The suitcase, the task

Maria Stepanova, Equator:

My task is to understand and to analyse what is happening today in Russia – and in the wider world (which is gleefully following in Russia’s stead). This task still seems vital to me, although I know too well that it is unlikely to achieve much. The monumental efforts of the historians and philosophers of the twentieth century have not prevented state violence from resurging.

Ω Ω Ω

The exile must slough off all their identities – of birth and upbringing, the old home and the new one – to simply be who they are. Not a good German, or a good Czech, or a good Frenchman. Rather, a person without the armour of identity.

Ω Ω Ω

In The Human Condition, written 15 years after “We Refugees”, Hannah Arendt rejects the idea of hope, which she feels is a passive and therefore fatal sentiment. Hope is always situated somewhere in the future. It wears the mask of inevitability, and so deceives us. It reduces human life to expectation. By way of an alternative, Arent proffers the concept of natality, which seems vital to me in these new dark times. Unlike hope, natality does not offer a ready template for a future towards which we should strive, nor does it console us with the belief that everything will turn out OK in the end. It’s less an ethical notion than a physiological quality innate in the living creature. Natality is, very simply, the ability to start anew, from the beginning, over and over; without knowing why or to what end; each time being reborn, stubbornly; pointlessly persisting – precisely because that is our human wont.