{"id":166876,"date":"2024-03-05T10:15:50","date_gmt":"2024-03-05T15:15:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=166876"},"modified":"2024-03-04T14:42:49","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T19:42:49","slug":"dead-or-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/","title":{"rendered":"Dead or Alive"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Girl buried with a crown of ceramic flowers, Patras, Greece, ca. 300\u2013400 B.C.E.<\/small> From the Museum of Patras. Photograph by Fred Martin Kaaby, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

What do you have to give up in order to feel alive? To answer this question we need to have some sense of what aliveness might mean to us, of what we have to do to feel alive, and how we know when we are feeling this seemingly most obvious and ordinary thing (at its most abstract we might be wondering, as a kind of guideline, what our criteria are for feeling alive). It may seem odd to think that feeling alive is not only an issue\u2014is something that needs to be assessed\u2014but requires a sacrifice of sorts, or is indeed a sacrificial act; that to feel alive involves us in some kind of renunciation. It is, of course, glibly and not so glibly true that in order to feel alive one might have to give up, say, one\u2019s habitual tactics and techniques for deadening oneself, the anaesthesias of everyday life that can seem to make it livable. At its most minimal, after all, it is not unusual for people to feel profoundly ambivalent about being fully alive to the climate of terror and delight in which we live. In order to answer this question you would, of course, need to have some sense of what aliveness means, if anything. How do you feel alive, and how do you know if you feel it?<\/p>\n

Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist literary critic, wrote in his famous essay \u201cArt as Technique\u201d of 1917:<\/p>\n

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one\u2019s wife and the fear of war \u2026 And art [through its defamiliarizing practices] exists that one may recover the sensation of life \u2026 The technique of art is to make objects \u201cunfamiliar,\u201d to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is, perhaps, an ironic inevitability integral to what Shklovsky proposes that art as a process and practice of defamiliarization is now all too familiar to us. Whether or not we agree with Walter Pater\u2019s remark that \u201cour failure is to form habits,\u201d when Shklovsky invokes the whole idea of recovering the sensation of life, he reminds us\u2014and clearly we need reminding\u2014that the sensation of life can be lost. And he implies, without making this as explicit as he might, that we also want to relinquish or even sometimes attack the sensation of life; as though, as I say, in psychoanalytic language, we are ambivalent about the sensation of life and can happily, as it were, dispense with it. <\/p>\n

So the point of art being, as we say, \u201cdifficult\u201d is that it resists our easy appropriation of it. We can\u2019t use it to consolidate our prejudices, or reinforce our assumptions and presumptions. Art of any value requires the kind of attention we don\u2019t give to the taken-for-granted, that we don\u2019t give to all those things we think we know. Art, in this sense, unsettles and disrupts preconceptions, it waylays our anticipation, and it does this by increasing the difficulty and length of perception; art resists and sabotages our familiar habits of perception. The wish, the drive to familiarize, Shklovsky suggests, is insistent, the insistent as second nature. And the implication is that this drive to familiarize is like a drive towards death, towards the death-in-life that contemporary reality was felt by some people to be (we take note, needless to say, that this essay by a Russian critic was written in 1917).<\/p>\n

It is entirely understandable that when Freud proposed in 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle<\/em>, that there was a death instinct, a \u201cdestructive drive\u201d that was continually at war in us with a life instinct, it was met with, and continues to meet with, considerable skepticism (the idea of a death \u201cinstinct\u201d might seem like a contradiction in terms). And yet clearly\u2014as is evident in the work of Shklovsky and Freud and many others\u2014there was in those times and places in Europe a strong sense of the deathliness of modern life. And it is not incidental that the aesthetics of defamiliarization and the anxiety about human destructiveness has stayed with us; is, indeed, part of our sensation of life. If these are analogous to death\u2014familiarization and destructiveness\u2014if these inclinations are what we are up against, for whatever reason, what then is life, what is a sensation of life or a life instinct? These, after all, are matters of life and death.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Science, of course, helps us with our familiarization. By providing descriptions of so-called laws of nature, through the promotion of causality as an abiding principle, in the development of deductive and inductive logic, in its by now familiar methods of verification and falsification, our realm of familiarity\u2014of what we can claim to know and take for granted\u2014has increased exponentially in the last four hundred years. Indeed one definition of progress would be the extending of the empire of the familiar. And one of our more familiar forms of familiarity\u2014or rather, one of our taken-for-granted means of familiarization\u2014has been the art and science of generalization, of the abstraction called categorization. Though much parodied, and mocked and critiqued\u2014by, for shorthand, let\u2019s say Borges and Foucault\u2014our capacity for generalization, for making links, for finding things in common between disparate phenomena, has been our supreme habit and talent; for preferring sameness to difference, abstraction to what Blake called \u201cminute particulars.\u201d What, as we shall see, the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls \u201cthe fascist state of mind\u201d is the militant, paranoid imposition of sameness (on the self and on others), the terror of difference requiring its abolition. Indeed psychoanalysis, I take it, is useful as both the symptom and the cure for our will to generalization.<\/p>\n

