“Against Resilience” is Rebecca Comay’s introduction to her book On Persistence, released by Seagull in July 2026, with an afterword by Alberto Toscano. Its publication on Communis, in a slightly edited form, has been authorized by the author and Seagull. A much shorter extract of this introduction was previously published on e-flux on 30 July 2026. For the Spanish translation of Comay’s text, read “Contra la resiliencia.”

“In the face of the world’s organized abandonment, ‘organized pessimism’ might well be the operative approach—rebuilding houses or replanting olive trees after the army and the settlers keep destroying them, fighting evictions and land confiscations, organizing boycotts and demonstrations, reopening schools, setting up medi­cal clinics, holding hunger strikes while stuck in indefinite ‘adminis­trative detention’, refusing to confess in the interrogation chamber, refusing to leave, returning home, burying the dead, tending to the living, rebuilding in the rubble, photographing, filming, reporting the facts to a world which already has them.

And yet, writing from Gaza on the thirty seventh day of the genocide, Ali Abdel-Wahab answered all those who told him he personified sumud that he had never asked to be the experiment in how much genocide Palestinian steadfastness can endure.”

— Rebecca Comay

Persistence is not intrepidness, resoluteness, exertion; it is indifferent to that virility and vigour. It is not the overcoming of obstacles or the triumph over adversity. It is not stamina, steadfastness, fortitude. It is not diligence, industriousness, discipline; it resists that drive to productivity and performance. It is not the thrum of habit or the dull drag of the quotidian. Persistence is not patience; it lacks that constancy and composure. It is not the incremental inch towards the someday-better nor the sigh of the meanwhile. Neither hope nor resignation is the operative mood. Or, if one feels compelled to speak of hope, it’s of the perverse Kafka variety: there is hope, plenty of hope, an infinity of hope, maybe even too much hope—only not for us.[1] In other words, persistence is not driven by the whip of “cruel optimism”.[2] Persistence is not the vulgar pursuit of immortality or the extension of life by other means. It is not the survivalist preparation for apocalypse. And persistence is definitely not resilience. It lacks that bounce and plasticity—which is to say that persistence is not the forced flexibility and pliability of the neoliberal subject. Persistence is ill-adaptive: brittle, unbending, uncompliant, impatient, inefficient, untimely. It is sustained neither by the drumbeat of victory nor by the sublime consolation of defeat. Persistence disorganizes the normative temporal and spatial order. It exerts a needling, scrabbling pressure—resistant to direction, desisting from project and programme, insistent in its demands. It is a duration, a hardness, a perdurance that extends beyond the limits of endurance. Persistence is obstinacy, ostinato, the stubborn rhythm of a time without flow—a “strong, slow drilling” through a present that has become rigid and inert.[3] Persistence, resistance, desistance, insistence: everything is circling around this irritable cluster.

You can’t count on its emancipatory potential. That shopping list of negativities was more speculative than sustainable, as is the way of all negation. Excessive or unmanaged persistence, or the wrong kind of persistence—but persistence is always already verging on the excessive and the unmanageable—can be dangerous: a stalker, a predator, an addiction, a toxic relationship, an obsession. Persistence has its perfidious doubles. It can be the slow drip of oppression or the unremitting cycle of exploitation. Persistence in this case naturalizes itself, effacing its own origins and hardening into ideology: it seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, irremediable, inexpungeable, unstoppable—we speak of persistent poverty, a persistent wage gap, a persistent virus, a persistent biochemical toxin. Capitalism is defined by this self-perpetuation and throbs to its accelerating rhythm. Value must continually increase in order to stay the same as itself; the rate of profit must keep rising if it is to avoid falling; everything must keep growing in order to keep going—the secret law and ultimate contradiction of capital accumulation. Capital persists while workers are cut off from the means of subsistence and life sinks to a subpar existence. All this doubling can be disorienting and dispiriting. Politically speaking, it can threaten to confound the distinction between the slow burn of revolutionary upheaval and the inertia of left-melancholic despair.

We might say that persistence is a kind of perseverance, but only if we can divest this word of its Hobbesian-Spinozist-Nietzschean vitalism. This is perseverance of a peculiarly attenuated sort. Persistence is not the drive to self-preservation, in suo esse perseverare conatur, every entity’s inextinguishable straining to continue.[4] Persistence is both a hyperbolic and a deflated conatus—at once too much and too little: too much strife and striving, too little self or being for which to strive. Persistence is not the joyful swell of the conatus nor the surge of the will to power. It is not self-augmentation or self-enhancement. If anything, persistence is a deflation, diminution, or “lessening” (shades of Beckett)—a swaying between impetus and impediment. You might easily mistake this sway for the vacillations of Spinoza’s “sad passions”, but that would miss the point.[5] You’d be equally mistaken to conflate this pulsation with the throb and thrum of “vibrant matter”.[6] Hobbes was right to speak of the “artificial eternity” of the conatus (there is nothing biological or instinctual about this drivenness), even if he was led to aggrandize this as the mythic self-perpetuation of the fortified state.[7]

Persistence is the tipping point where perseverance slips almost inaudibly into perseveration—the irritable overdrive of a speech or action compulsively repeating itself in the absence of any determinable goal or purpose. Perseveration is a temporal derangement, at once a short-circuit and a prolongation: time stretches interminably onward and snaps back to the non-starter of an endlessly protracted rebeginning. The stretch and the snap are two sides of the same elastic. Perseveration is both a brake and a flood: a conversation stopper that never stops stopping. Speech-language pathologists describe perseveration as a rigidity or automatism, a stereotypy, a torrential stickiness and stuckness, an inability to switch tracks or to switch off. The machine is always on, it never stops running, yet there’s somehow always something off about it, something not quite right—off-track, off-kilter, socially off-putting, as off-key as a poorly tuned instrument. Psychiatry, which uses perseveration as a quasi-technical category, doesn’t quite know where to classify this pathological stammer, an inanity that’s not quite an insanity, even while it finds its syllables scattered everywhere. In the DSM-5, the bible of American psychiatry, perseveration crops up as a symptom of just about everything: ADHD, Alzheimer’s, anxiety disorder, aphasia, autism, basal ganglia damage, epilepsy, foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, frontal lobe malformation, haemorrhagic stroke, neurodegenerative disease, OCD, Parkinson’s, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, depressive rumination …[8] The indiscriminate consignment of all these disparate afflictions to the hardwiring of biology or the vagaries of individual pathology only confounds their historical enmeshment and contributes to its persistence.

