graced Freud’s consulting room. The couch on the other side I had never seen before. Minutes before we began, Carol Siegel, the London director, told me that it was the couch on which he had died. It seemed appropriate, not just to the historic crisis we were all living, but also to my topic that, in the space of a split second, any of the internal equipoise which I thought I had summoned to deliver the lecture pretty much fell to pieces.

Anyone writing about Covid, and again during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, will, I suspect, have had their version of this experience, where the acute reality of the hour makes any control over words, indeed any semblance of self-mastery, seem even more fraudulent than usual. This is just one reason why the injunction to carry on as normal—or return to normal—as fast as possible, which was the supreme driver of then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s political and personal agenda, seemed not just to fly in the face of all evidence but was also felt to be such an insult. Grappling with death had become our daily fare and obligation, although it is one that so many world leaders from Johnson to Jair Bolsonaro to Narendra Modi appeared to hate (almost as if it were a personal affront). Johnson was therefore by no means alone in this although he was, I would say, one of the worst. Like Trump, he is dishonest to the core. Even more important than his personal failings, however, was the fact that the entire political atmosphere he promoted—feel good, pretend the worst isn’t happening—was a barefaced lie. We have been living a war of (psychic) attrition: told on a more or less daily basis that the situation can be managed, while, to take just the most glaring example, the NHS crumbled (as relentlessly charted by palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke among others, though it was obvious to anyone who had eyes to see). After every temporary reprieve, the toll of infection mounted once more—most recently the surge of summer 2022, which the government in the UK chose more or less completely to ignore, while as I write, a new Omicron variant, starting in India, is being reported across the globe (cases reported in the UK, US, Germany, and Canada). Consigning Covid to history, surveillance and testing capabilities have been dropped by countries across the world.

Under such pretence and obfuscation, what happens to the idea that being human is to be irrevocably in touch with both intimate and social pain? At moments it has felt to me that we are being asked to participate in a collective psychosis—where the gap between inner life and the reality of the world around us is being pulled further and further apart, at the same time as the walls around what it is permissible to think, say, and do have started to close in. To take just two examples of the second: a new law cracking down on public protest in the UK; inhuman asylum policies now stalling entry to Ukrainian refugees (not to speak of the plan to send refugees on a one-way ticket to offshore camps in Rwanda). In Freud’s famous distinction, the neurotic represses, or tries to repress, that part of their desire which clashes with reality; the psychotic withdraws from reality and moulds their sense of the outside world to harmonize with their delusions. Hence the famous resistance of psychotic disturbance to negotiation and cure. Although the Austro-British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein would prove him wrong, Freud felt that psychosis was beyond the reach of psychoanalytic treatment. I have lost count of the number of times over these past years when it has felt as if those in power, without a tremor of self-doubt, were inviting us to enter the bubble of a world gone completely mad.

In 1926, Klein arrived in London, introduced into the British psychoanalytic community by Freud’s future biographer, Ernest Jones. Just over a decade later in 1938, Freud, in flight from the Nazis, escaped Austria to London accompanied by his daughter, the psychoanalyst Anna Freud. Psychoanalysis therefore made its way into the UK under the shadow of past and impending war. Plague had also been its bedfellow, although this is less known. In 1920, Freud’s favourite daughter, Sophie Halberstadt-Freud, died during the fourth wave of the so-called ‘Spanish’ flu, which had ravaged Europe for several years and which also played its part in determining the outcome of the First World War. Before it struck, the Axis powers were confident of victory. Freud therefore found himself in the midst of the two experiences, plague and war, for which Camus believed no one is ever prepared. As we will see, Freud was no exception. These are two writers linked across the divide between knowledge that can and cannot be borne. By far the worst pandemic of the twentieth century, with a death toll higher than the two world wars combined, the Spanish flu has been more or less erased from history. Excavating this history, tracing the impact of his daughter’s death on Freud’s understanding of the human mind, is to register the uncanny and persistent ease of historical forgetting against which the whole of psychoanalysis pitches itself.

* * *

The third figure whom I offer here as a guide through these times is the extraordinary French thinker and writer Simone Weil. Perhaps coincidentally, more likely not, she completes the circuit of the book by leading us back to Camus. He was one of the first to recognize her writing, admiring her at a time when her truly prodigious output was barely known. In 1943 at the age of thirty-four, Weil died in a hospital in London where she had been waiting to cross the Channel and join the French Resistance. She had fallen ill with tuberculosis, which became incurable when she refused to eat any more than the pitiful rations of food available to her co-patriots fighting in France. She was also grief-stricken that her plan to parachute a troop of nurses into occupied France to tend the sick and the dying, a plan she managed to have brought to the attention of Charles de Gaulle, had been dismissed by him as insane.

Weil knew exactly what she was asking for. She acknowledged that the nurses would most likely die alongside their patients and would know this. But she also had confidence in what she described as a unique brand of determination, possessed by some women who risk their lives in the service of care. Such an act would offer the world at war an irrefutable moral example from which the enemy would be unable to recover. This ‘cold, virile’ determination is rarely found, she suggested, ‘in the same human being together with the tenderness required to comfort suffering and the agony of death. But no matter how rare, it can be found.’ She could be describing nurses and care workers during the pandemic, or those making their way to tend the mortally wounded in cities under bombardment in Ukraine. It was, she elaborated, a form of courage which, unlike the fatal bravado of wartime, was not ‘kindled’ by the desire to kill, but by the ability and willingness to bear the sight of the dying. For Weil, this vision was merely an extension of every human’s obligation to the most vulnerable people in the world which means accepting their frailty and mortality as one’s own. It was also where she grounded her ethics of love. Bearing the thought that a loved one is mortal, she wrote in her 1941–1942 notebook in Marseille, the first stop in her flight from Nazi-occupied Paris, ‘might indeed have died at the very moment one is thinking about them’, is in itself an act of love (she was in the midst of the war, but she could equally have been writing about a pandemic).

Weil’s prescience here seems remarkable. For more than two years, fear of contagion has dominated airwaves across the globe, only to be suddenly and carelessly usurped by war. The two are linked, not just as Camus suggested by how unprepared people have historically been for both, but also for the way they pit humans against each other. Shun the contagious, kill the enemy—such brutal instructions are always in danger of becoming the norm (fear of contagion as the antithesis of care). As if, they each imply, the first step towards a liveable life, or even the only way to survive, is to draw up a list of those to be killed and/or ostracized. For Weil, on the other hand, the only viable path to justice was to make common cause with those who ‘do not count’, not ‘in any situation, in anyone’s eyes’—the exploited and destitute, the criminal reoffender, the racial minority, the outcast, the sick, the refugee—those whose fate the more fortunate are desperate to avoid, those they least want to be. Crucially, in the world of Homer, which was so important to Weil, Zeus, on whose law justice depends, extends his protection above all to those whose place in the established order of things is uncertain—the stranger and the suppliant.

Weil was calling for a radical new form of equality. One that trusts in the ability of hearts and minds to cut across national, class and racial bounds. Her description of class exploitation has lost none of its force; she herself worked in factories in order to experience the affliction of the workers at first hand. What she found was a form of living death, what she sought was a world in which nobody would ever find themselves in conditions which made it preferable to die. Her condemnation of French colonialism for trampling over indigenous peoples was without reserve. If France failed to relinquish its colonies, she insisted, any victory against Nazism would fail. She came close to predicting ecological disaster. Society was weighing on humanity ‘more cruelly than water, earth, air and fire’, all the more so as it wrests the elements to its purpose, while capital expansion was heading for the point where it would be ‘halted by the actual limits of the earth’s surface’ (or not halted as billionaires today launch themselves into space). Her belief in democracy was as steadfast as it was wary. Democracies whose main aim is to overthrow democracy itself (Hitler’s Germany) ‘stifle their own breath’ when they introduce discriminatory laws, but if they fail to do so, they will be ‘as safe as a little bird in front of a snake’. Nations that deny their own violent histories, notably imperial crimes, are as foolishly destructive ‘as a child tearing the petals off a rose’ (she was agitator and poet).

One by one, as we will see, Weil puts in place the building blocks of the most heated political struggles and debates that stretch across the world today: the fight for decolonization and for the legacy of slavery to be remembered; the calling out of corruption and coercion in democracies that boast their freedom; or, in the opposite direction, the preposterous suggestion, made by the former UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, shortly after the Russian invasion, that Ukrainian refugees fleeing a war zone should be barred entry for fear of Russian infiltrators (another threat of contagion to add to all the rest). What might a nation look like, Weil asks, that is grounded in love for the alien, something which to this day has never been seen? What unthinkable shifts in the mental weather are needed for the world in which we are living to survive? A form of sainthood, she concedes. But then in the midst of a catastrophic world war which she hated, perhaps sainthood was in order ‘just as doctors are needed in a city stricken with plague’. None of this got in the way of her analysis of the irresistible temptation of power at its most lethal, which pushes anyone who wields it to exceed all human restraint. If the Russian military are committing atrocities in Ukraine, one reporter on the ground observed, it is simply because, like its American and British counterparts, ‘they can’. Weil’s work can be read as a manifesto. She is laying out just how much is needed to remedy social destruction and to avoid the worst of who we are. ‘Each of us,’ she writes, is tempted to set his failings to one side, ‘to stuff them into the attic,’ but ‘to give way to this temptation is to ruin the soul.’ She is talking of individual human subjects and of nations.

* * *

As I am writing, universities in England are experiencing the worst assault on the humanities that I can remember in my lifetime (and there have been a few). No one I know doubts for one minute that this is a reaction to the role that universities are playing in creating a space for social critique at a time when it has never been more needed. To take just one example, universities are at the forefront of the cry for decolonization on campus, for memory and redress in relation to slavery and subjugation, which Weil was advocating those many years ago. As a student in Oxford at the time of the student uprisings of 1968, I for one have never lost my conviction that universities should be at the vanguard of such struggles, and that providing an education in dissent, critique and activism is a role that any self-respecting institution of learning should play. Today these aims are written into the objectives of a new global university, the Open Society University Network, launched by George Soros in 2020 after his Central European University was hounded out of Hungary by anti-Semitism (an educational initiative to which Birkbeck together with the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities are proud to be associated). I remember responding with genuine bafflement when a senior academic told me, in response to ’68, that students were not at university to engage in politics, as if that were not a core part of their education into citizenship. The same objecting voices can be heard even more loudly today (for me, telling a student not to be political is like instructing a swimmer to stay on dry land).

At the core of this battle is the question of what thought is capable of. How far, in whatever circumstances, are we willing, or able, to let ourselves go into the unacceptable and unspoken reaches of the world and of the mind? This, of course, is where Freud’s work and psychoanalysis begins, the mental place into which pandemics and wars could be said to push just about everyone. Freedom of thought is most often taken to mean the freedom to say whatever we please without fear of censure. But there is another meaning, no less important, which is the ability to track by means of thought the more hidden, painful and scandalous aspects of human life in a world which has turned—or so it has seemed repeatedly over these past years—even more dangerous and cruel than it was before (again this might have special poignancy for the generation of ’68 who believed the world could be moulded to their dreams).

For Weil, there is something intrinsically radical in the power of thought. Because a human is a thinking creature, ‘never, whatever may happen’, will mankind accept servitude. 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. ‘The powerful forces that we have to fight are preparing to crush us,’ she acknowledged, ‘but they cannot stop us from working towards a clear comprehension of the object of our efforts.’ It was a refrain. However bad things get, ‘nothing in the world can prevent us from thinking clearly,’ ‘nothing can compel anyone to exercise their powers of thought or take away their powers over their own mind.’ I think it is fair to say that she was talking about herself. In the times we are living, when it can feel almost impossible to avoid despair, I have tried—as indeed throughout all that follows—to take her brief and run with it.



TO DIE ONE’S OWN DEATH

Thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic

I want to know why we, like upside-down sunflowers, turn to the dark side rather than to the light.

—Rachel Berdach, The Emperor, the Sages and Death (1938)

WHAT IS LEFT OF the inner life when the world turns more cruel, or appears to turn more cruel, than ever before? When it reels from inflicted blows—pandemic, war, starvation, climate devastation or all these together—what happens to the fabric of the mind? Is its only option defensive—to batten down the hatches, to haul up the drawbridge (to use the common figures of speech for a subject under assault), or simply to survive? And does that leave room to grieve, not just for those who have been lost, but for the shards, the broken pieces and muddled fragments of the human heart that make us who we are? Barely six months after the outbreak of the First World War, on Christmas Day 1914, Freud wrote to Ernest Jones lamenting that the psychoanalytic movement ‘is now perishing in the strife of nations’ (the two men were on opposite sides in the war). ‘I do not delude myself,’ he wrote. ‘The springtime of our science has abruptly broken off … all we can do is to keep the fire flickering in a few hearths, until a more favourable wind makes it possible to light it again to full blaze.’ At a time of pandemic, is there room for anything like the complex reckoning with life and with death that is the unique domain of psychoanalysis?

As our screens flicker daily with the toll of the dead, it is hard not to be overcome by the scale of a tragedy that has left people we love dying in isolation, funerals pared back beyond decency, the rituals of family commemoration that make death manageable, or almost manageable, outlawed. Not to speak of the interminable counting that reduces humans to abstractions, robbing us a second time of each individual loss, even while, in the words of the British palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke, the pandemic ‘unfolds one death at a time’. ‘When the statistics threaten to throw me off balance,’ she wrote of her struggle to restore dignity to those dying in hospital, ‘I try to keep things as small as I can.’

In such moments, it is perhaps even harder to allow ourselves to admit our emotional ambivalence towards the dead as much as the living, which, in our non-pandemic existence—if such a world can be imagined again—is our daily psychic fare. Truth, they say, is the first casualty of war, but psychic truth is not what is being talked about. War and pandemic strip the mind bare. They share a brute ability to smother our psychic repertoire. Just for a second, and if only in the public mind, they make grief seem pure. We cheer soldiers off to battle and weep when they fall; we stand gut-wrenched and helpless as a pandemic ravages its way through the homes that allowed us to cherish the illusion of safety. ‘You have, my poor child, seen death break into the family for the first time, or heard about it,’ Freud wrote to his eldest daughter, Mathilde, when Heinrich Graf—her uncle, his brother-in-law—died suddenly in 1908, ‘and perhaps shuddered at the idea that for none of us can life be made any safer.’ He offered no false consolation. We do not live in a safe world. But he did insist that, for old people like him, an awareness of the inevitable end gives life its special value—Freud was about to turn fifty-two, one of several points during his life when he was convinced he would die.

On 25 January 1920, Freud’s favourite daughter, Sophie Halberstadt-Freud (whom he called his ‘Sunday child’), died during her third pregnancy from complications arising from Spanish flu, which had wiped out millions across Europe since the first recorded case on 4 March 1918. His daughter was one of its late casualties, falling like a soldier killed just when peace is declared—a bitter irony given that the final wave which killed her was by no means the most deadly of the three. In fact, according to some analysts, this was a fourth wave exclusive to northern countries, many of whose citizens had wrongly believed themselves to be free of the disease by December 1918, when there had been time to recover from the surge in infections following the Armistice celebrations in the streets. Beyond the fact of their historical coincidence, the plague and the war were two piled up disasters. The destiny of one was bound to the fate of the other. Erich Ludendorff, the commander of the German forces, declared that the Spanish flu had robbed him of victory. Things had started to go downhill for the Central Powers in April 1918, when the disease made its first appearance in the trenches: until March that year they had believed they could win the war.

The Spanish flu is barely included in lists of the world’s modern afflictions, even though its death toll came close to the combined toll of the two world wars. Laura Spinney—whose book about the Spanish flu, Pale Rider, was published a couple of years before the onset of Covid-19—suggests that what can fairly be described as the worst ‘massacre’ of the twentieth century has been rubbed out of history. Censorship also tracked the course of the disease, the extent of whose devastation was, just like today, silenced or palmed off from one country to the next. It was only called ‘Spanish’ flu because Spain—neither the country of origin nor the most stricken—was the only nation not to suppress the truth of its virulent nature. Freud himself barely mentions it, though it claimed the lives of 15,000 Viennese. By autumn 1918, schools and theatres in the city were being intermittently closed to reduce the risk of infection. In 1919, the year before Sophie’s death, three of Freud’s other children, Anna, Ernst and Mathilde, had fallen ill. In May that year his wife, Martha, after years of undernourishment as she tried to manage caring for the whole family through the war, went down with a case of ‘grippe-pneumonie’, with recurrent waves of high fever, from which she took two months to recover.

