On Persistence

The following is a lightly edited excerpt from Rebecca Comay’s On Persistence, published this month by Seagull Books.

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Against Resilience

Persistence is not intrepidness, resoluteness, exertion; it is indifferent to that virility and vigor. It is not the overcoming of obstacles or the triumph over adversity. It is not stamina, steadfastness, endurance. It is not diligence, industriousness, discipline; it resists that drive to productivity and performance. It is not the thrum of habit or the dull drag of the quotidian. Persistence is not patience; it lacks that constancy and composure. It is not the incremental inch toward the someday-better nor the sigh of the meanwhile. Neither hope nor resignation are the operative moods. Or, if one feels compelled to speak of hope, it’s of the perverse Kafka variety: there is hope, plenty of hope, an infinity of hope, maybe even too much hope—only not for us.1 In other words, persistence is not driven by the whip of “cruel optimism.”2 Persistence is not the vulgar pursuit of immortality or the extension of life by other means, it’s not the survivalist preparation for apocalypse. And persistence is definitely not resilience. It lacks that bounce and plasticity—which is to say that persistence is not the forced flexibility and pliability of the neoliberal subject. Persistence is ill-adaptive: brittle, unbending, uncompliant, impatient, inefficient, untimely. It is sustained neither by the drumbeat of victory nor by the sublime consolation of defeat. Persistence disorganizes the normative temporal and spatial order. It exerts a needling, scrabbling pressure—resistant to direction, desisting from project and program, insistent in its demands. It is a duration, a hardness, a perdurance that extends beyond the limits of endurance. Persistence is obstinacy, ostinato, the stubborn rhythm of a time without flow—a “strong, slow drilling” through a present that has become rigid and inert.3

You can’t count on its emancipatory potential. That shopping list of negativities was more speculative than sustainable, as is the way of all negation. Excessive or unmanaged persistence, or the wrong kind of persistence—but persistence is always already verging on the excessive and the unmanageable—can be dangerous: a stalker, a predator, an addiction, a toxic relationship, an obsession. Persistence has its perfidious doubles. It can be the slow drip of oppression or the unremitting cycle of exploitation. Persistence in this case naturalizes itself, effacing its own origins and hardening into ideology: it seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, irremediable, inexpungeable, unstoppable—we speak of persistent poverty, a persistent wage gap, a persistent virus, a persistent biochemical toxin. Capitalism is defined by this self-perpetuation and throbs to its accelerating rhythm. Value must continually increase in order to stay the same as itself, the rate of profit must keep rising if it is to avoid falling, everything must keep growing in order to keep going—the secret law and ultimate contradiction of capital accumulation. Capital persists while workers are cut off from the means of subsistence and life sinks to a subpar existence. All this doubling can be disorienting and dispiriting. Politically speaking, it can threaten to confound the distinction between the slow burn of revolutionary upheaval and the inertia of left-melancholic despair.  

We might say that persistence is a kind of perseverance, but if only we can divest this word of its Hobbesian-Spinozist-Nietzschean vitalism. This is perseverance of a peculiarly attenuated sort.  Persistence is not the drive to self-preservation, in suo esse perseverare conatur, every entity’s inextinguishable straining to continue.4 Persistence is both a hyperbolic and a deflated conatus—at once too much and too little: too much strife and striving, too little self or being for which to strive. Persistence is not the joyful swell of the conatus nor the surge of the will-to-power. It is not self-augmentation or self-enhancement. If anything, persistence is a deflation, diminution, or “lessening” (shades of Beckett)—a swaying between impetus and impediment. You might easily mistake this sway for the vacillations of Spinoza’s “sad passions” but that would miss the point.5 You’d be equally mistaken to conflate this pulsation with the throb and thrum of “vibrant matter.”6 Hobbes was right to speak of the “artificial eternity” of the conatus (there is nothing biological or instinctual about this drivenness), even if he was led to aggrandize this as the mythic self-perpetuation of the fortified state.7 

