An All-Too-Human Virus. Jean-Luc Nancy. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Jean-Luc Nancy
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Афоризмы и цитаты
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509550234
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quickly. Everyone makes mistakes. For all that, Giorgio’s spirit is no less endowed with a subtlety and a kindness that one can call – without the least bit of irony – exceptional.

      February 2020

      *

      More than a year after our first exchange on the subject of what was not yet termed a ‘pandemic’ at that point, Giorgio Agamben and I have maintained our respective positions. Today he considers the vaccination to be a futile religion, while I see in it more of a combination of achievement and uncertainty – both technological – that corresponds to the general situation of the civilization from which the pandemic originated. I understand that Giorgio considers our society’s obsession with health to be pathetic. Like him, I have Nietzsche’s concept of ‘great health’ in mind. But when an entire civilizational organism is ill – and made all the more so by its obsession with health – it is understandable that it seeks a way out of the illness. Perhaps we will not find a way out, or will not do so unscathed – and this will perhaps present new opportunities. But the already ancient critique of religion, however it might be formulated, has not yet managed to bring about a new civilization.

      April 2021

      As has often been said, Europe exported its wars after 1945. Having destroyed itself, it didn’t know what to do other than spread its disunion through its former colonies, in accordance with its alliances and tensions with the world’s new poles of power. Between these poles it was no more than a memory, even though it pretended to have a future.

      Now Europe imports. Not only merchandise, as it has done for a long time, but first and foremost populations, which is not new either, but is becoming urgent, and indeed overwhelming, at the same rate as exported conflicts and climatic turmoil (which were born in this same Europe). And today it has come to import a viral epidemic.

      The old theatre of exemplarities – right of law, science, democracy, appearances and well-being – still gives rise to desires, even if its objects are worn out, indeed out of order. It thus remains open to spectators even if it is not very welcoming to those who don’t have the means to fulfil these desires. It shouldn’t be surprising if a virus enters the theatre as well.

      While the first hotbed of the epidemic looks as if it will soon be under control, and while many countries that are still relatively unaffected are closing their borders to Europeans as they had to the Chinese, Europe is becoming the centre of the epidemic. It seems to have brought together the effects of trips to China (business, tourism, study), those of visitors from China and elsewhere (business, tourism, study), those of its general uncertainty, and finally those of its internal disagreements.

      It is thus that the inevitable repetition of the expression ‘emergency measures’ causes the ghost of Carl Schmitt to emerge, through a sort of hasty conflation. The virus thus propagates discourses of ostentatious bravado. Not being fooled becomes more important than avoiding contagion – which amounts to being doubly fooled – and perhaps fooled by a poorly repressed anxiety. Or by a puerile sentiment of impunity or bravado …

      Everyone (myself included) chips in with a critical, doubting or interpretative remark. Philosophy, psychoanalysis and political commentary about the virus are all the rage.

      (Let’s exempt from this schema the delicious poem by Michel Deguy, ‘Coronation’, on the website of the journal Po&sie.)

      The coronavirus, as a pandemic, is indeed in every way a product of globalization. It is a precise expression of the latter’s traits and tendencies; it is an active, pugnacious and effective free-trade advocate. It takes part in the broad process by which cultures come undone; what it affirms is not so much a culture as a mechanics of forces that are inextricably technical, economic, dominating and, if need be, physiological or physical (think of petroleum, of the atom). It is true that at the same time the model of growth is called into question, such that the French head of state feels compelled to make mention of it. It is quite possible that we will indeed be forced to shift our algorithms – but nothing indicates that this might give rise to another way of thinking.

      *

      The virus attests to the absence of the divine, because we know its biological constitution. We are even discovering to what point the living being is more complex and less comprehensible than our previous representations of it led us to think, and to what extent the exercise of political power – that of a people, that of a supposed ‘community’, for example ‘European’, or that of strongman regimes – is another form of complexity, one that is also less comprehensible than it seems. We understand better the extent to which the term ‘biopolitics’ is ridiculous under these conditions: life and politics both defy us. Our scientific knowledge invites us to be dependent solely on our own technical power, but there is no