Conditions were not alleviated at the end of the war, when a defeated Austria was left, in the words of Stefan Zweig, ‘a mutilated rump, bleeding from all arteries’. By then Freud, far from his earlier, exhilarated support for the Central Powers, welcomed the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire: ‘I weep not a single tear for this Austria or this Germany.’ (‘All my libido is given to Austro-Hungary,’ he had pronounced in 1914 in response to the declaration of war.) ‘We are all of us slowly failing,’ he wrote to Jones in January 1919, ‘in health and bulk.’ By April, he wrote to Ferenczi, his family was subsisting on a ‘starvation diet’ (‘Hungerkost’). A year later, Freud and his wife were unable to get to their sick daughter because there were no trains—‘not even a children’s train’, he wrote on 27 January 1920 to the Swiss pastor Oskar Pfister, referring to the trains of the international children’s association that were ferrying children out of starving Austria.

Over the preceding years, Freud’s greatest anxiety had been for his sons Martin and Ernst, who had eagerly enlisted when war began (a third son, Oliver, rejected for active service, served as an army engineer). The dangers they faced at the front troubled his dreams. A nightmare in 1915 had as its manifest content ‘very clearly the death of my sons, Martin first of all’ (he called it a ‘prophetic dream’). All his sons would outlive their father’s night-time prophecy, but he was right to tremble on their behalf. Martin, a prisoner of war on the Italian front, eventually returned home in April 1919, but he was one of the lucky ones. More than a million Austro-Hungarian soldiers died either in battle or from disease. At no point did Freud have the slightest intimation—why would he?—that it was the fate of his daughter at the mercy of the Spanish flu which he should most dread.

It was in response to Covid-19 that the date of the Freud Memorial lecture on which this chapter is based had to be moved from 6 May, the anniversary of Freud’s birth, to 23 September, the anniversary of the day he died in 1939—a switch which echoed the tension between affirmation and destruction, between life and death, that from 1919 onwards was increasingly at the core of Freud’s work. It was no doubt in response to this pressing context that I found myself newly alert to the wretchedness of the hour as it closed around Freud’s family in Vienna—around the walls of what is now the Freud Museum where I should have been speaking—first during the First World War and its aftermath, and then on the cusp of the even more deadly Second World War. I became acutely aware, that is, of the way the disasters of history penetrate, float in and out, ricochet and are repudiated by the mind—including my own since, during a lifelong preoccupation with Freud, I had not fully grasped the scope of this reality before.

Psychoanalysis begins with a mind in flight, a mind that cannot take the measure of its own pain. It begins, that is, with the recognition that the world—or what Freud sometimes referred to as ‘civilization’—makes demands on human subjects that are too much to bear. Rereading the famous biographies—Jones, Peter Gay, Max Schur—I was now struck by just how exposed and vulnerable Freud was to the ills, major and petty, of the times, and by the fierce contrasts in his moods between blindness and insight, equanimity and dismay. Freud was articulate about what he personally found most insufferable: debt was his greatest fear (by the end of the war he had lost 95 per cent of his cash savings); to those afflicted by poverty he responded with a mix of compassion and dread; he hated rationing; there were no lengths he would not go to in order to secure the precious cigars that were killing him. For all the privilege of this Viennese family, they skirted penury and floundered in wellbeing and health. As we have recently seen only too clearly, disaster uncovers the material and racial fault-lines of a society, but it also unforgivingly exposes the truth that no human subject is spared, in Freud’s words, ‘the perplexity and helplessness of the human race’.

To read Freud against this backdrop is to observe someone capable of the wildest fluctuations, covering the entire range of moods to which everyone I know, affected by today’s pandemic, has at one point or another succumbed. ‘We are suffering under no restrictions, no epidemic, and are in good spirits,’ he wrote to Jones at the start of the war, before his misplaced faith in the cause of the Central Powers began to wane. ‘Curiously,’ he wrote to the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in February 1917 (when food was scarce and lack of heating froze his fingers, making anything apart from letter-writing impossible), ‘my spirits are unshaken’—‘proof’, he continued, of ‘how little justification in reality one needs for inner wellbeing’. In August 1918 he wrote to Karl Abraham to say that he could once again venture to ‘join in the world’s pleasure and the world’s pain’. He was citing Goethe, although the German word ‘tragen’ is less ‘join in’ than ‘bear’ or ‘endure’ (‘der Erde Lust, der Erde Leid zu tragen’), as if in the world he was living, pleasure, no less than pain, had become a burden.

He would also plunge into mental darkness. ‘One has to use every means possible to withdraw from the frightful tension in the world outside,’ he wrote to Ferenczi in 1916. ‘It is not to be borne.’ In November 1914, as the full horror of the war was beginning to emerge, he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé: ‘I and my contemporaries will never again see a joyous world. It is too hideous.’ Mankind was a doomed experiment and did not deserve to survive. ‘We have to abdicate,’ he continued, ‘and the Great Unknown, he or it, lurking behind Fate, will one day repeat such an experiment with another race.’ In an extraordinary gesture of radical self-abnegation—not the type of gesture for which he is best known—Freud was willing to sacrifice humanity, as we might say these days, to save the planet (he could not of course have foreseen today’s Voluntary Human Extinction Movement whose motto is ‘May we live long and die out’). Later, in the 1930s, with the next war on the horizon, he again speculated that the human race was approaching its end, now that the ‘perfection of the instruments of destruction’ allowed two enemies to exterminate each other. Our great failing, he suggested, was the gulf which ‘earlier periods of human arrogance had torn too wide apart between mankind and the animals’. Freud’s despair was global and multi-species in its reach (a fact that seems to have received virtually no commentary, given the common travesty that his concerns were restricted to the small, privileged elite of Vienna). But it was the tragedy closer to home, Sophie’s death, that ushered his grief into a new phase—though it would not be until the death from tuberculosis of his grandson Heinele, Sophie’s second child, three years later, at the age of four, that he would declare all his joy in the world gone for ever. ‘I myself was aware,’ he wrote to his Hungarian friends Katà and Lajos Lévy, ‘of never having loved a human being, certainly never a child, so much.’ Years later he would write to his friend Ludwig Binswanger, after Binswanger’s son had died: ‘We shall remain inconsolable and never find a substitute.… It is the only way of perpetuating the love which we do not wish to renounce’—an idea that could not be further from his best-known writing on mourning as a task to be completed.

* * *

So what, on the hundredth anniversary of the death of Sophie Halberstadt-Freud, did the loss of the daughter do to her father, Sigmund Freud? And how might this story help us confront the awfulness of our own time, when unimaginable deaths—Freud described the war as ‘inconceivable’—are again legion? In 1924, Fritz Wittels, Freud’s first biographer, suggested that there was a link between Sophie’s death and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in which Freud introduced the idea of the death drive. Freud’s rebuttal came fast. The suggestion was implausible, he said. He wrote the first draft in 1919, when Sophie was still alive. It turns out that Freud had pre-empted Wittels; in July 1920, four years before the biography appeared, he had written to Max Eitingon: ‘You will be able to certify that it was half-finished when Sophie was alive and flourishing.’ This is already bizarre—‘half-finished’ leaves plenty of room for additions after her death. Why, we might ask, would the fact that it was completed before she died be presented as something which, in an unspecified future, would need to be certified (‘sie werden bestätigen können’)? Today, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of the Freud scholar Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, who first brought the early manuscripts of his writing to light, we know that he was being evasive (she describes these ‘hitherto neglected and silent’ documents as ‘rough-hewn and overwhelming’). An entirely new sixth chapter, the longest by far, was added to a later draft, making up almost a third of the published text. The new chapter contained the first appearance in print of the term ‘death drive’. Its only earlier appearance was in two letters to Eitingon of February 1920, just weeks after Sophie’s death. I think it would, therefore, be fair to say that Freud owes the genesis of this unprecedented concept to her.

In his response to Wittels, Freud is dismissive—the word Grubrich-Simitis uses is ‘laconic’—acknowledging only a single addition to the text: a ‘discussion concerning the mortality or immortality of protozoa’. He surely displays here what he called the ‘kettle logic’ of the unconscious, in which a defendant offers a run of arguments, each invalidating the next: he had finished the text already; there is nothing significant in the additions he made; the only new material concerned the immortality and/or mortality of biological life (as if such a topic could have no bearing on the death of a child). In his letter to Pfister after Sophie died, he described her as being ‘snatched away … as if she had never been’. ‘The undisguised brutality of our time,’ he continued, ‘weighs heavily on us.’ Nothing, surely, conveys the pain of a life being snuffed out forever more than loved ones in the prime of their lives dying in the midst of a war or pandemic (in this historic moment of Freud’s life, both more or less at the same time). How do you hold on to any intimation of futurity beyond death—whether in the shape of the immortal germ plasm or the eternal soul—when people all around you are dying like flies?

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is one of the most important works of the second half of Freud’s life. It is the culmination of his thinking on the topography of the mind and it introduces the new dualism of the drives (it was also the first of his works to be published as an individual monograph). It has excited passionate enthusiasm and virulent hostility in equal measure. In his biography of Freud, Max Schur goes to considerable lengths to discredit it, which may seem odd given that his own book is devoted to understanding the place of death in Freud’s life and work. But the idea of an unconscious demonic principle driving the psyche to distraction could be said to sabotage once and for all the vision of man in control of his mind—and for Schur, as for many others, it was therefore anathema.

I am not exaggerating. Schur was Freud’s physician in his dying years. When the pain of Freud’s cancer left his life without value or meaning, Schur—on the basis of a spoken agreement between them—administered the fatal dose of morphine. It was unquestionably Freud’s wish, and Schur is eloquent on the dignity with which he approached the end of his life after sixteen years of suffering. But at the risk of wild analysis—analysis outside the consulting room—my reading is that Schur could only live with what he had done so long as he could trust in man’s ability to subordinate his will to his reason, and—contrary, one might say, to the entire spirit of psychoanalysis—always to do what is best for himself.

Who does death belong to? If this has become a question during today’s pandemic it is because the lack of state provision, the missing medical supplies, the dearth of equipment and isolation from human touch have made it feel to many for the first time that death is something of which a person—the one dying, and those closest to her or him—can be robbed. Freud and his wife could not reach their sick daughter because there was no transport, not even the trains getting children out of a starving country in the aftermath of war. They could not be with her when she died. This may help us to understand these remarkable lines from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, from what we now know to be its new sixth chapter: ‘If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime ἀνάγκη [necessity], than to a chance that might perhaps have been escaped.’ In the preceding chapter, Freud had been elaborating on the repetition compulsion, which he had first identified in soldiers returning from battle who found themselves reliving their worst experiences in night-time and waking dreams. Slowly tracing this tendency from the front to the consulting room (patients wedded to their symptoms), Freud concludes that such a compulsion is a property of all living matter. The urge of all organic life is to restore an earlier state of things. What follows is a considerable downgrade in the status of the drives of self-preservation and mastery that were key to his earlier topography of the mind, as they are all now seen to be working in the service of the organism’s need to follow the path to its own death: ‘The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.’ ‘The aim of all life,’ Freud states in perhaps one of his most counterintuitive affirmations, ‘is death.’

In this theoretical trajectory—by Freud’s own account one of his most speculative—he is moving between elegy and treatise, between sorrow and science: ‘We are strengthened in our belief,’ he says, ‘by the writings of our poets.’ But what stood out here for me this time was a dimension that seemed to enter his thought with the death of Sophie, to which we can now confidently say this whole chapter came in response. Better death as a silent companion than a death that falls out of the skies. A remorseless law of nature is preferable to a death that should—might—not have taken place. The resonance during the Covid-19 pandemic could not be more striking, as one person after another is confronted with the intolerable idea that their loved ones died through the sheer, reckless inefficiency of political scoundrels whose behaviour, in the words of one Guardian newspaper columnist, ‘is often indistinguishable from deliberate destructiveness’.

We know that all Freud’s writing coils out of his inner world, but I can think of no other moment when he lays his psychological cards on the table with such transparency. Nothing worse than the idea of death as part of a string of accidents. Hence the numerous cases of negligence which are being brought against the UK government on behalf of some of the twenty thousand victims of Covid-19 who, if lockdown had been declared one week earlier in March 2020, would not have died: care workers in their twenties, young, predominantly BIPOC nurses and doctors, dementia sufferers who, once their families could no longer visit, lost the will to live. Through the merciless nature of their deaths, the victims of pandemic and war are being deprived of the essence of life. This is what Freud is trying to give back to his daughter, restoring her rightful inheritance. To put it simply: without the belief that life should move along its path to its own end, her sudden death—five days after falling ill—would have been too much for him to bear: ‘easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature … than to a chance that might perhaps have been escaped’. ‘Perhaps,’ he adds, ‘we have adopted the belief because there is some comfort in it.’ ‘It may be,’ he adds, citing Schiller, ‘that this belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those illusions which we have created “um die Schwere das Daseins zu ertragen” [“to bear the burden of existence”].’ He was warding off her destiny, naming it for the outrage it was. Today, for all the glaring differences of class and race in how, where and whom the pandemic strikes, this prospect of sudden and random death has to include just about everyone. Freud is offering a philosophy of grief. He helps us understand why what is happening among us now can feel as much an internal as an external catastrophe. Death in a pandemic is no way to die.

Freud’s dismissal, in his exchange with Wittels, of his own ruminations on the immortality of the germ plasm should give us pause. As if immortality were not something you were likely to find yourself thinking about after the death of a child. This perhaps partly explains the reason why, in a letter to Ferenczi written two weeks after Sophie died, grief-stricken as he was, he described her loss as a ‘narcissistic injury’, to be uncovered deep beneath the daily duties through which he was finding his way back into his life. ‘I do as much work as I can,’ he had written to Pfister two days after she died, ‘and am grateful for the distraction. The loss of a child seems to be a grave blow to one’s narcissism.’

A closer look at Chapter Six of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which sees Freud on the trail of biological death, can perhaps guide us here (although, as he notes, in the writing of biologists, the whole concept of death ‘melts away in their hands’). His question is whether biology will confirm his conviction that death is an inherent property of all organic life, or whether there is something in living substance that is immortal. According to the evolutionary biologist August Weismann, death belongs solely to multicellular organisms whose soma dies at the moment of reproduction when the germ plasm enters a new living form. Unicellular organisms, on the other hand, do not appear to die but eternally reproduce themselves. Or you could argue, as Max Hartmann did in Death and Reproduction (1906), that death cannot be reduced to the appearance of a dead body, but describes the moment when a cell comes to the end of its individual development as it mutates and gives itself over to the next stage of life.

What matters here is not whether biology can actually give backing to Freud’s troubled concept of a human drive to death. As is so often the case in his work, the issue is what these preoccupations generate, what they allow him to go on thinking about. ‘In this sense,’ Freud writes with more than a hint of satisfaction, ‘protozoa too are mortal; in their case death always coincides with reproduction, but it is to some extent obscured by it, since the whole substance of the parent animal may be transmitted directly into the young offspring.’ The only thing that saves the organism from dying is its passage, entire, into its offspring—perish the thought, one might say. Transpose this into human life, and the death of a biological child becomes a narcissistic injury because it is only through the existence of children that the parent has a stab at eternity. What Freud is saying here is as chilling as it is simple. The only thing that keeps a parent alive is their child.

Freud’s death drive seems, therefore, to lose itself in the minutiae of organic life. But at the same time it reaches into the external political world: contrary to what is often suggested, the two realms of Freud’s thinking work in tandem. Remember that the war was the essential backdrop to the concept of the repetition compulsion as returning soldiers were reliving the dangers inflicted by the outside world (the very concept of trauma which, according to an influential misreading, Freud—from the 1890s onwards—had definitively left behind). Freud’s preoccupation with organic life and with the perils of the world, with inmost biological process and external hardship, become increasingly tied up in his thought, just as the question of what we inherit without knowing it (our predisposition), and what the world rains down on us (the accidents of life) begin to come together on the same page. I have no doubt that it is Covid-19 that has newly alerted me to these strange alliances, not least as I struggle, like so many, to bring into some psychic alignment the pain of my inner life and the tragedy unfolding outside my door.

How to link these domains becomes the preoccupation of the second phase of Freud’s working life. This is what war does to theory. At a symposium on ‘The Psychoanalysis of the War Neuroses’, delivered at the Fifth International Psychoanalytical Congress held in Budapest in 1918, Freud refuses the distinction between war neuroses and peacetime neuroses, which pits the external threat of the former against the internal libidinal conflict of the latter. Freud wants to unite them. The difficulties in doing so, he concludes, cease to be insuperable if one ‘described repression, which lies at the basis of every neurosis, as a reaction to a trauma—as an elementary traumatic neurosis’. Repression, which is the foundation of all neuroses, is a trauma in and of itself. No one escapes. In the midst of the war, trauma, we might say, has been reinstated, straddling the division between inner and outer worlds. By his own account, a traumatized soldier is torn between the two: between the demands of loyalty to his ego—which tells him to avoid danger at any cost—and loyalty to his nation, which requires that he be prepared to die.