Persistence hovers on the cusp between perseverance and perseveration. Per-sistere. It jams the forward movement and momentum, the per of progress and passage, and brings everything to the point of stalling. Persistence is a thoroughgoing (per) or intensified form of standstill or stasis—a “serious” or “severe” (per) stoppage. But sistere is not just about steadfastness and stability. The standstill can be an interruption and interference that sets everything in motion: taking a stand, standing firm, standing up, rising up, uprising. There is a related ambiguity, in Greek, between stasis as sluggishness or stagnation and stasis as sedition, upheaval, civil war. We can hear a similar ambiguity in the English word “static”—at once immobility and the buzzing freeze of electrical interference. This also raises the question of sustainability, of staying power (sta-), as in John Ashbery’s question, quickly extinguished, about the flickering intervals of freedom: “What more is there to do, except stay?” (The poem continues: “And that we cannot do.”)[9] To stay is also, juridically, to suspend proceedings, to put justice on hold, to pause, to delay.

Finally: both perseverance and perseveration rhyme anagrammatically with preservation in the inopportune or melancholic sense: a fossilization, a petrification, a hypermnesic fixation, an archival ache and illness, a stumbling block to the progressive flow of time and history. Nietzsche speaks poorly of this stony fixation. It is the spirit of revenge, teeth-gnashing, the stone in the belly, the inability to digest, to be done with things, the will’s ill will towards time and its irredeemable imperfect—a shipwreck on the rocky shoals of the “it was”.[10] With another anagrammatic twist this stubbornness swerves into the fixations and fascinations of perversion—a stubborn twisting away from and against (ver) the path forward (per).

Existence is rocky—in both senses—at once obdurate and unstable. Everything circles through and around this stony vortex.

Repetition and Resistance

Persistence is the defining paradox of psychoanalysis—its inefficiencies, its abruptions, its much-ridiculed longueurs. Freud bundles all these temporal perturbances under the rubric of resistance. You demand a cure that you then proceed to spend all your time and ingenuity and money sabotaging. How long will it take? I don’t have time for this. You come in with the desperate need to be done with it, for your misery to abate, and yet you end up doing everything in your power to avoid ending. Wait. I need a few more minutes, weeks, lifetimes. At first Freud approaches the problem with the aggression of a conquistador: resistance is the obstacle to therapeutic success and must be routed out with military precision. For a while he resorts to careful diplomatic tactics: resistance is to be harnessed and enlisted by means of an artfully negotiated therapeutic contract. Eventually it all gets too much: the resistances are sprouting everywhere; anything and everything, the whole gamut from defiance to compliance, turns out to be a form of resistance; and Freud is left pondering the imponderable—namely, that psychoanalysis’s condition of possibility might turn out to be its condition of impossibility. “Everything that interrupts and impedes the progress of analysis is a resistance…”[11] Everything: Freud flirts with the idea that the entire universe may be conspiring to derail the treatment—war, death in the family, dental emergency—everything can and must be folded into the analysis as fodder for interpretation; nothing is to be taken at face value; anything and everything becomes a modality of resistance. The obstacle to analysis is not an external accident or mishap; it is not the result of a clinical error or misjudgement; it is not simple contrariness or stupidity; it is baked into the analytic process as its enabling condition and ongoing motor.

The antithesis in analysis “terminable” [endlich] and “interminable” [unendlich]—the contradiction between finitude and infinity—thus turns out to be a (speculative) identity.[12] Termination can be an insidious way of prolonging the treatment, while prolongation can turn into the treatment’s premature short-circuit. After his analysis is officially concluded—not just once but twice—the Wolf Man, one of Freud’s most illustrious failures, will self-identify with the brand name “Wolf Man” and spend the rest of his life in perpetual analysis, shuttling from one analyst to another, from one illness to another, churning out one wolf painting after another, continuing the analysis by proxy until his death.

Freud will eventually link this clinical perturbance to the paradoxical temporality of the death drive, and ultimately to the drivenness of the drive as such. The subject hurtles impatiently towards a death that it vigorously keeps postponing. I want nothing more than to put an immediate end to things, to skitter back as quickly as possible to my prior state of torpid inanimate existence, even as I do everything in my power to avoid ending.[13] The drive for cessation is in this way indistinguishable from the drive to keep on going. The antinomy is foundational. I persist in living, if only to keep insisting on the irrefutable reality of my desistance. Every moment offers another opportunity to establish my capacity for extinction. Persistence itself is this mortification—a pre-emptive strike against death that condemns me to the endless rehearsal of my own post-mortem existence. And I bring this performance to the sacred precincts of analysis, where I enact my own mortification and inflict it on my tormentor: is there anything more deadly than having to sit there day after day, listening to the endless recital of another’s dreams? Freud did not quite theorize boredom as the kernel of the countertransference, but he surely invited it when he rearranged the furniture and elevated the dream to the centrepiece of analysis.

