1A nightmare becomes interesting when you can give in to its twisted power. In almost every intense experience, headroom appears that can be exploited for your own objectives, no matter how insignificant. Finding yourself in the sense of powerlessness, exhaustion, loss of control, or defeat? It is certainly worth looking for your own style of resignation. Not even for someone to notice – you must abandon the illusion. But a loss, a personalized form of loss – if we are capable of losing – is a circumstance that can open an ocean of potentials. You just need to switch attention – not only that of others – and wait something out, let it go or take ownership, fight from a weak position, become embroiled, or take a pounding. You can also flee or get involved, enter a role, or, finally, embody yourself. Indeed, you can become almost anything, even just for a moment.

2An insect, for example, as in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis; a dog, as in Rachel Yoder’s novel; a cockroach or balding bird, as in Bruno Schulz; a modern-day caveman, as in George Saunders’s story; or a dolphin, as the actress Jennifer Coolidge declared. For playing a dolphin is a survival strategy. The range of strategies is infinite, but most are connected by the point at which the person begins to draw a strange – unexpected, subversive – power from inverting the previous perspective. “Hang in there, it’s only life,” or something similar. This kind of statement can be overwhelming if we hear it from others. But if it comes in the act of recognizing that we have nothing to lose, it can be a salvation. Not only from convention and pressure, but also from means of concentrated violence.

Starting Points

4Ben Jelloun’s story about the secret Tazmamart prison is based on facts, with the example of Salim, while extreme, revealing a certain fundamental mechanism. To survive is to renounce. A person can survive only by cutting him or herself off, forfeiting the past, abandoning that which is familiar and close – to that person and others. An act of survival interpreted as continuity, as success and victory, is usually a myth – one of those not necessarily innocent myths upon which so-called Western culture is founded. In fact, the stories of Arachne, Odysseus and Job also do not portray survival as the continuation of fate. Instead of return, there is a process of radical change, rejection, exclusion, or decay, and only from this does a new subjectivity emerge – one with little in common with the previous course of life. The victims of violence testify to this rupture in various ways.

6Impossible returns are attested to by the ghostly protagonist of a novel by Kossi Efoui, a victim-perpetrator-witness of a fratricidal war in a country reminiscent of Rwanda:

• 4 Kossi Efoui, Witajcie, powracające widma [Solo d’un revenant], trans. Wawrzyniec Brzozowski (Kraków (...)

He returned home, but didn’t recognize his neighborhood where it should have been: didn’t recognize his house where his house should have stood, didn’t know anyone where his family should have been; so he hurried to his friends, but didn’t recognize either their houses or their fields, nor their faithful animals. And neither did anyone recognize him. Everyone looked at him as if he were an unknown vagrant.4

Transitions

8The question of what survival is or can be usually sounds inappropriate. It is either too abstract – when we ask about survival “in general” – or excessively intimate when posed to individuals. It makes sense when it concerns something that is being or has already been done, referring to something embodied and concrete. The answer, meanwhile, either dodges the question or touches the nub of the issue: everything that had to be done or neglected to overcome adversity. Usually contrary to the rules in place, often at the cost of others, frequently without dignity. The successful one tends to use all possible means to secure survival, enduring longer or more successfully than others or the thing that made the struggle necessary. A serious attempt to answer this question entails disclosure of our own tactics for survival to the full extent of this experience: from powerlessness, via dependence, to attempts to maneuver these states. There are therefore as many responses as strategies and forms of survival.