* * *

Are war and pandemic the worst things that can happen to humankind? If at first sight this seems an insane question—though not, as we will see, as insane as Freud’s reply—it nonetheless has resonance for the task he has set for himself of trying to track the impact of the world on its subjects, and of bygone ages on present time. We have seen that a preoccupation with immortality, duration and transmission runs through Chapter Six of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as Freud tried to navigate his daughter’s death and face up to the fact that a link in the chain of being had been broken beyond repair. But in another work written in the middle of the war, Freud follows a different path of prehistory. This time it is not the life of the germ plasm but a far-off epoch when existence could fairly be described as hell on earth—war and pandemic shrink by its side. I am referring to Freud’s twelfth meta-psychological paper, which he did not wish to see the light of day, and which none of us would have been able to access without the scholarly devotion of Grubrich-Simitis, who published it in 1987 under the title ‘A Phylogenetic Fantasy’. It was one of seven meta-psychological papers that Freud discarded or destroyed. Retrieving it against his wishes, Grubrich-Simitis was playing Max Brod to his Kafka. She calls it a ‘document of failure’—it is truly wild—but also accords it the deepest respect, arguing that it is the text in which Freud’s theories of the drive and of trauma, so often seen as incompatible, reveal their deepest affiliation. ‘My thesis,’ she writes, ‘is that Freud, in his phylogenetic fantasy, once again made an effort to integrate theoretically the traumatic aspects of pathogenesis into the drive model—a task with which we are still confronted today.’

‘The Phylogenetic Fantasy’, or ‘Overview of the Transference Neuroses’, makes the speculations of Beyond the Pleasure Principle look like hard science. In the beginning, Freud narrates, an Ice Age turned man into an anxious animal when ‘the hitherto predominantly friendly outside world … transformed itself into a mass of threatening perils’. ‘Food was not sufficient to permit an increase in the human hordes, and the powers of the individual were not enough to keep so many helpless beings alive.’ Faced with an emergency ‘beyond his control’, man imposed on himself a ban on reproduction, since to propagate the species in a time of such want was to put his very existence on the line: no children, no future, no glimpse of eternal life. Man’s response to such a brute curtailing of his drives was hysteria: the origins of conversion hysteria in modern times where the libido is a danger to be subdued. Man also became a tyrant, bestowing on himself unrestrained dominance as a reward for his power to safeguard the lives of the many: ‘Language was magic to him, his thoughts seemed omnipotent to him, he understood the world according to his ego.’ I love this. Tyranny is the silent companion of catastrophe, as has been so flagrantly demonstrated in the behaviour of the rulers of several nations across the world today, not least Donald Trump in his response to Covid-19. As if to say: I will save you, but you must make me king (not that such rulers save anyone). Not to mention the accompanying idea that the tyrant was the first hysteric: the idea of bodily panic as the unspoken subtext of masculine power is as unexpected—and as progressive—as any of Freud’s thoughts. Note how political he is being in a text too easily dismissed as sheer fantasy, including by Freud himself. Rather, I suggest that we see this paper as a thought experiment allowing him to take huge, and unprecedented, mental strides.

What passes through the generations, then, deep within the psyche of the people, is anxiety. Anxiety in response to an imperilled world, but also as a reaction to the tyranny of the powers that come to meet it. This is what children usher down through the generations: ‘The children bring along the anxiousness of the beginning of the Ice Age.’ The child is repeating the history of the species, offering Freud support in his belief in phylogenetic transmission—the ‘preponderance of the phylogenetic disposition over all other factors’. A year later, in Lecture 23 of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ‘The Path to Symptom Formation’, he states, ‘I have repeatedly been led to suspect that the psychology of the neuroses has stored up in it more of the antiquities of human development than any other source.’ (In Totem and Taboo, he had suggested that guilt can be stored in the unconscious of peoples for ‘many thousands of years.’) ‘What,’ he asks, ‘are the ways and means employed by one generation in order to hand on its mental states to the next one?’ An emphasis which, he also insists, does not eliminate the question of acquisition: ‘It only moves it into still earlier prehistory.’ This is Freud’s Lamarckism, to which he remained committed, even when Lamarck’s findings had been scientifically discredited (although whether this is in fact the case is contested by genetic theorists today).

What this strange unpublished meditation reveals is that the concept of phylogenesis, far from being some biologistic remnant in his thought, is his way of acknowledging the parlous state of mankind: want, poverty, affliction and trouble, the catastrophes of history, the burden of the past. Modern-day psychoanalysis talks of ‘transgenerational haunting’, the unconscious passage of historical trauma from one generation to the next. We bring our ancestors behind us, which means that, while we may die our own death, we also die on behalf of others who were there before us. Once more ahead of his time, Freud took this reality, which is now clinically recognized, and injected it into the bloodstream of humankind. The organism passes its entire substance into the next generation. Freud’s 1915 paper reminds us of the price of living in a world of disaster. As Grubrich-Simitis put it in a 1987 lecture on the topic, Freud was writing a guide for what was to come ‘should we want to imagine a new man-made Ice Age, and think in psychoanalytic terms about the consequences of a nuclear winter’. Nuclear winter then, pandemic or climate catastrophe now: the document still has no less, and no less alarming, resonance.

We are not done with the death drive. My attempt to grapple with it would be deeply misleading if I stopped there. In Freud’s account, that drive does not only belong on the side of quiescence, the slow, steady return of the living organism to an inanimate state. If the death drive is one of the most controversial of Freud’s theories, it is not just because of the deathly pallor it casts over life. It is also—perhaps even more so—because it turns violence into the internal property of everyone. This aspect of the drive proved to be an idea even more scandalous than Freud’s earlier belief that the drive for pleasure was the chief motivator of human life. Not least because it put paid to the cherished illusion that the evils of the world are the responsibility of everyone other than oneself. In 1929, Freud wrote to Einstein:

All our attention is directed to the outside, whence dangers threaten and satisfactions beckon. From the inside, we only want to be left in peace. So if someone tries to turn our attention inward, in effect twisting its neck, then our whole organization resists—just as, for example, the oesophagus and the urethra resist any attempt to reverse their normal direction of passage.

This must be one of his most visceral statements on the reason for the public hostility toward psychoanalysis. ‘There is nothing for which man’s capabilities are less suited,’ he had written somewhat more decorously to Binswanger in 1911, ‘than psychoanalysis.’

Once again, this idea, elaborated for the first time in Chapter Six of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is deeply imbricated in war. We may conjecture that it would have made Freud’s task too easy, his own grief fraudulent, if he had not also considered the way war shatters the innocence of the human mind—after all, to begin with, all his libido had been on the side of the war. What drives people crazy in wartime is their capacity, after a lifetime of prohibition and restraint, to take violence upon themselves. Not just because killing presents man with a clash, as Freud puts it, between ‘the claims of humanity’ and ‘the demands of a national war’. But because it brings him up against the violence that is an inner portion of being human. ‘Consider,’ Freud wrote in his 1916 introductory lecture on the censorship of dreams,

the Great War which is still laying Europe waste. Think of the vast amount of brutality, cruelty and lies which are able to spread over the civilized world. Do you really believe that a handful of ambitious and deluding men without conscience could have succeeded in unleashing all these evil spirits if their millions of followers did not share their guilt?

As in 1916, so in 2016 with the election of Trump, and since, in the era of Bolsonaro, Modi, Erdoğan, Orbán, Duterte et al. ‘We lay a stronger emphasis on what is evil in men,’ he continued, ‘only because other people disavow it, and thereby make the human mind, not better, but incomprehensible.’

I began by suggesting that one thing which today’s pandemic is depriving us of is the ambivalence of human grief. But as I was writing it came to seem unsurprising to me that Freud should emerge in these pages as a thinker of disaster. In a world today gone numb under the pressure of incompetence, lies and false triumphalism, his ideas can help us restore, first the bald truth of what is happening, and then—and only on that basis—all the shades of our inner world that live and die in the unconscious. 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, 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. ‘In each of the loved persons,’ he writes, ‘there was also something of the stranger … there adheres to the tenderest and most intimate of our love-relations a small portion of hostility which can excite an unconscious death-wish.’ 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 a 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. But for this to happen, the present-day run of narcissistic—mainly male—leaders would first have to acknowledge their failings, something of which they seem constitutionally incapable, and then, as a consequence, withdraw their casually dispersed and carefully targeted hatreds. ‘I, of course, belong to a race,’ Freud wrote to Romain Rolland in 1923, ‘which in the Middle Ages was held responsible for all epidemics.’ Ten years later, in a letter to Marie Bonaparte, he predicted that persecution of the Jews and the suppression of intellectual freedom were the only parts of Hitler’s project that were likely to succeed. He would have been appalled, we can safely assume, by the blame-game, not to speak of the increasingly vicious targeting of refugees, which has become the daily accompaniment to Covid-19.

Although Freud remarked that the impulse to human empathy is difficult to explain, that compassion can be a veil for narcissism, there are moments in his writing, again in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, when the bare outlines of such an impulse can be found: the protective shield of the psyche which allows itself to die to save the deeper layers of the mind from a similar fate; or the community of cells which survive even if individual cells have to die. Something is working through Freud’s text, a ‘socius primitive’ in Jacques Derrida’s reading, or a new form of common life which sheds the pitfalls of the singular ego. Or, to permit a modern-day example, like black activist Patrick Hutchinson carrying a far-right protestor to safety, at the risk of his own, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in London of June 2020. The video clip went viral for what it made momentarily seem possible. A life in which the pain of the times is shared, and in which every human subject, regardless of race, class, caste or sex would be able to participate. This may be what it means to struggle for a world in which everyone is free to die their own death.

* * *

To end with two writers I have only recently encountered, both of whose lives brushed against Freud’s and who, in their different ways, bring these issues into stark relief. The first is Rachel Berdach, who got in touch with Freud in 1938, shortly after he arrived in London ‘to die in freedom’. Both Berdach and Freud had escaped from the Nazis; four of Freud’s five sisters who had remained were deported to Theresienstadt; one died in the ghetto, the other three in the Treblinka extermination camp. Berdach had sent him her novel, The Emperor, the Sages and Death—a ‘mysterious and beautiful book’, he wrote to her, which ‘pleased me so much it made me unsure of my judgement’. ‘Who are you?’ Freud asked. ‘Where did you acquire all the knowledge expressed in your book?’ He invited her to meet him, and assumed, although this may sound counterintuitive, that given the priority her novel grants to death, she must be very young. Schur notes that the meeting between them took place though there appears to be no detailed record (it was one of the final encounters of his life). As for her age, Freud was right and wrong. In 1938 she was 60 years old; Freud was 82. But according to Theodor Reik, who had been her analyst, she had composed the novel in her head as a young woman, reciting it to herself word by word over decades, unwilling to commit it to print because of a fear that had set in following the death of someone she had loved. It was only after the far greater losses she experienced at the hands of the Nazis that she had been finally able to commit her novel to writing.

The book would merit an entire essay to itself. It is orchestrated as a set of philosophical dialogues between the thirteenth-century German emperor and enlightened despot Frederick II, the Egyptian Arab physician Abu Sina and the rabbi Jacob Charif ben Aron. There are also several Catholic anti-Semites. Across the borders of race and creed, the novel stages a meeting and clashing of minds. The psychoanalytic resonances are everywhere, from the emperor’s wish to understand man’s propensity for the dark (the epigraph to this chapter), to the rabbi’s description of Jewish understanding as aimed not just at what is being kept secret but at what is unknown. As Freud observes, this is a novel about dying. ‘I wish to be conscious to the very end,’ the emperor asserts, ‘so as not to lose life’s most mysterious part.’ When the rabbi’s scribe, Michael Ben Chacham, dies, the rabbi finds in his desk a batch of papers held together by parchment, which include these despairing lines: ‘Is man alone accursed to know of death while full with life?’ Do leaves fear autumn’s ‘deathly winds’? Do fruits long for the tree from which they fall? Do beasts hear death’s ‘approaching steps’? ‘How come,’ he exclaims, ‘we don’t love each other? Do we not share one fate?’

Again, this knowledge has the profoundest social and cultural repercussions. Death is, or should be, the great equalizer, flattening out the arbitrary distinctions between us. This is the rabbi’s cherished vision, whose political implications rebound in our time. His most fervent wish is to be neither ruler nor slave: ‘My dream is this: not to be ruler in my land, in any land, neither be slave in any place, not to erect new boundaries—remove the old ones for all, not to be chosen … My Canaan is the soil that all men plough.’ For a Jew to express such sentiments—not to be chosen, Canaan as the land for all men to plough—is close to blasphemy, especially in the historical context of what was in 1938 the ongoing struggle over Palestine. What is this glimpse of an alternative ethical life? In a key chapter, the characters light on a doll’s house in the imperial library which has inscribed over the gate: ‘Whomever thou meetest, it is Thou.’ ‘What a small world, indeed,’ Frederick exclaims, ‘A German elector dreams he meets himself; a Jew from Spain writes the same words which, when in India, a fakir did recite for me when asked about his faith … Tat twam asi—it’s you.’ A bit like the Freudian unconscious, this is a world that is both one and infinite, in which everything and everybody is included, and from which nothing can escape or disappear.

But as we know, to die one’s own death is not the same thing as to die alone in a world that seems deserted. In the very last pages, the rabbi wakes up one morning in a still, grey, empty world of disaster: ‘Cold fear now filled his heart. Where were the people, and was there war in the town? Had they chased out the citizens or had they fled? Had they perchance been killed? Was he the only one to have been forgotten?’ ‘Where is he now? He cannot tell.’ Slowly, realizing that something awful has happened, he is overwhelmed by a single desire, to catch up with those he is sure are about to be confronted by ‘unexpected terror’: ‘Must he not share their fate before he dies?’ He is too late. Men, beasts and plants are gone; death has swallowed the earth. Not a million miles from Grubrich-Simitis’s nuclear winter or from the catastrophe of climate change, this could be a chronicle of deaths foretold for the era we are living in now. The rabbi dies in isolation, but it is to a solidarity of people amid disaster—‘Must he not share their fate?’—that he commits his last breath.

In 1937, a year before the encounter between Berdach and Freud, the German psychoanalyst and neurologist John Rittmeister returned from Switzerland to Germany to complete his training analysis—at considerable risk, since he was known to the authorities for his communist sympathies. Appointed director of the Göring Institute, the skeleton psychoanalytic institute, purged of Jews, that was permitted to function under Hitler, he worked for the resistance until he was arrested by the Gestapo for treason in 1942 and executed in Plötzensee Prison in 1943. His remarkable prison diaries contain two entries that go to the heart of my theme. In the first, dated 24 December 1942, Rittmeister refers to his ‘abominable fate’, and then immediately chastises himself:

I say “my abominable fate”, forgetting too quickly the millions of “abominable fates” being played out across Europe and everywhere without an end to blood, suffering, tears and fear. Like someone who loses all taste because their neighbour’s plate is empty, this suffering prevents me from enjoying the pleasures of life.

In the second, dated 12 January 1943, he is musing on two different ways of ethical being in the world. One is dominated by the self, where an individual simply absorbs the other into their own mental sphere, turning them into no more than an occasion for enlarging their own ego. The second path, by contrast, grants autonomy to the other—setting them free to subsist in their own way. This way of being belongs, he writes, at the core of Freud’s work, which teaches us ‘love, not introversion’.

Against the odds, Rittmeister was dying his own death. But how, we may ask, could a man on the brink of execution by the Nazis find room to think of the millions of others doomed to an abominable fate, and remain so expansive and open? Today, as a consequence of the pandemic, there are calls for new forms of solidarity in life and in death, and for a new inclusive, political consciousness. How, though, to find a place in this new reality for the darker aspects of being human which, like upside-down sunflowers, remain at the centre of the unfinished project of psychoanalysis? Failing which, with the best will in the world, any move we make in that direction will, I fear, prove in the long run to be an empty gesture. To make sure this does not happen, we could perhaps do worse, as I have tried to do here, than to return to Freud’s radical, all-encompassing and finally loving vision.



LIVING DEATH

WHAT EXACTLY WAS BEING asked of people when they were told to ‘stay at home’ or ‘self-isolate’ in response to the first threat of Covid-19? In a BBC Panorama report on women who had managed to escape their abusers during lockdown, broadcast in the first year of the pandemic, one woman was asked, ‘What did the “stay at home” message mean to you?’ ‘Death,’ she replied almost inaudibly, and then repeated the word as if not expecting to be heard. Her partner damaged her internally, she said, and burned her with cigarettes ‘so no one would want me’. He also never left her alone in a room: she was isolated, yet never by herself; cut off from most human contact and at the same time deprived of privacy, robbed of the capacity to find a way through her own thoughts. This is isolation without interiority, solitude leeched of its inner dimension, loneliness without redress. It leaves you with no one to turn to, including yourself. The ‘self’ in ‘self-isolate’ is therefore a decoy. It forgets all those situations—incarceration, torture—where isolation is something that one person (with the power) inflicts on another. Above all, it leaves no room to ask what happens, during a time of collective trauma, to the mind’s innermost relationship to itself.