In the face of this roiling contradiction, Freud proffers the tepid non-explanation that I need to die in my own way; I need to own up to and appropriate my own finitude; I need to assume death or castration as my very own.[14] But this is neither Socratic courage nor the heroic self-affirmation of Heideggerian Being-towards-death—the authentic appropriation of my “ownmost own”. In a final blow to our buffeted narcissism, Freud explodes the singularity of the human by extending this paradox to all life forms, right down to the elementary particles of microcellular existence. My own way turns out to be not at all my own.

The Geriatric Sublime

Persistence is the perverse prolongation of a life that has outlived its use value, its productivity, its contribution to civic society, its capacity for moral improvement, defying actuarial statistics, impinging on future generations, straining hospitality as it overcrowds the finite surface of the globe. At the end of his life, and on the verge of his own slide into dementia, Kant starts handing out prescriptions for the dispelling of hypochondria and the enhancement of longevity. In the eighteenth century these two benefits were conjoined: hypochondria is the life-sapping anxiety that confirms and generates what it most fears. Anticipating our wellness industry, Adorno will later speak of “health unto death”.[15] Kant’s self-help manual is odd coming from any professional philosopher, especially in the context of an ostensible intervention into the arcana of academic bureaucracy, and already points to a fissure in university discourse: the “conflict” is not simply between philosophy and the adjacent academic disciplines but between academic and para- (or peri-)institutional practices. As the publishing revolution exploded, this kind of layperson’s literature was starting to burgeon in Germany, threatening to undermine both the professional authority of doctors and the state’s biopolitical monopoly over matters of life and death. Just as Gutenberg and Luther had privatized worship by turning faith into a personal responsibility and the Bible into a household commodity, the eighteenth-century publishing industry delegates health to the consumerist private sphere.

The confessional tone and tenor of Kant’s essay are as startling as the details. The comedy of Kant’s daily hygiene is familiar through De Quincey’s malicious parody (if it is a parody): the punctual afternoon walks; the stockings hoisted up just so; the peculiar breathing techniques; the exquisitely choreographed dinner parties with their meticulously curated topics of conversation; the acrobatic bedtime swaddling; the precisely timed 4:55 wake-up call; the thinking strictly rationed; the birds’ nests relocated; nature conquered; the coffee always exactly on the ready.[16] By the end, having outlived himself, Kant will be wheeled to the table to preside mutely over the proceedings like a waxwork effigy—a last supper for the moral agent as autonomy contracts to the empty “freedom of a turnspit”.[17]

 

But the spring may have broken. Musing on the prospect of a life lived beyond its expected lifespan, the very idea of an existence pried away from productivity and purpose, Kant wonders what one might do with all this extra time. He conjures up the figure of a very old man who occupies himself by surrounding himself with clocks that he sets off to strike “always one after the other, never at the same time”.[18] The pensioner turns the passing of time into an idle pastime. He kills time by sounding out its empty intervals. This would make it impossible to synchronize the clocks so as to set the time or to keep on schedule. Per–sistence slides sideways and externalizes itself as para–sistence. The old man meticulously marks time in such a way as to sabotage or circumvent (peri) the linear temporal order. The progressive continuum of inner sense, of universal history, and of moral destiny is punctiliously and punctually registered, acknowledged—and deranged.

Senile Dialectic

Persistence is the negative conatus of Beckett’s disabled figures, each running on empty, all constantly repeating themselves and each other, too exhausted either to exit the stage or to find the energy to stop talking. Endgame formalizes the predicament—the game that will not end if only because every ending has already been folded into the drama as another gambit: does Clov finally leave the scene, does he ever take action, or is he only acting? Persistence is here so thoroughgoing (per) that it lacks the fortitude or stamina for standing (sistere). Everyone in Beckett is hobbling, crawling, slithering sideways, sitting, rocking, collapsing. Following a cue from Beckett himself, this weakening is usually understood in terms of Beckett’s own break from the maestro: “The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance.”[19] Nothing is moving, nothing is happening—only the restlessness of a repetitive flailing and failing. One can’t even succeed at failing: even failure fails to liberate you from the burden of success and succession; there might always be someone or something to succeed you—a child, a speck, a flea—something, anything, that will turn you into another “accursed progenitor”.[20] Even death is not enough to release you from the endlessness of dying. One is condemned to repeat, to do it all over again; one must “Fail again. Fail better”, which, of course, if successful, can unfailingly only make things worse—Beckett’s signature staging of the Liar’s paradox.[21] Another familiar catchphrase: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”[22] The limping punctuation is essential. No connective ligament articulates the two clauses: there is no adverbial thrust and parry, no swaggering “but”, “and yet”, “however”, “nonetheless”, “nevertheless”, nothing either to connect or disconnect the two phrases, only the noncommittal, barely grammatical caesura or cut, the koptein of a comma. This contrasts with the staccato punctuation cutting through the paratactic sequence in “Fail again. Fail better”, but the effect is the same.

Like so many of Beckett’s formulas, both sentences read as self-citations, destined from the outset to harden into a cliché or motto, their origin forgotten, flaking loose from their context to reappear scattered everywhere on coffee mugs and T-shirts. Language too has a shelf life but keeps rattling on from beyond the grave as a spray of disjecta membra: the Unnameable spewing out a lifetime of pedagogical force-feeding; Lucky, on command to “think, pig!”, erupting into a snort of vaguely academic-sounding formulas; Nagg and Nell tormenting each other with their scraps of half-remembered anecdotes; Krapp ritually rewinding and replaying the snippets of his own birthday archive; the insistent echo of “ancient voices” in the mud or within the stifling confines of the torture chamber.

