I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
Write about fear? With reluctance, at first. A repellent, even disquieting subject — does fear not belong to the realm of resignation, even cowardice? To those who, paralyzed by it, do not rise up against injustice, do nothing against evil? Einstein delivered this verdict: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” Is it indifference, laziness, or fear that makes us watch without doing anything?
“Not even hurt, not even scared!” was the motto of bravery in the schoolyard. Alas, a few decades later, I greatly fear that fear still inspires in me a feeling of anger, the urge for a showdown, for a challenge. And yet, even if we still sometimes confuse boldness, recklessness, bravado, and courage, one cannot but observe that there is no equivalence between despising fear and combating it. And to combat it, one must first acknowledge it.
The rise of xenophobic nationalisms at the heart of Europe, the victory of the populists in the Italian elections, Brexit, the election of Trump in the United States, the irremovability of Putin’s presidency in Russia, but also Netanyahu’s popularity in Israel — all are so many symptoms of a fear that each time seems to triumph and to spread.
Faced with the fear of Islamist terrorism, but also the fear of layoffs, of “invasion,” of globalization, of social decline, the dictators and other petty tyrants offer themselves as bulwarks. Fear is their stock-in-trade, which they never cease to brandish the better to dismiss it at once. They are the protection, the bringing to a halt, the necessary firmness, the salvation of the people — provided the people are willing to place themselves in their hands.
Their programs converge on the denunciation of Others, the refusal of refugees, of immigrants, the defense of a traditional, often mythical culture against those who would threaten it. This may be, by turns or all at once, the cosmopolitan Jews, champions of globalization; Islam contaminating values and peoples to the point of threatening a Great Replacement; the exiled, always; homosexuality; the feminine — in short, everything that opens onto the other and weakens borders. Faced with “dangers” and with fear, they preach the return to a lost purity and grandeur. They propose annexation, war, crusade or jihad; fear is their weapon, and it flourishes in every communitarianism, every identitarianism: the more one keeps to one’s own kind, the more one fears others…
One may nevertheless wonder whether it is fear itself that must be refused, or the “objects” — indeed the alibis — of that fear. For one may legitimately fear Islamist attacks without turning on refugees and calling for a crusade of the Christian West; one may denounce offshoring without choosing closure and protectionism; one may want the liberation or the security of a people without opting for the disappearance of the other.
One may also fear the destruction of the planet, the atomization of work; one may fear loneliness and the future. But one must also fear that fear will go on dominating public debate. And above all, one must fear seeing these discourses and these regimes — now at our doors — triumph everywhere. For what seems to be spreading is less the fascist surge of the thirties than the abstentionist democratic erosion that makes possible, through consent or resignation, the victory of national-populist parties.
There is nothing reassuring here, nothing to underestimate; fear is also a compass, if we do not want it to become a horizon.
Beware of dog
For a long time I was afraid of dogs. Guardians of camps, of gulags, and of other Chilean stadiums, dogs — especially the big ones — did not seem to me always to have been man’s best friend. In any case, not everyone’s. As a little girl, I was told, without really being reassured, that dogs rarely bit unless they sniffed out fear in humans… An implacable logic: fear increases fear and provokes violence which increases fear, rather as trust engenders trust (it is not impossible that this truism holds beyond dogs…). But the most extraordinary thing, in my eyes, was that the owners sometimes laid claim to their dog’s nastiness. As a warning.
“Beware of dog” was regularly hung on the gates of the dreary little houses of my suburb. Sometimes a drawing of one of these dreadful “protectors,” all fangs and rage, amplified my stupefaction still further. For their security, some had chosen to live with vicious dogs… These plaques belong mostly to the past now; they have since been advantageously replaced by vicious surveillance cameras that do not even give warning.
A few decades later, the logic of these “vicious dogs” continues to elude me. Must one be defenseless against one’s own fear to decide to make a weapon of it? How can one install a dictator in one’s own garden? A vicious dog to protect the rosebushes, a tyrant to protect a freedom that, in choosing him, one has already renounced…
The Righteous: the risk of not being
Fear in itself is responsible for nothing. A natural feeling bound up with the survival instinct, a signal of danger, it makes flight or confrontation possible. Fear does not depend on our will; only the mastery of fear falls to us; it is up to us to govern it rather than be governed by it. And to confront it is perhaps also to name it. Nowadays, the word fear is frightening; people prefer the word insecurity.
