Let’s start again, very simply.
Let’s start again with the words ‘save life’.
I’ve been trying to say something just this simple. I’ve been trying to find a way to start again. I’ve been trying to start again and gather together notes and traces of something like a book I have been writing since ~2017 about saving life and the end of the world, the way these two ideas go together: no recognition of the end of the world in a real material sense without recognizing the possibility of saving life. One can’t have one without the other.
We say: let’s. We say: start. We say: again. We say: simply.
That’s before we even get to ‘life’. To the word, ‘life’.
We say ‘life’ as if we know what that is.
We say, let’s save life.
Or more gnomically, we say: save life.
As if making or under a command, or making or under a spell.
An imperative mode: save life. A grammatical command economy of sorts.
Is that simple? Is that simple enough?
The dream is that the saying of it is simple—and that if we say just those words, in just that order, then we are on the right side, that we have nothing else to do. We are on the side of life, on the side of the universe.
Is that enough?
*
Recently, Anne Carson wrote about handwriting, about being old, and about being in the place of Hitler, and she also wrote,
Let’s start with life, your life.
Carson writes this just after she has spoken of the problem of drawing a line that is not stupid (an idea taken from Roland Barthes) and how this relates to humans and the problem of human life:
How to draw a line that is not stupid: isn’t this one of our big problems as humans? Whether I am me or whether I am Hitler or whether I am Wilhelm von Humboldt, it is a problem of human life.
It is life, a problem of life—all a problem of human life. Whatever we say, it comes back to that, or down to that, and one can admire the simplicity of the idea. And one of the problems of human life, let’s say, is drawing a line, a line that isn’t stupid. A line or two, some lines about life that are not stupid. Human life is drawing a line that isn’t stupid, and this is why Carson then says, right after, as quick as anything, ‘let’s start with life’. Perhaps for instance we have to draw a line because it’s getting late now. All we have to do is draw a line that isn’t stupid, and it really doesn’t matter who I am, as long as the line be drawn. I might be Hitler, say, or I might be Susan Sontag who dreams of being chased by Hitler in Katie Roiphe’s book The Violet Hour. But whoever I am, it’s a matter of life, of human life, of starting again, and of drawing a line, here.
*
Recognizing the end of the world is recognizing the words ‘save life’.
There is nothing save saving life, there is nothing save saving life at the end of the world.
But it seems impossible to gather all that together.
Haven’t you noticed how that’s the case? Even things which are tightly bound fall to the ground. And not just in memory. They fall apart no sooner than . . . no sooner than the moment.
Even just the attempt to say two words on the saving of life, even just the attempt to say two words, ‘save life’, doesn’t seem to gather itself together.
Have I or anyone else for that matter gathered anything or made anything really matter there where we might be able to say ‘save life’?
In that place, of ‘save life’. Of saving life. And what is that place, do we even know that, to start with?
*
Let’s start, we say, but before we know it, some proclivity, some swerve, enters in. Let’s start, we say, but then the elder Carson, the cancer-threatened elder, interrupts and says ‘Hitler’. I am Hitler, I am in the place of Hitler, I am being chased by Hitler—someone says. We want the line (the border, the frontier, and so on) to be good, to be unique, but it turns out it has been crossed. The line has already gone. Or rather, I’m on the line, I’m here, but I can’t hear you.
We want to live within limits, but that dream has gone.
Really, though? That’s not for sure.
Let’s start again, in the case at hand.
Let’s start again with the saving of life.
*
Or rather, to get there, to get to those two important words (‘save life’), let’s start again with the climate children. The ‘children’s crusade’ of 2019. The children (not the only ones) who tried to say: ‘save life’. The ones who left school just to say that. As if they lived according to those words. The simple words ‘save life’. Living with a street tattoo saying ‘save life’, that and that alone. The simplest words alive.
We are referring to the children’s crusade which Franco Berardi speaks of in his ‘Game Over’ lecture of the same year, 2019. Also let’s recall the point Slavoj Žižek made at the time, that we should not bypass the crusade; we should always be wary of bypassing. We should not bypass Greta, and treat her argument as too simple. ‘Save life’: it seems too simple, yes, but is it? Or maybe it really is simple. It’s so simple, you can’t keep it in mind. You already crossed the line?
Let’s pretend we can say something like: we should not bypass the simplicity of the message of the children of 2019, and moreover we should be careful not to overlook the ‘whataboutism’ of Greta and friends, which was no doubt far from naive, and can always chase us into the present, any present to come.
The whataboutism, in its simplest form, is saying: what about life? What about saving life?
Isn’t that pure whataboutism?
