Survival: A Theological-Political Genealogy

By Adam Y. Stern

For a world mired in catastrophe, nothing could be more urgent than the question of survival. In this theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking book, Adam Y. Stern calls for a critical reevaluation of survival as a contemporary regime of representation.

In Survival, Stern asks what texts, what institutions, and what traditions have made survival a recognizable element of our current political vocabulary. The book begins by suggesting that the interpretive key lies in the discursive prominence of "Jewish survival." Yet the Jewish example, he argues, is less a marker of Jewish history than an index of Christianity's impact on the modern, secular, political imagination. With this inversion, the book repositions Jewish survival as the supplemental effect and mask of a more capacious political theology of Christian survival.

The argument proceeds by taking major moments in twentieth-century philosophy, theology, and political theory as occasions for collecting the scattered elements of survival's theological-political archive. Through readings of canonical texts by secular and Jewish thinkers—Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud—Stern shows that survival belongs to a history of debates about the sovereignty and subjection of Christ's body. Interrogating survival as a rhetorical formation, the book intervenes in discussions about biopolitics, secularism, political theology, and the philosophy of religion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812297867

Book preview

SURVIVAL

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE

Series Editors

Angus Burgin

Peter E. Gordon

Joel Isaac

Karuna Mantena

Samuel Moyn

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Camille Robcis

Sophia Rosenfeld

SURVIVAL

A Theological-Political Genealogy

Adam Y. Stern

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stern, Adam Y., author.

Title: Survival : a theological-political genealogy / Adam Y. Stern.

Other titles: Intellectual history of the modern age.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Series: Intellectual history of the modern age | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020020776 | ISBN 9780812252873 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Survival—Philosophy. | Political theology. | Jews—Identity. | Jews—History. | Judaism—Relations—Christianity. | Christianity and other religions—Judaism.

Classification: LCC BT83.59 .S74 2021 | DDC 261.7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020776

Who do those people think they are, that they can make light of or ignore what they have done to us and still wrap themselves in the mantle of the survivors?

—Edward W. Said, Bombs and Bulldozers

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction. Beginnings

1. The Elements of Survivalism

2. The Archaeology of Survival

3. The Imitation of Christ

4. The Sovereign in the Age of Its Eucharistic Reproducibility

5. The Empty Tomb

Epilogue. Other Thoughts

Notes

Index

PREFACE

This book began with two observations. The first was that survival occupies a prominent place within the modern, secular political imagination. One need only think of the ways that the figure of the survivor has come to mediate the representation of current events, from genocide, climate catastrophe, and mass shootings to disaster capitalism, sexual violence, nuclear war, terminal illness, and more. The second was that one could also identify a popular association between survival and the Jews. Consider here not only the primacy accorded to the Holocaust survivor in our time but also the extent to which survival underwrites the narration of both Jewish history (the survival of the Jews) and Jewish politics (the survival of Israel). The question I wanted to ask was this: What, if anything, unites these two horizons? Could an examination of secular survival shed light on the issue of Jewish survival? And what could a study of Jewish survival tell us about the dissemination of survival more broadly? From an early stage, it became clear that any attempt to write this history would have to go beyond two obvious foci: Darwinism and the Holocaust. Neither biology nor biopolitics seemed to fully account for the theological and theological-political resonances of the discourse on Jewish survival. My hunch, moreover, was that any theological-political perspective on (Jewish) survival would have to acknowledge the codes sedimented by the asymmetric legacy of the Jewish-Christian debate. This gave rise to a hypothesis. Perhaps the link between Jewish survival and secular survival could be found in the invisible space between them and in the very thing that otherwise managed to erase itself from view: the theological-political history of Christianity.