No less misleading, or at least dangerously partial, was the mantra, at the centre of lockdown policies worldwide, that staying at home will save lives (or, in one sinister government ad widely circulated on Facebook, ‘If you go out, you can spread it. People will die’). Without consideration of whether staying home is possible, or what might follow when it is, this turns the body into a lethal weapon outside the sacred precincts of the home. The formula is an avatar for privilege and injustice. What are the advantages of staying indoors for a family crowded into an airless slum? Or for the low-paid workers living in cramped conditions as a result of the rising, pandemic-fuelled demand for cheap factory-produced food? Against decades of feminist argument, the phrase also made the fatal error of suggesting that the moment you reach your front door, you are safe. In the United States, women were prevented by their abusers from washing their hands so that, even in isolation (especially in isolation), their fear of infection would increase. In England, one couple sat listening to Boris Johnson on the radio when he announced the lockdown. ‘He looked over at me,’ the woman later described her husband, ‘he had his arms folded and his chest out, ’cause he knew that would intimidate me, and he said, “Let the games begin.”’ He then raped her in a space invisible and inaudible to the world outside: curtains closed, front door locked, TV and music both turned up so loud that no one could hear her screaming ‘for someone, for anybody’. This is isolation at degree zero, trampling over the relics of what, not so long ago—though it has felt like the distant past—was meant, for some at least, to have been a relatively safe world, a time when women in many countries, though not all women, were more or less free to walk out the door. Neither health benefit nor saving grace, the official guidance proved itself to be the hidden accomplice of cruelty, a spur to violent gender-based crime.

Slowly these stories came to light. The problem has been global—the ‘shadow pandemic’, in the words of a United Nations report—yet for some reason it did not seem to have crossed the minds of those in government that lockdown would be a nightmare for women trapped in abusive relationships (though I am not sure why this should come as any surprise). Visits to the website of Refuge, the United Kingdom’s largest domestic-abuse charity, increased during the pandemic by over 60 per cent. True, there was a clause in the UK Coronavirus Act of April 2020—intended, we were subsequently told, for women abused in their homes—allowing that not everyone would be able to self-isolate. But the only person who seems to have made use of that clause was Boris Johnson’s unelected chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, to excuse his breaking lockdown rules when—infected with Covid-19—he travelled with his family to stay with his parents in Durham. By doing so, he smashed any remaining confidence in government policies, putting thousands at risk (Cummings’ subsequent sacking by Johnson had nothing to do with his infraction of the rules—on this, Johnson himself would turn out to have excelled him by miles). Britain has shared with the United States one of the highest infection and death rates in the world.

It took nineteen days after the lockdown began for funds to be released to women’s refuges, which were desperately straitened after years of government austerity policies. According to the ‘Counting Dead Women’ campaign, during that time, sixteen women were murdered, or suspected to have been murdered by their partners—more than double the average number for such killings during an equivalent period before the pandemic. ‘If you think it was bad before,’ the husband said, ‘you are in for a rough ride.’ (‘Let the games begin.’) Lockdown had emboldened him, giving him a new lease on life and on death. Another woman, pregnant, was force-fed—it started as a game, almost like a fetish, she said. Her partner boasted that he didn’t have to ‘cover up’ any more while repeatedly assuring her that she was safe at home (he would not let her leave the house to attend a hospital pregnancy scan). Another woman, Annie (not her real name), had endured two years of domestic abuse when the restrictions were imposed: ‘It was at this moment she finally started to believe her partner would kill her.’ Abuse in a time of pandemic—angry men walking into shuttered rooms with ‘guns’ blazing and a soft voice. Or, as one poster plastered across London put it, ‘Abusers always work from home.’

* * *

We have been faced with a new ‘femicide’, the term originally coined by Diana Russell in 1976, something which the pandemic has brought out of the dark. With reference to Covid-19, Julia Kristeva uses the term ‘feminicide’, since it is women’s presumed ‘femininity’ that is at stake. There is, Kristeva suggests, a central ‘phobic core’ to all humankind, an inner fear of mortality and of life’s fragility that normally, notably in privileged Western cultures, gets packed away into the darkest, most hidden, recesses of the mind. Deep down, everyone knows it. But repeatedly over history, it has been the task of women to create a world which, despite that knowledge, feels safe. Feminicide, then, is the enraged response to women who betray this prescribed essence of the feminine. They are being punished—paying with their lives—for a death that has become too keenly felt. As defences start to crumble, the phobic core of being human explodes. Even as the pandemic seems to diminish in its force, this violence against women has continued, as if the felt fragility of life had released into the atmosphere a new, ugly—and seemingly unstoppable—permission to engage in violence. The numbers of sexual offences are soaring (unlike theft and robbery whose numbers have declined). Domestic violence has become more visible, but the renewed attention has not reduced the prevalence of sexual crime—if anything the opposite.

We are living through an epoch of permanent grief, a time of psychic reckoning that is too much to endure. Cherished illusions are suddenly stripped bare. It is as if the end of illusion, an end that Freud fervently desired in relation to religious belief, had suddenly come upon us without warning, summoning the deepest fears of the soul. It was Freud’s argument that religion served above all to keep fear of mortality at bay; his mistake was to think that, for that very reason, any such belief was an illusion that, over time, the powers of the reasoning mind were bound to dissipate (an argument which runs contrary to a basic tenet of psychoanalysis, that nothing perishes in the unconscious). Faced with this new psychic dispensation, many rulers across the globe chose to batten down the hatches, laying down the law as to what they could, or would not, tolerate, internally and in the world they claim to own. It does not work. The world refuses to bend to psychotic conviction, to the omnipotent belief in the powers of the human mind (Bolsonaro, Trump). In a time of pandemic it rapidly becomes clear that you cannot force the world to your will—the wager of dictators throughout history. Nor can you pretend that the body is within your control. A virus mutates, shunts invisibly through the atmosphere, carries itself by means of droplets we cannot even feel on our faces (which is why the reassurance provided by wearing masks felt so flimsy). At any given moment, regardless of the precautions we take, Covid-19 could be anywhere. At the same time, the unjust, uneven distribution of vaccinations, which dramatically reduced the number of fatalities for those privileged enough to receive them, left swathes of people across the globe still hyper-vulnerable to deadly infection.

Meanwhile, as the quiet backdrop to this story, all women’s hard-won workplace victories in terms of hours, promotions and equal pay, and in relation to childcare and domestic labour at home, are in danger of being lost (not that any of this had been fully achieved pre-pandemic). ‘With the schools closed,’ Eliot Weinberger wrote in his essay ‘The American Virus,’ ‘45 per cent of men say they are spending more time home-schooling than their wives. Three per cent of women say their husbands are spending more time home-schooling than they themselves are.’ The problem, then, is not only that women were sent back to the home, where they took on the lion’s share of domestic work, home schooling, and everything else; it is also that, according to a well-worn tradition and grievance, this reality was unseen. (I remember my shock as a young woman when a friend made the obvious point that the success of domestic work is measured by its ability to wipe out every last trace of itself.) Angela Merkel warned of a creeping ‘retraditionalization’ of roles. The domestic workload of women in France tripled between March and May 2020. In Spain, more than 170,000 people signed a petition protesting against this ‘regression’. In the United Kingdom, the ‘early years’ sector has been pushed to the brink of collapse: in February 2021, a government report predicted that two thirds of preschool nurseries risked closure within a year. According to the British campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed, more than half of pregnant women and mothers expected the pandemic to permanently damage their careers.

All the more reason to note, as I have discussed elsewhere, that, according to a survey of 194 countries conducted by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the World Economic Forum in 2020, the countries that dealt better with Covid-19, at least at the outset, were all led by women: Germany’s Angela Merkel, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen, Finland’s Sanna Marin, Barbados’s Mia Amor Mottley—a fact that has received little attention.

These women were exerting a different form of politics—no glint of an ego in flight from its own weakness, no false affirmation, no claim to illimitable power. Perhaps for this reason, such leaders did not hesitate to invoke the other histories and forms of violence at play, no less in need of acknowledgement. Might this attentiveness be more likely to come from those who do not shy away from social violence, past, present and future? We might, for example, contrast Johnson’s avoidance of the families of the bereaved with Jacinda Ardern’s physical embrace of the survivors of the Christchurch mosque massacre in 2019. Ardern’s willingness to refuse anti-Islam prejudice by hugging Muslim men and women has for many made her a model of what a world leader should be. Or we might note how Mia Mottley’s handling of the pandemic more or less coincided with the transition of Barbados to a republic, a transition which she presided over with a grace that did not compromise the memory of Britain’s death-dealing colonial past. Likewise, her careful listing of the nations facing a death sentence in her call for action against climate catastrophe at COP26 in November 2021: ‘1.5C is what we need to stay alive—two degrees is a death sentence for the people of Antigua and Barbuda, for the people of the Maldives, for the people of Dominica and Fiji, for the people of Kenya and Mozambique—and yes, for the people of Samoa and Barbados. We do not want that dreaded death sentence and we’ve come here today to say “try harder, try harder.”’

* * *

‘The evolution of civilization,’ Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents, ‘is the struggle for life of the human species.’ But to struggle for life, you first have to recognize death as its inevitable outcome, which is why Freud could also assert without contradiction that the human organism wants above all to die after its own fashion. To live, you have to allow death into the frame. You have to open the inner world to what is most painful to contemplate. Today, psychoanalysts—faced with the strained intimacy of the virtual session—are confronting an outpouring of anguish, unbidden memories, and traumas never before spoken of, alongside a struggle to hold on to one of the few spheres in our culture where the task is to accept the fullest psychic responsibility for oneself (psychoanalysis as the opposite of housework in how it deals with the mess that we make). Needless to say, this shared analytic space could not be further from a threatening home in which your only options are to smother your thoughts, get the hell out, or hang on for dear life. It might be too that such a space, which gives room to pain and its possible transformations, or something close to it, is a space in which aesthetic work becomes possible, offering us another form of creative accountability, providing a counter-vision in an unequal and collapsing world.

I have overstated the division of the sexes—focusing on the worst-case scenarios as, under the pressure of the pandemic, the most forbidding versions of sexual difference have been granted an ugly new freedom to roam. Thankfully, that division is far more precarious and less sure than, in its worst incarnation, it so often appears—or violently claims—to be. Nor, crucially, given the resurgent racism during the pandemic, is gender division the only fake and overstated division in our culture, which, underscored by the pandemic, is tearing people apart, and mowing them down, on and off the streets. Nonetheless, the harsh fate of so many women in lockdown, alongside the gift of women leaders who are beating their unique path through disaster, might have a lesson to teach us. If the hardest task in the struggle for life is to give death its place at the core of being human, then perhaps one reason so many women are being punished during this pandemic is because they are more willing to do so.



LIFE AFTER DEATH

Reconstruction After Covid

AT THE END OF 2021, when there was hope that the pandemic might become a fading memory, I was asked by The Guardian to write about the future, about the afterlife of Covid-19. But the future can never be told. This at least was the view of the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was commissioned to run a series to celebrate the paper’s first one hundred years in 1921. The future is ‘fluctuating, vague and uncertain’, he wrote later, at a time when the mass unemployment of the 1930s had upended all confidence, the first stage on a road to international disaster which both could, and could not, be foreseen. ‘The senses in which I am using the term [uncertain],’ he explained, ‘is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth-owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.’

This may always be the case, but the pandemic has brought this truth so brutally into our lives that at moments it threatens to crush the best hopes of the heart which always look beyond the present. We are being robbed of the illusion that we can predict what will happen in the space of a second, a minute, an hour or a day. From one moment to the next, the pandemic seems to turn and point its finger at anyone, even at those who believed they were immune. As long as Covid remains a global presence, waves of increasing severity will be possible anywhere and at any moment in time. Across the world, people are desperate to feel they have turned a corner, that an end is in sight, only to be faced with a future that seems to be retreating like a vanishing horizon, a shadow, a blur. Nobody knows, with any degree of confidence, what will happen next. Anyone claiming otherwise is a fraud.

Only so much faith can be placed even in the governments who have shown the surest touch in dealing with the pandemic. Anyone living under regimes whose acts have felt measured and thoughtful will have watched with dismay the death-dealing denials of national leaders from India to Brazil. No nation is exempt, which is just one reason why the monopoly of vaccinations by the privileged nations is so manifestly self-defeating. If the wretched of the earth are not protected, then no one is. An ethical principle—one which in an ideal world should always apply—is pushing to the fore, taking on an unmistakeable if ghostly shape. Nobody can save themselves, certainly not forever, at the cost of anybody else.

In the UK, many legitimately railed against an incompetent government whose repeated refusal to take measures called for by their scientific advisers led to us having one of the highest death tolls of the Western world. They were guilty of negligence, but they have also violated the unspoken contract between government and governed, by leaving the people alone with their fear. Though officially denied, ‘herd immunity’ seems to have been the policy at the outset of the pandemic and experimented with again, in the UK possibly as late as the summer of 2021. If the idea of herd immunity has been so disturbing, this is not just because it conjures the image of the virus being given free rein and potentially mutating into vaccine-resistant variants, or because of the sinister undercover calculations of the acceptable number of the dead which it entails. Perhaps even more distressingly, the avalanche of deaths that ‘herd immunity’ appeared so callously to sanction rubs in our faces the reality that death can happen at any time and eventually comes for us all. ‘Let the bodies pile high,’ words allegedly spoken (though officially denied) by Boris Johnson, proved hard to dispel, leaving any vestiges of safety in shreds. A stalled economy, whose serious consequences must indeed be recognized, was—or so government priorities suggested—more alarming than mass deaths.

Freud once stated that no one believes in their own death. In the unconscious there is a blank space where knowledge of this one sure thing about our futures should be. If the pandemic changed life forever, it might therefore be because that inability to countenance death—which may seem to be the condition of daily sanity—was revealed as the delusion it always is. To be human, in modern Western cultures at least, is to postpone the knowledge of death away for as long as we can. ‘There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died,’ the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller’. On the other hand, he argued that in modern life dying had been pushed beyond the perceptual realm of the living, although his diagnosis did not of course include destitute nations, or anticipate the impending war.

In a pandemic, death cannot be exiled to the outskirts of existence. Instead, it becomes an unremitting presence that seems to trail from room to room. One of the as yet unanswered questions of the present moment is how soon hospitals will return once and for all to curing and caring for life rather than preparing for death, so that doctors and nurses will no longer be faced with the inhuman choice between cancer and Covid-19. ‘Not today,’ one palliative care nurse found herself saying in the midst of the first wave to patients isolated from their loved ones, the terror visible in their eyes, when they asked her if they were going to die. ‘Not today’—she did not even pretend to know more.

* * *

What on earth, we might then ask, does the future consist of once the awareness of death passes a certain threshold and breaks into our waking dreams? What is the psychic time we are living? How can we prepare—can we prepare?—for what is to come? If the uncertainty strikes at the core of inner life, it also has a political dimension. Every claim for justice relies on belief in a possible future, even when—or rather especially when—we feel the planet might be facing its demise. This is all the more the case as the pandemic allows the bruising fault-lines of racial, sexual and economic inequality in the modern world to press on our sense of reality for everyone, unavoidably, to see.

The misery of impoverished peoples, the surge of violence against black people, women trapped in their homes during lockdown, assaulted and murdered by their partners—all these realities, each as we have seen with its history of racial and sexual violence, are more present to public consciousness, as they move from the sidelines onto the front page. The psychological terrain is starting to shift. Alongside the terror, and at least partly in response, a renewed form of boldness, itself relying on longstanding traditions of protest, has entered the stage, a new claim on the future, we might say. One by one, people in pursuit of collective responsibility have called out the systematic forms of discrimination that are so often passed off as the norm. People will no longer accept denials that the problem exists, as in the UK government-commissioned Sewell report of March 2021 which rejected the fact of institutional racism; or tolerate the most deeply entrenched hatreds, as captured in the famous photograph of a white couple in St. Louis pointing their gun at Black Lives Matter protestors; or leave unchallenged the studied indifference towards injustice that makes people turn aside and casually assume that this is just how the world is and always will be.

Meanwhile, it has become more and more obvious that endless growth and accumulation of wealth involves an exploitation of humans and resources that is destroying the planet. First, in the pandemic, most likely man-made when the virus crossed the barrier between humans and other animals which many scientists believe was caused by interference in the food chain. This in itself is a consequence of large-scale industrial farms and the wildlife trade which are boosting the production of deadly pathogens—the evidence that this increases the risks of future pandemics is now overwhelming. Secondly, in the bodies of migrants mostly in flight from war zones, washed up on the shores of the so-called ‘developed’ nations. Then, in the droughts, floods, wildfires, superstorms, heatwaves, earthquakes and hurricanes, under pressure of climate disaster, as if life on the planet had already reached the end of days. Another nurse remembers how, as she walked through the Covid-deserted London streets in March and April 2021, it felt as if ‘the Apocalypse had hit’. ‘We were terrified of this new disease,’ states Dr Maheshi Ramasami, senior clinical researcher on the Oxford AstraZeneca team, who recently described their slow realization of what they were facing: ‘There was one moment when somebody said to me, “Is this what the end of the world feels like?”’

