Inspire yourself, breath The political evolutions of the lockdown
What is happening to us? The great, nearly eternal question that defines the act of thinking has perhaps never been as sensitive as it is today, ever since the beginning of the lockdown. We all have the confused feeling of living through a historic shift, and at the same time experiencing an unknown mood.
It is hard to pin precise, definitive words on this moment, to give meaning to this unsettlingly strange time. As François Cusset writes, it is best to admit that we are not in any way forced to “choose between black night and midday sun. In short, anyone who thinks too quickly misses the secret of the lockdown”. In the writer and essayist’s view, it is “impossible to say exactly what one felt in April 2020, nor to draw from it a sudden closeness with the human brothers and sisters from whom everything had distanced us”; “but at least one felt something, everyone did, together, even though one no longer felt much”. “The interruption of the world made us afraid, and did us good, inseparably”.
Without trying to penetrate the secret of the lockdown, one can still try to clarify it, approach it, by precisely putting this experience into words, not so much to recount it like those lockdown dairies that are often poorly received for being disconnected from collective suffering, but rather to convey what Romain Huët calls “an experience of the messy world”.
What is obvious is that we have all been thrown into a situation of radical uncertainty, a state of constant anxiety. To borrow the words of Marielle Marcé, this crisis is ushering in a new “pace of life”. The health crisis is deeply altering our relationship with the world, with ourselves, with others. It is plunging everyone into a stressful state. Above all, it is objectivising our unequal conditions in all areas of life.
This crisis can also present an unusual opportunity: enabling us to reflect on what we care about and no longer care about, collectively and individually. “It is also at the heart of that negativity, of the disaster, that the urgent need to transform the present is impatiently taking shape”, writes Romain Huët. “And what if, stuck at home, immobile, crabby and panicked, we were no less alive, ultimately”, Cusset wonders.
Placed at the heart of this tension between fear and good, between defeat and revitalisation, this conversation aims to help us understand what is happening to us, for want of imagining what awaits us.
With Marielle Macé, essayist, author of Nos cabanes (Verdier)
François Cusset, writer and essayist, author of Génie du confinement (Liens qui libèrent)
Romain Huët, sociologist, author of De si violentes fatigues: les devenirs politiques de l’épuisement quotidien (Puf)