Survival: A Theological-Political Genealogy interrogates the possibility that Latin Christianity has played an overwhelming role in shaping survival as a word, theme, and figure. More than that, the book is an attempt to follow the language of survival as it modulates, disarticulates, and rearranges categorical distinctions between the secular, the Jewish, the Judeo-Christian, and the Christian. My strategy throughout has been to read secular and/or Jewish writers who have contributed (or been made to contribute) to the vast proliferation of survival-talk. What I show is that these arguments—arguments that appear to highlight the secular and/or Jewish signature of survival—also consent and even demand attention to a different set of readings. Again and again, they return survival to a Latinate field of translation, to scenes of incarnation, passion, and resurrection—in short, to a stage dominated by the body of Christ. In this sense, the book is less a history of survival than a genealogy of its contemporary force. It does not seek to address the whole of survival’s manifold uses, forge a linear narrative of its development, or contextualize it in reference to a single historical event. Instead, the book moves backward from the present, in order to rewrite the interpretative regimes that have dominated survival’s insistent circulation. These genealogies of survival take major texts of twentieth-century philosophy, theology, and political theory as sites—indeed, as insurgent occasions—for collecting and constellating the scattered elements of survival’s theological-political archive. My hope is that this labor of narrative bricolage will establish a framework for thinking survival as a Christian question and, in doing so, will offer a critical assessment of Christianity’s role in the constitution of modern, secular, and Jewish politics.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing this book, I have become more aware than ever of my infinite debt to others. First to Amy Hollywood and Peter Gordon. Amy is simply the most insightful reader I know. Her critical acumen has motivated the best parts of this book and taught me what it means to say that efficacious action comes not solely through melancholy, but also through joy. I can only look forward to learning more from her. Peter is a careful scholar and an unwavering mentor. His questions, comments, and provocations have continually prompted me to think further and more clearly. If I have said anything of historical merit, it is surely because of his resolute direction.

I also express my deep thanks to John Hamilton and Gil Anidjar. John’s enthusiasm for this project—philological and otherwise—has been absolutely vital. Gil has been educating me in the requisite art of reading for a long time. I can safely say that without his work and teaching, this book would not have been possible. A special shout-out as well to Na’ama Rokem, whose acute perspicacity is matched only by the magnitude of her generosity. I am thankful to count her as a friend. And to Ryan Coyne and Sarah Hammerschlag: for too much.

At Yale, I had the opportunity to join a vibrant intellectual community. I thank especially Carolyn Dean, Hannan Hever, Nancy Levene, Katie Lofton, Paul North, Elli Stern, and, of course, Maurie Samuels! Since coming to Madison, I have been fortunate in new colleagues. Special thanks to Tom DuBois, Hannah Eldridge, Sabine Gross, Mark Louden, Venkat Mani, Tony Michels, Jordan Rosenblum, and Manon van de Water. For advice over the years, I extend my gratitude to Emily Apter, Raphael Gross, Dana Hollander, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Ilana Pardes, James Robinson, Daniel Weidner, and Liliane Weissberg. Thanks to Alina Bothe and Markus Nesselrodt for inviting me to participate in their special issue of the LBI Yearbook (2016).

Friends and colleagues have contributed to this book in ways tangible and intangible. Between New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Berlin, New Haven, and Madison: Kenyon Adams, Niv Allon, Yael Almog, Chris Beam, Rami Boundouki, Sam Brody, Josh Cohen, Josh Connor, Anastatia Curley, Ofer Dynes, Yaniv Feller, Itamar Francez, Tatyana Gershkovich, Novina Goehlsdorf, Irving Goh, Allyson Gonzalez, Elad Lapidot, Daniel Luban, Maria Anna Mariani, Jamie Martin, Hannah Roh, Francey Russell, Adam Sachs, Sam Spinner, Willem Styfhals, Davey Tomlinson, Kris Trujillo, Kirsten Wesselhoeft, Daniel Wyche, Klaus Yoder, Saul Zaritt, Dominik Zechner, Simos Zeniou, and Alexandra Zirkle. And needless to say: Ernie Mitchell, Larisa Reznik, Daniel Schultz, and Xiaobo Yuan.

This project has benefited from fellowships awarded by the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme, and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. These grants allowed me, among other things, to spend a semester writing and studying at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (ZfL). I am grateful as well for the support provided by the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

At the University of Pennsylvania Press, I thank Damon Linker, Bob Lockhart, Erica Ginsburg, and Zoe Kovacs.

For their constant encouragement, I thank my parents, Marian and Robert; my brothers, Ari and Zach; and my in-laws, Judy and Neal.

For his wonder, laughter, and more—Theo.

Finally, this book is for Sunny—azoy vi zi iz.

ABBREVIATIONS

Throughout this study, I use the following abbreviations for frequently cited texts. In order to acknowledge my reliance on others, and for the sake of consistency, I cite existing English translations whenever available. However, I regularly amend, and sometimes rewrite, these versions for both accuracy and argument.