9Many times, they are connected by fractured transitions between resignation, activation, withdrawal, and engagement. All those moments when people feel that they cannot go on, yet this is just a warm-up to the suffering. When we delude ourselves that we have strength, and do it so effectively that we ultimately gain it. When someone unexpectedly offers a helping hand, although it seems that we lost our grasp reflex long ago. When we let go and refuse to survive, but do so by our own rules. Or when we are already lost, but defeat proves to be a liberation. After all, it is not always identical biological reflexes – the atavism of the struggle for survival – and attempts to more consciously guide our fate, the seeds of discord and resistance, that work together in us. The process of survival, despite all the contextual differences, always resembles a sine wave, and until the very end it is uncertain when and at which point of the line the cut will be made. A new system of connections forms dynamically around the individual – forces are at work that make the existing endurance difficult, those that benefit it, and those that seem neutral, but can be used for one’s own purposes. The contradictory forces are not mutually exclusive, but operate as a resonance determining the context of the event. The individual need not be aware of them to feel the influence that activates streams of passivity and activity and leads to moments of exhaustion and lifts in energy. A person trying to survive is not so much in the whirlpool of events as embodies the mechanism of the whirlpool, drawing into their field everything that can increase their causative mass.

10In this sense, survival is the struggle of the individual with outside forces and oneself as the object of survival. A split, or at least mediation, between the “I” struggling for agency and the “I” who gives up, weakens, and withers, seems unavoidable. The act proceeds in trembling – of the body, affects, status – and oscillation between the active and the passive. Except that people trying to survive are not solely active or passive; this division is impossible to sustain. What they are is counter-passive, balancing between agitation to act and withdrawal, and actively responding to stimuli that arrive. I understand counter-passivity as the ability to counteract one’s own passivity, manage one’s discord, mobilize reserves, and make a series of turns, shifting smoothly from defense, via evasion, to fighting, escaping, and dependence. Counter-passivity is based on known scenarios of behavior, while also marking the potential horizon of salvation through acts of improvisation. Arguments of past and future are only potential references – some among many tools of survival. What counts above all is the here and now, spontaneous reaction to a changing context, mindfulness of one’s own feelings and interpretations, and sensing what is happening. To survive means to have good intuition. And this is always past-future, drawing from the body’s experience and with designs on further materializations.

11However, the sense of time is complicated. One cannot survive by living only in the past. Indeed, cutting oneself off from habits, people, places, things, and memories can be a condition of salvation. It would therefore seem more obvious to keep up the strength by thinking about what will come next when the adversities have been overcome. But the strangeness of this experience is often complex: the past is a closed chapter, with no return, and the future seems so uncertain that it is unthinkable. What is happening now is the only dimension available, but it can be equally unbearable: the person is immersed in a present he or she does not want and tries to wait out. The present, therefore, is embodied, but not necessarily experienced – there is no access to it. This means that those affected by this process, by embodying the present are thrown off the experience of intimacy. They are corporeally exposed to the actions of destructive factors, but have no chance either of regeneration or of feeling themselves. The freedom of the body, urges, customs, the right to manage their own time and space are subordinated to the dictate of external forces. The paradox of the act of survival is therefore that the illusion of steering one’s own course is dispelled, and yet individuals are left to their own devices, able to depend solely on themselves or on a changing, improvised community of survival.

• 11 Kornel Filipowicz, “Biała ręka” [White hand], in Filipowicz, Biały ptak i inne opowiadania (Kraków: (...)

Days passed, and every morning at the same time we marched through the town that smelled of caramel candies and synthetic fuel. The town’s residents paid no attention to us, didn’t turn their heads, didn’t look at us, although the clacking of clogs could be heard from far away in the quiet morning air. They were blind and deaf.11