It is, indeed, one of the by now familiar paradoxes of psychoanalysis that the theory and clinical practice most committed to the singularity and individual history of the individual speaks only in generalities. Whether psychoanalysts speak of the unconscious, of development, of the self as either centered or decentered, of symptoms and diagnostic categories, and even of psychoanalytic technique, the always somewhat eccentric, idiosyncratic\u2014indeed genetically unique\u2014individual is inevitably described as an example of something apparently more or less already known; the individual is described, that is to say, in relation to a set of putative norms, the normative standards that must inevitably organize any given culture, and that operate both consciously and unconsciously on behalf of the people that comprise that culture.<\/p>\n

In psychoanalytic writing, the individual is in a category; psychoanalytic theory doesn\u2019t, and can\u2019t, dispense with categories but simply tries to make them more inclusive. The people who turn up in psychoanalytic case histories or clinical vignettes may be more like characters in novels or short stories than simply allegorical characters, but they are there as representative people; even if what they represent is not quite as clear as it might seem. If the individual in psychoanalysis is not being fitted into a pre-existing description, he will simply become the pretext for a new category, adding to the stock of available psychoanalytic reality (on the whole you can\u2019t have a diagnostic category of one). So-called human nature as it supposedly is, or supposedly should be, is the measure. And what makes the individual an individual is the ways in which she deviates from, or improvises within, or modifies the available norms of so-called human nature as we have come to describe it; how she becomes the exception that proves the rule, and also, of course, how she abides by the rules in her own particular way. It is always, to put it simply, the compliant and the non-compliant self that is being assessed. Psychoanalysis is inevitably alert, as what Barthes called \u201ca science of the singular,\u201d to what creates distinction in both senses\u2014what renders someone or something distinct, somehow separated out, differentiated from the run-of-the-mill; and what impresses us as unusual, out of the ordinary, as we say. Psychoanalysis, unavoidably perhaps, strikingly draws to our attention the very different allure of the language of sameness and the language of difference, each with their different kinds of reassurance, inspiration and divisiveness.<\/p>\n

So we might say, by way of oversimplification, that for character we go to fiction and poems and plays; for explanations of and generalizations about character we go to psychoanalysis. And in this sense\u2014in the overriding commitment to generalization and the prediction it supposedly makes possible\u2014psychoanalysis is no different to medicine, or indeed to many contemporary sciences. Descriptions are required that by definition do not solely fit the individual case. The individual who is broadly speaking the same as other people is the individual who is of interest to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts write about people who seem to speak the same language; what Freud was to call the language of symptoms; what Lacan would call the unconscious structured as a language. And in this sense psychoanalysis reflects in its theorizing, if not always in its clinical practice, a familiar everyday experience; we notice all the time how easily and often we are aware of what Lacan calls the \u201cabsolute otherness\u201d of other people, and how often enough other people are also felt to be somehow more or less similar to oneself.<\/p>\n

We do, after all, share a language, through our upbringing and education as members of any given culture; and yet, as Lacan suggests in writing about James Joyce, we also to some extent are able to invent the language we use, giving it our own distinct idiom, our particular rhythms and vocabularies. Everyone, in any given society, uses the same language, but slightly differently; we can improvise within the given system of the language we inherit. Language is a sometimes surprisingly flexible regime. Joyce is clearly both exemplary and representative for Lacan for how we can do new things with words; and this has something to do with aliveness. \u201cOne chooses to speak the language that one effectively speaks,\u201d Lacan writes. \u201cOne creates a language in so far as one at every instance gives it a sense, one gives it a little nudge, without which language would not be alive.\u201d A little nudge seems a minimal thing; choosing and creating a language seems rather grandiose in its ambitions. And notably it is the idea of aliveness that Lacan has recourse to.<\/p>\n