INTRODUCTION

Beginnings

It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive. But rather at the word archive—and with the archive of so familiar a word.

—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

Who is speaking about survival?

Let us begin at the beginning and with that ancient archive of beginnings that just so happens to begin in the beginning. The Hebrew Bible seems to have no trouble speaking about survival.¹ In the book of Genesis, Joseph says to his brothers: God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors (45:7).² Later, in the book of Exodus, God establishes the rules and ordinances governing the practice of slavery: When a slaveowner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment (21:20–21). The book of Numbers eventually recounts the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan and their decimation of the Amorite king Og: So they killed him, and his sons, and all his people, until there was no survivor left (Num. 21:35). It is a story that the book of Deuteronomy repeats in almost identical terms and one that the book of Joshua echoes in its description of another Israelite campaign against the people and city of Ai: Israel struck them down, until no one was left who survived or escaped (Josh. 8:22).

Altogether, variations of the verb to survive appear no fewer than fifty times across the text of the Hebrew Bible, be it in the books of Judges, Kings, Joel, and Obadiah or in Zephaniah, Job, Lamentations, and Ezra. The most well-known examples come from later prophets like Ezekiel, where God’s judgment turns toward Israel. Isaiah declares: If the Lord of hosts had not left us a few survivors, we would have been like Sodom, and become like Gomorrah (1:9). God says to Jeremiah: The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest, the Lord appeared to him from far away (31:2–3). As for Nehemiah, he worries from exile about the state of his people: I asked them about the Jews that survived, those who had escaped the captivity, and about Jerusalem. They replied, ‘The survivors there in the province who escaped captivity are in great trouble and shame; the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been destroyed by fire’ (1:2–3).

These scattered citations hardly amount to an exhaustive account of the meaning and significance of the Hebrew Bible’s survival-talk. But even such a restricted catalog should be enough to register the biblical beginnings and archaic origins of an entire theological-political tradition focused on the primordial affinity between survival and the Jews—not to mention the ‘mystery’ of Jewish survival through the ages.³ The history has been told in a variety of overlapping and sometimes conflicting ways.⁴ Many point to the Talmud and its concern with the eternality of Israel.⁵ Others focus on the reception of the rabbinic dictum: "af ‘al pi she-ḥata yisra’el hu, though he sinned, an Israelite he remains.⁶ There are those who recount the aftermath of the Temple’s destruction;⁷ those who read Maimonides;⁸ those who quote Spinoza;⁹ those who cite Franz Rosenzweig;¹⁰ and those who look to Zionism.¹¹ For certain writers, like Simon Rawidowicz, Jewish history has never been anything other than a history of survival, a chronicle of an ever-dying people and a people constantly on the verge of ceasing to be, of disappearing.¹² Meanwhile, scholars such as David Biale have spoken of the more proximate transformations of a no less extensive history. After the Holocaust, says Biale, a new ideology of survival revived the old ideology of divine election as the basis for Jewish life, decisively altering the Jewish politics of the new state of Israel and the Diaspora community in America.¹³ In a notable remark from late 1969, Hannah Arendt links this survival business back to the book of Nehemiah and to the survival passion which has possessed this people since antiquity and has actually made it survive.¹⁴ More recently, the Israeli historian Benny Morris has confirmed that Jews are one of the few people from ancient times who have managed to more-or-less survive and endure into the twenty-first century.¹⁵ A comparable sentiment also underlies the work of the American Jewish historian David Myers, who characterizes the dialectic between professional integrity and Jewish survival as the central tension animating the writing of Jewish history.¹⁶ There is perhaps no denying the simple and obvious truth: Jewish politics really begins with the question of survival."¹⁷

