An All-Too-Human Virus. Jean-Luc Nancy

any less equivocal?

Of course, we must presume that objectivity will guide our decisions. If this objectivity is one of ‘lockdown’ or ‘distancing’, how far should the authorities go to ensure that it is respected? And of course, from the opposite standpoint, whence arises the self-interested arbitrariness of a government that seeks to preserve the Olympic Games (this is just one example among many), from which it, and many of the businesses and managers for whom it is partly an instrument, expect to benefit? Or the self-interested arbitrariness of a government that seizes the occasion to stir up nationalism?

      The magnifying glass of the virus enlarges the features of our contradictions and our limits. It is a reality principle that knocks at the door of our pleasure principle. Death accompanies it. The death that we exported through wars, famines and devastations, that we believed to be confined to a few other viruses and to the various forms of cancer (themselves in a quasi-viral expansion), is lying in wait for us at the nearest street corner. Just think! We are humans, bipeds without feathers endowed with language, but surely neither superhuman nor transhuman. All too human? Must we not rather understand that we never can be?

      1 1. Tr.: Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer. London: Penguin, 1995, p. 35 (7.434); translation slightly modified.