We are not all, as common sense will be keen to tell us, James Joyce. But what common sense is, by the same token, reminding us is that language that is or seems alive can be, or sometimes seem, a comparative rarity; aliveness in language may be in short supply and so we may wonder what it is in ourselves that might want to deaden language; or to put it the other way around, what the fear of aliveness in language may be a fear of. And yet a nudge is not itself a grand or dramatic gesture; a nudge, we could think, might be well within most people\u2019s range. And so, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we could surmise that there is a defense against nudging, against giving the language even a slight nudge. There is a defense against aliveness in language. And the study of literature, we might say, is always broaching this conflict between the aliveness and deathliness, or deadliness, of language.<\/p>\n

But in Lacan\u2019s view, language would not be alive without these nudges\u2014without these idiosyncratic twists and turns that each of us can to some extent make. And we should note here that he writes of the aliveness of the language, not of its users, and this is stranger than it might at first seem; language, after all, is neither alive nor dead; the aliveness that it has comes from us, it is our aliveness. And this aliveness is associated for Lacan with, to some extent, and however limited and circumscribed, choosing the language one speaks, creating a language by giving it a little nudge. In this description our aliveness\u2014and presumably our deadness\u2014is in our language. That is one place we can both find it, and think and talk about it.<\/p>\n

It is worth wondering, for example, what kind of aliveness and what kind of deadness we enjoy in language. We can find it there, in language, among other places. And this aliveness is somehow precarious; not to mention the fact that Lacan is using here a language he has always, as a psychoanalyst, been averse to\u2014the language of existentialism, the idea of choosing a language. As though to talk about aliveness in language\u2014and you could think he has been talking of nothing else in his promotion of what he calls \u201cfull speech\u201d\u2014has slightly undone him. There is then the language we are possessed by and that possesses us\u2014man is the animal, Lacan writes, with his familiar melodramatic panache, captured and tortured by language\u2014and now, in late Lacan, there is the language we can create and choose. Lacan should have said at this moment, if he wasn\u2019t so determined to be fascinating, that we can have this both ways: we can use language and it can use us, and the point and not the problem is the contradiction. But as I say, when Lacan starts talking about aliveness in language, things begin to open up, and aliveness becomes a term of art for him.<\/p>\n

For Lacan it is through Joyce\u2019s unique and exceptional talent that we can see this. I want to suggest then in this essay that our aliveness\u2014here for Lacan linked with something about individuality, or singularity, and something about language\u2014can be peculiarly difficult for us to be fully alive to. If aliveness is an issue for us, then deadness, and all the less binary alternatives to aliveness, must also be exercising us. What aliveness and its alternatives might be may perhaps be among our abiding preoccupations, among what Borges calls our \u201cessential perplexities.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Describing the idea, \u201creduced to its essence,\u201d that prompted his novel The Wings of the Dove<\/em>, Henry James wrote in his preface to the New York edition that it was<\/p>\n

of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world; aware moreover of the condemnation and passionately desiring to \u2018put in\u2019 before extinction as many of the finer vibrations as possible, and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

James writes of his doomed heroine\u2019s wish to \u201cwrest from her shrinking hour still as much of the fruit of life as possible;\u201d of her \u201cpassionate yearning to live while she might.\u201d If the project is to achieve \u201chowever briefly and brokenly\u201d the sense of having lived, then this sense may be hard won and even perhaps fleeting (and if you have a fleeting or fugitive sense of having lived, how much can you trust that sense?). James\u2019s heroine in the novel, Milly Theale, is confronted, as we are as readers, with the salient question of what it is, or might be, to have the sense of having lived. And what it would be to live fully, and in Milly Theale\u2019s case, and not only hers, to live fully in the light and dark of forthcoming death. The question of how we would know if we had lived; of what, as it were, our criteria might be for this. What do we have to do, and to have done, what has to have happened to us, that would give us this enigmatic sense of having lived, or as having lived as fully as we might? What do we take the fruit of life to be if we want as much of it as possible, reminded as James knows we must be of the fruit Adam and Eve ate in the garden (which of course gave them less life and not more)?<\/p>\n

