Saramago’s Blindness.

Saramago's novel Blindness is about a pandemic of blindness where people only see a milky white substance. In the first part, the blind are confined in an old asylum guarded by soldiers and the novel describes life in confinement. In the second part, the confined realise that the soldiers guarding them have gone and that in fact everyone has gone blind. here the novel turns to describe blind people trying to survive in a city where everyone is blind. 

on one hand the novel does not aim for realism: for instance, we only have a glimpse of how people who are already blind and rely on braille, and other markers for the visually impaired, can rise to become a new dominant governing elite in such a world. There is an assumption that all what would follow if everyone goes blind is chaos and hobbesian-like tendencies. on the other hand, the novel is exceptionally realist, Saramago goes to great length to capture what an individual and collective experience of blindness entails. a remarkable achievement.

By the end of the novel it become clear that at least one chief aim of the novel is to be a morality tale: the personal and social degradation experienced in this state of blindness is but an extreme concentration of the way we degrade ourselves and each other when we are not blind. It made me think of an ‘ethics of the senses’ that is perhaps strongly present in Nietzsche.

just like those of us who can hear well can hear without listening - that is, without assuming the social and ethical responsibility towards ourselves and others that the possession of a sense of hearing put before us - there are those of us who have banalised the possession of the sense of sight, such as we fail to experience it in it’s full intensity. we can look very well without seeing, without fully ‘taking in’, what we are looking at. without, as Nietzsche put it, bringing in those interests and affects which transform seeing into seeing something.

In the face of Covid19 we practice physical distancing. And just as people in the novel lost their eye sight, we have lost our physical capacity to be physically close to people. Thus, the novel’s take on blindness invites us to think. Just as blindness brought out what we did not see even when we could see, is our physical distancing bringing out the social and affective distance that marked how we relate to people even when we could still be in their proximity? That is, do physical confinement and distancing bring out the question of how much have we allowed ourselves to ‘take in’ and be ethically responsible for our closeness to people when we were practicing physical proximity? 

There are no easy answers here for i have actually heard a number of people say that they have become closer to some people now that they are no longer in their physical proximity. and as Amine Maalouf says about his relation to Lebanon in his book Origines: ‘there are loves that only flourish at a distance’