It’s not just characters and phrases that have outlived their allotted lifespan. Embedded in Beckett’s enactment of inaction is the deactivation of a moribund aesthetic and philosophical tradition. Historically outdated remnants linger past their expiration date and are absorbed without having been either transformed or metabolized, producing a wrinkle of untimeliness within the progressive continuum of time. Floating amidst the flotsam are the persistent residues of defunct tropes and genres. In Endgame, it’s the remnants of tragic form that keep recombining and recirculating as cultural waste. Adorno draws attention to Beckett’s exaggerated observance of the so-called “Aristotelian unities”—the unity of time parodied as a day in which the interval between dawn and dusk collapses; the unity of place parodied as the space of a carceral interior; the unity of action parodied as the empty repetition of inaction.[23]

Also bobbing in the cultural detritus are the smatterings of philosophy that Beckett neither assimilates nor quite discharges. Strangely, Beckett’s self-directed philosophical apprenticeship, more or less his last sustained research project before abandoning an academic career forever, largely involved copying out undergraduate philosophy textbooks verbatim, as if to discharge the “loutishness of learning” by repeating its idiocies.[24] That expurgation might later prove useful when fending off his own readers’ endless efforts to mine his texts for moral and philosophical takeaway. Among these philosophical gleanings are the husks of a dialectic that has outlived its own purposiveness and purpose. Stripped of its magical power to snatch victory from defeat, to put negativity to work, the dialectic lives on as a spectral remainder and parodic reminder of its own vanished potency and productivity. These dialectical tatters resurface in the debilitated couplings and impotent antagonisms of the parade of “pseudo-couples” littering both stage and page:[25] Mercier and Camier, Molloy and Moran, Clov and Hamm, Nagg and Nell, Winnie and Willie, x and y—senile figures, figures of a “senile, lunatic” dialectic (Adorno).[26]

Proust’s Remains

Persistence is the writer’s descent into the purgatory of the unfinished work. Proust, I mean his narrator, realizes at death’s door not only that he is finally ready to start writing but that he has never not been writing: all those years of procrastination had already been folded into the project as its fulcrum and enabling condition. Not-writing turns out to have been all the while a modality of writing. All the wasted time and money, the dinner parties, the gossip, the fortune spent on Fortuny gowns and bad investments, the jealous agonies and investigations, all that squandered capital can eventually be written off as research expenses for the work to come. But this logic also runs in reverse: writing turns out to be a modality of not-writing. The irony is not only that the narrator finally finds Time (capitalized) at the instant of irrecoverably losing it, that he discovers his subject matter and vocation once he no longer has time to realize it. The even more bitter irony is that, when finally given the impetus and opportunity to write, he discovers that he has neither energy nor appetite to use it. Non-writing becomes writing becomes non-writing: a perfect (negative) dialectical inversion.

This obviously refutes the standard reading of Proust as an aficionado of redemption. The multi-orgasmic blast of epiphanies at the final matinée scene has a comically manic insistence: thrill piling upon thrill, intensity upon intensity, each one more unconvincing than the previous, neither individually nor cumulatively capable of energizing the narrator to even (want to) begin his literary undertaking. Each climax leads only to an anticlimactic cycle of uplift and deflation, which eventually fizzles without fulfilment. There is no horizon of completion, not even an indefinitely deferred horizon towards which to stretch. The work is strictly speaking not a project: it lurches to a standstill (sistere) without forward (pro) thrust. Its non-finito is not the endlessness of the infinite task or the expansive finitude of the Romantic fragment. Proust’s comparison of the unfinished work to an unfinished cathedral is disingenuous.[27] There is no room for literary successors: Proust systematically blocks every opening so as to leave no foothold for future generations to carry on the task. And yet it somehow keeps growing.

 

Proust had already from the outset closed his own book by writing the ending at the very beginning, leaving it no room to grow.[28] As the years piled on and the pages piled up, the book had no space to expand except sideways (para), from the middle, bulging tumescently from the inside out. This bloat has a curious resemblance to the herniated bulge of Hegel’s Phenomenology, another monster whose starting points and endpoints were stabilized (sistere) at the outset, and yet which wouldn’t stop growing. Dialectical development is not the bad infinite of endless serial accumulation; its method is not additive; it increases rather through a monstrous hypertrophy of the middle. Both Hegel and Proust offer up a performance of pure mediation or “mid-ness”, an endless detour to an end that has been fixed from the beginning—Zeno’s paradox in action. The Recherche keeps bloating ever outward: the sentences swelling with endless subordinations and parenthetical digressions; the paragraphs distended over pages; the pages sprouting on every side with creeping tendrils, the famous paperoles festooning the text with their endless corrections and additions; the Book splitting into an ever-increasing number of separate volumes; each volume ballooning ever thicker. Proust wanted to compress this swollenness, to rein in those wayward tendrils, to encircle (peri) and entrap the fugitive text within the “necessary links of a well-wrought style”.[29] He wanted to dispense with paragraph breaks, to eliminate indentations, to refuse the work’s segmentation into volumes, to have all those pages bound and snapped shut within the enclosure of two covers. Within this carceral space of confinement the work (Albertine) might finally shrink to size. Only the author’s death might put a stop to the text’s endless expansion, but even this cannot be assured.

Anecdote has it that Proust spent his last hours writing his own death into the novel as he finished the last touches on the death scene of his fictional novelist Bergotte.[30] There are many death scenes stitched into the novel—some resplendent, some banal, some profaned, some conspicuous for being callously trivialized, disregarded, or unmentioned. Only the beloved grandmother is granted the dignity of a beautiful dying, and even her transfiguration is short-lived. Her deathbed metamorphosis into a medieval tomb sculpture will be eclipsed by her later apparition as a disturbing phantasm and phantom, a monster, a ghost, a crumbling statue (even petrifaction fails to stabilize), and notably as a photograph. The dead and dying artists fare no better. The composer Vinteuil is humiliated post-mortem by the ceremonial antics of his lesbian daughter; the actress Berma lives out her last days in abject humiliation at the hands of her own daughter; the painter Elstir slips away without his departure even being noticed. Birgitte’s own death is striking for its banality: overwhelmed by a last-minute confrontation with his own ineptitude, the writer has an attack of uraemia and artistic envy and lives on only as a commodity in the marketplace of letters.

