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

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      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.

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