We can add that what is difficult about this whataboutism is, simply, remembering it—taking it seriously.
Let’s start again, let’s keep it simple. But then look what happens! (One is talking about Hitler again, and doing so with an elder, a translator, and not just with a thug.)
Berardi, for one, asks an apparently simple question:
This movement is a rebellion against extinction. (Can you rebel against extinction?)
The apparent simplicity of this question and proposition is, in turn, deceptive—the first problem with saving life is whether such an idea really is simple at all.
Save life: can you even see these words as you read them?
Let’s say more. (Can we say more?)
Let’s see if we can say more (even if we just went blind without seeing it). (Blindness without blindness: I am blind but I don’t even see it. I don’t see the darkness that usually indicates the lack of something there to be seen.)
But perhaps we are thinking this:
Everything could and would be decided if there were a simple answer to this question—of rebellion with regard to extinction or resistance to extinction. The question of saving life. Of saying: save life.
Everything would be okay if we could just . . . save life.
If we knew what life was, what its value is or was, what it meant, and so on, we might just be able to save life—we would simply save life.
We could say these words, a magically self- and other-imposed hyper-moral commandment: save life.
A self-referring injunction that would be there to be read by the whole world:
SAVE LIFE.
*
*
Berardi mentions Zain—the Lebanese boy from the movie Capernaum (2018) who takes legal action against his parents because he was born—and then pivots from the climate march to the idea of a kind of wider protest against life itself, a life contemptible precisely because it seems capable of its own violent removal (life just doesn’t want to listen to save life):
Zain is the perfect symbol of the children’s crusade that is mounting everywhere: an immense crowd of innocent victims who want to know why they have been compelled to abandon the blank immortality of eternal Nothingness, why they have been summoned, assembled in this awkward city of violence, in the sad murkiness of precarity and anguish. Why did you force me out of my space of dispassionate nonbeing into the fog and fury of exhaustion?
There is a link here between Zain, as introduced by Berardi, and the case of Nicolas Perruche—which resulted in the Perruche judgment of 2000 and created a right not to be born in French law—as read by Derrida in the second volume of The Death Penalty seminars. Derrida speaks in the 6 December 2000 session of the seminar of
the right not to be born that has recently come under discussion in France [in November 2000], regarding Nicolas, the young man so severely handicapped whose parents have sued the medical establishment for its diagnostic failure and for not having informed them or advised them in due time of the possibility or necessity of preventing the impending birth.
It is this right not to be born that Berardi, in effect, is connecting through the film Capernaum to the climate children of 2019, as if the right to resist extinction is also, paradoxically, the right not to be born. But the point here seems to be not to have never existed, but the strength of the resistance occurring on the adjacent psychic terrain of what was called for a while ‘extinction rebellion’.
So offensive is the state of this violent world (Berardi’s ‘awkward city of violence’) into which children now come, that the impulse to rebel against extinction may also—or even only—find its expression in a legal protest against life itself.
The resisting subject—the subject who resists, however impossibly, extinction, and wants to save life—is here marked out as an exceptionally, or uniquely legal subject.
(The only legality is this psychic index: save life.)
Derrida goes on:
Regardless of the side one took in a trial that has now been decided by a judgment indemnifying life itself, the discussion involved the being alive of someone whose parents thought that it would have been better for him not to live; it involved not the unconditional right to life but a potential right not to be born. Not the right to die or to make die but the right not to be born. Who or what can be the subject of this right?
It is precisely this question of the subject, in the context of a right not to be born as distinguished from a right to die (euthanasia, assisted death and so on), that leads Derrida to some of the most challenging and precious formulations in these seminars delivered around the time of the Perruche judgement. Insofar as the right not to be born may at least be codified and made part of national law for a time (note that the judgment was eventually overturned by The National Assembly), then Derrida seems warranted to notice here a certain aporia around the legal question of who the subject is to whom—or to which—this new law applies.
How can the one outside life, the one not yet born, the one who may therefore never be born, who will never have been born, be a legal subject?
How can the one not there—the one never to be there—be a subject? Who is the right not to be born subject to, subjected to or around, and the impulse to resist extinction?
Whom is is to whom we say ‘save life’, who gets to say ‘save life’, simply, nobly, despite and because of all ridicule, there where it is impossible, save which psychic subject, save whom?
If things are not already complex here, or at least a great deal simpler than simplicity itself, then what does that mean?
Is the question of saving life a matter of the inability to stay simple? Isn’t the subject itself too complex to bio-genetically stave itself off, away, from?
What does that indicate?
Save life, whom? Save life, save for who?