Although photographs and photographic metaphors are scattered everywhere throughout Proust’s novel, photography itself is not granted the dignity of an art form; there are no dead photographers to honour, humiliate, disregard, ignore or even to forget. Perhaps this is because photography itself is figured as deadly—either death-dealing or deadly boring—voluntary memory at its most uninspiring. (A similar anxiety attaches to mass publication generally; Proust gives it a comic spin when he describes his narrator’s sense of bewilderment and imposture upon unexpectedly encountering his own words reprinted in the morning newspaper.)

Ironically, on his own deathbed Proust will be swarmed with photographers who arrive on cue to take his final portrait. Man Ray will take the celebrated picture of the dead writer lying like a sculpture amidst the clutter of his papers. For a flickering moment, photography comes to the aid of the writer, before proceeding to kill him anew. For a moment, it endows writing itself with the marmoreal perfection of the “dream of stone”.[31] For a moment, photography allows the writer to close the gap between author and narrator, to close the gap between beginning and ending, to seal off the prison, to rein in the straggles, to finish dying, to close the book. And then it starts up all over again.

Bad Mothers

Persistence is the frozen eternity of a mother’s grief. Profligate in childbearing, extravagant in words, Niobe is punished by the gods for her reproductive and verbal copia. As if it’s not enough to have her fourteen children murdered, the mourning mother will be turned to stone, deprived of speech, locomotion, regal status. Banished to the hinterland of civilization, where she will be magnified to mountainous proportions, Niobe becomes a permanent fixture in the distant landscape, at once colossal and invisible, known only by rumour and hearsay, her sorrow both amplified and silenced. But petrification fails to petrify. Pregnant with loss, overflowing with sorrow, the stone seeps and suppurates: Niobe’s return to the inanimate is instantaneous, irreversible, and yet interminably unfinished—the death drive in action—a ceaseless vacillation between stasis and movement, between fixity and flux, between stone and water. Stone is not stony enough to contain the turbulence of mourning, death is not deadly enough to stop the rest-lessness of living, silence is not silent enough to still the clamour.

And Niobe’s sufferings continue. Petrification intensifies the punishment and escalates the crime, unleashing a ceaseless circle of humiliation and hubris. In Niobe’s sorry fate we witness at once a humbling reduction to the human, less-than-human—the downward drag of the humus, the earthy—and a surge of rebellious chthonic matter. In yet a further mortification, Niobe’s stony carapace will be put on display as civic monumentum and religious reminder—mounted in the temple of Zeus in Olympia, on the Palatine in Rome, carved into the first terrace of Dante’s Purgatorio as the permanent allegory of pride chastised and yet unvanquished.

Walter Benjamin will see in Niobe’s stony fate the prototype of mythic violence—the spectral entanglement of “law-founding” and “law-preserving” violence. Her suffering crystallizes the paradox of a law generated by its own infraction. Niobe is punished for a crime that only retroactively becomes a crime, according to a law that only becomes a law in the punishment that it unleashes. Law “preserves” itself—it executes, archives and reproduces itself—by making the victim collaborate in their own punishment, redoubling suffering, leaving guilt as its sticky residue, like water on stone. That Benjamin singles out reproductive violence as the exemplary case of mythic violence, and that he fails to comment on the specific gendering of this violence, compounds the violence. Still, she persisted.

Paradoxes of Lament

Persistence is the interminability of lament: its insufficiency, its grandiosity, the aggressivity of its demands. Marooned in the stifling zone between private and public, between the singularity of loss and the conventionality of its expression, lament gives voice to an intractable antinomy: what is most irrefragably my own, what repels communication and community, is precisely what most demands acknowledgement or recognition. Lament is a blocked or failed performative. It simultaneously underperforms and outperforms. It demands a response that is systematically thwarted. All mourning is haunted by the spectre of its own inadequacy, redundancy, untimeliness, or ineffectiveness—too soon, too late, too little, too much—and this discomfort intensifies when mourning comes to enter in its ledger of losses the social and cultural context that would conspire to make loss itself legitimate or legible as such. Lament forces the realization, a properly historical and political one, that it is loss itself that is lost; mourning itself must be mourned. This accounts for the unstoppable slide from grief to grievance: lament lambasts a world in which lament itself would be stifled.

 

Lament thus takes performativity beyond the limits of performance. This can make for an impossibly long play. Hamlet’s dilatoriness is not a function of anaemic overthinking or “Hamletism”. The inhibition rather speaks to the enormity of his historical assignment.[32] His ostentatious fidelity to the dead, his disdain for ceremonial convention, all this frenetic memory work is shaped and energized by an unflagging scrutiny of the available cultural options. In Reformation England these options have been steadily shrinking: traditional rituals are being dismantled, funerary processions restricted, sumptuary extravaganzas prohibited, church bells silenced. Hamlet has the tenacity of a Benjamin-style Grübler—a true collector. Where Dürer’s Melencolia sits slumped amidst her clutter of abandoned tools and artefacts, Hamlet paces amidst the detritus of a moribund funerary tradition, taking inventory of the accoutrements and “maimed rites” of past melancholy styles. “Passing show”, he puts passage itself on show and makes a show of passing: he is improvising a rite of passage for vanishing rites of passage.

He’s also preparing to be a player at his own funeral. Hamlet’s last words have the stammer of a voice from beyond the grave: he has missed the moment of dying and is condemned forever to keep repeating it. Neither Hamlet nor Hamlet reach their end, if only because they have already overreached it (Zeno yet again). The character does not die when he dies, the play does not end when it ends, the rest is conspicuously not silence. Hamlet stammers, Fortinbras trumpets, Horatio blandishes … The play overshoots its ending with a blare of military fanfare; the voice sputters from beyond the grave with a splatter of empty monosyllables; the solid flesh melts into a dew and drip of language. It’s Hamlet, not his mother, who turns out to be “Niobe, all tears”.