There is the suggestion here that the sense of having lived, that life itself, may be a strangely elusive thing. Indeed, later in the novel, the hero, Merton Densher, reflects on this strange elusiveness of life that seems to haunt and drive the narrative: \u201cLife, he logically opined, was what he must somehow arrange to annex and possess.\u201d The implication here being that life might get away from him, that it can somehow escape us; that even though we are to all intents and purposes alive, we have to arrange to annex and possess life as though it is something we must colonize, or claim, or appropriate. That life has to be invaded and subjugated as though it is a foreign country, not somewhere we are already living in. Life as elsewhere, something we have to get to, or find, or seek out. But life is presented in The Wings of the Dove\u2014<\/em>a novel whose key terms everything<\/em> and nothing<\/em> are threaded through the book\u2014as an obscure object of desire. The sense of having lived, and the sense of living\u2014both of which might seem to be self-evident\u2014are the object of James\u2019s skepticism in this book. If we don\u2019t know what it is to have lived, what do we know?<\/p>\n

It would be odd to say\u2014though, as we shall see, Freud did say it\u2014that we also want less life, that it is our deadness that we also desire. That we also do not want to live or to have lived. Clearly both Lacan in his celebration of Joyce (and language) and James in his presentation of Milly Theale are promoting aliveness and the sense of having lived as both questions and, more optimistically, objects of desire, if not actually the object of desire. But it is of course as a question that it perplexes us\u2014what might stop us giving language a slight nudge?\u2014a question not answered, I think, by lack of talent. And what might stop us feeling we have lived, or are indeed living? And how do we know what this would be? Where did we get our ideas about this from?<\/p>\n

Indeed, what the nudge of language\u2014the choosing and creating of our language\u2014and the sense of having lived have in common is the sense of having to satisfy what is taken to be an essential individual need; partly of making my language and my life my own, whatever that might mean. But also something that could be described as meeting a demand, as though some authoritative figure\u2014what Lacan would call the Big Other\u2014has said, \u201cYou must make your own language, as far as you can, you must have the sense of having lived, as far as you can.\u201d And a moment\u2019s reflection will show us that these particular demands, made on us and made on ourselves, when they are not inspiring may be a lot of other things; they may, for example, be puzzling, or tyrannical, or absurd. And one thing psychoanalysis can be particularly useful for is providing a language for, a way of talking about, our personal and cultural ideals; both their provenance and their history, and how and why we have come to value them as we do.<\/p>\n

Most of us probably want to be able to use language in our own way and not merely conform to it as though it were a regime; and most of us, enough of the time, want to live, and to have lived. And yet, of course, these ideals, and ambitions, and aspirations are of their time and place; and are things only a language-using animal would be preoccupied with. We assume that animals and plants are just living and not wondering what they are doing. We may wonder when and for whom the question of whether one has lived began to be a preoccupation; and indeed when and how language as something we use and are used by became of interest (and it is of interest, as I say, to find Lacan, long a promoter of the idea that we are the victims of and victimized by language, here, in his later work, speaking up for the alternative view; as though wanting to be free of it). It is not incidental historically that both Lacan and James, in their very different ways, and from very different cultures and personal histories, are speaking up for what we have learned to call individualism (or more benignly, idiosyncrasy, or eccentricity).<\/p>\n

The term individualism<\/em> was clearly coined reactively to an earlier notion that it was possible to be a member of a society without being considered, or needing to be considered, an individual. Psychoanalysis as a modern invention can\u2019t help but trade in ideas about individualism; about how you might begin to describe what an individual is, and about what the allure of individualism might be, and about the individual\u2019s freedom to find loopholes in her culture\u2019s normative demands (one of the normative demands is for the individual to be normal enough: that is, recognizable, identifiable and describable). Psychoanalysis is clearly about how the modern individual fits and doesn\u2019t fit and misfits into their culture (the new psychoanalytic patient, one might say, is the casualty, for all sorts of reason, of his culture). In psychoanalysis the originality of the individual, his individualism, is taken for granted\u2014each person\u2019s appearance, character and history is, to us, significantly different and distinctive\u2014but there is nothing original, in psychoanalytic terms, about what makes for this originality; the preconditions for each person\u2019s originality are generic\u2014originality is a function of uniformity and conformity. What distinguishes people from each other comes out of an apparently recognized common condition, and a recognized common constitution (sometimes called human nature, though human nature seems to take a dazzling variety of forms). We take it for granted now, in other words, that there are rules for, and criteria about, what a person is and can be in any given culture (the parameters of what it is possible for a person to be are largely set).<\/p>\n

