Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

The novelist Daisy Hildyard writes about the way we are entangled in these Shadow Lands as a form of doppelganging. In her 2017 book, The Second Body, she describes the human condition as one of having two bodies: the one we live in consciously—satiating our hunger, commuting to work, working out at the gym, making babies—and a shadow self that props up and supports those actions by traversing studiously denied parallel worlds on our behalf, extracting and manufacturing the resources and goods that make it all possible. She writes: You are stuck in your body right here, but in a technical way you could be said to be in India and Iraq, you are in the sky causing storms, and you are in the sea herding whales towards the beach. You probably don’t feel your body in those places: it is as if you have two distinct bodies. You have an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep and go about your day-to-day life. You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales … a body which is not so solid as the other one, but much larger. In Hildyard’s conception, our complicity in wars fought with our tax dollars to protect the oil and gas that likely warms our homes, cooks our food, and propels our vehicles, and in turn fuels extinction, is not separate from us; it’s an extension of our physical beings. “This second body,” she writes, “is your own literal and physical biological existence— it is a version of you.” A less visible dimension of our embodied ...