Persistence is the tipping point where perseverance slips almost inaudibly into perseveration—the irritable overdrive of a speech or action compulsively repeating itself in the absence of any determinable goal or purpose. Perseveration is a temporal derangement, at once a short circuit and a prolongation: time stretches interminably onward and snaps back to the nonstarter of an endlessly protracted rebeginning. The stretch and the snap are two sides of the same elastic.  Perseveration is both a brake and a flood: a conversation-stopper that never stops stopping. Speech-language pathologists describe perseveration as a rigidity or automatism, a stereotypy, a torrential stickiness and stuckness, an inability to switch tracks or to switch off. The machine is always on, it never stops running, yet there’s somehow always something off about it, something not-quite-right—off-track, off-kilter, socially off-putting, as off-key as a poorly tuned instrument.  Psychiatry, which uses perseveration as a quasi-technical category, doesn’t quite know where to classify this pathological stammer, an inanity that’s not quite an insanity, even while it finds its syllables scattered everywhere. In the DSM-V, the bible of American psychiatry, perseveration crops up as a symptom of just about everything: ADHD, Alzheimer’s, aphasia, autism, epilepsy, frontal lobe malformation, hemorrhagic stroke, learning disability, neurodegenerative disease, OCD, Parkinson’s, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, depressive rumination …8 The indiscriminate consignment of all these disparate afflictions to the hardwiring of biology or the vagaries of individual pathology only confounds their historical enmeshment and contributes to its persistence. 

Persistence hovers on the cusp between perseverance and perseveration. It jams the forward movement and momentum, the per of progress and passage, and brings everything to the point of stalling. Persistence is a thoroughgoing (per) or intensified form of standstill or stasis—a “serious” or “severe” (per) stoppage. But sistere is not just about steadfastness and stability. The standstill can be an interruption and interference that sets everything in motion: taking a stand, standing firm, standing up, rising up, uprising. There is a related ambiguity, in Greek, between stasis as sluggishness or stagnation and stasis as sedition, upheaval, civil war. We can hear a similar ambiguity in the English word “static”—at once immobility and the buzzing freeze of electrical interference. This also raises the question of sustainability, of staying power (sta-), as in John Ashbery’s question, quickly extinguished, about the flickering intervals of freedom: “What more is there to do, except stay?” (The poem continues: “And that we cannot do.”)9  To stay is also, juridically, to suspend proceedings, to put justice on hold, to pause, to delay.

Finally: both perseverance and perseveration rhyme anagrammatically with preservation in the inopportune or melancholic sense: a fossilization, a petrification, a hypermnesic fixation, an archival ache and illness, a stumbling block to the progressive flow of time and history.  Nietzsche speaks poorly of this stony fixation. It is the spirit of revenge, teeth-gnashing, the stone in the belly, the inability to digest, to be done with things, the will’s ill-will towards time and its irredeemable imperfect—a shipwreck on the rocky shoals of the “it was.”10 With another anagrammatic twist this stubbornness swerves into the fixations and fascinations of perversion—a stubborn twisting away from and against (ver) the path forward (per).

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Viral Persistence

In 2022, I found my life upended by an unwelcome visitor. “Long Covid” is starting to feel like an understatement, some three years in, with the timeline and prognosis uncertain, but it’s the term favored by the citizen-scientist community, which has been largely left to its own devices (literally) to wade through the ocean of too-much-information flooding social media. Some patients prefer to call themselves “long haulers,” which strikes me as oddly muscular given the debilitating nature of the disease. In the absence of the political will either to invest in full-throttle medical research or to mitigate the devastating social consequences of this mass disabling event, the surplus population has reached some 400 million since the pandemic began, with the annual global economic cost in the order of $1 trillion (that’s not factoring in the gross disparities in reporting or the downstream cascade of secondary disabilities).11

