An All-Too-Human Virus

Jean-Luc Nancy, Cory Stockwell, David Fernbach, Sarah Clift

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781509550227, 9781509550210
• eBook ISBN: 9781509550234
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In the past, pandemics were considered divine punishment, but we now understand the biological characteristics of viruses and we know they are spread through social interaction. What used to be divine has become human – all too human, as Nietzsche would say.

But while the virus dispels the divine, we are discovering that living beings are more complex and harder to define than we had previously imagined, and also that political power is more complex than we may have thought. And this, argues Nancy, helps us to see why the term 'biopolitics' fails to grasp the conditions in which we now find ourselves. Life and politics challenge us together. Our scientific knowledge tells us that we are dependent only on our own technical power, but can we rely on technologies when knowledge itself includes uncertainties? If this is the case for technical power, it is much more so for political power, even when it presents itself as guided by objective data.

The virus is a magnifying glass that reveals the contradictions, limitations and frailties of the human condition, calling into question as never before our stubborn belief in progress and our hubristic sense of our own indestructibility as a species.

1
An All-Too-Human Virus

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.

What does this mean? Not only the fact of a propagation, which has its carriers and its routes. Europe is not the centre of the world, far from it, but it is doing its utmost to play its old role of model or example. There may be strong attractions or impressive opportunities elsewhere: traditional ones, at times a little worn out, as in North America, or newer ones in Asia and in Africa (Latin America is different, having many European characteristics that are mixed with others). But Europe seemed to remain desirable, or more or less believed itself to be so, at least as a refuge.

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.

Nor should it be surprising if it triggers more confusion here than where it was born. Because in China everything has returned to working order, whether we are talking about markets or illnesses. In Europe, by contrast, there has been disorder – between nations and between aspirations. The result was indecision, agitation, and a difficult adaptation. Across the way, the United States immediately rediscovered its superb isolationism and its ability to make clear decisions. Europe has always searched for itself – at the same time as it searched for the world, discovering it, exploring it and exploiting it before once again getting to a point where it no longer knew where it was.

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 would be tempting to caricature the situation thus: in Europe it’s ‘Every man for himself!’, and elsewhere it’s ‘It’s you and me, virus!’. Or, alternatively, in Europe hesitation, scepticism and the desire to reject received ideas play a larger role than in many other regions. This is the heritage of libertine, libertarian and reasoning reason – in other words of what for us, old Europeans, represented the very life of the mind.

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.)

Everyone is discussing and arguing, because we have long been accustomed to difficulty, ignorance and undecidability. On a global scale it seems, by contrast, that assurance, control and decision are dominant. This, at least, is the image that we might make for ourselves, or that tends to be composed in the global imaginary.

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.

Because it is not enough to eradicate a virus. If technical and political mastery turns out to be its own end, it will make of the world a simple field of forces that are ever more strained against one another, stripped of all the civilizing pretexts that were effective in the past. The contagious brutality of the virus grows into a brutality of management. We are already faced with the need to choose between those who are and those who are not eligible for care. (We have not yet said anything about the economic and social injustice that is sure to ensue.) We are not dealing here with the devious calculations of some Machiavellian conspirators. There are no particular abuses by states. There is only the general law of interconnections, control over which is what is at stake for technoeconomic powers.

*

The pandemics of the past could be seen as divine punishments, just as sickness in general was for a long time exogenous to the social body. Today the majority of sicknesses are endogenous, produced by our living conditions, food supply and ingestion of toxic substances. What was divine has become human – all too human, as Nietzsche says. Modernity was for a long time best expressed by Pascal’s words: ‘man infinitely surpasses man’.¹ But if humans surpass themselves ‘too much’ – that is, without elevating themselves any longer to Pascal’s divine – then they no longer surpass themselves at all. Instead, they get bogged down in a humanity that is surpassed by the events and the situations it has produced.

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 pure and simple technicity, because knowledge itself brings with it uncertainty (it’s enough to read the studies that are being published). Technical power is not unequivocal; so how can a political power that is expected to respond at the same time to objective data and to legitimate expectations be 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.

2
‘Communovirus’

An Indian friend of mine tells me that back home they talk about the ‘communovirus’. How could we not have thought of that already? It’s so obvious! And what an admirable and complete ambivalence: a virus coming from communism, a virus that communizes us. That is much more fertile than the derisory ‘corona’, which evokes old monarchical or imperial histories. And ‘communo-’ is good for dethroning ‘corona’, if not decapitating it.

This is what it seems to be doing in its first meaning, since the virus comes from the largest country in the world, whose regime is officially communist. It is not just officially so: as President Xi Jinping has said, its management of the viral epidemic demonstrates the superiority of a socialist system with Chinese characteristics. Although communism consists essentially in the abolition of private property, Chinese communism has consisted, for many years now, in a careful combination of collective (or state) property and private property (apart from land ownership).¹

As we know, this combination has led to remarkable growth in China’s economic and technical capacities and in its global role. It is still too soon to know how to designate the society produced by this combination: in what sense is it communist and in what sense has it introduced the virus of individual competition, even in its ultraliberal extreme? For the time being, COVID-19 has enabled China to demonstrate the effectiveness of the collective and statal aspect of its system. This effectiveness has proved itself to the point that China is now coming to the aid of Italy and France.

Of course, there is no shortage of commentary on the enhanced authoritarian power that the Chinese state is currently enjoying. In fact it is just as if the virus appeared at the right time to shore up official communism. What is irksome is that in this way the meaning of the word ‘communism’ gets ever more blurred – and it was already uncertain.

Marx wrote very precisely that private property had meant the disappearance of collective ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Publisher’s Note
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1. An All-Too-Human Virus
• 2. ‘Communovirus’
• 3. Let Us Be Infants
• 4. Evil and Power
• 5. Freedom
• 6. Neoviralism
• 7. To Free Freedom
• 8. The Useful and the Useless
• 9. Still All Too Human
• Appendix 1. Interview with Nicolas Dutent
• Appendix 2. From the Future to the Time to Come: The Revolution of the Virus, with Jean-François Bouthors
• Sources of the Texts
• End User License Agreement