The virtues of the virus

ABSTRACT

It is difficult to resist the temptation of analogy when trying to make sense of the proportions of the pandemic event. In the reflections that accompany its uncontrolled spread, Covid-19 has become a sort of generalized metaphor, almost the symbolic precipitate of the human condition in post-modernity. What happened 40 years ago with HIV is repeating itself today. The pandemic appears as a sort of experimentum crucis, able to test hypotheses that go from politics to the effects of globalization to the transformation of communication at the time of the Internet-reaching the heights of the finest metaphysical speculation. The isolation, the mistrust and suspicion the virus causes make it alternatively "populist" and "sovereigntist". The emergency measures it forces upon us seem to universalize the "state of exception" that the present has inherited from the political theology of the twentieth century, confirming Foucault's thesis that modern sovereign power is biopolitical (a power that is articulated in the production, management and administration of "life"). Also, because of the fundamental anonymity characterizing it, the virus seems to share the same immaterial quality that grounds the dominion of financial capitalism. Because of how contagious it is, it can be easily compared to the pre-reflexive and "viral" nature of online communication. Last but not least, the virus signals our eternal human condition. In case we have forgotten that we are mortal, finite, contingent, lacking, ontological, wanting and so forth, the virus is here to remind us, forcing us to meditate and correct our distraction, that of compulsive consumers. These considerations are legitimate. They are, in fact, perfectly justified. This is, however, also their defect. If they make sense, it is precisely because they reduce what is unknown to what is known. They use the virus as intuitive proof that responds-to speak in phenomenological terms-to an expectation that is theoretical. For the critical insight that is being developed around the virus, Covid-19 is rather the name of a science fiction film used to certify previous knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)