In Capital, Marx describes the bottom stratum of the pauperized population as a “hospital” or “sick house,” the two current translations, although neither are really adequate, if only because there’s no apparent discharge date on the horizon. Marx is referring not to the temporarily unemployed but to those incapable, unwilling, or no longer capable of working—the disabled, the incurable, the misfits, the disaffected, the superannuated, the injured, the casualties and castoffs of the workplace—those unfit to join capitalism’s industrial reserve army and too disaggregated to coagulate into a class or collective movement. Curiously, instead of the expected Krankenhaus, Marx uses the prestigious French loanword Invalidenhaus to describe this stagnant dumping ground—a military hospital, hospice, or retirement home for disabled war veterans.12 Swaddled in my cocoon, it’s obviously ridiculous to include myself in this dumpster—money, health insurance, absurdly flexible working conditions, the perks of the neoliberal university where getting to work from home, even if it means having to work all the time, offers the option of teaching from bed while the rest of the world cavorts. Awash with ressentiment and embarrassed by my own ableism, I find myself spending half the time gorging on expensive supplements and following the latest clinical trials and the rest engrossed in critical disability theory and reading Alice James.

I think of Proust converting impediment into opportunity as he scribbles away asthmatically in his sealed off bedroom. That seems grandiose. Aunt Léonie is a more interesting figure,  tirelessly fine-tuning her symptoms while suspended “in her indefinite condition of grief, physical exhaustion, obsessions, and religious observances,” tugging forwards and backwards like the waterlilies in the Vivonne river.”13 I think of Kant toiling away at his wellness regime, assuming responsibility for his own lifestyle and lifespan, the perfect neoliberal subject already stirring in the womb of bourgeois liberalism. In the age of hypochondria 2.0, when you can outsource your anxiety to prosthetic wearables that tell you exactly how exhausted you are, exactly what percentage is left in your rapidly depleting body battery, such vigilance has become unnecessary. I open the newspaper and read about a woman with Long Covid who has recently applied for medically assisted death (MAID). (Canada has become the new Switzerland minus even the minimal fiction of a safety net. As the welfare state disintegrates and austerity measures dig ever deeper they’ve suddenly started giving it out like candy.) Her reasons actually have less to do with the unabating misery of the illness than straight up economic duress: too sick to work and unable to live on her nothing of a disability allowance, she is also too sick to survive homelessness.14 I read about another woman who applied for a small subsidy to install a chair lift so she can get out to shop for groceries. The caseworker declines the request, reminding her that if she can’t manage there’s always the option of MAID …15 

Meanwhile, the medical hypotheses accumulate, the symptoms multiply, everything adding up to the persistence of an illness continuing long past its expiration date: lingering viral detritus; mitochondrial dysfunction; endothelial inflammation; microbiome dybiosis; residual micro-clots clogging the capillaries; the reactivation of antigens from long dormant infections; the immune system stuck in relentless overdrive; the autonomic nervous system running in a permanent state of emergency, a condition of chronic acuteness where crisis and continuum converge—Benjamin’s state of exception written on the inflamed corpuscles of the body. At what point does the acute tip into the chronic, when does short become long, how long is long? As with most chronic or “invisible” diseases, you get used to the gaslighting followed, if you’re lucky, by the doctor’s benediction and a pepper-spray of acronyms—PACS, PCC, PEM, GET, CID, POTS, CXL, GBA,  MCAS, LDN, NAC, YWA, as in Yoga with Adrienne, the internet wellness guru who’s supposed to help you self-help yourself. The virus persists and so must we. Scrolling zombified through yet another wellness website I stumble on a disgusting brand of CBT,  Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), packaged for the times with a 4A mantra (acknowledge, allow, accommodate, forget the last). I’ve learned precious little about the virtues of endurance, willpower, spunk, patience, courage, resilience, discipline, etc., over the past couple of years but I’ve learned a bit about how not to talk about persistence. 

