#on failure

Failure as structure of existence would also mean that failure is something that touches every one of us. No one is immune to it. This explains why, for many of us, life is oftentimes seen as a project that seeks to rectify some kind of previous or even original failure, to fill the sense of failure with something else, turning our entire existence into a lifelong struggle to overcome that failure. There is, of course, no guarantee that we will ever succeed at this project in our lifetime. In fact, we might just keep failing, which is to say that we keep repeating the structure of existential failure, as Beckett reminds us in “Worstward Ho!” from which the phrase “fail again” is taken. According to Beckett there, we constantly fail, or our lives are irreducibly structured to fail over and over again, no matter how much we try—ad infinitum and ad nauseum—to figure out if our sense of ontological failure precedes the world with all its sociopolitico-economic structures setting us up to fail. As Beckett also intimates, settling this issue—if it were ever possible—would not make us feel better about our failed existence either. Heeding Beckett’s lesson, then, we can say that it is erroneous to determine whether failure or success comes first. Success does not precede failure, nor vice versa. Failure and success are firsts. Failure and success are always already there, on their own, each not dependent on the other. Or, to cite Jones again, “Failure is not simply the inverse of success. It has its own story to tell.”