“This is not a review!”

In the early days of the global pandemic, during the period of the lockdown in the United States, I decided to undertake a rigorous existential examination of the states associated with extreme experiences of solitude, insomnia, fear of madness, and death. I imagined that in the event I succumbed to the virus that my “desert island journal,” as I began to refer to my genre, would have some consoling value for the other castaways who had been locked away on their own desert islands. At the end of December 2020, just when the reports of a second wave of the virus began to surge through Europe and make its way across the Atlantic, I decided to stuff my journal into a bottle and throw it into the inland sea that had grown between myself and all the other desert islands. In the post today, like one of those bottles that just happened to wash up on the beach in the morning tide, I received in return two slim volumes by Zsuzsa Baross that were contemporaneous with my desert island journal.

The author herself describes the first volume, On Contemporaneity, After Agamben: The Concept and its Times (2020) as a series of “discrete and discontinuous writings, essays, fragments, incomplete reflections, often in different ‘styles,’ composed for different occasions” (2020, ix). The second volume, Living On | To Survive: Epidemic Writings (2022) is more literally composed of a series of dated reflections written sometime between April 2020 and Spring 2021. (According to the author’s own internal chronology, she reports she composed “’On the absence of the World’ in the midst in the pandemic . . .” [2022, vii]). The question of “times” should be obvious to anyone who lived through the pandemic, that is, whose life was in some way “contemporaneous” with its multiple durations, which too many now say to be all in the past. But it is also a question for those of us who experienced the pandemic, that is, those who have crossed over, but now find themselves “living on” after it—if, indeed, one can make either of these statements today! The questions would be too numerous: “how?” “In what sense?” “In what manner?” that is, “in what world?” did we survive? I say this because, from my own experience, I witnessed many who actually never experienced the pandemic, since they had already lived according to its standards; others have simply chosen to “live on,” and in order to survive, have elected simply to forget the “times” that were contemporaneous with what we call the pandemic today, and who have chosen to repress the entire duration without having fully experienced it (in its “fullness,” so to speak). For example, I recently heard from an editor—I won’t say who or for which publisher!—that “the editorial board has decided not to publish any future titles on the subject of the pandemic.” If this represents something symptomatic, like a collective decision of repression, then it would be a miracle that these two volumes have survived the catastrophe!

The central issue of both volumes is the contemporaneity between two completely heterogenous orders of temporality, that is, between chronos and kairos, or between “the time that remains” and the “world after.” There is also a third temporality that stands for something like the fulfillment of time (in the Greek, pleroma). As Baross explains in the preface to On Contemporaneity, the proper name of “Agamben” serves as an index to this problem and its multiple temporalities: before the time of the pandemic, en medias res, but also in relation to what that author evokes as “a futureless future—to come, or perhaps, already interminably, on course” (i.e., en route, on its way, perhaps even heading toward us). Secondly, the name serves to divide time into two unequal epochs: there is the time that is commensurate with Agamben’s own concept of contemporaneity from his earlier interpretation of the concept of “biopolitics” in the pages Homo Sacer (1994), and which in many ways can be said to have inaugurated the larger epochal sense of temporality that was understood to apply to the so-called “age of biopolitics,” a time that encompasses both the Greeks and the moderns, or the polis and the camp. In a third, more essential sense, the concept of contemporaneity refers to Derrida whose deconstructive gestus influences the author’s own attempt to drag (tragen) this epochal concept of time forward and to expose it to its own outside, that is, toward another sense of temporality occasioned by “the world after” the pandemic, a sense of survival that neither Agamben, nor Derrida, nor indeed anyone who was contemporaneous with both these philosophers—including ourselves in the past!—could have had any possible foreknowledge. This is the sense of “an experience without experience,” between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, according to Benjamin’s terms that the author also evokes, that is, between actively engaging a time in order to gain something essential from it and mere “lived experience.”

In addition to the proper names of “Agamben” and “Derrida,” the other major index of this caesura between epochs, or between the sense of the world and the sense of the absence of the world, is the famous line from Paul Celan’s poem from Atemwende (1967), “Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen” (The world is gone, I must carry you). As the reader will likely already be familiar, this line—often cited alone, without the context of the poem itself or other poems and fragments from the volume—becomes a refrain that Derrida will often return to in his last writings and seminars, especially in Béliers (2003) and in the second seminar on La bête et le souverain (2002–2003). According to the same gesture recounted above, this is the line whose inexplicable sense the author attempts to translate or transport into the future of “the world after.” Therefore, she understands this act of translating across two heterogenous times as her singular task and personal burden, and thus confesses this is the second volume where she returns again to the same poetic statement, saying:

—the ‘I’ (ich) and the ‘You’ (dich) burdens me / us with the task, imposing on me / us the impossible obligation and difficult duty to carry out (tragen). It is I / we who must transport the figure, the voice, the missive, the corpus ‘Derrida’ to ‘here and now,’ making it our contemporaneity in /of this world that itself is lacking full presence, is departing, collapsing, destituting itself. (2020, 33)

Thus, one wonders if the major task undertaken in both volumes represents a kind of huge salvage operation in which the author dives into the wreckage of the world that is gone to drag (tragen) up the sense of a discrete number of names, dates, places, objects, songs, texts, etc., etc. In the ending of the fragment “Of the Mother Tongue—With /After Hélène Cixous,” toward the end of On Contemporaneity, there is a long meditation on the phrase “All is lost” that echoes the lament of a castaway on the island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, variations of which are also vocalized in innumerable voices and in other languages, including the voice of “HC” who serves as the author’s own Vergil. At the same time, there is also the promise of the “mother tongue” that survives destruction; thus “it is not Ève but the tongue that speaks, leading her back to the world, to a here and now: her death bed. To a death that did not pass, to the dying yet to be done with” (2020, 133). It is in this line that we might understand what or who first gave the author this impossible mission, this incredible burden of a somewhat hopeless salvage operation. The answer is already in the word “sur-vivre,” which is the title of the second volume, Living On | To Survive. Of course, the word is a citation of Derrida’s “untimely essay” written from the previous world, but it is also the voice that first commanded the author herself to take up this task, that is, to write (in order) to survive. After all, the desire that lies at the origin of the task of writing can come from no external authority, no force or violence (Walten), except the force of death itself, which remains silent and untranslatable in any mother tongue.

