PLURIBUS: THE POWER OF DIVISION
Love desires personality; therefore love desires division.
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Five novels about the global catastrophe and its aftermath have deeply marked my thinking. Let me begin with the oldest one: J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which global warming, caused by increased solar radiation, has rendered much of the surface of planet Earth uninhabitable. The story follows a team of scientists researching environmental developments in the flooded city of London. What makes the novel unique is that Ballard presents characters who take advantage of societal and civilizational collapse as opportunities to pursue new modes of perception, unconscious urges, and systems of meaning – in short, what is for the majority of people a mega-catastrophe opens up for some main characters a new space of radical experience of jouissance, of surrendering oneself to a bliss which obliterates the limits of our subjectivity: when, at the novel’s end, the majority decide to return to their home in the north, Dr Kerans continues travelling south, like “a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun”…
Next comes The Three-Body Problem (2008), Liu Cixin’s masterpiece, which confronts Earth with Trisolaris, a far-away planet with three suns that rise and set at strange and unpredictable intervals: sometimes far too distant and horribly cold, sometimes far too close and destructively hot, and sometimes not seen for long periods of time. Devastating hurricanes, droughts and floods, not to mention global warming – do they not all indicate that we are witnessing something for which the only appropriate term is “the end of nature”? (“Nature” is to be understood here in the traditional sense of a regular rhythm of seasons, the reliable background of human history, something on which we can count always to be there.) Such an approach undermines all platitudes about saving nature – the first axiom of a truly materialist ecology is: “Nature doesn’t exist.”
Then there are two novels in which the enigma that moves the plot remains unexplained. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2015), arguably the most depressing novel I have ever read, mixes in an extraordinarily efficient way a science-fiction premise with intimate psychological drama and love story. A medical breakthrough in the late 1950s has extended the human lifespan beyond 100 years, but to achieve this, the state grew clones who are destined to donate their organs to prolong the lives of mortally ill people. However, in order for this activity to become acceptable, a profound change had to occur in public morals, radically redefining what counts as socially acceptable – driven by the promise of survival, people accepted this since clones were artificially produced outside the network of kinship relations and were thus perceived as beings who did not count as fully human.
The book’s big enigma remains unanswered: why do the main characters never try to escape their fate of an early death (although they could easily attempt to disappear into society)? The story is pervaded by radical ambiguity with regard to this point: do the givers accept their fate because they are not fully human, or do they accept it because they are in some basic sense more human than the rest of us, ordinary humans? Plus, why is it that every single “real” human among them has zero ethical dilemmas and does not rebel against the state of things, though they clearly see that those “givers” are fully human?
Perhaps even darker is I Who Have Never Known Men (originally published in French as Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes in 1995) by Jacqueline Harpman. Thirty-nine women and a girl are being held prisoner in a cage underground. The guards are all male and never speak to them. The girl is the only one of the prisoners who has no memory of the outside world; none of them know why they are being held prisoner, or why there is one child among thirty-nine adults. One day, an alarm sounds, and the guards flee; the prisoners are subsequently able to escape. They find themselves on an immense barren plain, with no other people anywhere, and no clue as to what has happened to the world. The narrator, the young girl, has to learn all about reality before the catastrophe from the others. She is also the last one to survive – alone, mortally ill, she writes her autobiography and kills herself to die with dignity.
The book can be read as a variation on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (a case of extreme patriarchal violence), as an anti-feminist description of how women need men to survive, as the story of a group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic landscape, as the affirmation of a need to tell one’s story even if we are not sure that anyone will be there to read it, as an echo of the author’s Auschwitz experience… But the genius of the book is that, although it plays with all these possible backgrounds, it is full of details that destroy each of these readings. There is no explanation of what really happened, just a description of the growing despair and solitude.
Last but not least, there is a unique global catastrophe with some kind of happy ending. A whole series of features distinguishes Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (2014) from the predominant formula of post-apocalyptic narratives. The sudden epidemic that wipes out almost all of humanity is not presented as a rupture that opens up the space for the full actualization of previous social antagonisms (rich and poor, racism, sexual oppression, but also new forms of solidarity – Fredric Jameson liked to bring out the utopian potential of apocalyptic stories: the survivors are compelled to practice a properly Communist collaboration). In Station Eleven we get just a cut before/after, and “before” is read from the perspective of the “after,” not the other way round. There is no key to the catastrophe provided by the preceding social or family or individual tensions (as in the classic formula) – in some sense, we even get a happy ending through cultural activity: theatre performances (of Shakespeare plays) by a group of survivors called the Travelling Symphony provide the main link between dispersed communities that survived the catastrophe.
Now, I would add to these five novels a recent TV series, Pluribus (2025). What makes Pluribus unique is that the end of our world (our civilization) is presented as a benevolent act of an alien intelligence that wants to make humanity united and happy. To what does this vision react? In the winter of 2025–2026, a morbid-sounding app named “Are You Dead” has taken China by storm, tapping into widespread loneliness and youth disaffection. The app targets all those who live alone and is based on a simple premise: users must check in on the app every day – if several days are missed, the app will automatically notify the user’s emergency contact. The app has gone viral, topping Apple’s paid App Store ranking, and it caused such a surge in downloads that it has rebranded and introduced a subscription fee. This virality speaks to a larger trend not only in China but in different forms across our entire world: a rise in people living alone, often feeling isolated or struggling with their well-being1. And it is this trend, I think, that provides the proper background for the mega-success of Pluribus.
Pluribus follows Albuquerque author Carol Sturka, who is one of only 13 people in the world immune to the effects of the “Joining”, an event in which an extraterrestrial virus transformed the rest of humanity into a peaceful and content hive mind known as the “Others”. The hive mind happily accommodates the wishes of those who remain unaffected, but admits that it will ultimately seek to assimilate them when it learns how to do so. Carol is adamantly against their efforts as she searches for a way to reverse the Joining. She flees to her house, where she discovers a TV broadcast showing a man in the White House press room with a lower third showing Carol’s name and a phone number on-screen. When she calls, the man explains that the virus has transformed humanity into a permanently happy and peaceful hive mind.
Carol reacts as an unpleasant hysterical subject resisting the Others, trying to penetrate how they work, addressing ridiculous demands to them, engaging in violent outbursts to hurt them, etc. She is asking herself not the usual hysterical question “Am I a woman or a man?” but a more basic question: “Am I dead or alive?” She is correct in doing this: without individual others, confronted only with impersonal Them, I am existentially dead. In Lacanian terms, she is caught between the two deaths: while biologically alive she is dead at the socio-symbolic level. Since she terribly needs contact but cannot convince any of the other non-infected to fully join her, she succumbs to the temptation to engage in a personal relationship of trust and lesbian sex with Zosia, who on behalf of the Others maintains a contact with her – Zosia replaces Helen, her lesbian partner who dies. After a long honeymoon, Zosia admits to her that she has just faked love in order to make it easier for Carol to join Them. Her only ally thus remains Manousos, a Colombian immune individual living in Paraguay who refuses all contact with the Others and succeeds in joining Carol – we thus get the ideal couple of resistance: hysterical Carol and Manousos, the perfect obsessional. After being disappointed by Zosia, Carol orders a nuclear weapon which the Others deliver to her house by drone – end of season 1.
