When it comes to willing — or the formulation of a wish to will — dictators have an advantage over democratic countries. In Europe, we can agree on what we don’t want, at least not here in our own countries: war, poverty, torture. But what we do want is a question that requires more consideration. The very big, but also very capacious, word “freedom” is not enough. First of all, because we have to ask: Whose freedom? And at whose expense? Second of all, because it requires us to take a step back from willing as such, to take back our own wishes, when in doubt, in the interest of equality. At this point, the freedom to which we so often appeal contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. “Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently,” the brilliant Rosa Luxemburg said, and there’s the rub, if we’re honest. Consumption is a constant process that offers the soul no satisfaction in the long run. Consumption is also a predatory process, a matter of life and death for people elsewhere. Taken together, these two facts mean that things can’t stay as they are. We are in an in-between state, and it will be important to understand what is growing there and where we are heading, where it is our will to go, before we are robbed of the ability to will anything at all.

[...] feeling and desire lead both characters to cross a border. And feeling and desire are, after all, the signs that someone is alive. Never more alive than in the face of death.