Fail better against the pressure of having to succeed
In our neoliberal society, a perverse dialectic of success-failure is imposed, as if failure were the threshold of success
PalmaWe should “fail better”, Beckett advises us. Jorge Riechmann turned the advice into the title of a beautiful book. In this vein, very recently, "Gran manual del fracaso" by Juanpe Sánchez López has arrived in bookstores. The beginning strikes me like a stone thrown from childhood: he tells us that as a little boy he was a fat and gay child, so he felt he could not fail at anything else. And as if they were drawing a map of the same experience, Sara Torres begins "Lo que hay" like this: “I am a girl who picked flowers and returned home with my dress without a single crease and my headband perfectly placed. I never climbed trees, I didn't play with balls”.Gran manual del fracaso, by Juanpe Sánchez López. The beginning strikes me like a stone thrown from childhood: he tells us that as a little boy he was a fat and gay child, so he felt he could not fail at anything else. And as if they were drawing a map of the same experience, Sara Torres begins Lo que hay like this: “I am a girl who picked flowers and returned home with my dress without a single crease and my headband perfectly placed. I never climbed trees, I didn't play with balls”.
There exists a measuring rod, straight, silent, persistent; that many of us carry very close to our consciousness. The right word, the measured gesture, the soft laugh, the healthy food, the compulsory sport, the unbeatable corset that must save us from failure. We want to save ourselves because we experience failure as a feeling of loss, of not being enough, of not being able to be better than we are. Of not being where we would like to be at this precise moment in life, of not having met the goals we had set for ourselves a while ago. Of having a vulnerable body, of having swallowed the poison even though we knew it was not love.
In our neoliberal society, a perverse success-failure dialectic is imposed. As if failure were the threshold of success, a stage of learning, which must always have its gaze set on success. We are told that we learn from failure, but what we learn is not how not to make mistakes, but how to make better mistakes. Juanpe disrupts the success-failure duality, he refuses to understand life as if it were the arrow that seeks, univocally, the center of the final target. He prefers being the laughter of friends having a drink, without paying much attention to the arrow, without taking into account the scores of the game.
We live in an apocalyptic present: the death of poetry, of the self, of the author, of books; the end of love, of history, of all things (except for capitalism, which will remain until the end, to contemplate the undoing). The chronicle of a death foretold, the feeling of collective and individual failure, hijacks our capacity for action. Cynicism covers any possible resistance. Predesigned narratives push us to participate in a race in which we have long since been the losers.
Social ideals
We know, thanks to feminisms, thanks to the ethical bets of queer and anti-racist movements, that the success we pursue is linked to the fulfillment of social ideals that are neither original nor innocent. To be successful, the neoliberal voice tells us, is to reproduce the roles that maintain the capitalist system: work (and productivity), home (and family), partner (and monogamy). From here, they control our expectations and map out life, they structure the rhythms of our happiness.
The Gran manual del fracaso invites us to flee from the prison of expectations, not to become free-souled narcissists, but to bind ourselves to life without armor or sword. We are always in time to undo what no longer serves us, what hurts us; in time to question whether we do not want what we should want.
On the page that opens La seducción, by Sara Torres, we find: “For me, the history of desire is fundamentally the history of failure, everything I have wanted and could not be, all the times I have trembled in the distance between myself and what I wanted”. Perhaps it is about this, breaking the yardstick, stopping measuring ourselves, making room for the trembling. The group Mishima promises it to us with that song, “you will tremble again”, we could add, if it weren't too much, “to fail is synonymous with living”.
Reading this book, we remember that we are not in an individual race, not even when fear puts us to the test. We exist because a network of hands pulls us, continuously, from the open sea. Facing the dominant dialectic of success-failure, just on the other shore, friendship awaits us. The moments we share just because, in a distant castle, beyond chronos, beyond the ticking of the machinery. Friends, lovers of the soul, perform the miracle, piercing the unlivable and frantic race, to let joy in. To assure us that they have seen our shadows and our lights, and they love us just as we are.
They look us in the eyes and promise us: we have time, darling.