Testament of the Revolution

And persistence is the relentless insistence of the dead. In his Theses on history, Benjamin speaks of the “secret pact” binding past and present generations: we are summoned to an appointment with the ancestors—signed, time-stamped, and addressed to us uniquely.[33] Secret: we are in the register of the unconscious. Like all transgenerational assignments, the message is written in invisible ink, in need of deciphering, an “enigmatic signifier” demanding interpretation, translation, reactivation.[34]

At the critical moment, the “moment of danger”, the past intrudes with the coercive pressure of a message from beyond the grave—a communication without a stable referent, demanding continual resignification or reinvestment—”pure language” in the “early Benjamin” sense.[35] Here we encounter the posthumous pressure of the Revolution, the one splintering into the many, where repetition itself speaks of both failure and obligation. For the descendants, it is the injunction to take up the inextinguishable legacy of the missed, botched, and failed revolutionary moments of the past—or, more precisely, it is the imperative to rewrite failure as contingent or conjunctural defeat, to extract from the counterrevolution the impetus and imperative of redemption. To inherit the past is to repeat, to remember, to work through, to work out, to unwork, to dismantle, to decompose, to dis-member, to disremember.

 

This is precisely how Marx had described the sputtering rhythm of nineteenth-century revolutions in The Eighteenth Brumaire. It’s not out of some Sisyphean futility that revolutions keep repeating, that they stall and judder, constantly short-circuiting and lurching back to their starting point to start up all over again. There’s a reason for this retroversion, namely that history won’t wait. Paradoxically, it is impatience and not nostalgia that turns the clocks back. Revolutions don’t advance by steps and stages, each picking up where the previous one left off. History doesn’t progress, it doesn’t accumulate, it doesn’t wait. Revolutionary modernity is not an “unfinished project”, a promise awaiting fulfilment, a potential awaiting actualization, a beginning awaiting completion. Every aborted revolution undermines the achievements of the preceding revolutions and deflates the heroic narratives inspired by these. The danger ripples backwards until the entire past is shattered by its power. The return to ground zero is the chance to reboot the system, to take it all over again from the beginning: Fail again. Fail better.

It’s in this sense that Benjamin will describe revolution as an “emergency brake” forcing the locomotive of history to a halt. But time doesn’t stand still in the revolutionary standstill (sistere). The shock introduces a reverse thrust into history, forcing a return to the beginning where everything must begin anew. The entire past must be smashed to rubble, everything must start again, including the original beginning, which therefore loses its foundational authority and ceases to be a beginning. Repetition forces a total reconfiguration of the political imaginary. It demands nothing less than a total reworking of the world. This is a melancholic, even a pessimistic, finding—we are confronted yet again with the death drive at its most vigorous—but not a defeatist one. Pessimism must be organized (Benjamin).[36]

Addendum: Viral Persistence

In 2022, this scatter forcibly snapped into a constellation when I found my life upended by an unwelcome visitor. “Long Covid” is starting to feel like an understatement, some three years in now, with the timeline and prognosis uncertain, but it’s the term favoured by the citizen-scientist community, which has been largely left to its own devices (literally) to wade through the ocean of too-much-information flooding social media. Some patients prefer to call themselves “long haulers”, which strikes me as oddly muscular given the debilitating nature of the disease. In the absence of the political will either to invest in full-throttle medical research or to mitigate the devastating social consequences of this mass disabling event, the surplus population has reached some 400 million as I’m writing, with the annual global economic cost in the order of $1 trillion (that’s not factoring in the gross disparities in reporting or the downstream cascade of secondary disabilities).[37]

In Capital, Marx describes the bottom stratum of the pauperized population as a “hospital” or “sick house”, the two current translations, although neither is really adequate, if only because there’s no apparent discharge date on the horizon. Marx is referring not to the temporarily unemployed but to those incapable, unwilling, or no longer capable of working—the disabled, the incurable, the misfits, the disaffected, the superannuated, the injured, the casualties and cast-offs of the workplace—those unfit to join capitalism’s industrial reserve army and too disaggregated to coagulate into a class or collective movement. Curiously, instead of the expected Krankenhaus, Marx uses the prestigious French loanword Invalidenhaus to describe this stagnant dumping ground—a military hospital, hospice, or retirement home for disabled war veterans.[38] Swaddled in my cocoon, it’s obviously ridiculous to include myself in this dumpster—money, health insurance, absurdly flexible working conditions, the perks of the neoliberal university where getting to work from home, even if it means having to work all the time, offers the option of teaching from bed while the rest of the world cavorts. Awash with ressentiment and embarrassed by my own ableism, I find myself spending half the time gorging on expensive supplements and following the latest clinical trials and the rest engrossed in critical disability theory and reading Alice James.

I think of Proust converting impediment into opportunity as he scribbles away asthmatically in his sealed-off bedroom. That seems grandiose. Aunt Léonie may be a more interesting figure, tirelessly fine-tuning her symptoms while suspended “in her indefinite condition of grief, physical exhaustion, obsessions, and religious observances”, tugging forwards and backwards like the water lilies bobbing in the Vivonne river.[39] I think of Kant toiling away at his wellness regime, assuming responsibility for his own lifestyle and lifespan, the perfect neoliberal subject already stirring in the womb of bourgeois liberalism. In the age of hypochondria 2.0, when you can outsource your anxiety to prosthetic wearables that tell you exactly how exhausted you are, exactly what percentage is left in your rapidly depleting body battery, such vigilance has become unnecessary.