Everything is telling us that we cannot go on making all the bad decisions that have been made in the name of progress. Being driven—working harder and harder, making more and more money—is not a virtue or some kind of ethical principle to adhere to, but a sure sign of greed, panic and decay. Shooting oneself into outer space, as Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos have raced against each other to do, is a narcissistic sideshow put on by obscenely wealthy men. That they are men is surely key (the last gasp of the phallus and all that). The sky is no limit. They are most likely unaware of how their ambitions echo the strains of an inglorious past. ‘Expansion is everything,’ wrote Cecil Rhodes, mining magnate and Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896, ‘I would annex the planets if I could.’

Rhodes passed laws to drive black people off their land, limiting the areas where they could then settle. The laws he put in place are considered by many historians to have provided a foundation for what later became apartheid. Rhodes’ statue at the University of Cape Town was brought down by student protests in one of the most resonant political actions of the times, but the one outside Oriel College in Oxford is still standing. Either way, the organizing principle and fantasy—colonizing the universe to infinity—endures. ‘We know there is life on Mars,’ the Associate Administrator of Nasa’s Science Mission stated in 2015, ‘because we sent it there.’ The process is known as ‘forward contamination’—you destroy at exactly the same moment that you make something grow. In March 2021, one of Musk’s space ships crashed back to earth in Texas. ‘We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, so if it blows up, it’s cool,’ he is reported to have observed in response to earlier local complaints in Boca Chica village and Brownsville. The crash scattered debris over the fragile ecosystem of state and federally protected lands in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, a national wildlife refuge which is home to vulnerable species.

It is surely no coincidence that such Faustian pacts are being struck at a time when the fragility of life on earth has never been more glaring. These intrepid space explorers remind me of the stinking rich individuals who try to barter with the boatman on their way to the island of the dead in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass—the last novel in his trilogy, His Dark Materials. Bezos is said to be pouring millions into Alto Labs, a Silicon Valley gene reprogramming company searching for the secrets of eternal life. They think their money will save them, while the bodies of the less privileged crumble and fail (the sums already spent on these space extravaganzas would pay for vaccines across the world for everyone). This much seems clear. If we want to prepare for a better, fairer, life—if we want to prepare for any kind of future at all—we must slow the pace and change our relationship to time.

* * *

So what happens if we enter the realm of psychic time, the inner world of the unconscious where the mind, which we can never fully know or master, constantly flickers back and forth between the different moments of a partly remembered, partly repressed life? This is a vision of human subjectivity that completely scuppers any idea of progress as a forward march through time. The British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, writing in 1949, described a patient who had to go looking for a piece of their past in the future, something they could barely envisage in the present and which, when it first happened, had been too painful for them to fully live or even contemplate. Seen in this light, the relentless drive to push ourselves on and on as if our lives depended on it—killing us more likely—reveals itself as an impossible effort to bypass inner pain. The first hysterical patient in the history of psychoanalysis—analyzed by Freud’s colleague Josef Breuer—fell ill as she sat nursing her dying father, overwhelmed by an inadmissible combination of resentment and sorrow. Her anger at the suffocating restrictions of her life was a feeling which, as a young Viennese daughter, she could not allow herself, at least consciously, to entertain. Even without a pandemic, it is rare for such agonizing ambivalence towards those we love and lose to be spoken. There is a limit to how much we can psychically tolerate. This remains the fundamental insight of psychoanalysis, never more needed than today.

When, in April 2021, Boris Johnson slipped under night cover to visit the Covid-19 memorial wall along the Thames, avoiding daytime mourners, an act generally seen as an insult to all those whom the wall is designed to commemorate; or when he blustered and refused for eighteen months to meet the bereaved families of people who had died of the pandemic, he was refusing public accountability, while at the same time making a statement, no doubt unintentionally, about what he could not bear to countenance. He eventually met and assured the families that there would be a public enquiry for which, somewhat unpromisingly, he announced that he would take personal charge himself (he resigned without fulfilling the promise). His behaviour illustrates the gulf between official life and the inward life of the mind. Grief brings time shuddering to a halt. As beautifully rendered by poet Denise Riley after the death of her son, it is time lived without its flow. When you are grieving there is nothing else to do but grieve, as the mind battles against a knowledge which no one ever wishes to own. Even the term ‘the bereaved’ is misleading as it suggests a group apart and something over and done with, as if you can neatly place to one side and sign off on something which feels, for the one afflicted, like an interminable process (which must feel interminable, at least to begin with, if it is ever to be processed at all).

Seen in this light, Johnson’s ‘boosterism’, his boyish insouciance as it became famously known, appears to be a psychological project. What had to be avoided at all cost was any glimmer of anguish. At the risk—once more—of wild analysis, I would hazard a guess that this began in childhood, as the strategy of the eldest son of a depressed mother for whom he must never stop smiling in order to keep her alive. (Charlotte Johnson Wahl’s depression as a young mother is publicly known.) ‘I will never forget the pain of the children running down the hospital corridor,’ the family nanny stated, ‘and having to leave again.’ Instead, anything can and must be managed. Everything is going to be all right, a mantra whose irreality has never been more glaring. ‘Troubles come and go … Disasters are seldom as bad as they seem’—the wisdom of Queen Elizabeth II as described by Johnson in his speech to the House of Commons the day after she died (others might see her ability, in the worst moments, to face the awfulness of the hour as her strength).

According to this ethos, all that matters is the endlessly deferred promise of good times ahead. Hence too, I would suggest, the evasions and obfuscations—from climate change, to ‘levelling up’, to social care—for none of which has there ever been anything sufficiently ambitious or well-resourced to be dignified with the word ‘plan’. The same goes for the fiasco of ‘freedom day’ on 19 July 2021, when most remaining pandemic restrictions were lifted in the UK, a day people in England were exhorted to celebrate. Marked by soaring cases and chaos over isolation policy, for many in the UK and across a tensely watching world, it felt instead like an occasion for dread. ‘Needless suffering’, ‘disastrous myopia’ is how observers from New York to the capitals of Europe described UK government recklessness as cases then steadily rose close to their highest levels. Each time, the same pattern. The political reality of the moment is ignored by subduing the difficult forms of mental life which would be needed in order to face it.

In one of his most famous statements, Freud described the hysterical patient as suffering ‘mainly from reminiscences’. From that moment on, psychoanalytic thought has committed itself to understanding how flight from the past traps people in endlessly repeating time, robbing them of any chance for a life that might be lived with a modicum of freedom. You have to look back, however agonizing, however against all your deepest impulses, if you are to have the slightest hope of getting to a new stage. This too has become more obvious as people are crossing over from the space of intimacy and privately stored memories to telling their stories in the public domain. When women step up—and it is mainly if not exclusively women—to recount harrowing tales of sexual abuse from bygone years, it is part of a bid to claim the past as the only way of enabling a future to emerge no longer blocked by violent memory. When a group of British Airways passengers and crew, who had been taken hostage and held as human shields by Saddam Hussein in 1990 at the start of the Gulf War, insisted in summer 2021, after decades of obfuscation and silence, that their story be told, it was their way of saying that the past will never sleep as long as their historic and continuing trauma is unknown (the flight was on a secret UK spy mission authorized by Margaret Thatcher when Hussein’s troops were already lined up on the border of Kuwait). ‘We can’t move on with our lives,’ a mother whose child died of haemophilia in the 1980s said last year. The child had been contaminated with HIV from a transfusion of untreated blood—a scandal which the then-Health Secretary, Sir Kenneth Clarke, refuses to own to this day (forty years after the scandal, in August 2022, interim payments were announced for the survivors, but thousands of the parents and children of victims have still received nothing). Each of these hitherto untold stories indicate a new opening. During lockdown, psychoanalysts reported a flood of untold memories from their patients, as if the physical distance and reduced intimacy of the virtual session, combined with the sheer urgency of the moment, were finally giving them the courage to speak.

* * *

One glance at today’s culture wars will confirm how central this type of reckoning is to our ability to understand the political controversies of the present. What is causing the most trouble, provoking the strongest rebuttals and hatred, is the fearlessness with which the damaged, disadvantaged and dispossessed are calling up the legacy of the past as their passage to a viable future (‘manufacturing offences from the past’ in the words of Gavin Williamson, the Secretary of State for Education sacked by Johnson in 2021). Their resolve to combat historic and entrenched injustice is surely exemplary. Most vocal of all has been the anger unleashed by the project to bring down the statues of imperial magnates—beginning with Rhodes—or to acknowledge that colonial Britain was involved in the slave trade at all. At the time of abolition, British slavers were bought off by the government with compensation worth $17bn. Those funds have massively increased over hundreds of years, leaving the next generations to enjoy levels of prosperity that—not surprisingly and even in the face of incontrovertible scholarship and evidence—they have shown themselves reluctant to accept as sourced in such ill-gotten gains. When ‘The Legacies of British Slavery’, the University College London database charting this history, first opened in 2016, within days it was flooded in almost equal measure by those wishing to know the truth of the past and those wishing no less fervently to deny it.

‘My terror of forgetting,’ wrote the Jewish scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ‘is greater than my terror of having too much to remember.’ He was writing in the 1980s at a very different moment, when it was a subject of public debate as to whether Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal, should be put on trial. A friend had sent Yerushalmi a poll in Le Monde which asked its participants whether the word ‘forgetting’ or the word ‘justice’ best summed up their attitude to the events of the war and the occupation of France. Is it possible, Yerushalmi asks, that the opposite of forgetting is not memory, but justice? My answer is ‘both’—they are inseparable. There can be no struggle for justice without a vision of the future, so long as we do not lose sight of the worst of the past. We all need to become the historians of our public and private worlds.

One place to begin would be to make room for the complex legacies of the human mind, without the need to push reckoning aside. Past wrongs would not be subject to denial, as if our personal or national identities depended on a pseudo-innocence which absolves us of all crimes. Let the insights of the analytic couch percolate into our public and political lives and, no less crucially, the other way round (we need to acknowledge the weight of historical affliction on our dreams). Social trauma and injustice must not be seen as belonging to another universe from our most wayward fears and desires. Instead they should both find their place at the negotiating table, as we tentatively begin to forge the outlines of a better world. Meanwhile, taking responsibility for failure in relation to the pandemic would help: the cry for redress, for official investigations, or simply for public acknowledgement of the avoidable disaster which millions have been living, from the UK to India to Brazil—although none of this will bring back the thousands who should not have died in the first place.

In psychoanalytic thought, failure and fragility are a crucial part of who we are (only by knowing this can we make the best of our lives). Failure too has a strong political resonance, as many of us anxiously waited to see what might happen in Afghanistan: whether the collapse of the Western powers in a country in which they had been so financially and militarily invested for two decades would be a game-changer; or whether, instead, despite the more or less unanimous agreement that we were witnessing a catastrophic failure of policy, any such recognition would turn out to be a fleeting gesture with nothing learnt, no more than a pause in the preparations for endless war. Squabbling over whether the US is a ‘big’ or ‘super’ power—according to Ben Wallace, UK Defence Minister at the time, only a nation willing to exert global force has a right to the second epithet—was hardly reassuring.

So, how then will the pandemic be lived when it is no longer—as we can only hope—at the forefront of people’s consciously lived lives? How will it be remembered? Will it be a tale of vaccine triumph, with no mention of the murderous injustice of unequal global distribution; a story of government negligence and accountability; or an acceptance of the ongoing grief for the dead? Responding to a suggestion to make the memorial wall permanent, the artist Rachel Whiteread suggested it should be ‘left just to be and then gradually disappear. To have its quietness.’ You cannot, she stated, memorialize something that is still going on; a more permanent memorial will need distance and time. When we reach that point, the challenge will be to resist the temptation to brush everything under the carpet, as if the best hope for the future were to go back to normal and blithely continue with matters as they were before: push death aside, treat swathes of the earth’s inhabitants as dispensable, drive the planet to its end. On the other hand, a world that makes room for memory and justice would be something else. There is still everything to play for.



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE CHAPTERS IN THIS book nearly all arose in response to a request from a publication inviting me to think about the various crises—war, pandemic, soaring inequality—which have each cast such a dark shadow over the past years. I am grateful to all those who encouraged me to write in situations which have taken me to the limits of understanding. The first chapter on Albert Camus’s The Plague, which gives this book its title, appeared in the London Review of Books, Volume 42, No. 9, 7 May 2020. The second chapter, on Freud and the death of his daughter, was delivered as the Annual Freud Memorial lecture, under the auspices of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, livestreamed—due to Covid-19—from the London Freud Museum on 23 September 2020. It was published in its first version in the London Review of Books, Volume 42, No. 22, 19 November 2020. Chapter Three, ‘Living Death’, was published in Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2020, and Chapter Four, ‘Life After Death’, in The Guardian, 7 December 2021. Chapter Five, on Simone Weil, appeared in the New York Review of Books, Volume 69, No. 1, 13 January 2022. Each of them has been substantially revised and expanded for this book, taking into account as far as possible the rapidly evolving situation with which, since the first faint signs of the pandemic, the world has been faced.

I have continued to benefit from the input of Mary-Kay Wilmers and colleagues at the London Review of Books. I am grateful to editor and poet Jana Prikyl for welcoming me to the New York Review of Books. Thanks to Jamieson Webster for asking me to contribute to the Gagosian, and to Clare Longrigg for including me in the 200-year anniversary celebration of The Guardian. Special thanks to Monika Pessler and Daniela Finzi, Director and Research Director of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, first for inviting me to speak, and then for generously hosting the lecture in the face of considerable difficulties. Thanks are also due to Carol Siegel, Director of the London Freud Museum, for stepping in and creating a unique dialogue between London and Vienna. My thanks to Julia Kristeva, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Judith Butler and Michael Parsons for their participation in the conversation that followed the lecture. Howard Caygill offered insight and much-needed support in relation to the extraordinary thinking of Simone Weil, who has turned into something of a guiding spirit through the book.

Once again, my thanks to Esther Leslie and other colleagues at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities whose perseverance in the ongoing, critical, project of the Humanities during these difficult times has felt exemplary. Likewise to Lisa Baraitser, Stephen Frosh and Daniel Pick for their unyielding commitment to the place of psychoanalysis in that project.

Thanks for the editorial skills of Milo Walls at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who has once more been a pleasure to work with. I appreciate the kindness with which Mitzi Angel greeted the book. Tracy Bohan continues to offer support and friendship which has become more vital than ever. I am grateful to Jacques Testard for publishing the book at the extraordinary Fitzcarraldo Editions, where I join a list which inspires and daunts me in equal measure.

My much loved companions of life, thought and pleasure, who I have thanked before and in whose debt I will always be—including the one to whom this book is dedicated—each know who they are. Thank you all from the heart.



NOTES

The page numbers for the notes that appear in the print version of this title are not in your ebook. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

‘centuries old and unchanging’: Neil Macfarquhar, ‘What Russians see in the news’, The New York Times, 23 August 2022.

‘lives by the holy conviction that it will exist for ever’: Oleksandr Mykhed, ‘We will rebuild everything’, Financial Times, 31 December 2022–1 January 2023.

It is in the name of ‘eternal Russia’…: Ilya Budraitskis, ‘Day 5, Day 9, Day 16: Responses to the Invasion of Ukraine’, London Review of Books, Vol. 44, No. 6, 24 March 2022.

Like warriors, what invading armies want, Weil writes…: Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, 1939, Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad, tr. Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 16.

‘When one of us dies, I will move to Paris’: Sigmund Freud, ‘Our Attitude Towards Death’, Essay 1, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 1915, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth, Vol. 14, 1957), 298.

‘is for him to see that all the greed, aggression and deceit in the world…’: D. W. Winnicott, ‘Discussion of War Aims’, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst (New York: Norton, 1986), 212.

Consigning Covid to history, surveillance and testing capabilities have been dropped by countries across the world: Philip Ball, ‘Why are we pretending Covid’s over?’, The Guardian, 16 August 2022.

This ‘cold, virile’ determination is rarely found, she suggested…: Simone Weil quoted in Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 375.

was not ‘kindled’ by the desire to kill…: Simone Weil quoted in Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 375.

‘might indeed have died at the very moment one is thinking about them…’: Simone Weil, Cahiers VI, Marseille, Winter 1941–1942, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Florence de Lussy (Paris: Gallimard, Quarto editions, 1999), 838.

those who ‘do not count’, not ‘in any situation, in anyone’s eyes’: Simone Weil, La condition ouvrière (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 107, quoted in Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 245.