We may have a strong sense of the distinctiveness of each person, but it is all too easy for individuals to disappear in theory. This essay is about how some psychoanalysts have tried to hold on to something unprescribed and unprescribable about people in the unavoidably abstracted and generalizing language of psychoanalysis. And how notions of aliveness and deadness have tended to figure in some of these accounts. As though describing what aliveness might be\u2014how, as it were, we might recognize it, what makes for aliveness\u2014has become a peculiarly modern preoccupation. When Freud famously wrote that the individual wants to die in his own way, he was speaking of, perhaps ironically, possessive individualism.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In a comment on his paper \u201cThe Use of an Object,\u201d Donald Winnicott writes that \u201cin this vitally important early stage the \u2018destructive\u2019 aliveness of the individual is simply a symptom of being alive, and has nothing to do with an individual\u2019s anger at the frustrations that belong to meeting the reality principle.\u201d The theory that Winnicott is commenting on in his paper is of course of interest here. But for the purposes of this essay I want to point out what he is trying to get to with the phrases \u201cvitally important,\u201d \u201cdestructive aliveness,\u201d and \u201ca symptom of being alive.\u201d It might be a sign of aliveness, he suggests, to want to try to destroy things and people, and this destructive aliveness is a symptom of being alive, being alive having its own symptoms. How do we know if the child, and later the adult, is alive? They have a destructive aliveness, in Winnicott\u2019s view. But aliveness here, again, is not something self-evident; we go on describing what Winnicott calls the symptoms of being alive, the intelligible signs. He thinks he is doing empirical science here, simply describing in a new way something that already exists. He doesn\u2019t say, and he wouldn\u2019t, this is what I want aliveness to be, these for me are signs of life because this is the kind of aliveness I want, this is the kind of world I want to be alive in. He doesn\u2019t assume too rigorously, as Freud did, that perception is distorted by wish.<\/p>\n

How does the psychoanalytic subject as scientist do science? Wishfully, both despite and because of his psychoanalytically informed sensibility. But the question I am using Winnicott, among others, to ask is: Why would anyone be interested in aliveness; or, indeed, in whether they have lived? What is an interest in aliveness an interest in? What makes this word come into play? How has it come about that we need to know whether we are alive? And what might be the consequences of such knowledge, were we to have it? In what sense, to ask the pragmatic question, does aliveness and the knowledge of being alive, and of having lived, get us the life we want? The implication of all this is, of course, that we might be unconscious, we might be radically unaware of how dead we are and want to be. When Freud writes that protection against stimuli is more important for the individual than receptivity to stimuli, he is making us think about precisely this.<\/p>\n

When I was taught in school that, as the critic F. R. Leavis insisted, D. H. Lawrence was on the side of life, I knew, as an adolescent, what this meant. Now I think Leavis\u2019s formulation is inspired for all the questions it must beg. Apart, of course, from the obvious but pressing one: If you are not on the side of life, what are you on the side of? All of Winnicott\u2019s writing is organized around the idea of aliveness\u2014of what is supposedly on the side of life\u2014and we need to see both what he is using the word to do, and why he might have needed to import this particular term into psychoanalysis, which had been able to do without it. Aliveness, as opposed, so to speak, to life, doesn\u2019t, needless to say, figure in any of the available dictionaries of psychoanalysis; and in its very ordinariness it has never become a technical term in psychoanalysis, nor part of the jargon of the profession. So what does the idea of aliveness add to psychoanalysis\u2014and so to our lives if we happen to be interested in psychoanalysis?<\/p>\n

When, for example, Winnicott writes in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment<\/em> that \u201chere is but little point in formulating a True Self idea except for the purpose of trying to understand the False Self, because it does no more than collect together the details of the experience of aliveness,\u201d he is telling us that his definition of what he calls the True Self, the non-compliant self of spontaneity and desire and singularity, the self committed to play rather than adaptation or, indeed, to compliance, involves no more and no less than collecting together the details of the experience of aliveness. And these details of the experience of aliveness are everything the so-called False Self is not. This experience of aliveness\u2014essentially in Winnicott the experience of noncompliance\u2014is for Winnicott something essential. Without it he says there is only a sense of futility, of one\u2019s life not being worth living.<\/p>\n