I open the newspaper and read about a Toronto woman with Long Covid who has recently applied for medically assisted death (MAID). Canada has become the new Switzerland, minus the minimal fiction of a safety net. As the welfare state disintegrates and austerity measures dig ever deeper, they’ve started giving it out like candy. Her reasons actually have less to do with the unabating misery of the illness than straight-up economic duress: too sick to work and unable to live on her nothing of a disability allowance, she is also too sick to survive homelessness.[40] I read about another woman who applied for a small subsidy to install an accessibility ramp so she can get out to shop for groceries. The caseworker declines the request, advising her that if she can’t manage there’s always the option of MAID …[41]

Meanwhile, the medical hypotheses accumulate, the symptoms multiply, everything adding up to the persistence of an illness continuing long past its expiration date: lingering viral detritus; mitochondrial dysfunction; endothelial inflammation; microbiome dysbiosis; residual microclots clogging the capillaries; the reactivation of antigens from long-dormant previous infections; the immune system stuck in relentless overdrive; the autonomic nervous system running in a permanent state of emergency, a condition of chronic acuteness where crisis and continuum converge—Benjamin’s state of exception written on the inflamed corpuscles of the body. At what point does the acute tip into the chronic, when does short become long, how long is long? As with most chronic or “invisible” diseases, you get used to the gaslighting, followed, if you’re lucky, by the doctor’s benediction and a pepper-spray of acronyms—PACS, PCC, PEM, GET, CID, POTS, CXL, GBA, MCAS, LDN, NAC, YWA, as in Yoga with Adriene, the internet wellness guru who’s supposed to help you self-help yourself. The virus persists and so must we. Scrolling zombified through yet another wellness website I stumble on a disgusting brand of CBT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), packaged for the times with a 4A mantra (acknowledge, allow, accommodate, forget the last). I’ve learned precious little about the virtues of endurance, willpower, spunk, patience, courage, resilience, discipline, etc. over the past couple of years, but I’ve learned a bit about how not to talk about persistence.

I am writing this way not from any impulse to go first-personal but simply to mark a moment. It strikes me now that a critical disability framework might carve a path through these tales of prolongation, elongation, stretching, overliving, outliving, and retroactive commotion. This framework might also bend the arc between Freud and Benjamin, between psychoanalysis and politics, between individual and collective. If psychoanalysis teaches anything, it’s that persistence is not the will of either the individual or the collective: it’s not about the will at all. Psychoanalysis also shows that the antithesis between individual and collective, between private and public, is a forced one: there is no subject that is not stretched and striated by the social, no form of sociality that has not seeped into the nerve endings of the individual; every self is a discordant multitude of overlapping agencies, every collective a magnetic force field of intersecting transferential vectors; all psychology is group psychology; the personal is political. This means that the terms of agency need to be redefined. Ageing philosophers, ailing writers, wasted figures, thwarted mourners, fraying kinships, barren mothers, frozen landscapes, tattered genres, failed revolutions, shrunken stages. We need to understand the “stage” in both senses—a spatial and a temporal station and stopping point, a platform (staticum) or arena (stadium) in which the historical antinomies of the present can be played out and displayed in their most distilled and thoroughgoing (per) form. The stage is a time and place of standstill or Stillstand.

But one can also think about the debilitated power of an angel whose wings are broken (the hurricane is too violent); the botched actions of a little hunchback (the burden is too heavy); the impeded gait of a city-dweller (the streets are too congested); the “weak power” of a Messiah who may arrive, like the Revolution, “any day”, which is not to say every day[42]—and which also allows for the possibility that he may arrive, like Kafka’s messiah, only the day after his own arrival, which is to say one day too late.[43]

Persistence Under Siege

As I write these words, it’s August 2024 and the horror is unspooling. (As this goes to press, almost two years later, the horror continues unabated.) We must never stop talking about the genocidal slaughter in Gaza and the decades of global indifference and opportunism that continue to bankroll it. It’s impossible not to bring in disability politics when thinking about everything relegated to the sidelines under the rubric of supposedly collateral damage: maimed and mutilated bodies; bombed homes and hospitals; destroyed sewage and power grids; escalating disease and famine; environmental devastation; cultural spoliation; the unfathomable legacy of intergenerational trauma. The relentlessness of the intensifying Nakba forces us to abandon the conventional idea of trauma, just like catastrophe, crisis, war, or disaster, as a discrete time-stamped event or mishap rather than as an “edgeless” and escalating condition. “That things ‘go on like this’ is the catastrophe.”[44] Ugly persistence: the nation-state installed in perpetuity, holding out in a state of indefinite permanence, constantly consolidating itself as a spatial and temporal fortress, reasserting its sovereignty through intensified acts of terror, packaging violence as victimhood, genocide as self-defence—the stubborn resurgence of an archaic political theology reconfigured in the shape of the modern ethnonationalist katechon.

There is the other persistence. Sumud: the intransigence of sheer staying power—temporal, spatial—a term introduced into the political lexicon as early as the 1960s, when revolution was still on the agenda, and as powerful as ever: in the occupied territories, in the refugee camps, in the diaspora, within the 1948 borders of Israel, in occupied Jerusalem, in the killing fields of Gaza. Sumud has never been a matter of stoicism or resignation—not even in the dreary post-Oslo era, when the options might appear to have shrivelled to the forced choices of submission, imprisonment, exile, death. In the face of the world’s utterly organized abandonment, “organized pessimism” might well be the operative approach. The actions are as varied and improvised as the circumstances demand and permit, but the practice persists—rebuilding houses after the army keeps demolishing them, replanting olive trees after the settlers keep destroying them, fighting evictions and land confiscations, organizing boycotts, holding demonstrations, reopening schools, setting up medi­cal clinics, holding hunger strikes while stuck in indefinite “adminis­trative detention”, refusing to confess in the interrogation chamber,[45] refusing to leave, returning home, burying the dead, tending to the living, rebuilding in the rubble, photographing, filming, reporting the facts to a world which already has them. But persistence is also the slow burn of armed resistance—flashes of revolt sparking a rekindled revolutionary move­ment, improvised actions accumulating into a collective refusal, the transformation of a Gramscian war of posi­tion into a war of manoeuvre. One need not be afraid to bring back the language of fortitude and even of heroism. In extremity, sheer existence can be an act of resistance.

