Defeat or the refusal of reality

Dear (French) readers,

And how about you, what state were you in, last Sunday night? The next day, the slightest reference to France’s shocking Rugby World Cup exit at the hands of South Africa was too much for my colleagues to handle. “It’s too soon to talk about it,” one of them said, jokingly, but with a very real tone of deflation in his voice. The loss is no serious affair, in light of tragic events unfolding in the news. Yet still, the elimination of Les Bleus on home soil has resounded like a national scandal and left a sense of collective bitterness in its wake. “The end of the illusion,” reads one headline, in the newspaper Libération. “These tears will never go away,” predicts the sports magazine L’Equipe. One player summed up the mood on national television after the match:  “We’re sad with this result and this scenario which is cruel.”

To speak of disappointment wouldn’t do the feeling justice. Sadness ? Almost, but not quite. Anger? Nearly… What the French are really suffering from is a feeling of injustice! Not so much because of the refereeing, which was deemed biassed by some, but because the match was lost by just one point. The reason the loss is so frustrating is because of its contingent nature: as if, with such a close score, it could so easily have gone both ways. And so we’re mourning a victory that slipped through our fingertips, almost by chance. So is this really the “end of the illusion”? Actually, it’s only the beginning.

‘Nothing is more fragile than the human ability to admit reality’

—Clément Rosset, philosopher

“Nothing is more fragile than the human ability to admit reality, to accept without reservation the imperative prerogative of reality,” writes French philosopher Clément Rosset in his book The Real and its Double (in French, 1976). Accepting defeat is a pain which we can avoid by taking refuge in illusions. We duplicate the event at the origin of our disappointment and make “of the same idea two distinct ideas – one painful, the other completely different.” For the French rugby team, the party’s over. And the adventure which very well could have gone on is its illusory double. Represented in close relation to a more glorious possibility, defeat becomes a degraded version of what we see as a more legitimate reality.

The problem is that “any duplication requires an original and a copy.” But when reality displeases us, we invert reality and fiction: the event that actually happened becomes a “a kind of ‘bad’ reality, belonging to the order of the double, of the copy or the mere image,” Rosset writes. To sigh and say, “oh how unfortunate!” or to think that it would have been less cruel to lose by fifteen points is to consider that the event that happened is not the “right” one, Rosset would say. “The right event” – in this case, to either win by a little or lose by a lot – “is precisely the one that did not take place.” Because possibilities do not exist, Rosset reminds us; they’re ghostly.

This makes illusion much more difficult to correct than denial: it’s an “art of perceiving things correctly” – because we know that France lost – “but not the consequences” – by putting it down to mere chance, we preserve the merit of the French team. We see clearly, but with double vision: it’s impossible to envisage this narrow defeat as an autonomous, sufficient, and undisputable reality. In our eyes, “the true reality is elsewhere.” In fact, every time we say “it’s such a shame that…”, we reject reality and its tragic aspects.

But when reality suits us, we’re suddenly perfectly capable of ignoring other possibilities. When the fruit of chance tastes good – when we find love on the only day of the year we go to the museum – we believe in destiny. And the more statistically unlikely the fortuitous event is, the more it seems to us, paradoxically, to be necessary. If France had won in the last seconds of the game, and by just one point, they would have been hailed as even more heroic, epic, mythical: they had to win, we’d have said, without any thought for alternative possibilities. Contingency then becomes a sign of destiny. But in the face of misfortune, the recognition of destiny suddenly fades in favour of an outrage towards the perceived randomness of the event: we could have won! This time, contingency disqualifies the idea of ​​necessity and establishes the pre-eminence of the possible over the real. It’s therefore when hopes are disappointed that illusions begin!

Does that mean we should instead glorify failure, as is now the trend in Silicon Valley? In the kingdom of tech, where it’s estimated that 90% of projects go south, failure is commonly seen as a necessary condition of success – an initiation rite of sorts. To reach the summits, we must first rise from the ashes. Like Steve Jobs, fired from Apple; Travis Kalanick (founder of Uber), who went back to live with his parents for a while; Reid Hoffman, whose social media company collapsed before he launched PayPal and LinkedIn... To see failure as an opportunity to bounce back: is that what accepting reality looks like? Wrong again, according to Clément Rosset. Because to make failure the promise of future success is to once again turn our back on the real present, and turn towards a possible future instead. Again, it’s to prefer elsewhere to here. This is the drama of reality, Rosset warns us: “Although it insists and absolutely wants to be perceived, it can quite easily show up somewhere else.” Sometimes, you’ve just got to have a good cry, without trying to do something with your tears!

Athénaïs Gagey

Picture © Thibault Camus / AP / SIPA