The details of the experience of aliveness are something like a sustaining accumulation of spontaneous, uncalculated, and unrehearsed experiences that nurture a person\u2019s sense of possibility and pleasure. They are clearly, for Winnicott, things we need to collect. So he devotes a lot of his work to understanding and describing the preconditions for the seclusion, overprotection, or even sabotage of the True Self. Aliveness, the more fully alive self, in this story is something we are duly protective of and perhaps unduly frightened of (and for). Our aliveness is assumed here to be something very vulnerable and precarious. And if our aliveness is not robust\u2014not something we can really take for granted\u2014then what is it? Or rather, what is it like? If the details of our experience of aliveness need to be collected\u2014with the implication of gathered up and stored and looked after\u2014it must be because we might forget about them, or discard them, or not take them seriously.<\/p>\n

It seems strange that we could forget our aliveness\u2014our being alive\u2014and yet this is what Winnicott is inviting us to consider. We haven\u2019t taken on, or taken in, or realized the vital significance for our ongoing lives of these experiences of aliveness. And indeed there may be an ordinary sense in which we need to keep in mind what or who does actually make us feel alive; and how unwittingly keen we might be to not feel alive, and so forget about it all. We don\u2019t have to take it for granted that aliveness is the thing\u2014that it is some kind of essential be-all and do-all of our lives\u2014but we can consider it; and consider what not considering it involves us in. Aliveness may become an issue, culturally and historically, when we feel that there is so much in our private and political lives that we cannot bear to be alive to. If we have become, if we have made ourselves, great familiarizers and generalizers, we have been actively and determinedly narrowing our minds.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Freud was alert to the paradoxes of certainty; the ways in which certainty narrows the mind often in the name of truth and liberation. From a psychoanalytic point of view, what the individual is always suffering from, one way and another, is anxieties about exchange, and the dependence it inevitably entails. The problem, as Winnicott once put it, of being isolated without being insulated. Insulation, immunity, purity are the preoccupations of the self under threat. \u201cAn enquiry which proceeds like a monologue, without interruption,\u201d Freud writes in The Future of an Illusion<\/em>, his 1927 text about religion, \u201cis not altogether free from danger. One is too easily tempted into pushing aside thoughts which threaten to break into it, and in exchange one is left with a feeling of uncertainty which in the end one tries to keep down by over-decisiveness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over-decisiveness here\u2014a simulated sense of conviction\u2014is a version of familiarization; when I am being over-decisive I am saying to myself and others, \u201cI know what I think and I know what I\u2019m doing;\u201d which the psychoanalyst can redescribe as someone in an omniscient state of mind to deny the unconscious. A monologue without interruption is a world without other people; and interruption in Shklovsky\u2019s terms is the only cure for familiarization. What Freud is describing here as the uninterruptible monologue is an anxious and determined refusal of the complexity of one\u2019s own mind and the minds of others. Because the obvious question here is: What is this uninterruptible monologue in the service of? What is it a self-cure for? In the terms of this essay it is a self-cure for defamiliarization, a self-cure for aliveness. Exclusionary in the service of survival, it is essentially self-starving.<\/p>\n

In a commentary on this already quoted passage of Freud in his paper \u201cThe Fascist State of Mind\u201d:<\/p>\n

An enquiry which proceeds like a monologue, without interruption, is not altogether free from danger. One is too easily tempted into pushing aside thoughts which threaten to break into it, and in exchange one is left with a feeling of uncertainty which in the end one tries to keep down by over-decisiveness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Christopher Bollas emphasizes that a person is forever haunted by what he is excluding. But this picture of impermeability\u2014of an anxiety about violation\u2014is what Bollas calls a \u201csimplifying violence;\u201d it can even be, he writes, an attempt to \u201crecuperate from one\u2019s own destruction of the humane parts of the self in the interests of survival.\u201d One\u2019s aliveness, one\u2019s being alive, can depend on the vitalizing effect of conflict; in the wish, in a fascist state of mind, to abolish conflict, the individual kills off his aliveness. It is integral to the dynamic of the fascist state of mind, Bollas writes, to \u201cempty the mind of all opposition.\u201d One of the traits of what he describes as \u201cintellectual genocide\u201d is \u201ccategorization by aggregation\u201d\u2014I am calling it more simply generalization\u2014which he refers to as \u201cthe moment when the individual is transferred to a mass in which he loses his identity. It may be ordinary, \u2018Oh, but of course, she\u2019s a Freudian.\u2019 It may be permissible, if dicey: \u2018Well, of course, she\u2019s ill,\u2019 or \u2018Well, he is a psychopath.\u2019 Or it may be an extreme act of lumping together: \u2018He\u2019s a Jew.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