Beginnings, of course, are always problematic, usually deceptive, sometimes treacherous. The King James Bible (1611), for example, says next to nothing about survival, survivors, or surviving. There, Joseph promises "a great deliverance [li-feletah gedolah]; slaves continue [ya‘amod] a day or two; the Israelites smite their enemies until none are left … alive [sarid] and until there are none to remain or escape [sarid u-falit]; the book of Jeremiah discusses the people which were left of the sword [seride ḥarev]; Isaiah prophesies a very small remnant [sarid]; and Nehemiah asks about the Iewes that had escaped [ha-yehudim ha-peletah] as well as the remnant [ha-nish’arim] that are left." Not until the immediate postwar period, with the publication and dissemination of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (1952), would these prevailing interpretive choices give way to a more pervasive and more unified survivalist lexicon. Since then, the language of survival has only ramified, now appearing throughout the text of many English Bibles and translating a series of Hebrew terms (ya‘amod, sarid, peletah, ha-nish’ar, she’erit, etc.) for Jewish and Christian readers alike.¹⁸

The decision to begin, then, may begin with a decision to translate.¹⁹ Take the Hebrew expression nitsol ha-shoah and its English equivalent, the Holocaust survivor. As Idith Zertal has argued, the rabbinic word nitsol (saved) does not bear the semantic charge delivered by the words "survivor in English or survivant in French."²⁰ The same could be said of the phrase she’erit he-peletah (survivors, remaining survivors, or surviving remnant), which in the postwar years emerged as a biblical anchor for the travails of Jewish survival.²¹ There is, finally, the intervening force of the Latin Vulgate, where two passages allude to the divided legacy of survival’s two possible etymological sources: superstare and supervivere. In the first, Jacob says to Joseph: "I can die now, having seen for myself that you are still alive [Heb., ‘odkha ḥay; Lat., superstitem te relinquo] (Gen. 46:30). The second, once again, reads: If the slave survives [Heb., ya‘amod; Lat., supervixerit] a day or two, there is no punishment (Exod. 21:21). When it comes to the genealogy of survival, I am trying to say, a great deal rides on the history of the word survival": how one defines it, how one traces its particular constellation of meanings, and how one locates it within a scrambled matrix of discursive asymmetries, linguistic hegemonies, and translational imperatives. Survival’s beginnings will have a lot to do with where one decides to begin.

So who is speaking about survival? Let us begin again in English, in America, and with the rise of the survivor as a secular saint.²² As Peter Novick and others have argued, the postwar era in America attests to a remarkable set of changes in the perception and valorization of what has only recently consolidated into the "shocking, massive, and distinctive thing now known as the Holocaust."²³ The Eichmann trial, so the story goes, was the first time that American audiences found themselves exposed to the Holocaust as a discrete event separated from the wider context of Nazi destruction.²⁴ A series of political and cultural incidents—including the October War (1973), the television series Holocaust (1978), and the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1993)—further contributed to the production of the Holocaust as an American memory.²⁵ The emergence of the survivor was a crucial stage in this narrative, one summed up in striking fashion by the oft-cited words of the author Werner Weinberg: Immediately after the war, we were ‘liberated prisoners’; in subsequent years we were included in the term ‘DPs’ or ‘displaced persons.’ … In the US we were sometimes generously called ‘new Americans.’ Then for a long time … there was a good chance that we, as a group, might go nameless. But one day I noticed that I had been reclassified as a ‘survivor.’²⁶

Students of American culture have framed this transformation as a shift from victim to survivor, whereby those formerly identified as the passive, silent, and weak objects of Nazi aggression gradually became figures endowed with agency, speech, and power, capable of moving from the realms of exclusion and invisibility to public recognition and moral authority.²⁷ According to one familiar rendition of this argument, early attitudes toward victims showed a profound ambivalence, combining a contempt for their supposed lack of resistance (going like sheep to the slaughter) with a simultaneous reverence for the redemptive virtues of their suffering and death.²⁸ Those who had managed to display some degree of defiance often found themselves accused of collaboration in bringing about the death of others. With time, this image began to change, such that once-demonized examples of the worst could become celebrated as symbols of courage, heroism, and virtue. Major public events like the Eichmann trial positively differentiated survivors from victims for the first time by imbuing only the former with the new social function of juridico-historical witness (33). This revaluation would lead to the construction of the Holocaust as an occasion for feelings of pride. It meant that one could stress the survivor’s triumph over death as well as resignify the meaning of survival more generally, divesting it of its collaborationist connotations and accepting it as an exceptional accomplishment (37).