17The answer to the question of what it means to “survive” is becoming increasingly complicated. For some, it simply means to live through, to maintain vital functions and biological continuity. There is much to suggest, however, that survival can differ from subsistence. The biographies of Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Jean Améry, Jerzy Kosiński and Romain Gary, for all the differences of fate separating them, make it clear that survival of the concentrated violence of war need not go hand in hand with subsistence, enduring its far-reaching consequences. Bruno Bettelheim writes of survival without subsistence as a phenomenon of “retaining a life that has lost all meaning.” Such people not only lose their subjective continuity and their self-image, but above all, by living through something they should not be forced to experience, they pass the “point of no return.” Adjudicating on such individuals, Giorgio Agamben says that there was nothing human about their maximum suffering. Forced to endure more than they should have had to, they are unable to rejoin social life. When they testify – if they are capable of doing so – they represent not only their own loss, but also – and maybe above all – those who have lost their lives. It is they whom Agamben calls “superstes” – witnesses who survived everything until the end, who were and are mired in it, “charred” by the event, and are forever branded, unable to be neutral. They are at once witnesses and victims. They have often admitted that, though they survived in an objective – biological and legal – sense, nothing protected them from losing themselves. From the maelstrom of the experience of violence, they emerged as different entities. Yet their voices and gestures were dispersed in the welter of more optimistic, unambiguous declarations. They lost out in competition both with individual testimonies of salvation “against all odds” and with the community, political strategies of planned separation from the difficult past – separation meaning a new beginning, a project of power and agency, (re)building social relations – incidentally, all differences notwithstanding, strategies employed after the war in both Israel and Poland.

Human Lizards

18I am writing about the spectrum of survival – about those who lose themselves or are lost on the way – but there are also those who manage, or are at least able to feign, to themselves and others, the fortuitousness, or even success of their efforts. What is it to survive “against all odds”? Survival attempts are often described as aiming for a goal, with clear motivations – the desire for revenge, dissension, hope, the need for reckoning, to punish the guilty, testify to harm, or preserve biological and cultural continuity. As if the fortuity of the act depended on a rational plan, determination, and effective implementation. But might these motivations not be created by survivors ex post as a secondary justification for the strange, difficult process they underwent? And above all, are they not provoked or enforced by the community, which makes stories of determination a prerequisite for survivors to return to social life? It is difficult to escape the impression in such cases that the category of survival is closely interwoven with the concepts of emancipation and social advancement. The fortune of survival is usually viewed through a prism of continuation, the scale of success in the “new life.” In the perspective of the narrative memory and trauma, the physical survival of the experience is only a starting point for potential continuations of survival as endurance. It therefore spans between the past – the experience as a precondition – and the future based on this condition.

19I call this form the lizard model, survival “against all odds,” since the description of it usually focuses on the act of saving some essence of identity, status, or image, and all the losses borne by the individual are presented as an unavoidable cost, something that had to be cut off or abandoned as it would have rendered salvation impossible. This idea of survival is reminiscent of the mechanism employed by lizards, which cast off their tail when endangered to distract their opponent. Although a tail can grow back – in a smaller or deformed state – autotomy means that lizards lose their previous position in the hierarchy.

20Wisława Szymborska wrote about the autotomic defensive reaction of the sea cucumber:

• 15 Wisława Szymborska, “Autotomy,” trans. Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak, in Szymborska, Map: (...)

When in danger the sea-cucumber divides itself in two:
one self it surrenders for devouring by the world,
with the second it makes good its escape.
It splits violently into perdition and salvation,
into fine and reward, into what was and what will be.
In the middle of its body there opens up a chasm
with two shores that are immediately alien.
On one shore death, on the other life.
Here despair, there hope.
[…] To die as much as necessary, without going too far.
To grow back as much as needed, from the remnant that survives.15

21This model, according to which it is possible to salvage the essence of individuality, in the European context has become the most obvious form of representation of survivors. It certainly became entrenched in Western societies after the First World War. Psychologically and physically ravaged soldiers returning to their local communities made a major impact on the social imaginary. They returned alive, albeit radically changed; they experienced loss, and yet survived. Their social status changed, but still they were part of the community and could aspire to rebuild themselves and their position by new rules – performatively as veterans, for example.