What we see in these examples is the diminution of difference, of singularity; the dehumanization of individuals if what we take the human to be is something beyond a certain point ungeneralizable, uncategorizable; what Bollas calls aptly the act of lumping together both devitalizes people and apparently familiarizes them. What is lost in this categorization is the individual and idiosyncratic details of aliveness; details that virtually by definition cannot be generalized or categorized. Like Lacan\u2019s idea of the nudge given to language to make it distinctively alive, aliveness and idiosyncrasy go together. Once again it becomes a question\u2014though its binary quality should make us suspicious\u2014of how we tell the difference between aliveness and deadness; as though we take it that this, fundamentally, is the repertoire.<\/p>\n

In what Bollas calls \u201cthe ordinary functioning parts of the mind,\u201d<\/p>\n

it is rather like a parliamentary order with instincts, memories, needs, anxieties, and object responses finding representatives in the psyche for mental processing. When under the pressure of some particularly intense drive (such as greed), or force (such as envy), or anxiety (such as the fear of mutilation) this internal world can indeed lose its parliamentary function and evolve into a less representative internal order.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The image is that in a state of emergence\u2014greed, envy, anxiety and of course desire\u2014a gross autocratic oversimplification of the self takes over; and the paradoxical fact is that we then deaden ourselves in order to survive; survival, that is to say, is preferred to aliveness. So aliveness, we might say\u2014to use a more traditional, less Darwinian, vocabulary\u2014is to do with flourishing, living our fullest life. But when survival is the project we can only do it by deadening ourselves; deathliness makes life viable. In Bollas\u2019s terms, parliamentary democracy of conflict and conciliating and compromising rival claims is a picture of aliveness; fascism is a desperate and murderous deadening.<\/p>\n

What then might be the preconditions for not deadening ourselves, or not needing to deaden ourselves? Clearly one of the preconditions must be, absurd as it might sound, knowing the difference between aliveness and deadness in ourselves; and having good reasons for wanting and desiring aliveness as a value, as an object of desire.<\/p>\n

When we are talking about the sensation of life, or the sense of having lived, or collecting the details of the experience of aliveness, we are trying to give an account of something surprisingly elusive; something, consciously at least, most of us would want to celebrate and encourage despite, as it were, all the evidence to the contrary. There is on the one hand the confident assertion of where life and aliveness is\u2014in defamiliarization, in language, in idiolect, in spontaneity, in surprise, in the life instincts\u2014and then in counterpoint to this the question of why any of this occurs to us, or needs to be articulated. For animals, life is the living of it, the surviving of it, for the requisite time. But for us, life is sustained, or not, by words about life; life as something we can live or something we might find we are not actually living, or might turn out not to have lived. As though it may not always be exactly death we fear but the death in life we might find ourselves living or having lived. As though one could live a life that could turn out not to have been one.<\/p>\n

