Of Placebo Hopes and Amorous Fear

(Affective) Life at the End of the World

Essay by Déborah Danowski

Fear and hope. Philosophers have dealt at length with these two affects which, they say, exist where there is uncertainty, whether about a good or an evil to come. Seen from further away, we can say that hope is one of the emblematic affects of modernity, founded on the idea that time always follows a single direction, and that this direction eventually leads to a better state than the miserable state we started from. Hope is both, postponement and expectation: of progress, abundance, accomplished civilisation, history, of the kingdom, the promised future. Modernism is intrinsically optimistic, whereas pessimism is usually seen as a retrograde, reactionary disposition, typical of unbelieving nihilists or of primitivists nostalgic for an imaginary origin.

With our passage into the Anthropocene however, some have suggested that we should give up hope, because it makes us believe in false solutions, as if the problems were given and could all be laid out on a table, so that someone – who is never us, never the collectives, civil societies, autonomous peoples – could make them disappear. Therefore, according to these philosophers, only when we abandon hope will we become capable of acting, resisting and fighting those responsible for the destruction.

But fear does not fare much better in the face of criticism. Fear also paralyses and kills, especially when captured by the neoliberal state, which sees great opportunities in moments of catastrophe to get rid of its opponents and all kinds of obstacles and regulations. We could say that fear is a fascist affect, or rather, it is an affect convenient for, and therefore willingly nurtured by, xenophobic nationalism and similar tendencies. In this sense, it is the opposite of hope because it creates fictitious enemies and prejudices, it creates walls, it makes one sick and desperate. Hence environmental activists are often accused of being pessimists and catastrophists. We agree that it is necessary to alert people to the dangers and denounce the interests of big industries and capitalism – but we must be careful with our words and not exaggerate; if we scare too much, we run the risk of demobilising.

These criticisms of both sentiments are justified for good reasons, but other reasons show us that we should not make hasty assessments because affects are not sentimental monoliths, our souls are inclined by multiple, mobile and contradictory motives. Yes, there is a hope, the «placebo hope» (as Ailton Krenak said), which functions as a device of neoliberal capitalism and which, as such, annihilates any feeling of revolt and resistance, any impetus for collective action and for inventing ways out. But there is also another kind of hope. How can we think it should not exist, or it should be resisted when we hear the indigenous activist say: «It is the experience of living today that enables us to think about tomorrow. This is not a placebo hope, but the hope of life itself, which potentiates life.» Or when we read or hear accounts from some survivors of one of the most extreme situations humans have ever been subjected to by other humans. Primo Levi, writer, chemist and Holocaust survivor, tells us of the hope the prisoners kept in order to survive the exhausting day until they could lie down in their squalid beds and briefly dream of their families and the world outside the concentration camp. The hope of these and many other people – and this is how I think of it – need not be a grandiose affect, nor need it presuppose the upward and unidirectional arrow of time. For something to happen in the present, for there to be a way out, all that is needed is a differential effect of hope, which we can ultimately define as any small inclination of the soul toward that which broadens our existence.

And yes, there is a fear that paralyses and kills. But let’s consider: Some thinkers, especially after the Second World War and the atomic bombs dropped by the allies on Japan, considered fear a prophylactic passion, necessary, even fundamental to sensitise us and take us out of the state of paralysis, giving us a chance not to annul, but to postpone, literally, the end of the world. Philosopher and poet Günther Anders has a beautiful expression for this affect: «amorous fear» (Günther Anders: Die Zerstörung unserer Zukunft: Ein Lesebuch, 2011), the fear that takes us to the streets, the fear for others and for the next generations. A collective and political fear, which is also a way to reclaim this affect, which has been stolen by the extreme right and the statecapitalist police regime.

The image Anders has in mind is that of a total nuclear war, which would bring about the abrupt and absolute end of the world. Since then, we have been experiencing a relatively slower end of the world, and maybe this is what allows us to still think that it is an ethical choice, the one between scaring or not scaring, depressing or not depressing, dosing the words or telling the whole truth.

Faced with accusations of catastrophism, I have always asked myself: If I can be afraid, depressed, saddened, why would I be better equipped than others, people in general, the famous commonsense man, the one who only has opinions, who is an easy prey to ideologies, who does not really know, who does not know how to think?

