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The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 425
contingencies abound in one’s personal life
—
as one accidental
incident may have the grave consequence of taking the course of
history to a drastically different direction
—
and even though the past
is flawed and the future is unpredictable, yet one has no other option
than to live in the “imperfect now.” Rather than resorting to and
embracing the discourse of exceptionalism in attempting to write a
narrative of the self in which one emerges as the sovereign of one’s
life and the master of one’s fate, Landsman learns to “shift the order
of possibilities” in his life so that he learns to see the index of one’s
success
—
being accepted and recognized as a success
—
is no longer
taken to be important. This shifting of the order of possibilities is
termed by Eric Santner as an “inner conversion,” which he describes
as the “uncoupling” of “the drive from its destiny” (2001: 124). And
if I understand Santner correctly, the “uncoupling” that he tries to
elaborate upon is nothing more than the “disruption” and
“interruption” of the notion of destiny or teleology that is valorized
in the writing of the story of an individual or people towards self-
fulfillment or self-completion. In other words, Santner exposes and
questions the ethical consequences of structuring one’s life along a
teleological trajectory which, in a way, governs chance events and
possibilities by first anticipating them and then by taking preemptive
actions to exclude them, or to exclude them by including them. This
rationalist attempt to “discipline” and “author” one’s life via the
“governance of contingency,” to borrow a phrase from Michael
Dillon (2007), however, does not mean that contingencies are
eliminated and domesticated; rather, as we can see from the growing
popularity of counterfactual fiction, one tiny change can lead to a
convoluted web of greater changes. Anything can and does happen.
What truly matters is not that History
—
the past, the present, and
the future
—
cannot be disciplined by the mere force of the human
will; what matters is that which activates the “uncoupling” of the
drive from its destiny so that one can shift the order of possibilities
in one’s world and learn to live with the contingencies of History.
In Santner’s attempt to flesh out a legacy from the Jewish