Crucially, in the world of Homer, which was so important to Weil…: For a fuller discussion of justice in relation to Homer, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice, Which Rationality (London: Duckworth, 1988), 14.

‘more cruelly than water, earth, air and fire’; ‘halted by the actual limits of the earth’s surface’: Simone Weil, ‘Prospects—are we heading for the proletarian revolution?’, 1933, Oppression and Liberty, tr. Arthur Wills and John Petrie (London: Routledge, 1958), 1, 19, ‘Perspectives—Allons-nous vers la révolution prolétarienne’, Oeuvres complètes, 268, 251.

‘stifle their own breath’; ‘as safe as a little bird in front of a snake’: Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, 1943, tr. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 1952), 28; ‘L’enracinement’, Oeuvres complètes, 1044.

‘as a child tearing the petals off a rose’: Weil, The Need for Roots, 119; ‘L’enracinement’, Oeuvres complètes, 1101.

‘just as doctors are needed in a city stricken with plague’: Simone Weil, ‘Dernières Pensées’, Letter to Father Perrin, Casablanca, 26 May 1942, Oeuvres complètes, 787.

‘they can’: Tom Stevenson, ‘Things fall from the sky’, London Review of Books, Vol. 44, No. 7, 7 April 2022.

‘Each of us’: Weil, The Need for Roots, 101, ‘L’enracinement’, Oeuvres complètes, 1089.

‘never, whatever may happen’: Weil, ‘The Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression’, 1934, Oppression and Liberty, ‘Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale’, Oeuvres complètes, 79.

Thought can be revolutionary or counter-revolutionary … ‘corrosive’: Simone Weil, ‘Fragments’, Oppression and Liberty, 137, ‘Méditation sur l’obéissance et la liberté’, Oeuvres complètes, 493.

‘The powerful forces that we have to fight are preparing to crush us…’: Simone Weil, ‘Prospects’, Oppression and Liberty, 22; ‘Perspectives’, Oeuvres complètes, 271.

‘nothing in the world can prevent us from thinking clearly’; ‘nothing can compel anyone to exercise their powers of thought…’: Weil, ‘Prospects’, Oppression and Liberty, 22, 93; ‘Perspectives’, Oeuvres complètes, 271, 325.

‘The plague was unimaginable, or rather it was being imagined in the wrong way’: Albert Camus, La peste, 1947, ed. W. J. Strachan (London: Methuen, 1962), 53; The Plague, tr. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Random House, 1948), 38 (some translations modified).

‘lacking in imagination … They don’t think on the right scale for plagues…’: Albert Camus, ‘The composition of The Plague, from Notebooks II, III, and IV’, Selected Essays and Notebooks, ed. and tr. Philip Thody (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966), 228.

‘There have been as many plagues as wars in history…’: Camus, La peste, 49; The Plague, 34.

‘It was only as time passed, and the rise in the steady death rate could not be ignored…’: Camus, La peste, 93; The Plague, 72.

‘its self-command, the ruthless almost mathematical efficiency that had been its trump card hitherto’: Camus, La peste, 290; The Plague, 242.

‘Counting’ might, then, fall under the rubric of what Freud described…: Sigmund Freud, ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’, 1910, Standard Edition, Vol. 11 (London: Hogarth, 1957).

‘bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers…’: Camus, La peste, 278; The Plague, 332.

‘It was as if the earth on which our houses were planted…’: Camus, La peste, 26; The Plague, 15.

In a 2020 interview, French analyst and theorist Julia Kristeva…: Julia Kristeva, ‘Humanity is rediscovering existential solitude, a sense of limits and of mortality’, interview with Stefano Montefiore, Corriera della Sera, 29 March 2020, tr. into French by Henri José Legrand.

‘like a ghost that refused to depart for the other world’: Lyra McKee, ‘We were meant to be the generation that reaped the spoils of peace’, The Guardian, 28 March 2020.

‘the days of young people disappearing and dying young would be gone’: McKee, The Guardian, 2020.

as if McKee had been warning us that we were about to enter, or re-enter, a state of war: McKee, The Guardian, 2020.

‘the categorical refusal of an intrusion felt to be intolerable’: Albert Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 21; The Rebel, tr. Anthony Bower, foreword by Sir Herbert Read (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), 19. My thanks to Neil Foxlee for his comments on the translation of Camus, see Letters, London Review of Books, Vol. 42, No. 10, 21 May 2020.

‘There are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt…’: Camus, La peste, 237–38; The Plague, 196-97.

‘The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment…’: Arundhati Roy, ‘The Pandemic Is a Portal’, Financial Times, 3 April 2020.

‘could not understand how men could torture others while continuing to look at them’: quoted by Olivier Todd in Albert Camus: A Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), 313. N.B.: English translation gives quotes without references.

‘Our getting and spending…’: Rebecca Solnit, ‘Hope in a time of crisis’, The Guardian, 7 April 2020.

‘Profiteers were taking a hand and purveying at enormous prices essential foodstuffs…’: Camus, La peste, 258; The Plague, 214.

‘Thus whereas plague through its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our city’s folk…’: Camus, La peste, 258; The Plague, 214.

‘I thought, how could police use violence against the frontline fighters against Covid-19…’: Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Shah Meer-Baloch, ‘Doctors tell of beatings by police amid ventilator and PPE shortage’, The Guardian, 9 April 2020. See also Roy, ‘The Pandemic Is a Portal’.

There was an irony here: See Jeremy Harding, ‘The Castaway’, London Review of Books, Vol. 36, No. 23, 4 December 2014.

the ‘institutional’ injustice; the repeated ‘lie’ of assimilation…: quoted by Morvan Lebesque in Camus par lui-même, ‘Écrivains de toujours’, 64 (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 125.

a long extract of The Plague appeared clandestinely in France in a collection of Resistance publications: Shoshana Felman, ‘Camus’ The Plague, or a Monument to Witnessing’, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 98.

That epithet is reserved for the character of Joseph Grand for his acts of kindness and his dedication to an ideal…: Camus, La peste, 57, 154; The Plague, 42, 126.

‘Evil sometimes has a human face…’: Roland Barthes, Bulletins du club du meilleur livre, 1955, 7, quoted by Maciej Kałuża in ‘The distance between reality and fiction: Roland Barthes reading Albert Camus’, Studia de Arte e Educacione, 12, 2017.

‘no more than a puff of smoke’; ‘to die in heaps’: Shoshana Felman, ‘Camus’ The Plague, or a Monument to Witnessing’, 97. Camus, La peste, 50-51; The Plague, 35-36.

‘with genius added’: Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, 168.

‘effacement’; ‘a motionless black figure which gradually merged into the invading darkness’; ‘only effacing herself a trifle more than usual’: Camus, La peste, 298; The Plague, 248.

The women in the novel are either patient sufferers, or occasional prophetesses…: Camus, La peste, 297, 130; The Plague, 248, 104-105.

‘knew everything without ever thinking’; ‘the gift she had of knowing everything without apparently taking thought’: Camus, La peste, 248; The Plague, 298.

As the daily bombardment of numbers continued during Covid-19, one chilling statistic started to receive attention…: Mark Townsend, ‘Domestic violence cases soar as lockdown takes its toll’, The Guardian, 4 April 2020; Anon, ‘I know the trauma of domestic abuse. I fear for women in lockdown’, The Observer, 12 April 2020.

‘Of course a man should fight for the victims.… but if that stops him from loving anything else, then what’s the use of fighting?’: Camus, La peste, 277; The Plague, 231.

‘Before them the darkness stretched out into infinity…’: Camus, La peste, 277; The Plague, 232.

The word comes close to the idea of calculated crime and from there to mass murder…: Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2016).

For Tarrou, murder is state murder: Camus, La peste, 266-75; The Plague, 222-30.

‘an accomplice’: Camus, La peste, 176; The Plague, 215-16.

‘it desires to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco’: Sigmund Freud, ‘The Disillusionment of the War’, Essay 2, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 279.

‘quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise’: Camus, La peste, 331; The Plague, 278.

‘is now perishing in the strife of nations’: Freud to Jones, 25 December 1914, transcribed in Jones’ hand, quoted by Peter Gay in Freud: A Life For Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 351.

‘I do not delude myself … The springtime of our science has abruptly broken off…’: Freud to Jones, quoted in Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, 351.

‘unfolds one death at a time…’: Rachel Clarke, ‘Behind the statistics’, The Guardian, 30 May 2020.

‘You have, my poor child, seen death break into the family for the first time, or heard about it…’: Freud to Mathilda, 26 March 1908, Sigmund Freud, Briefe 1873–1939 (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1960), 188; Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. E. L. Freud, 137, quoted by Max Schur in Freud: Living and Dying (London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1972), 263.

In fact, according to some analysts, this was a fourth wave exclusive to northern countries, many of whose citizens had wrongly believed themselves to be free of the disease by December 1918…: Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (London: Vintage, 2017), 44-45.

Things had started to go downhill for the Central Powers in April 1918…: Spinney, Pale Rider, 249-50.

what can fairly be described as the worst ‘massacre’ of the twentieth century has been rubbed out of history: Spinney, Pale Rider, 4.

By autumn 1918, schools and theatres in the city were being intermittently closed…: Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time, 382.

In May that year his wife, Martha, after years of undernourishment as she tried to manage caring for the whole family through the war…: Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time, 382.

‘a mutilated rump, bleeding from all arteries’: Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern, Erinnerungen eines Europäers (1944), quoted in Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time, 380.

‘I weep not a single tear for this Austria or this Germany’: Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern, 256-59; Freud to Ferenczi, 23 August 1914, 25 October 1918, quoted by Ernest Jones in Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 2, Years of Maturity 1901–1919 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 192.

‘We are all of us slowly failing…’: Freud to Jones, 15 January 1919, English Freud Collection, Library of Congress, quoted in Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time, 378.

‘Hungerkost’: Freud to Ferenczi, 9 April 1919, quoted in Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time, 381.

‘not even a children’s train’: Freud to Pfister, 27 January 1920, Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, ed. Heinrich Meng and Ernst L. Freud, tr. Eric Mosbacher (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1963), 75.

referring to the trains of the international children’s association that were ferrying children out of starving Austria: Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 330.

‘prophetic dream’: Freud to Ferenczi, 10 July 1915, quoted in Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time, 354.

More than a million Austro-Hungarian soldiers died either in battle or from disease: Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time, 381.

‘the perplexity and helplessness of the human race’: Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 1927, Vol. 21 (London: Hogarth, 1961), 18.

‘We are suffering under no restrictions, no epidemic, and are in good spirits’: Freud to Jones, 22 October 1914, quoted in Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time, 353.

‘my spirits are unshaken…’: Freud to Ferenczi, 16 February 1917, quoted by Jones in Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 2, 216.

‘join in the world’s pleasure and the world’s pain’; ‘der Erde Lust, der Erde Leid zu tragen’: Freud to Abraham, 27 August 1918, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 316.

‘One has to use every means possible to withdraw from the frightful tension in the world outside…’: Freud to Ferenczi, 2 August 1916, quoted in Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 212.

‘I and my contemporaries will never again see a joyous world. It is too hideous’: Freud to Lou Andreas-Salomé, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 292.

‘We have to abdicate…’: Freud to Andreas-Salomé, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 292.

he could not of course have foreseen today’s Voluntary Human Extinction Movement…: Sian Cain, ‘Why a generation is choosing to be child-free’, The Guardian, 25 July 2020.

‘perfection of the instruments of destruction’; ‘earlier periods of human arrogance had torn too wide apart between mankind and the animals’: Freud, ‘Why War?’, 1933, Standard Edition, Vol. 22 (London: Hogarth, 1964), 213; Moses and Monotheism, 1939, Standard Edition, Vol. 23 (London: Hogarth, 1964), 100.

‘I myself was aware…’: Freud to K. and L. Levy, 11 June 1923, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 358.

‘We shall remain inconsolable and never find a substitute…’: Freud to Binswanger, 11–12 April 1929, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 421. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 1915, Standard Edition, Vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1957). Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, ‘Spanish Flu, Covid-19 and Sigmund Freud: What can we learn from history’, 3 September 2020 (Facebook and Freud Museum).

‘You will be able to certify that it was half-finished when Sophie was alive and flourishing’: Freud to Max Eitingon, 18 July 1920, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 329, 553.

‘hitherto neglected and silent’; ‘rough-hewn and overwhelming’: Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Back to Freud’s Texts: Making Silent Documents Speak, tr. Philip Slotkin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 1.

Its only earlier appearance was in two letters to Eitingon of February 1920, just weeks after Sophie’s death: Grubrich-Simitis, Back to Freud’s Texts: Making Silent Documents Speak, 189.

‘discussion concerning the mortality or immortality of protozoa’: Grubrich-Simitis, Back to Freud’s Texts: Making Silent Documents Speak, 189.

‘snatched away … as if she had never been’: Freud to Pfister, 27 January 1920, Psychoanalysis and Faith, 75.

‘The undisguised brutality of our time…’: Freud to Pfister, 27 January 1920, Psychoanalysis and Faith, 75.

This version of events is contested although there is no conclusive evidence for any of the alternative versions. For a strong summary of the issues, see Dany Nobus, ‘Yom Kippur 1939: Freud, Schur and the Rupture of the Lethal Pact’, Freud in the Margins—Rethinking the History of Psychoanalysis (New York, Columbia University Press, forthcoming); Michael Molnar, ‘Death in the Library’, unpublished manuscript. See also the letter from Lucie Freud to Felix Augenfeld, 2 October 1939, Sigmund Freud Papers: Family Papers, 1851–1978; Correspondence between Others, 1870–1976; Freud, Lucie; to Felix Augenfeld, 1939, 1973, 1976, Library of Congress. I am grateful to Daniela Finzi for alerting me to this controversy and to Dany Nobus and Michael Molnar for sharing their research.

‘If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us…’: Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, Standard Edition, Vol. 18 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 45.

‘The aim of all life…’: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 38-39.

‘We are strengthened in our belief…’: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 45.

‘is often indistinguishable from deliberate destructiveness’: Zoe Williams, ‘Isolating the over-50s? It’s designed to sow discord’, The Guardian, 4 August 2020.

‘easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature…’; ‘Perhaps … we have adopted the belief because there is some comfort in it’; ‘It may be … that this belief in the internal necessity of dying…’: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 45.

‘narcissistic injury’: Freud to Ferenczi, 4 February 1920, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 331.

‘I do as much work as I can…’: Freud to Pfister, 27 January 1920, Psychoanalysis and Faith, 75.

‘melts away in their hands’: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 45.

death cannot be reduced to the appearance of a dead body, but describes the moment when a cell comes to the end of its individual development: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 45-49.

‘In this sense … protozoa too are mortal’: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 47.

‘described repression, which lies at the basis of every neurosis, as a reaction to a trauma…’: Sigmund Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses, 1919, Standard Edition, Vol. 17 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 210 (italics mine).

By his own account, a traumatized soldier is torn between the two: Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses, 209.

I am referring to Freud’s twelfth meta-psychological paper…: Sigmund Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, ed. and with an essay by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, tr. Axel Hoffer and Peter T. Hoffer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Freud’s title had been ‘Overview of the Transference Neuroses’, which Grubrich-Simitis makes the sub-title as it corresponds less closely to the work’s content.

‘My thesis … is that Freud, in his phylogenetic fantasy…’: Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, ‘Trauma or drive—drive and Trauma: A Reading of Sigmund Freud’s Phylogenetic Fantasy of 1915’, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 43 (1988), 6.

‘the hitherto predominantly friendly outside world … transformed itself into a mass of threatening perils’: Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, 1915, 14.

‘Food was not sufficient to permit an increase in the human hordes…’: Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, 14.

Faced with an emergency ‘beyond his control’, man imposed on himself a ban on reproduction…: Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, 15.

‘Language was magic to him, his thoughts seemed omnipotent to him, he understood the world according to his ego’: Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, 15.

‘The children bring along the anxiousness of the beginning of the Ice Age’: Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, 14.

‘preponderance of the phylogenetic disposition over all other factors’: Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, 14.

‘I have repeatedly been led to suspect that the psychology of the neuroses has stored up in it more of the antiquities of human development than any other source’; ‘many thousands of years’: Sigmund Freud, ‘The Paths to Symptom Formation’, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Part 3, Lecture 23, 1916–1917, Standard Edition, Vol. 16 (London: Hogarth, 1963), 371; Totem and Taboo, 1912–1913, Standard Edition, Vol. 13 (London: Hogarth, 1953), 158.

‘What … are the ways and means employed by one generation in order to hand on its mental states to the next one?’: Freud, Totem and Taboo, 158.

‘It only moves it into still earlier prehistory’: Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, 10.

‘should we want to imagine a new man-made Ice Age, and think in psychoanalytic terms about the consequences of a nuclear winter’: Grubrich-Simitis, ‘Trauma or drive—drive or Trauma: A Reading of Sigmund Freud’s Phylogenetic Fantasy of 1915’, 5.