Matters are significantly more complicated than this linear chronology would suggest (as this study as a whole will attempt to show). The basic outline, however, does go some way toward specifying the various factors that have contributed to the production and dissemination of the survivor as a recognizable figure. One could think here of the early medical work done by psychiatrists and Freudian psychoanalysts such as William Niederland on the emotional disorders suffered by those who had spent time in concentration camps.²⁹ Over the course of the 1960s, Niederland and others undertook clinical research into the so-called problem of the survivor, eventually identifying survivor syndrome as a distinctive diagnostic category.³⁰ In his 1968 summary of the issue, Niederland isolated a series of archetypical symptoms, ranging from anxiety, depression, and psychosis to loss of personal identity, psychosomatic disturbance, and the feeling of being a ghost or living corpse (313).

The psychiatric contribution to the issue of survival found its most far-reaching extension in the work of Robert Jay Lifton.³¹ By the time Niederland was outlining his theory of survivor syndrome, Lifton had already begun his immense research into the general psychology of the survivor, where he developed a broad comparison between Hiroshima and other ‘extreme’ historical experiences, including the destruction wrought by the plagues in fourteenth-century Europe (DL, 479). In sum, he says, we can define the survivor as one who has come into contact with death in some bodily or psychic fashion and has himself remained alive (ibid.). Like Niederland, Lifton would go on to specify a number of characteristics common to the survivor experience: the sense of being bound to images of destruction, feelings of guilt, the loss of emotion, and the struggle to give meaning to one’s experience or reestablish the form of a moral world. In the end, what Lifton discovered was that these categories describe not only the effects of a particular historical experience but also a set of universal psychological tendencies (ibid.). Across time and space, the survivor becomes Everyman (ibid.).

Lifton eventually saw fit to organize his findings into a singular and universally applicable concept of the survivor.³² But this was not before the psychologization of survival itself had come under suspicion. Famously, in a 1976 book titled The Survivor, the literary critic Terrence Des Pres argued that the Holocaust had given rise to the survivor as a significant human type (TS, 206–7). For the first time, Des Pres explained, the simple struggle for life had occurred beyond the compulsions of culture and in a context stripped of the normal institutions and structuring symbols of civilization (207). This experience brought to light not psychological guilt but a biologically determined ‘talent’ long suppressed by cultural deformation, a bank of knowledge embedded in the body’s cells (193). In a hostile response to Des Pres’ affirmative biologism, Bruno Bettelheim defended the psychological importance of guilt as the most significant aspect of survivorship.³³ Guilt, he said, arises not from the commission of a crime but from the ability to know that one must not acquiesce in the evils of a concentration camp world, must not buy one’s own life at the expense of the lives of others (284). Guilt and responsibility, not the celebration of mere survival, is what makes us human (313).³⁴

From the psychological to the biological to the ethical, the problem of the survivor had become a divisive issue by the 1970s, the topic of heated debate and disciplinary conflict. But the feud between Bettelheim and Des Pres conceals more than it reveals. In its narrow focus on the Holocaust, it occludes the survivor’s vast proliferation as a comparative figure of extreme situations. The real question, says Edith Hall, may be how the noun "survivor came to be applied, in an ontological sense, to anybody who had committed or suffered anything involving trauma, and by extension to the ontological status of virtually everyone."³⁵ For Christopher Lasch, the profusion meant reflecting on the creation of a more general culture of survivalism, in which everyday life had begun to pattern itself on the survival strategies forced on those exposed to extreme adversity.³⁶

Many have attempted to account for the transformation of survival from a sign of the extreme to an element of the everyday. This has included more and less persuasive judgments concerning the language of personal liberation introduced in the 1960s, the expansion of psychotherapeutic discourse, and the emergence of a new Romantic age of post-nationalist, multiculturalist identities.³⁷ Observers have also underscored the tremendous impact of the women’s movement on the recognition of sexual abuse as a traumatic memory comparable to the experience of Holocaust survivors.³⁸ Another parallel story emphasizes the role played by Vietnam veterans in gaining acceptance of PTSD as an official mental disorder.³⁹ In the wake of survivor syndrome, Lifton and others suggested that these soldiers … had been consumed by the same survivor guilt as the Jewish and Japanese survivors.⁴⁰ It is a critical development in the militarization of a term that has increasingly combined perpetrators and victims of violence into a single generic category (92).⁴¹

