We Are Not Barbapapas

Online publication, March 2020.

The word has been released, the one that will characterize for History the signifier under which the “war” efforts of the people and its guardians will be gathered: “resilience.” The term is not unpleasant; it even carries hope, but what matters here is the sequence of words in which it is caught, as well as the place from which they are uttered.

When Boris Cyrulnik uses this term, resilience—long before the fabulous career this concept now associated with his name would enjoy—it designates a capacity for repair through movement, recovery through action, a sort of healing where a material regains its initial shape after undergoing deformation, etc. It is understood as the ability to resume form despite the deforming event. All this seems fortunate, positive. Who would oppose that, who would not want us to pull through?

Resilience and to rescind (résilier) do not share the same Latin root (resilire) for nothing. Precisely, pulling through is not rescinding, or at least not necessarily, because some rebounds are also breaks—necessary ones. We also rebound by breaking a contract or a commitment, for example, or when we extract ourselves from a bad path. Consequently, using the word resilience to describe or interpret a psychological process that is inevitably individual is not easy on the one hand, and even less so to describe a collective movement where state forces are engaged in action on behalf of a population invited, and convinced, to observe its own immobility.

Just as it was completely useless, and foolish, to want not to be afraid after the 2015 attacks, driven by a fierce and vengeful narcissistic claim tinged with doubtful ideological and historical justifications (our usual mantras of the “Enlightenment,” “Human Rights,” etc.), it would be inconsistent to want everything to return to the way it was before, afterwards. Of course, in 2015, it was necessary to appreciate one’s own fear and that of others after the killings at Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, and elsewhere—all of them legitimate—in order to think them and speak them.

Similarly, it would be fortunate, in 2020, not to resume the same form as before the deformation suffered by the Covid-19 epidemic. How could what we are experiencing have no effect? Leave no useful trace? And not only to better protect the system and the discourse in which we are caught, and led by them, in our current situation.

Form and matter maintain complex and very interesting relationships. Visual artists know a thing or two about it, psychoanalysts too, and many others. Everyone can know a thing or two. After a scratch, our cells repair the tissues, and very quickly everything seems to have returned to the way it was before, sometimes without even a scar to bear witness to what happened. Do you believe that your cells, your body, your unconscious do not bear the mark, the marks of what occurred? For everything that is lived—and even more so for events inaugurating trauma, as will be the case with our present situation—leaves a trace, a writing, a mark to be read, thought, and spoken, which can then support the work of healing, of repair… which we may call by various names provided we examine its effects. For to let ourselves believe, through the hazardous use of signifiers that are too heavy, too large, and excessively burdened with a mission that is not theirs, that we have the strength to put everything back as it was—as if almost nothing had happened while promising a memory, souvenirs for future History being written—is an insult to the efforts and losses accepted.

We will not emerge unscathed, and all the better! We will be marked, perhaps even fearful for a long period. The impalpable matter of what we are living today invites us to abandon known, habitual, formatted forms, all ready to receive the matter to circumscribe it, form it, and crush its instructive asperities. The invisible virus puts our imagination to the test: no representation, no image (aside from medical imaging). Only the effects of the virus allow its existence to be seen by attesting to its progress through symptoms and deaths. It will remain invisible long after this delicate moment in human history. We, however, will have changed, provided we do not force the writing of the History of France and the World too quickly and too hard with ideological arabesques unfit to consider the dimension of the subject that characterizes us and binds us all. A little air and space in this dilated time. A little thought, urgently, because thinking is never something to be put off until tomorrow. Otherwise, after resilience and care, we will have to deal with empathy, trust, and self-esteem, etc.—so many signifying representatives of this neoliberal discourse specific to globalization, in defiance of the unconscious.

We will look toward another path, to see if other suns can welcome our lives carrying these pieces of thought, bits of drawings, notes taken on the fly, photographs, teleworking, digital schools—all this material, all these materials accumulated during lockdown, which we will make speak in the aftermath. Such will be our psychic work in the future, such will be the social bond of tomorrow (perhaps less degraded than that of yesterday).

We can rescind in our own way, still unknown, yet to be invented; rebound, certainly, but also separate ourselves from what no longer fits, which remains to be said. We can break the chain of words of the discourse that brought us toward this distressing and frightening experience. We can, groggy and stunned as we are, pay attention to the words we prefer to describe what we are living; it is never just a matter of vocabulary but always a confession of our invisible intentions, which are also unconscious. Resilience is not the covering over of what is already unleashed, what is going to start moving, to start speaking. Resilience will not be the invitation to deny the lived experience by framing it with that gimmick that acknowledges the truth while depriving it of it “at the same time.” Resilire will more surely than resilience be a crossing point for our effort to think, a hinge upon which will articulate the just separations that we must first elaborate, imagine, and then choose. For we are not Barbapapas (take that as you will). We are speaking beings, summoned to renounce in order to inscribe our future choices, necessarily in rupture with the true old world. A matter of the consumption of goods, but also of words and ideas.

Vincent Bourseul

Paris, March 26, 2020.