‘All our attention is directed to the outside, whence dangers threaten and satisfactions beckon…’: Freud to Einstein, 26 March 1929, Library of Congress, quoted in Grubrich-Simitis (1996), 11, translation modified.

‘There is nothing for which man’s capabilities are less suited…’: Freud to Binswanger, 28 May 1911, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 262.

‘the claims of humanity’; ‘the demands of a national war’: Freud, Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses, 214.

‘Consider … the Great War which is still laying Europe waste…’: Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures, Part 2, Lecture 9, ‘The Censorship of Dreams’, Standard Edition, Vol. 15 (London: Hogarth, 1961), 146.

‘We lay a stronger emphasis on what is evil in men…’: Freud, ‘The Censorship of Dreams’, 147.

‘In each of the loved persons … there was also something of the stranger…’: Freud, ‘Our Attitude Towards Death’, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 293.

‘It was acquired … in relation to dead people who were loved as a reaction against the satisfaction hidden behind the grief for them…’: Freud, ‘Our Attitude Towards Death’, 295.

‘vein of ethical sensitiveness’: Freud, ‘Our Attitude Towards Death’, 295.

‘I, of course, belong to a race…’: Freud to Romain Rolland, 8 April 1923, Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. E. L. Freud, 200, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 350.

Ten years later, in a letter to Marie Bonaparte, he predicted that persecution of the Jews and the suppression of intellectual freedom…: Freud to Bonaparte, 26 March 1933, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 444.

Although Freud remarked that the impulse to human empathy is difficult to explain, that compassion can be a veil for narcissism: Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Standard Edition, Vol. 18 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 110n; From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, 1918, Standard Edition, Vol. 17 (London: Hogarth, 1955), 88.

the protective shield of the psyche which allows itself to die to save the deeper layers of the mind from a similar fate…: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 27, 50.

A life in which the pain of the times is shared, and in which every human subject, regardless of race, class, caste or sex would be able to participate: Jacques Derrida, ‘Spéculer sur Freud’, La carte postale, De Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 288; on the concept of the ‘commons’ in time of pandemic, see also Etienne Balibar, ‘On living, learning, imagining in the middle of the crisis’ [https://icls.columbia.edu/etienne-balibar-on-living-learning-imagining-in-the-middle-of-the-crisis/].

‘mysterious and beautiful book…’: Theodor Reik, ‘Introduction’, Rachel Berdach, The Emperor, the Sages and Death (1938), tr. William Wolf, introd. by Theodor Reik (New York and London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1962), 8; Freud to Rachel Berdach, 27 December 1938, Letters of Sigmund Freud, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 514.

‘Who are you?… Where did you acquire all the knowledge expressed in your book?’: Freud to Rachel Berdach, quoted in Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, 514.

The psychoanalytic resonances are everywhere, from the emperor’s wish to understand man’s propensity for the dark…: Berdach, The Emperor, the Sages and Death, 32, 90.

‘I wish to be conscious to the very end,’ the emperor asserts, ‘so as not to lose life’s most mysterious part’: Berdach, The Emperor, the Sages and Death, 142.

‘Is man alone accursed to know of death while full with life…’: Berdach, The Emperor, the Sages and Death, 192.

‘My dream is this: not to be ruler in my land, in any land, neither be slave in any place, not to erect new boundaries…’: Berdach, The Emperor, the Sages and Death, 127.

‘Whomever thou meetest, it is Thou…’: Berdach, The Emperor, the Sages and Death, 168.

A bit like the Freudian unconscious, this is a world that is both one and infinite, in which everything and everybody is included…: Berdach, The Emperor, the Sages and Death, 189.

But as we know, to die one’s own death is not the same thing as to die alone in a world that seems deserted: Haroon Siddique, ‘Survivors of Covid-19 show increased rate of psychiatric disorders, study finds’, The Guardian, 3 August 2020.

‘Cold fear now filled his heart. Where were the people, and was there war in the town?…’: Berdach, The Emperor, the Sages and Death, 197.

‘Must he not share their fate before he dies?’: Berdach, The Emperor, the Sages and Death, 196.

‘I say “my abominable fate”, forgetting too quickly the millions of “abominable fates” being played out across Europe and everywhere without an end to blood…’: ‘In memoriam—Extraits du journal du Dr John Rittmeister, tenu en prison entre le 26 septembre 1942 et le 13 mai 1943’, Les années brunes—la psychanalyse sous le Troisième Reich (Paris: Confrontation, 1984), 172.

‘love, not introversion’: ‘In memoriam—Extraits du journal du Dr John Rittmeister’, Les années brunes—la psychanalyse sous le Troisième Reich, 174.

‘What did the “stay at home” message mean to you?’ ‘Death’: ‘Escaping My Abuser’, Panorama, BBC, 17 August 2020.

In the United States, women were prevented by their abusers from washing their hands: See Andrew M. Campbell, ‘Increasing Reports of Domestic Violence during the Covid-19 Pandemic’, ‘An Increasing Risk of Family Violence during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Strengthening Community Collaborations to Save Lives’, Forensic Science International Reports, 12 April 2020 [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7152912/].

In England, one couple sat listening to Boris Johnson on the radio when he announced the lockdown…: ‘Escaping My Abuser’, Panorama, 17 August 2020.

‘shadow pandemic’: United Nations, ‘Policy Brief: The Impact of Covid-19 on Women’, 9 April 2020 [www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/report/policy-brief-the-impact-of-covid-19-on-women/policy-brief-the-impact-of-covid-19-on-women-en-1.pdf]. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director, UN Women, ‘Violence against Women and Girls: The Shadow Pandemic’, 6 April 2020 [www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2020/4/statement-ed-phumzile-violence-against-women-during-pandemic].

Visits to the website of Refuge, the United Kingdom’s largest domestic-abuse charity, increased during the pandemic by over 60 per cent: Mark Townsend, ‘Revealed: surge in domestic violence during Covid-19 crisis’, The Guardian, 12 April 2020. Gaby Hinsliff, ‘The coronavirus backlash: how the pandemic is destroying women’s rights’, The Guardian, 23 June 2020. See also https://refuge.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Refuge-Covid-Service-Report.pdf, which gives the figure for April 2020 to February 2021 of an over 60 per cent increase of average calls and contacts on their data base compared with January to March 2020.

According to the ‘Counting Dead Women’ campaign, during that time, sixteen women were murdered…: Rachel Younger, ‘Twice as many women killed by men during Covid Lockdown, charity reveals’, 29 November 2020, ITV News [https://www.itv.com/news/2020-11-28/three-times-more-women-killed-by-men-during-covid-lockdown-charity-reveals]; Jamie Grierson, ‘Domestic Abuse Killings “more than double” amid Covid-19 lockdown’, The Guardian, 15 April 2020 [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/15/domestic-abuse-killings-more-than-double-amid-covid-19-lockdown].

‘If you think it was bad before…’: ‘Escaping My Abuser’, Panorama, 17 August 2020.

Her partner boasted that he didn’t have to ‘cover up’ any more while repeatedly assuring her that she was safe at home…: ‘Escaping My Abuser’, Panorama, 17 August 2020.

‘It was at this moment she finally started to believe her partner would kill her’: Jamie Grierson, ‘“I live in fear of the unknown”: Life in a Refuge under Lockdown’, The Guardian, 21 May 2020 [www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/21/i-live-in-fear-of-the-unknown-life-in-a-refuge-under-lockdown].

With reference to Covid-19, Julia Kristeva uses the term ‘feminicide’…: Julia Kristeva, ‘La situation virale et ses résonances psychanalytiques’, webinar, 14 June 2020 [www.ipa.world/IPA/en/IPA1/Webinars/La_situation_virale.aspx]. On femicide, see Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven, Crimes against Women: Proceedings of the International Tribunal (Millbrae, CA: Les Femmes, 1976).

As defences start to crumble, the phobic core of being human explodes: As Andrea Long Chu points out, women are being assaulted by men for whom being confined at home risks turning them into women. See Long Chu, Females (London and New York: Verso, 2019).

Domestic violence has become more visible, but the renewed attention has not reduced the prevalence of sexual crime—if anything the opposite: Rajeev Sayal and Alexandra Topping, ‘Plan to tackle sexual assault a “pipe dream” as offences hit a record high’, The Guardian, 29 April 2022.

‘With the schools closed … 45 per cent of men say they are spending more time home-schooling than their wives’: Eliot Weinberger, ‘The American Virus’, London Review of Books, Vol. 42, No. 11, 4 June 2020.

Angela Merkel warned of a creeping ‘retraditionalization’ of roles: Angela Merkel, quoted by Rory Carroll, Kate Connolly, Ashifa Kassam and Kim Willsher in ‘“We are losers in this crisis”: research finds lockdowns reinforcing gender inequality’, The Guardian, 29 May 2020 [www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/29/we-are-losers-in-this-crisis-research-finds-lockdowns-reinforcing-gender-inequality].

The domestic workload of women in France tripled between March and May 2020: Carroll, Connolly, Kassam and Willsher, ‘“We are losers in this crisis”: research finds lockdowns reinforcing gender inequality’, The Guardian, 29 May 2020.

In Spain, more than 170,000 people signed a petition protesting against this ‘regression’: Carroll, Connolly, Kassam and Willsher, ‘“We are losers in this crisis”: research finds lockdowns reinforcing gender inequality’, The Guardian, 29 May 2020.

In the United Kingdom, the ‘early years’ sector has been pushed to the brink of collapse…: Hinsliff, ‘The coronavirus backlash: how the pandemic is destroying women’s rights’, The Guardian, 23 June 2020.

According to the British campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed, more than half of pregnant women and mothers expected the pandemic permanently to damage their careers: Hinsliff, ‘The coronavirus backlash: how the pandemic is destroying women’s rights’, The Guardian, 23 June 2020.

the countries that dealt better with Covid-19, at least at the outset, were all led by women…: See Jon Henley, ‘Female-led countries handled Covid-19 better, research finds’, The Guardian, 19 August 2020 [www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/18/female-led-countries-handled-coronavirus-better-study-jacinda-ardern-angela-merkel]; Judy Stober, Letters, The Guardian, 25 August 2020 [www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/24/women-excel-in-handling-covid-19]. See also Jacqueline Rose, ‘Afterword’, On Violence and On Violence Against Women (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; London: Faber, 2021).

We might, for example, contrast Johnson’s avoidance of the families of the bereaved with Jacinda Ardern’s physical embrace of the survivors of the Christchurch mosque massacre in 2019…; Or we might note how Mia Mottley’s handling of the pandemic more or less coincided with the transition of Barbados to a republic…: Nesrine Malik, ‘With respect: how Jacinda Ardern showed the world what a world leader should be’, The Guardian, 19 March 2019; Alice Scarsi, ‘Queen heartbreak as Barbados Prime Minister launches COP26 speech after republican vow’, Daily Express, 1 November 2021.

‘The evolution of civilization…’: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1930, Standard Edition, Vol. 21 (London: Hogarth, 1961), 122.

which is why Freud could also assert without contradiction that the human organism wants above all to die after its own fashion: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 39.

‘fluctuating, vague and uncertain…’; ‘The senses in which I am using the term [uncertain] … is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain…’: John Maynard Keynes, ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money’, 1937, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 14 (Macmillan: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, 1973), 113.

Freud once stated that no one believes in their own death: Freud, ‘Our Attitude Towards Death’, 289.

‘There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died’: Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), 94.

‘We were terrified of this new disease…’: quoted by Oliver Franklin-Wallace in ‘An oral history of AstraZeneca: “Making a vaccine in a year is like landing on the moon”’, The Guardian, 28 August 2021.

‘Expansion is everything…’: quoted by Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), 124.

Rhodes’ statue at the University of Cape Town was brought down by student protests in one of the most resonant political actions of the times…: I discuss the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign in South Africa more fully in ‘Political Protest and the Denial of History—South Africa and the Legacy of the Future’, On Violence and On Violence Against Women.

‘We know there is life on Mars … because we sent it there’: quoted by Nicola Twilly in ‘Meet the Martians’, New Yorker, 8 October 2015.

‘We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, so if it blows up, it’s cool…’: Elon Musk, quoted by Dianna Wray in ‘Elon Musk SpaceX Launch site threatens wildlife in Texas, environmental groups say’, The Guardian, 5 September 2021.

The British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, writing in 1949, described a patient who had to go looking for a piece of their past in the future…: D. W. Winnicott, ‘Fear of Breakdown’, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 1974.

The first hysterical patient in the history of psychoanalysis—analyzed by Freud’s colleague Josef Breuer—fell ill as she sat nursing her dying father…: Freud and Josef Breuer, ‘Anna O’, Studies on Hysteria, 1893–1895, Standard Edition, Vol. 2 (London: Hogarth, 1955).

When you are grieving there is nothing else to do but grieve, as the mind battles against a knowledge which no one ever wishes to own: Denise Riley, Say Something Back—Time Lived Without its Flow (London: PanMacmillan, 2016).

‘I will never forget the pain of the children running down the hospital corridor … and having to leave again’: Tatler Archive, ‘Boris Johnson’s mother on her soft-hearted son’, Tatler, 14 September 2021.

When a group of British Airways passengers and crew, who had been taken hostage and held as human shields by Saddam Hussein in 1990 at the start of the Gulf War…: Mike White, ‘The Awful Secret of Flight 149: Spies, Lies and Ruined Lives’, Stuff, 8 August 2021 [https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/books/125874638/the-awful-secret-of-flight-149-spies-lies-and-ruined-lives].

forty years after the scandal, in August 2022, interim payments were announced for the survivors, but thousands of the parents and children of victims have still received nothing: Matthew White, ‘Survivors of contaminated blood scandal awarded interim payments’, The Guardian, 17 August 2022.

‘manufacturing offences from the past’: Tom Wilkinson, ‘Under-fire Education Secretary calls on universities to bring nation together’, Evening Standard, 9 September 2021.

‘My terror of forgetting … is greater than my terror of having too much to remember’: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor—Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 117.

Squabbling over whether the US is a ‘big’ or ‘super’ power—according to Ben Wallace, UK Defence Minister at the time…: Dan Sabbagh and Patrick Wintour, ‘UK defence secretary suggests US is no longer a superpower’, The Guardian, 2 September 2021.

‘left just to be and then gradually disappear. To have its quietness’: quoted by Charlotte Higgins, ‘Rachel Whiteread: “I wanted to make the opposite of what I had always been making”’: The Guardian, 12 April 2021.

‘For some years … I have held the theory that joy is an indispensable ingredient in human life, for the health of the mind’; ‘equivalent of madness’: Simone Weil, Letter to Jean Posternak, 1938, Seventy Letters—Personal and Intellectual Windows on a Thinker, tr. and arr. by Richard Rees (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 1965), 95.

‘the nationalist obsession, the adoration of power in its most brutal form…’: Weil, Spring 1937, Seventy Letters, 84.

‘morally unbreathable atmosphere’; ‘intoxicated’; ‘both of terror and love to the whole universe’: Weil, Seventy Letters, 94.

‘An incredible amount of lying, false information, demagogy, mixed boastfulness and panic’: Weil, Seventy Letters, 94.

She could be describing the UK in the throes of Brexit, or the US, faced with the ascendancy of China…: Weil, Seventy Letters, 94.

‘Freedom, justice, art, thought and similar kinds of greatness’: Weil, Seventy Letters, 94.

‘French sanity … is becoming endangered. To say nothing of the rest of Europe’: Weil, Seventy Letters, 95.

‘Why … have I not the infinite number of existences I need?’: Weil, Letter to Posternak, quoted in Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 315.

‘so sculptural’: Weil, Letter to Posternak, quoted in Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 315 (translation modified).

Weil’s mother told her that killing to prevent a rape was the one exception she made to the commandment that one should not kill: Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 193.

‘upsurge’: Simone Weil, ‘La personne et le sacré—Collectivité, Personne, Impersonnel, Droit, Justice’, 1943, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, 23, originally published as ‘The Fallacy of Personal Rights’, Twentieth Century, May and June, 1959.

Antigone in particular she returned to at the end of her life…: Weil, ‘La personne et le sacré’, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, 23.

‘They contented themselves with the name of justice’: Weil, ‘La personne et le sacré’, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, 23.

‘consecrated’; ‘surely guarantee her a place in the first rank’; ‘stubbornly refused’; ‘ersatz of grandeur’; ‘sought to conquer nothing’: Albert Camus, Nouvelle revue française, June 1949, ‘Commentaires’; Weil, Oeuvres complètes, 1264.

‘the sole great thinker of her time’: Albert Camus to Selma Weil, 11 February 1951, ‘Vie et oeuvres’, Oeuvres complètes, 91.

‘terrible and pitiless in its audacity’; ‘rare heights of thought’: Camus quoted in opening ‘Presentation’ of Weil, L’enracinement, ed. Florence de Lussy and Michael Narcy (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), 55.