Two events over the last decade have put a twist on the idea that you should not scare: The first was the movement of young climate activists, especially those inspired by Greta Thunberg, who said: We want you to be afraid, we want you to feel what we are feeling. Now, when young people say that they are afraid and that it is necessary to be afraid, who are «we» to say we need to temper our words? Let us also remember the words of the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa: «Whites do not fear as we do being crushed by the falling sky. But one day, they will be afraid perhaps as much as we are!» (Davi Kopenawa & Bruce Albert: The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, 2013)

But the criticism is not limited to questioning the affects that we can or should generate in others; it also condemns our own feelings, as if being afraid or being hopeful expressed a moral weakness.

Then came the second event, the Covid19 pandemic. It came with terrible scenes from Wuhan and soon after from Italy, Ecuador and other countries, with warnings from the WHO, with airspace restrictions and lockdowns. It also came full of adversatives about whether or not it was to be taken seriously ... And, especially in the US and in Brazil, it came together with the policy of active denial by the government. But we quickly learned that in order to protect ourselves and others we needed empathy and fear. Fear of contaminating those close to us, and fear of getting sick and dying without assistance. Day after day, as the number of victims increased, epidemiologists and other scientists presented us with frightening facts, projections and appeals. When catastrophe strikes, there is no time to mince words. Those who were not afraid, or at least pretended not to be, were Trump and Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, the indifferent, the genocidal, and his unconditional supporters. You have to be a coward not to be afraid. Amorous fear, by contrast, both keeps us at home and drives us into the streets to fight the politics of death. Once again, it is Krenak who expresses this idea in a remarkably lucid way: «What inspired me to put ideas together in the book Ideas for Postponing the End of the World were visions I received from my ancestors, it was the fact that I inhabit a collective world. Theirs is a perspective of a world that only makes sense if I am cohabiting it with other beings. This is what gives me the joy of being in it. The joy of being in the world is sharing. If one extinguishes the other species, the world becomes a sad place, sadder and sadder.» (Ailton Krenak: Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, 2020)

Something similar has been happening in resonance with the ecological collapse under way. Let me just mention a few more sentiments that have come up repeatedly in reports, either from people and peoples, who are themselves already suffering the impacts of climate change, or from scientists. The Inuit of Canada describe the milder climate as «devastating», «depressing», «frustrating», «sad», «frightening». The Aborigines of the Upper Hunter Region of eastern Australia report a kind of sadness for which the neologism «solastalgia» has been suggested: faced with the reality of their millenniaold land devastated by openpit coal mines, factory pollution and drought, solastalgia refers to «homesickness [unlike nostalgia] one feels when one is still at home». The same people speak of the feeling of losing an arm, of being caught in a trap. Scientists confess not only their sadness and desolation at witnessing the death of corals, the silence of fields depopulated of insects and birds, the melting of gigantic ice sheets, but also their frustration and depression at the inaction of governments and big business to mitigate future impacts despite their warnings.

The xapiri spirits get angry, as the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa tells us: «If all those who make the xapiri dance die, the whites will be alone and helpless in their land, devastated and invaded by a multitude of evil beings who will devour them without respite. (...) This is what may happen one day if all the shamans die and if the xapiri, enraged by the death of their fathers, flee away from the humans. Then, all that will be left in the forest, in nature, will be the evil ne wãri beings, who are already warning and threatening: ‹Ma! If the Yanomami disappear, we will stay here to avenge them! We will not let the whites who devoured them survive!› This is what my xapiri sometimes tell me in my sleep, after having drunk yãkoana all day.»

Anger, rage, desire for revenge, but also joy. It is a mistake to think that we have to choose what to feel, what feeling to awaken and cultivate in others, as if there were two distinct planes, the perceptive and the affective, and as if they were determined simply by our individual will and reason. Affects are not atomic and monolithic blocks, but unstable, mobile and moving mixtures, mostly transient as are the perceptions, expressions of the relational multiplicity of the cosmos. Affects and perceptions require life, and there is no life but collective life. The danger lies precisely in their separation and immobilisation, their fixation on a single object. And affective fixation occurs at the very moment when the perceptual flow is interrupted, when we lose our ability to create portals, channels between different perspectives. When our existence shrinks to such an extent that it remains only a small, solitary spark in a dark and evanescent world.