And what if the only fear an individual should have were the fear of his own fear…
“The anguish of insecurity is so present in economic, social, and political discourse, security has become such a value, that it curbs our freedom while sketching out the totalitarian horizon… Risk is the trial par excellence of courage and of freedom,” wrote the much-lamented philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle. In a fine book written in the first person, she offers an éloge du risque (in praise of risk): the risk of the encounter, of the event, of resistance, of life. Risk would be the incarnation of the courage that faces fear, like a decisive moment of the subject.
Fear has often been evoked by those who took risks. True heroes such as Mandela, Manouchian never dodged it; their testimonies recount this bond between courage and fear. As if courage began with a reckoning with fear, a judgment upon it, followed by a decision: to confront it. For these courageous ones, as for thousands of other resisters and Righteous throughout the world, it seems there exists a fear greater still than that of risking one’s life: the fear of being a swine. And that fear does not immobilize; it engenders action, wagers on the future, by answering: present.
The Righteous during the war often spoke of a duty that had imposed itself upon them. And yet there is nothing more personal than this decision, as silent as it was irrevocable. The struggle against fear is, it seems, as intimate as it is merciless.
When one takes a risk, one does not always measure its scope; it is the decision that prevails. Thus the fate of the Righteous was not the same everywhere in the world. While in Poland they were coldly executed by the Nazis, the Righteous of France were only very rarely punished for their courage. Still, it would be unjust to say that they “risked” nothing; they did not really know what risk they were taking, they had simply decided to take it. After the war, they did not speak of their “courage”; often, indeed, they reproached themselves for not having done enough. This modesty is also the mark of that courage — the courage that confesses its weakness and its fear of never being equal to the task. The Righteous took a risk, whatever the price, because in them the fear of the wicked was supplanted by the fear of being wicked. As if courage protected the subject, strengthened him, saved him by offering him self-esteem and its corollary: the capacity to love others.
The Righteous acknowledged fear, confronted it, held it on a leash. It did not have the last word.
And what if the last word were a name: I am Spartacus
The Righteous also bear witness to this bond between the subject, fear, and the risk of courage. It is perhaps through this way of answering present that the summoned subject masters his fear. “Present,” “Hineni,” Leonard Cohen repeats in one of his very last songs. In Hebrew it means: “Here I am!” Before Leonard Cohen and before the Righteous, Abraham, Moses, and other biblical prophets also affirmed this moral responsibility: “Here I am. I do not flee, I am here, I stand upright and I answer the call.”
In Stanley Kubrick’s film Spartacus, there is a magical scene I have rewatched dozens of times, always with the same shivers. The rebel slaves are in chains, defeated; the Roman governor then offers them an ultimate mercy: let them give up the name of Spartacus and they will avoid crucifixion. Kirk Douglas rises and says: “I am Spartacus.” Tony Curtis stands in turn, followed by all his other comrades. Each steps forward and says: “I am Spartacus.”
Three admirable words: “I” “am” “Spartacus.” There is that tear of Kirk Douglas’s in unison with our own… And that feeling that this story has not said its last word, that their defeat will never be final. That they are laying the foundations of the future, of a possible awakening, of a reminder, of a memory. At the risk of their lives.
Through his name, Spartacus, all the rebels are named, as if the collective were made up of individual courages each bearing a proper name. “I am Spartacus” resounds like the eternal resistance to the crushing of the name of man.
To become and to remain a subject — is that not, in the final analysis, to confront the fear of not being one?
Faced with fear, with the threat of annihilation, there is this “Hineni,” “I answer: present.” Fear changes sides; it can be read in the gaze, full of dismay and chagrin, of the Roman commander. Of course there will be the dead and the crucified, coups d’état and betrayed revolutions, but the name of Spartacus continues to resound across the centuries. The vicious dogs, their masters, and the tyrants have always feared it.