Giving Up

This morning I had this experience in the gym. Everything was going fine until I tried to walk down the stairs — then things began to go awry. The my ankles froze and the tops of my feet felt like they were being cut open with razor blades. “Work!” I yelled at my feet. God dammit, work! You were working a minute ago! No luck. “I give up,” I recall saying to myself in exasperation.

This episode and Adam Phillips’ recent LRB essay has me thinking about what it means to give up. Giving up is often thought of as leaving something incomplete: we stop reading books in the middle, leave jobs, projects, relationships. While, culturally speaking, giving up is akin to tanking, sandbagging, or just general lack of gumption, in an existential sense, when one gives up, it’s as if one brings into being some counterfactual world that never existed, one that doesn’t stop, one without a fractured or interrupted telos, one without someone tampering with the trajectory of things. What if you had finished grad school? Or gotten married? Or stuck with that diet? Or, in another valence, continued smoking? Giving up is for quitters: it’s gotten too tough, too intimate, too real, or the consequences of your choices are obvious and you need to retreat. Giving up is your chance to experience choice par excellence.

The alternative to giving up is what, however? Philips points to the stakes of the question in to Camus saying that the ultimate in giving up is suicide — giving up on life. There are lots of questions one could ask about this equivalence — are we so sure about the value of soldiering on? It was the Great Dane who reminded us of the perils of this choice: whips and scorns of time, oppressor’s wrong, proud man’s contumely. Etc.

However, this reference takes us, via Phillips, to a tour of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and what is sometimes called the death drive. I don’t want to rehearse the details of this beautiful little text over again, but suffice it to recall the game of the child (Freud’s grandson) throwing the a toy on a string out of his crib, while saying saying “fort” (gone) and then bringing it back and saying “da” (there!). Freud interprets the gesture as an attempt to master the discomfort of his mother leaving him — it hurts less if he can inflict a little of the pain on himself. There is too much to say about that text: suffice to say that it is Derrida who gets it best: the pleasure principle and the death drive, far from working against each other, are synonymous if not always working in tandem. Their job is to restore homeostasis to the subject. 

In that context, giving up even giving up on living, we might say, is living on. To speculate, as Derrida puts it, is to temporarily catch up with the living, empirical entropy of subjectivity.

As Phillips puts it in citing Kafka: “‘He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way.’”

So, how to proceed? Is there really a question?