Politics & Power Quote by Elfriede Jelinek

Isolation, in Jelinek's hands, isn’t a private mood; it’s a political technology. When she calls it “one of the greatest problems,” she’s pointing at a condition that looks like personal preference or psychological fate but functions like social engineering. The phrasing “ever-growing obstacle” matters: isolation isn’t static loneliness, it’s an expanding architecture - amplified by neoliberal work routines, fragmented media, and the market’s constant push to treat every need as an individual transaction. If solidarity requires bodies and voices moving together, isolation is the quiet system that keeps them apart while insisting nothing is wrong.

Jelinek’s theater has long staged how language itself can be coercive: banal slogans, advertising cadences, patriarchal scripts. This line follows that logic. She’s suspicious of the comforting story that politics fails because people are apathetic or irrational. A more damning subtext runs underneath: we are being sorted into separateness so thoroughly that collective action starts to feel unnatural, even impolite. Isolation becomes not just a barrier to organizing, but a solvent that dissolves the very imagination of “we.”

The context is also Austrian and European, where Jelinek wrote amid postwar amnesia, resurgent right-wing populism, and a culture that often prefers private decorum to public confrontation. Her point lands today with extra bite: algorithmic feeds and gig-economy precarity don’t merely distract; they individualize risk and shame, making shared grievance harder to name. “Political solidarity” is framed not as idealism but as a practical necessity - and isolation as its most efficient saboteur.