Alternatives

«А вождь наконец-то покидал насиженную Россию ... но на смену приходила только серая страшноватость, в которой душа советского типа быстро догнивала и проваливалась внутрь самой себя. Газеты уверяли, что в этой страшноватости давно живет весь мир и оттого в нем так много вещей и денег, а понять это мешает только «советская ментальность».

В. Пелевин, Generation П, с. 32.

All that remains is the серая страшноватость, endlessly refurbished, endlessly traversed by people who are so mutilated that they no longer even want what they desire and instead devote all their energies to affirming the primacy of an unlivable world over what is left of their selves. The utopian impulse is surely an old one, but what I long for is undoubtedly much newer - "N'importe où! n'importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!" But the ce implies an autre. That isn't quite it. That is still some kind of basically religious impulse. What I long for lies too far ahead of me. All I can do with my desire is prepare the way for it by willing the total negation of that which is. The way in which the present world is constituted makes the good life impossible. What resists it is too far inside us, and the subject is too riven with contradictions to survive outside of the hell which it has created for itself. But everyone already knows that utopia is not for us. That is why they claim that it does not exist. But what could be more pathetic than to think that goodness can only exist for me? We can imagine an empty utopia. This can still animate a basically humanistic political project, one which is constitutionally resistant to self-satisfaction: as long as we are alive, we have failed. But that does not mean that we want to die. We want, rather, to keep falling forward into the infinite possibility offered by an existence free from us, beyond us, not for our children (which we should not have), but for something endlessly ahead of us, unattainable, incomprehensible, the quintessence of hope.

This is what I realized as I walked past the "Cluck-U Chicken" in New Brunswick the other day.