I could also have said that it’s a critique, an embodied critique of the middle-class cult of personal safety. It’s a rejection of the belief that every vulnerability should be protected, and that the central project of our lives is to undo our own precarity. It’s a refusal of a way of life devoted to insurance. I won’t buy our son out of an uncertain future, John says when we discuss life insurance. That’s what life is, he says. I don’t want to argue with that. Instead, I quietly submit a blood sample and sign the paperwork that will insure my life for $250,000.