22The exterminatory nature and scale of mass violence of the Second World War should potentially have changed the way of defining what survival is and in which terms the status of survivors is described. Yet this did not happen – at the level of symbolic and political representation, the loss of those who survived was again gradually turned into a model of survival “against all odds,” a lizard model. When, after the Adolf Eichmann trial, a new era began – that of testimony – and thus only then did a delayed, postwar convention of testimony emerge, at the same time the form of expression on survival stabilized. The institutions gathering testimonies from Jewish survivors in Israel, the United States, and Western Europe developed templates of asking and telling about a survival, struggle, resistance or escape. As a result, certain standards of possible reactions to these testimonies were also accepted. Survivors were expected to provide a narrative of the heroism, agency, activation, and action that enabled them to get away from the epicenter of violence. The human lizards therefore spoke of why it was they who had survived, but also about what they had lost: families, friends, homes, their health, dreams, plans. But the more and more often they spoke, the more they moved from a position of victims – which they also were, after all – to one of witnesses – at least from the perspective of outside observers of the testimony. The community expected testimonies to have drama and intensity, colorful illustrations of the triumph of the strength of the spirit over the weakness of the body (and vice versa), cunning, persistence, solidarity. It also expected above all a happy ending and “tried and tested” stories of a successful survival strategy, tips forming a more universal guide or handbook on how to escape oppression.

23In this process, the figure of the witness has become synonymous with that of the survivor, who, having survived, should testify. The category of survival is increasingly broad, no longer concerning only traumatizing events. Survival has become an experiential pass to adopt a position, speak out, and testify as an attempt to change status. Those testifying with the power of their authority and the authenticity of their experience and image built a cultural figure of survival, reinforcing the myth of biographical continuity as well as the model of the human lizard. They testified to their losses as well as their painful and difficult, yet still possible continuation, while between the words there was an impossible gap to fill, a barren mental field.

25Indeed, it is worth considering survival as a sum of the interruptions that dispel the illusion of linearity of the experience, knocking the individual from the previous framework violently enough to create a different quality of being. And this is not about the notion of “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” beloved of capitalist thinking, training the individual in intense experiences to bring about development and progress. Nor is it about complete disintegration, a transformation so far-reaching that it makes self-recognition impossible. For example, the kind that Catherine Malabou is referring to when proposing the idea of destructive plasticity to describe people harmed in sudden accidents, affected by dementia, or experiencing major cognitive disorders.

Who Stays in the Tail?

27I mean the gray area between survival and subsistence. An experience that is an irreversible change, a radical break with the previous order, but retaining awareness of the change and its scale. Survival with no happy ending, deprived of hope, not even desired by those who have made the effort, nor wanted by outsiders. One that is too unstable to be able to breathe a sigh of relief, or is only temporary, when there is no chance of a return to the community, or even of feigning optimism. So this time it is not about survival against all odds, but about those and that which was cut off, the remnants, the scraps of survival. One could say that what has been lost, removed, or rejected like the lizard’s tail no longer matters or even exists. But I want to ask about these tails and offcuts, their status and further date.

29Who and what is in fact meant here? Indeterminate figures that do something and have a certain function, yet remain abstract at the descriptive level – it is hard for the reader to imagine their materializations. Surpluses of meanings can be sensed in what is unsaid – we do not necessarily understand them, but we suspend this moment of uncertainty in reading, adding coherence to it, focusing on the substance and not the extraneous. Yet something remains on the edges of perception, lingers, and sometimes returns in completely different circumstances. Contrary to appearances, the mechanism of framing our own interpretation has much in common with selection of what is needed for survival, with casting off the tails of endurance. Both our own and the shared one that divided communities – usually in a violent, painful way. Survival is usually at the cost of someone or something, even a part of ourselves.

• 24 Preciado, An Apartment, 27.

The entire universe cut in half and solely in half. Everything is heads or tails in this system of knowledge. We are human or animal. Man or woman. Living or dead. We are the colonizer or the colonized. Living organism or machine. We have been divided by the norm. Cut in half and forced to remain on one side or the other of the rift. What we call “subjectivity” is only the scar that, over the multiplicity of all that we could have been, covers the wound of this fracture. It is over this scar that property, family, and inheritance were founded […] names are written and sexual identities asserted.24