None of this, though, carries the weight of the apocalyptic thinking and siege mentality of the Cold War.⁴² The anthropologist Joseph Masco has demonstrated that the nuclear danger became a complex new political ideology specifically aimed at engineering the population’s affective response to the threat of mass ruination.⁴³ Already by the early 1950s, the Eisenhower administration had begun efforts to prepare its citizenry for the nuclear crisis by creating a program of ‘psychological defense’ aimed at ‘feelings’ that would unify the nation in the face of apocalyptic everyday threat (367).⁴⁴ Although the propaganda campaign took a number of forms, probably none was more spectacular than Operation Cue, which, on May 5, 1955, gave 100 million Americans the opportunity to watch live on television a ‘typical’ suburban community blown to bits by an atomic bomb (372). The motto: Survival Is Your Business (378). And business has been good. One need only think of Hollywood and those yearly technoaesthetic displays that still allow Americans to survive their own destruction with fetishistic glee (384).

Popular media have no doubt served as a major vehicle in survival’s fluid movement across seemingly disparate contexts and discursive domains.⁴⁵ In one sardonic critique, Larry David stages a vicious debate between an elderly Holocaust survivor and a winner of the television series Survivor (2000–present). The feuding parties duel over the question: Who has the most rightful claim to the title?⁴⁶ Elsewhere, cinema theorist Carol Clover situates survival within the shifting gender dynamics of the modern slasher film. As she shows, the camera in these movies almost always sets its (male) gaze upon a distressed Final Girl, who, through a sheer will to survive, manages to overcome an experience of horror and live on as the movie’s sole survivor.⁴⁷ From a different angle, the anthropologist Talal Asad asks viewers of contemporary visual culture to recognize their implicit identification with the suffering, endurance, and healing of a male hero. In the era of Abu Ghraib, this neat conceit has sometimes taken the form of a CIA agent who survives torture and moves on to discover the truth of his mission.⁴⁸

The irony is that survival’s capacity to transform abjection into power also makes it a cunning dissimulating mechanism for the transformation of power into abjection. Within the camera obscura of postwar American wound culture, even serial killers call upon the deadly logic of the survivor to portray acts of murderous violence as triumphant moments of self-defense.⁴⁹ Consider, on another level, the renewed applicability of survival guilt to veterans of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond its success or failure as a palliative device for individual suffering, the phrase has the curious rhetorical advantage of recoding and disavowing the overwhelming presence of American imperialism (permitting guilt over the loss of friends and reticence over the death of enemies).⁵⁰ One other relevant iteration is the spread of doomsday thinking and lavish bunker building among the wealthiest of elites.⁵¹ The gilded apocalypticism of the words survival of the richest is just another reminder of the inversions and transposition that support an inclination toward neutralization and depoliticization.⁵²

There is more to say about survival’s uses and abuses in postwar America. But at this point, the history I have been sketching could risk advancing a case for American exceptionalism.⁵³ That is why it is important to take a global—by which I mean globalizing—perspective on this pressing problem.⁵⁴ After all, the search for survival’s beginnings has regularly brought scholarship to nineteenth-century England and its convoluted combination of Romanticism, Malthusianism, and Darwinism. Imaginings of the last man, ideas about population, and slogans like survival of the fittest have offered vocabulary and conceptual resources for the emergence of bio-politics and catastrophic thinking in the time of the Anthropocene.⁵⁵ A more capacious evaluation of survival in European intellectual history would follow the chains of transmission that move these lines of thought through a series of other names: Jules Michelet, Mary Shelley, E. B. Tylor, Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Franz Kafka, Robert Antelme, Primo Levi, Elias Canetti, Karl Jaspers, and W. G. Sebald (to name only a few). If Jacques Derrida is right, this literary-philosophical lineage bears directly upon a set of planetary concerns, wherein the figure of the survivant evokes the questions of human rights facing all beings living in a world that is more inegalitarian than ever.⁵⁶

On this scale, one could recall the work of Willy Brandt in establishing the Independent Commission on International Development Issues. In 1977, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany tasked the group with investigating global problems arising from the economic and social disparities of the world community.⁵⁷ The commission promised to set forth guidelines aimed at allaying the vast structural inequalities dividing a wealthy, economically, and technologically developed global North from an increasingly impoverished and still economically underdeveloped global South. When published in 1980, the Brandt Report fulfilled