When you are dying, like Milly Theale in James\u2019s novel, you could have the sense in retrospect that you haven\u2019t lived; but what about if you are young and not yet apparently dying but are wanting to live and to have lived, what can you do? What, if anything, is it possible to do to ensure that you are actually living? In the absence of any hard-and-fast information and advice\u2014and in the absence of any kind of consensus (or shared criteria) about what it is to live and to have lived\u2014all we can do, if we are interested, is ask these questions and see what, if anything, we want to do.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From<\/em>\u00a0On Giving Up\u00a0by Adam Phillips. Forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March 2024.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of many books, including <\/em>On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>On Balance.\u00a0He is also coauthor, with the historian Barbara Taylor, of\u00a0<\/em>On Kindness.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf we don\u2019t know what it is to have lived, what do we know?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2455,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68760],"tags":[1962,8275,67827,34191,10034,17144],"class_list":["post-166876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-psychoanalysis","tag-adam-phillips","tag-d-w-winnicott","tag-featured","tag-jacques-lacan","tag-lacan","tag-psychoanalysis"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDead or Alive by Adam Phillips<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 5, 2024 \u2013 \u201cIf we don\u2019t know what it is to have lived, what do we know?\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dead or Alive by Adam Phillips\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 5, 2024 \u2013 \u201cIf we don\u2019t know what it is to have lived, what do we know?\u201d\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2024-03-05T15:15:50+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1024px-girl-buried-with-a-crown-of-ceramic-myrtle-flowers.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1024\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"680\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Adam Phillips\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Adam Phillips\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"31 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Adam Phillips\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8b02c20348c9a8a1d5e073414362f533\"},\"headline\":\"Dead or Alive\",\"datePublished\":\"2024-03-05T15:15:50+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/\"},\"wordCount\":6282,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1024px-girl-buried-with-a-crown-of-ceramic-myrtle-flowers.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Adam Phillips\",\"D.W. Winnicott\",\"Featured\",\"Jacques Lacan\",\"Lacan\",\"psychoanalysis\"],\"articleSection\":[\"On Psychoanalysis\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/\",\"name\":\"Dead or Alive by Adam Phillips\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1024px-girl-buried-with-a-crown-of-ceramic-myrtle-flowers.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2024-03-05T15:15:50+00:00\",\"description\":\"March 5, 2024 \u2013 \u201cIf we don\u2019t know what it is to have lived, what do we know?\u201d\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1024px-girl-buried-with-a-crown-of-ceramic-myrtle-flowers.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1024px-girl-buried-with-a-crown-of-ceramic-myrtle-flowers.jpg\",\"width\":1024,\"height\":680,\"caption\":\"English: Girl buried with a crown of ceramic flowers. Patras, 300-400 B.C. From the Museum of Patras. Fred Martin Kaaby, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Dead or Alive\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"description\":\"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"width\":696,\"height\":696,\"caption\":\"The Paris Review\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\",\"https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview\",\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8b02c20348c9a8a1d5e073414362f533\",\"name\":\"Adam Phillips\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f5ba9fac659495dd03b62dd932cd5c509acfb263cd4f52ef46e0186de40d4955?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f5ba9fac659495dd03b62dd932cd5c509acfb263cd4f52ef46e0186de40d4955?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Adam Phillips\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/aphillips\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Dead or Alive by Adam Phillips","description":"March 5, 2024 \u2013 \u201cIf we don\u2019t know what it is to have lived, what do we know?\u201d","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Dead or Alive by Adam Phillips","og_description":"March 5, 2024 \u2013 \u201cIf we don\u2019t know what it is to have lived, what do we know?\u201d","og_url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/","og_site_name":"The Paris Review","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","article_published_time":"2024-03-05T15:15:50+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1024,"height":680,"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1024px-girl-buried-with-a-crown-of-ceramic-myrtle-flowers.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Adam Phillips","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@parisreview","twitter_site":"@parisreview","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Adam Phillips","Est. reading time":"31 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/"},"author":{"name":"Adam Phillips","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8b02c20348c9a8a1d5e073414362f533"},"headline":"Dead or Alive","datePublished":"2024-03-05T15:15:50+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/"},"wordCount":6282,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1024px-girl-buried-with-a-crown-of-ceramic-myrtle-flowers.jpg","keywords":["Adam Phillips","D.W. Winnicott","Featured","Jacques Lacan","Lacan","psychoanalysis"],"articleSection":["On Psychoanalysis"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/","name":"Dead or Alive by Adam Phillips","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1024px-girl-buried-with-a-crown-of-ceramic-myrtle-flowers.jpg","datePublished":"2024-03-05T15:15:50+00:00","description":"March 5, 2024 \u2013 \u201cIf we don\u2019t know what it is to have lived, what do we know?\u201d","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1024px-girl-buried-with-a-crown-of-ceramic-myrtle-flowers.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/1024px-girl-buried-with-a-crown-of-ceramic-myrtle-flowers.jpg","width":1024,"height":680,"caption":"English: Girl buried with a crown of ceramic flowers. Patras, 300-400 B.C. From the Museum of Patras. Fred Martin Kaaby, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/05\/dead-or-alive\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Dead or Alive"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","name":"The Paris Review","description":"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization","name":"The Paris Review","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","width":696,"height":696,"caption":"The Paris Review"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8b02c20348c9a8a1d5e073414362f533","name":"Adam Phillips","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f5ba9fac659495dd03b62dd932cd5c509acfb263cd4f52ef46e0186de40d4955?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f5ba9fac659495dd03b62dd932cd5c509acfb263cd4f52ef46e0186de40d4955?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Adam Phillips"},"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/aphillips\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2455"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166876"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":166990,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166876\/revisions\/166990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}