‘This does not distress me at all’: Weil, Letter to her parents, 18 July 1943, Seventy Letters, 196–97.

‘Hope … but in moderation’: Weil, Letter to her parents, 4 July 1943, Oeuvres complètes, 1237.

‘You have … bequeathed these ruined faces to me’: Sylvie Weil, At Home with André and Simone Weil, tr. Benjamin Ivry (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 114.

‘Simone … had already been transformed into a saint, and Selma into the saint’s mother’: Sylvie Weil, At Home with André and Simone Weil, 98-100.

There is no unifying thread through the writings of Simone Weil, and any attempt to create one risks compartmentalizing her ideas, creating false distinctions and separations: A short version of this chapter was originally published as a review of Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

As if, Weil wrote, someone were endlessly whispering in your ear, ‘You are nothing,’ ‘You do not count.’ ‘You are here to bend, to submit, to shut up’: Weil, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, 5.

She also lost her faith in any version of politics grounded in parties and trade unions: On Weil’s vexed relationship to her own Jewishness, see Thomas R. Nevin, Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self-Exiled Jew (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Florence de Lussy, ‘Excès et errements’ and ‘Un rejet du judaïsme’, Simone Weil, Que sais-je? (Paris: Editions poches, 2021). My thanks to Florence de Lussy for sharing this work with me. Gillian Rose, ‘Angry Angels: Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas’, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwells, 1993).

‘The Christian (by instinct if not by baptism) who, in 1943, died in a London hospital because she would not eat “more than her ration…”’: Anne Reynaud-Guérithault, ‘Introduction’, Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, tr. Hugh Price, 1933–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 25.

‘Only if you believe your place is on the lowest rung of the ladder … will you be led to regard others as your equal rather than giving preference to yourself’: Weil, Cahiers VI, 860.

‘is the situation of those who find themselves at the rear’: Weil, Letter to Georges Bernanos, 1938, Oeuvres complètes, 406, 15n8.

At eleven years old, living in Paris, she had joined a demonstration of workers demanding shorter hours and higher wages…: Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 20.

‘forthrightness’; ‘simpering graces’; ‘Your son, Simon’: Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 28. Sylvie Weil, At Home with André and Simone Weil, 62, 107.

‘André … never described his sister as a woman…’: Sylvie Weil, At Home with André and Simone Weil, 62.

‘I beg you … to protect her from exchanging smiles with admirers! I assure you that her personality is already starting to form’: Weil, Letter to Selma Weil, quoted in Sylvie Weil, At Home with André and Simone Weil, 109.

‘being wasted by sterile chagrin’: Weil, Seventy Letters, 156.

‘I envied her … for having a heart that could beat right across the world’: quoted in Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 51.

Struck low by repeated rejection, she felt that she risked dying of grief…: Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 533.

According to Simone Pétrement, none of those who were with her in London…: Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 526.

‘Everyone … commands wherever he has the power to do so’: Weil, ‘Luttons-nous pour la justice?’, 1957, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, 20.

‘The true God is God conceived as almighty, but as not commanding everywhere he could’; ‘the universe into existence by consenting not to command it’: Simone Weil, ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’, Waiting for God, 1942, tr. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper, 1973), 144, 158. Weil, ‘Formes de l’amour implicates de Dieu’, Oeuvres complètes, 723, 731.

‘as sovereign’: Weil, Cahiers VI, 907.

‘the rich are invincibly led to believe they are someone’: Weil, Cahiers VI, 901.

‘It is perfectly fine that you lack the privileges I possess’; ‘I claim for each and every one of you an equal share in the privileges I myself enjoy’: Weil, ‘La personne et le sacré,’ Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, 26.

‘The dark night of God’s absence is itself the soul’s contact with God’; ‘cords that attach us to the world to break’; ‘logical to the bitter end’: Susan Taubes, ‘The Absent God’, The Journal of Religion, Vol. 35, No. 1, January 1955.

‘both in my intellect and in the centre of my heart’: Weil, Seventy Letters, 178.

‘I am not the maiden who awaits her betrothed but the unwelcome third’; ‘I love you. I love you. I love you’: Weil, Cahiers III, 926.

‘profoundly tricky spiritual fact, viz that I cannot go towards God in love without bringing myself along’: Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New York: Vintage, 2005), 168-69.

Although in her notebooks she dismissed the inner life as ‘temptation’, she was an astute reader of his ideas: quoted by Robert Esposito in The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 81n.

‘thoughts we do not think, wishes we do not wish in our soul’; ‘wooden horses in which there are warriors leading an independent life’: Weil, Lectures in Philosophy, 93-94, 97.

‘Are there really in our souls … thoughts which escape us?’: Weil, Lectures in Philosophy, 94.

‘What we believe to be our ego (moi) … is as fugitive as a wave on the sea’: Weil, ‘L’amour de Dieu et le malheur’, 1942, Oeuvres complètes, 708.

‘If we are to perish … let us see to it that we do not perish without having existed’: Weil, ‘Prospects’, Oppression and Liberty, 22; ‘Perspectives’, Oeuvres complètes, 271.

‘dark ideas’; ‘brilliant self-assertiveness of her writerly project?’; ‘The answer is we can’t’: Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera, 171.

‘What we see so hideously before us are our own traits, only enlarged. This thought must not be allowed, far from it, to reduce by one jot our energy for the struggle’: Weil, ‘Cette guerre est une guerre de réligions’, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, 91.

‘It is often said that force is powerless to overcome thought … but for this to be true there must be thought’: Weil, ‘Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression’, Oppression and Liberty, 112, ‘Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale,’ Oeuvres complètes, 343.

Likewise, her strongest indictment of factory piece-work stemmed from the way it robbed the worker of any time or space for thought…: Weil, ‘Factory Work’, tr. Felix Giovanelli, Politics, December 1946, 372, ‘Expérience de la vie d’usine’, Oeuvres complètes, 201.

‘excludes all rules and predictions’: Weil, ‘Factory Work’, 375, ‘Expérience de la vie d’usine’, Oeuvres complètes, 208.

Anything less, she insisted, and life becomes uninhabitable, impossible to breathe: Weil, ‘Factory Work’, 375, ‘Expérience de la vie d’usine’, Oeuvres complètes, 208.

‘I do not recognize … any right on the part of the Church to limit the workings of the intellect…’: Weil, Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu, quoted in Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 523.

‘anathema sit’: Weil, ‘Autobiographie spirituelle: Letter to Father Perrin’, 15 May 1942, Oeuvres complètes, 779.

She refused to be baptized: This has been disputed. For a summary of the evidence and arguments both ways, see Eric Springsted, ‘Simone Weil and Baptism’ [http://www.laici.va/content/dam/laici/documenti/donna/culturasocieta/english/simone-weil-and-baptism.pdf].

‘by them alone’; ‘unique and perpetual obligation’; ‘all privations of the soul and of the body likely to destroy or mutilate the earthly life of any human being whoever they may be’: Weil, ‘Etude pour une Déclaration des Obligations Envers l’être humain’, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, 66-71; tr. Richard Rees, ‘Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations’, Two Moral Essays, ed. Robert Hathaway, Pendle Hill, 1981.

‘a form of justice, a way of restoring balance’: Sylvie Weil, At Home with André and Simone Weil, 150.

‘You are doing what my sister would have done … because she was honest, by and large’: Sylvie Weil, At Home with André and Simone Weil, 171.

‘entwined’: See Gillian Rose, ‘Angry Angels’, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwells, 1993).

‘As soon as any category of humans is placed outside the pale of those whose life has value, nothing is more natural than to kill them’: Weil, Introduction, ‘Une anarchiste en espagne’, 1936–1938, Oeuvres complètes, 390-91.

‘serious wound’: Weil, ‘Une anarchiste en espagne’, Oeuvres complètes, 390-91.

‘astonished I didn’t laugh’: Weil, Letter to Georges Bernanos, 1938, Oeuvres complètes, 407.

‘Not once have I seen anyone…’: Weil, Letter to Georges Bernanos, Oeuvres complètes, 408.

‘You are … the only person, to my knowledge…’: Weil, Letter to Georges Bernanos, Oeuvres complètes, 409.

‘The desire to humiliate the enemy…’: Weil, Letter to Georges Bernanos, Oeuvres complètes, 409.

‘exaltation of a kid caught up in a war’: Weil, Letter to Georges Bernanos, Oeuvres complètes, 409.

‘I must confess … that to my way of feeling, there would be less shame for France…’: quoted in Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 327.

‘carving out for herself her share of black or yellow human flesh’: Weil, The Need for Roots, 195; ‘L’enracinement’, Oeuvres complètes, 1149.

‘I cannot complain … that we are suffering the fate that we have inflicted on others’: Weil, ‘A propos de la question colonial dans ses rapports avec le destin du peuple français’, 1943, Oeuvres complètes, 431.

But she was right that a democracy made up of opposing parties had been powerless to prevent the formation of a party…: Weil, The Need for Roots, 28, ‘L’enracinement’, Oeuvres complètes, 1044.

‘is that, as a general rule, a people’s generosity rarely extends to making the effort to uncover the injustices committed in their name’: Weil, ‘Les Nouvelles données du problème colonial dans l’empire français’, 1938, Oeuvres complètes, 420.

‘In so far as we register the evil and ugliness within us…’: Weil, ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’, Waiting for God, 190 (translation modified), ‘Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu’, 1942, L’attente de Dieu, Oeuvres complètes, 749.

She also found herself wanting to hit other people on the head: Weil, Cahiers VI, 832, 836.

‘norm and aim of life’: Weil, ‘Autobiographie spirituelle’, Oeuvres complètes, 768.

‘with all one’s soul’; ‘mere fragment of living matter’: Weil, ‘L’amour de Dieu et le malheur’, Cahiers VI, 710, 857.

Unlike the Roman Empire whose spirit he inherited…: Weil, ‘Les origines de l’Hitlerisme’, 1940, Oeuvres complètes, 377.

‘The victory of those defending by means of arms a just cause, is not necessarily … a just victory’; ‘allowing that this is our destiny’; ‘accept for themselves the transformation they would have imposed on the vanquished’: Weil, ‘Les origines de l’Hitlerisme’, Oeuvres complètes, 377.

‘the purest triumph of love, the crowning grace of war…’: Weil, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, 29.

Weil calls for people from different stations in life, different nations…: Weil, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, 14, 35.

You are turning disgust into a willing and tender embrace: Weil, ‘L’amour de Dieu et le malheur’, Oeuvres complètes, 710.

‘It is as easy … to direct the mind willingly towards affliction as it is for a dog…’: Weil, ‘Lettre à Joë Bousquet’, 12 May 1942, Oeuvres complètes, 794.

‘upsurge’ … ‘transports’: Weil, ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’, 146-47; ‘Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu,’ Oeuvres complètes, 724.

In the final analysis, with the odds piled against it…: Weil, Cahiers VI, 857.

‘You do not have the same reasons as I have … to feel hatred and revulsion towards me’; ‘It is not by chance … that you have never been loved’: Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, ed. and tr. Richard Rees (New York: OUP, 1970), 43.

‘the colour of a dead leaf, like certain insects’: Weil, ‘Autobiographie spirituelle’, Oeuvres complètes, 770, 766, 775, 788.

‘malcontents’: Weil, quoted in Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, 236.

‘sole guide’: Weil, ‘Réflexions en vue d’un bilan’, 1939, Oeuvres complètes, 519.

Elsewhere, a dog barking beside the prostrate body of his master lying dead in the snow…: Weil, ‘La personne et le sacré’, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, 34.

Skin peeled from a burning object it has stuck to…: Weil, The Need for Roots, 157, ‘L’enracinement’, Oeuvres complètes, 1126.

‘a child without meat asking for salt’: Weil, The Need for Roots, 32, ‘L’enracinement’, Oeuvres complètes, 1047.

‘the child about to be born in the making of the layette’: Weil, The Need for Roots, 95, ‘L’enracinement’, Oeuvres complètes, 1085.

Nothing exists, Weil states, without its analogy in numbers: Weil, ‘Letter to André Weil’, Oeuvres complètes, 569.

God loves, not as I love, but as an emerald ‘is’ green: Weil, Cahiers III, 926.

‘are the only characters to speak the truth’; ‘Can’t you see the affinity, the essential analogy between these fools and me?’: Weil to her parents, 4 August 1943, Oeuvres complètes, 1236.

‘analogy and transference’: Weil, ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’, 184, ‘Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu’, Oeuvres complètes, 746.

it is a miracle, she insists, that thoughts are expressible given the myriad combinations which they make: Weil, ‘La personne et le sacré’, Écrits de Londres, 30-31.

‘the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world I have just described’: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981), 2.

In November 2022, it emerged that the richest nations, notably the US, UK, Canada and Australia…: Damian Carrington, ‘Revealed: US and UK fall billions short of “fair share” of climate funding’, The Guardian, 7 November 2022.

‘We were the ones whose blood, sweat and tears financed the industrial revolution…’: Damian Carrington, Patrick Greenfield, Fiona Harvey, Nina Lakhani, ‘Barbados PM launches blistering attack on rich nations at COP27 climate talks’, The Guardian, 7 November 2022.

‘According to the UN Secretary General, António Guterres…’: Damian Carrington, ‘“Climate carnage”: UN demands funding surge to save millions of lives’, The Guardian, 3 November 2022.

One unregulated digital ad in the November 2022 US mid-term elections used a horror movie soundtrack punctuated by gunfire…: Ed Pilkington, ‘Political messaging—Unregulated, highly targeted digital ads eclipse old media’, The Guardian, 4 November 2022.

‘Let there be no talk of “mental illness…”’: Jeff Sharlet quoted in Eyal Press, ‘Power, politics and feelings—whether it’s the courtroom or the waiting room, it’s impossible to take politics out of mental health’, The New York Times, Sunday Opinion, 16 October 2022.

‘all the social trappings of civilized society’; ‘shockingly easy’; ‘How many wars are morally unambiguous?’: Jeffrey Gettleman, ‘American Finds in Ukraine the War He Sought’, The New York Times, 10 October 2022.

‘an exogamous, extreme event’: Peter Walker, ‘Kwarteng: even more tax cuts to come and fewer regulations’, The Guardian, 26 September 2022.

Courage can sustain injustice…: MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 200.

‘lives again in the capitalists who, to maintain their privileges, acquiesce light-heartedly in the wars that may rob them of their sons’: Weil, ‘Reflections’, Oppression and Liberty, 64, ‘Réflexions’, Oeuvres complètes, 301.

He was warning against the risks of invoking the hidden depths of psychic life in the courtroom…: Sigmund Freud, ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide,’ 1928, Standard Edition, Vol. 21 (London: Hogarth, 1961), 189. The phrase is Constance Garnet’s in her translation from the German which has ‘a stick with two ends’.

‘were neither good nor bad’: Sigmund Freud, ‘The Disillusion of the War’, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 281.

‘The word traitor … should only be used about those of whom one feels certain…’: Weil to Jean Wahl, New York, 1942, Seventy Letters, 158-59.

‘who desired it emotionally and who welcomed it when it was done’: Freud, ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’, 189.

‘an uninterrupted battle directed mainly against herself’: Roberto Esposito, The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil?, tr. Vincenzo Binetti and Gareth Williams (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 69.

‘torn heart’; ‘extreme discord’: Esposito, The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil?, 5.

‘to kill as little as possible’: The Notebooks of Simone Weil, tr. Arthur Wills (New York: Routledge, 2004), quoted in Esposito, The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil?, 5.

‘obliterates anybody who feels its touch’: Weil, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, 20.

‘triumph of love’; ‘crowning grace’: Weil, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, 29.

It was, therefore, a central component of Aristotelian virtue to give death and human vulnerability their due: MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 128-29.

‘May I be alive when I die’: ‘D. W. W.: A Reflection’, in D. W. Winnicott, Psycho-Analytic Explorations, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, Madeleine Davis (London: Karnac Books, 1989), 4.

‘I do not know … why a curious division of labour prevails’: Judith N. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 16.

It is not often that a story of war, whether as fiction or non-fiction, is told through the eyes of women: Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin Random House, 2017) (first uncensored version). The book was unpublished for two years after completion because it went against the Russian history of the war.

‘Something unknown to her had entered her flesh like fire’: Alberto Moravia, Two Women, 1957, tr. Angus Davidson (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), 322.

‘I’m going to kill you’: Moravia, Two Women, 317.

‘You were simply waiting for a war, the whole lot of you’: Moravia, Two Women, 321.

‘the destruction of other people with the same feeling with which one enjoys the coming of spring and the flowers and the weather’: Moravia, Two Women, 266.

How can it be, she asks, that a ferocious Nazi, a man they encounter by chance in the mountains…: Moravia, Two Women, 200-204.

‘In short, it is almost better to have been born imperfect and gradually to become…’: Moravia, Two Women, 299.


Copyright © 2023 by Jacqueline Rose