Writing from Gaza on the thirty seventh day of the genocide, Ali Abdel-Wahab answered those who told him he personified sumud. He had never asked to be the experiment in how much genocide Palestinian steadfastness can endure.[46]

Notes

[1] Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography (G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston trans.) (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995).

[2] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

[3] Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” in The Vocation Lectures (Rodney Livingstone trans.) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), p. 93.

[4] Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, III, prop. VI.

[5] Spinoza, Ethics, III, prop. XVII (“fluctuatio”).

[6] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

[7] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XVI.

[8] American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM–5–TR) (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2022).

[9] John Ashbery, “The Instruction Manual” in Some Trees (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956). I’m grateful to Joshua Clover for this association.

[10] Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” in Untimely Meditations (R. J. Hollingdale trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 78; Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Redemption” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Adrian Del Caro trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 111.

[11] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 VOLS (James Strachey ed. and trans.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), VOL. 5, p. 517.

[12] Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937) in Standard Edition, VOL. 23, pp. 209–54.

[13] Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) in Standard Edition, VOL. 18, pp. 7–64.

[14] “What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 39.

[15] Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia §36 (Edmund Jephcott trans.) (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 58–59.

[16] Thomas De Quincey, “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, VOL. 3 (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1880).

[17] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Mary Gregor trans.) in Practical Philosophy (Mary Gregor ed.), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 218. Citations to Kant refer to existing English translations, occasionally modified, with the corresponding pagination of the Akademie edition of Kants Gesammelte Schriften (henceforth GS) supplied for ease of reference; here, 5:97.

[18] Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor trans.) in Religion and Rational Theology (Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni eds), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 317; GS, 7:102.

[19] Samuel Beckett, “An Interview with Beckett” (interview by Israel Shenker) in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 148.

[20] Samuel Beckett, Endgame in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 96.

[21] Samuel Beckett, “Worstward Ho” in Nohow On (New York: Grove Press, 1996), p. 77.

[22] Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable in Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable: Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 577.

[23] Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame” in Notes to Literature, Volume 2 (Rolf Tiedemann ed., Shierry Weber Nicholsen trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

[24] Samuel Beckett, “Gnome” in Collected Poems in English and French (London: John Calder, 1977).

[25] See Beckett, The Unnamable.

[26] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Robert Hullot-Kentor trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 251.

[27] Marcel Proust, Time Regained in In Search of Lost Time (C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin trans., revised by D. J. Enright), 6 VOLS (New York: Modern Library, 1993), VOL. 6, p. 508.

[28] “I’ve just begun—and finished—a whole long book.” Marcel Proust, letter to Mme Straus, c. 16 August 1909, in Selected Letters, Volume 2: 1904–1909 (Terence Kilmartin trans., Philip Kolb ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 446.

[29] Proust, Time Regained, VOL. 6, p. 291.

[30] See Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust (Barbara Bray trans.) (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), p. 349.

[31] See Charles Baudelaire, “La Beauté” in Les Fleurs du mal (Claude Pichois ed.), VOL. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 21.

[32] See “Deutschland ist Hamlet”: Ferdinand Freiligrath, ‘Hamlet’ in Ein Glaubensbekenntniß (Mainz: Zabern, 1844), pp. 253–57.

[33] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (Harry Zohn trans.) in Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940 (Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings eds) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 389.

[34] See Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (David Macey trans.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

[35] Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (Edmund Jephcott trans.) in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926 (Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings eds) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 62–74.

[36] Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” in Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 1, 1927–1930 (Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith eds) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 216–17.

[37] Amit Bansal, “Economic burden of long COVID: macroeconomic, cost-of-ill-ness and microeconomic impacts”, NPJ Primary Care Respiratory Medicine 35(1) (2025): 53.

[38] “Sickhouse”: Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, VOL. 1 (Paul Reitter trans., Paul North and Paul Reitter eds) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024), p. 589. “Hospital”: Marx, Capital, VOL. 1 (Ben Fowkes trans.) (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 797.

[39] Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way in In Search of Lost Time (C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin trans., revised by D. J. Enright), 6 VOLS (New York: Modern Library, 1993), VOL. 1, p. 238.

[40] See Hannah Alberga, “Ontario woman enduring effects of long COVID begins process for medically assisted death”, CTV News (11 July 2022). See also Steve Hill, “Long COVID patient in Canada requests medical assistance in dying due to lack of health and social care”, World Socialist Web Site (17 September 2024).

[41] See Murray Brewster, “Former paralympian tells MPs veterans department offered her assisted death”, CBC News (1 December 2022). See also Ramona Coelho, John Maher, K. Sonu Gaind and Trudo Lemmens, ‘The realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada’, Palliative & Supportive Care 21(5) (2023): 871–78.

[42] Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, p. 397.

[43] Franz Kafka, “The Coming of the Messiah” in Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken, 1961), p. 81.

[44] Walter Benjamin, “Central Park” (Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland trans.) in Selected Writings, Volume 4, p. 184 (translation modified).

[45] Lena Meari, “Sumud: A Palestinian Philosophy of Confrontation in Colonial Prisons,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113:3 (2014): 547–78.

[46] Ali Abdel-Wahab, “On the Limits of Sumud in Genocide: A Message from Gaza,” from the blog series “Genocide in Gaza” and “ Letters from Gaza.” Institute for Palestine Studies. November 13 2023, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1654628.

Feature image: Richard Serra (1938-2024), Snake (1994-1997). Weathering steel, three units, each comprised of two conical sections. Guggenheim Bilbao.

Rebecca Comay