I must confess, as a mere re-viewer, I cannot possibly do justice to the incredible intricacy of all the proper names, dates, citations, and literary allusions that comprise the author’s active engagement with the present that is recounted in these two volumes. Moreover, after reading them I immediately felt that it would be inappropriate, if not grotesque, to appear as an expert or critical reader. What would I do? Quibble with the author’s interpretation of a line from Celan, a passage from Derrida? Complain about the author’s preciosity in confessing intimate correspondences and personal conversations with Derrida or “J.L.N”? Offer my own counter-interpretation of the concept of “biopolitics” in Agamben? I have given this elsewhere, and in any case, this would not be the place for its rehearsal. Thus, in many ways, I came to the same conclusion that the author makes quoting from Benjamin on the experience of translation: “An impossible task, an Aufgabe to give up rather than to carry out” (Benjamin, quoted in 2022, 86). Therefore, instead of offering a “review,” I have simply decided to scan these books and report back from the distance of my own lived experience, which is a bit like viewing a landscape from the window of a plane at 30,000 feet. If the present reader is not satisfied with my decision, then you should read the books for yourself. Indeed, there is no other choice, and I have often thought that the genre of review essay should be abolished for most books in the genre of literature and philosophy anyway. In any case, this is not a review! (a statement that should be read according to the same paradoxical logic as Magritte’s painting).

Nevertheless, I will report the following: from the constellation or patchwork of discrete number of names, dates, places, objects, etc., I was at least able to make out two distinctive themes that the author often returns to in both volumes, each indicating a separate excursion into the world that is gone to the “here and now.” For example, in the conclusion to the chapter “Geophilosophy” in On Contemporaneity, I found a list of some of the items that the author manages to rescue from the past in her salvage mission, but also from the “futureless future” of the “age of the Anthropocene.” This list would preserve what would indeed be lost forever in a pure inorganic world to come, in a time that is “with-out, wholly outside,” without any possible memory, in a world that would be “un-survivable,” since even death could not survive there:

music, mathematics, Spinoza, Pontormo, Fra Angelico, Vermeer’s View of Delft, sequoia trees, the cathedral of Notre Dame, Bacon’s Van Gogh variations; without Heidegger, Celan, Celan’s Heidegger, Hölderlin, without breath, Atemwende, without Touch, Le Toucher de Jean Luc Nancy, without Le Jardin de Luxembourg, without Godard’s cinema, the jet liner tracing the sky at dusk over the river Seine, flocks of birds flying, mysteriously in perfectly synchronized formation over the skyline of the Vatican. (2020, 116)

This list raises again the gesture of translation, of what carrying across in the genre of a travel diary has to do with keeping memory, or remembrance, perhaps in the Heideggerian sense of Andenken, which is intimately connected to the poetry of both Hölderlin and Celan, both of whom frequently appear as the author’s travel companions. (Of course, one could also be reminded of the figure of Vergil who was Dante’s companion and guide.) Still, there are other fellow travelers who appear more like shades since they exist between the world that is gone and the “world after”—Bataille, Blanchot, Cixous, Deleuze, Kurtág, Nancy. The author refers to them as “My Contemporaries,” but we might also identify them as what Deleuze called “Mediators.” They belong to the performative gestus of “becoming contemporary,” given that the state of being contemporary is not a “social fact,” but according to the author’s definition of her own gesture. The act of writing is a nexus whose force belongs to a “different logic of time” that is “anachronic” to merely lived experience.

Returning once again to the question of genre I raised above as a central question in my own experience of reading these works, the overall style is not simply a travel diary even though the author continues to be a global traveler, at least, during the early period of the pandemic, and to enjoy the worldly “pleasures of plurilingualism” (2022, 130). After the period of the lockdown during 2020–2021 that comprised the entries in Living On, this does not mean that it is confined to being only a personal diary, or a journal intime, or that its excursions into the world are simply reduced to being flights of la littérature. Here, I would identify at least two precursors or precedents of the multiple styles “invented” by the author to address the issues of personal memory and external catastrophe of this world: first, Bataille’s L’expérience intérieure, where the interior movement is described as a kind of drunkenness, a stumbling from one thing to another, and a cry of fear when the subject takes herself for the night. The second precursor, of course, would be Blanchot’s L’Écriture du désastre. For example, in the beginning of the chapter “Geophilosophy” in On Contemporaneity, the author again strives to make the sense of this world’s singular catastrophe manifest by asking, “What writing could be the writing of this disaster?” In other words, “What writing would be contemporaneous with its times?” These questions resonate throughout both volumes to guide the author’s own account of the forceful act of becoming actively engaged and thus contemporaneous with “our times.” And there is yet a third question that appears in the conclusion of Living On | To Survive that serves as an echo of Derrida’s silent voice speaking to author herself as if from beyond the grave like Hamlet’s ghost: “Who is capable of death? To whom is this power granted or denied?” (2022, 107).

Gregg Lambert is Dean’s Professor of Humanities in the College of Arts & Sciences at St Syracuse University. He is author of many works, most recently, The World is Gone: Philosophy in Light of the Pandemic (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).