Tamara Tenenbaum: “The right has an advantage over progressives: they don’t pretend to be good people”

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf claimed space and money so that women could create in a world in which their time had not come. She wrote in an alien world looking to the future, as the narrator and essayist Tamara Tenenbaum (Buenos Aires, 1989) does in A Million Rooms of One's Own , winner of the Paidós Essay Prize.

The author of The End of Love. Loving and Fucking in the 21st Century (2019) picks up the thread of Woolf and her freedom to think. And she thinks about our times and the future, from feminism to work, passing through the commercialization of life that makes even leisure “lose its function and become about accumulating things or experiences” and the emotions of resentment and nostalgia that are changing a world that is no longer the one of five years ago.

“When I wrote The End of Love , the feeling was that the political subject that everyone was trying to figure out was the young woman. And that was me. Today, the political subject that everyone wants to figure out is the young man, enraged by the advances of progressivism, who hates the State and feels that life in society does not help him at all,” she admits. “The pandemic was a great accelerator of trends. It served the anti-state right to rally around the common cause that was the oppressive State and was also articulated with resentment about economic precariousness, housing, the feeling that nothing can be taken for granted anymore, not your income, not your health insurance, not schools, not anything, because everything you have any day may no longer be there. People are very distressed and look for someone to blame, and when they start looking for someone to blame, in general, they choose to blame immigrants and homosexuals, instead of blaming other people,” she says ironically.

“We need to be able to have fun at a cheaper price, so that having fun doesn't mean getting infinite things that are increasingly more expensive”

He nevertheless criticises how, before the current reactionary wave, progressive ideas “which are good, were mixed with certain forms of expression of the time that are not so good”. The progressive debate before this wave was mixed, he says, with “absolute emotionalism, with the idea that, if I feel things this way, that’s how they are. Total authoritarianism, because feelings are something that cannot be discussed, they close down the conversation, and they were also mixed with a certain authoritarian idea of ​​I am right because I am right. That has more to do with the forms of expression on Instagram than with progressivism.”

Although, she reflects, “perhaps progressivism has within itself a kind of enjoyment of moral superiority that makes it particularly vulnerable to this type of discourse. The right, the conservatives, have an advantage: they don’t pretend to be good people. I, who am a young, progressive woman, can be more comfortable talking among conservatives because they don’t ask so much of me. They are not looking for the moment when I am going to make a mistake. It’s real. I am always afraid of being unprogressive,” she smiles.

“We have gone from a fetishism of the victim to one of the conqueror”

But if a few years ago, he notes, “there was a fetishism with the epic of the victim, today we live its parodic inversion with the idea of ​​the conqueror, the Nietzschean superman, invulnerable, muscular, virile.” And he warns that at this moment the left “needs to find a language to talk about the future, because those who are making optimistic and future-oriented narratives are people like Elon Musk, who wants to colonize Mars, it doesn’t matter if it includes me or you.”

For another future, he hopes that the great change will be in work and consumption. “We need to be able to have fun at a cheaper price, so that having fun doesn’t mean getting infinite things that are increasingly more expensive. And to work in better conditions, so that the time we spend working doesn’t become torture. Part of what happens with consumption and tourism is that people have a very hard time at work and think that their horizon is weeks of vacation or an expensive dinner because you deserve it, because you had a very bad time. It’s a very poor horizon. We are living in a world that is very poorly calibrated in that sense. We have to have a better time at work and need less money to live outside of it.”

And he believes that in a world where post-human utopias are promised, it is possible to rescue some aspects of old humanism. “I have no fetish with the human species and its DNA. I care very little. But I do believe that there is something interesting in humanism that has to do with the idea of ​​doing things together and thinking about the things that we humans actually do that other species do not do for now. Like books and music and buildings. There is something beautiful in all that we have done as a civilization. And I would like to preserve the most beautiful things of our civilization and not become robots in the derogatory sense, in a sense that even turns us almost into bacteria. If people can no longer pay attention to anything, then they can neither read a book nor write one, nor draw a plan for a building, nor cook a paella without looking at their phone every five seconds, then we are regressing. Nobody is going to sell me on the idea that this is an evolution. We have to take care of what we have already evolved.”