Forms of Survival

The author writes about aspects of survival: powerlessness, withdrawal, engagement, activation, dependence, and maneuvering between these states. She proposes the concept of counter-passivity as the ability to counteract one’s passivity, manage disagreement, mobilize reserves, and transition from defense, through evasion, fight, and escape. She distinguishes acts of surviving – or attempts to maintain vital functions – and subsistence as the preservation of self-awareness, cognitive functions, and capacity to resist. She writes about the dominant in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural models of thinking about survivors as winners of fate. The author calls it the lizard model or survival “against all odds,” which focuses on the act of saving the essence of identity, as any losses the individual may suffer are presented as an inevitable cost, something that had to be cut off because it would have prevented salvation. Continuity is the primary determinant of survival success, considered in the context of advancement and emancipation. The article provides an alternative survival model: without a happy ending, without hope, with no chance of returning to the community. Hence, she means that which has been severed through division, about remnants of survival and their political and subversive potential.