“I’m under twenty-five and I am unable to envision the future. I’m not the only one." A
singular voice of the French "Bataclan Generation"—those most acutely conscious of the
terrorist attacks in the mid-2010s—grappling with issues of memory or post-memory trauma and
survivors’ dilemmas. Survive is concerned with the work of grieving for strangers—a grief
which does not begin or end but is rather a structural part of one’s being in the world. For
Finkelstein it is essential “[t]o abide. Deep inside what is dying in the midst of the
bullets going astray and the offenses accumulating in the midst of the misunderstandings
imposed on a face other than my own on a body other than my own...to build a world that thinks
a world that gives a world that beats—a living world.” Survive situates contemporary youth in
a violence-saturated present with which they are all too familiar yet from which many of them
feel alienated in a plurality of difficult-to-define ways. Frederika Amalia Finkelstein cuts
across national and cultural contexts from French to Argentinian to North American touching
on the challenge facing her generation: to understand their own lives as uniquely meaningful in
the face of unending mass suffering.