I started writing this last section not from any impulse to go first-personal but simply to mark a moment. It strikes me now that a critical disabilities framework might carve a path through these tales of prolongation, elongation, stretching, overliving, outliving, and retroactive commotion.  This framework might also bend the arc between Freud and Benjamin, between psychoanalysis and politics, between individual and collective. If psychoanalysis teaches anything, it’s that persistence is not the will of either the individual or the collective: it’s not about the will at all. Psychoanalysis also shows that the antithesis between individual and collective, between private and public, is a forced one: there is no subject that is not stretched and striated by the social, no form of sociality that has not seeped into the nerve endings of the individual; every self is a discordant multitude of overlapping agencies, every collective a magnetic forcefield of intersecting transferential vectors; all psychology is group psychology; the personal is political. This means that the terms of agency need to be redefined. Aging philosophers, ailing writers, wasted figures, thwarted mourners, fraying kinships, barren mothers, frozen landscapes, tattered genres, failed revolutions, shrunken stages. We need to understand the “stage” in both senses—a spatial and a temporal station and stopping point, a platform (staticum) or arena (stadium) in which the historical antinomies of the present can be played out and displayed in their most distilled and thoroughgoing (per) form. The stage is a time and place of standstill or stillstand.

But one can also think about the debilitated power of an angel whose wings are broken (the hurricane is too violent); the botched actions of a little hunchback (the burden is too heavy); the impeded gait of a city dweller (the streets are too congested); the “weak power” of a Messiah who may arrive, like the Revolution, “any day,” which is not to say every day16—and which also allows for the possibility that he may arrive, like Kafka’s messiah, only the day after his own arrival, which is to say one day too late.17 

Persistence Under Siege

As I write these words, it’s August 2024 and the horror is unspooling. (As this goes to press, it’s February 2026 and the horror continues.) We must never stop talking about the genocidal slaughter in Gaza and the decades of global indifference and opportunism that continue to bankroll it. It’s impossible not to bring in disability politics when thinking about everything relegated to the sidelines under the rubric of collateral damage: maimed and mutilated bodies; bombed homes and hospitals; destroyed sewage and power grids; escalating disease and famine; environmental devastation; cultural spoliation; the unfathomable legacy of intergenerational trauma. The relentlessness of the intensifying Nakba forces us to abandon the conventional idea of trauma, just like catastrophe, crisis, war, disaster, as a discrete time-stamped event or mishap rather than as an “edgeless” and escalating condition. “That things ‘go on like this’ is the catastrophe.”18 Ugly persistence: the nation-state installed in perpetuity, holding out in a state of indefinite permanence, constantly consolidating itself as a spatial and temporal fortress, reasserting its sovereignty through intensified acts of terror, packaging violence as victimhood, genocide as self-defense—the stubborn resurgence of an archaic political theology reconfigured in the shape of the modern ethnonationalist katechon.   

If I had the right to speak for others, and knew for sure how to avoid sentimentalizing, I’d be talking about that other persistence, sumud, the intransigence of sheer staying power—temporal, spatial—a term introduced into the political lexicon as early as the 1960s, when revolution was still on the agenda, and as powerful as ever: in the occupied territories, in the refugee camps, in the diaspora, within the 1948 borders of Israel, in occupied Jerusalem, in the killing fields of Gaza. The idea of sumud has been under pressure, including by some feminists, but it has never been a matter of stoicism or resignation—not even in the dreary post-Oslo era, when the options might appear to have shriveled to the forced choices of submission, imprisonment, exile, death. In the face of the world’s utterly organized abandonment, “organized pessimism” might well be the operative approach. The actions are as varied and improvised as the circumstances demand and permit, but the practice persists—rebuilding houses after the army keeps demolishing them, replanting olive trees after the settlers keep destroying them, fighting evictions and land confiscations, organizing boycotts, holding demonstrations, reopening schools, setting up medical clinics, holding hunger strikes while stuck in indefinite “adminis­trative detention,” refusing to confess in the interrogation chamber, refusing to leave, returning home, burying the dead, tending to the living, rebuilding in the rubble, photographing, filming, reporting the facts to the world. But persistence is also about the slow burn of armed resistance—flashes of revolt sparking a rekindled revolutionary move­ment, the repetition of improvised actions producing the momentum of a collective refusal, the transformation of a Gramscian war of posi­tion into a war of maneuver. One need not be afraid to bring back the language of fortitude and even of heroism in this context. In extremity, sheer existence can be an act of resistance.