99
108 100
109 101
110 102
111 103
112 104
An All-Too-Human Virus
Jean-Luc Nancy
Translated by Cory Stockwell, Sarah Clift and David Fernbach
polity
Originally published in French as Un trop humain virus © Bayard Editions, 2020
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5023-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939031
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:
Publisher’s Note
The Preface, Prologue, Chapters 1, 4, and 7 and the Appendices were translated by Cory Stockwell.
Chapters 3, 5, 6, 8, and 9 were translated by Sarah Clift.
Chapter 2 was translated by David Fernbach.
The material included in the Prologue was added to the English edition of this book.
Preface
1. The texts in this volume were assembled at the initiative of Suzanne Doppelt, for the publisher Bayard, in June 2020, at the (very provisional) end of the period of lockdown, and then of progressive opening, in France. The intention was to keep a record of the reactions to the event brought about by the numerous demands and initiatives that arose at the time – at the very least, of the reactions of one of the numerous ‘philosophers’ (this term took on a very broad meaning) that were expressed at that moment. For me, this concerned in particular the YouTube channel created by Jérôme Lèbre, ‘Philosophizing in the Time of the Epidemic’, which ended up including about a hundred interventions. There was also Antinomie, the Italian online journal created by Federico Ferrari and his friends, and many other instances. It was thus very clear that the pandemic, even before it was given its name, brought about a properly viral proliferation of discourse. This was ridiculed, and rightly so. But it is no less right to listen to what was said, for better or for worse (and whether we like it or not), in an urgent situation marked by anxiety and a sudden loss of bearings.
And all the more so as this sudden disarray brought to light an unmooring of certainties or of habits, one that has been active and corrosive for a long time now in the public mind and in the sensibility of developed societies, particularly in Europe. Having emerged from the fault lines or the fissures of what for a long time we took to be western infallibility, the virus was almost immediately perceived as something that revealed – indeed, deconstructed – the fragile and uncertain state of our rational and smoothly functioning civilization.
This is also why it reveals, in a light that is harsher than ever, the exacerbated and unjustifiable gaps between regions, countries, classes and layers of a world that, in becoming more interconnected, is at the same time split asunder, torn apart by its own exponential growth.
Today, a few days after 15 August, in other words less than three months after the end of the lockdown in France, the resumption of the epidemic is already the subject on everyone’s lips; elsewhere in the world, above all in the United States and Brazil, it has raged even more than in Europe; just about everywhere, we keep watch, we measure, and we work to halt new developments. At the same time we are beginning to register the grave economic effects of the phenomenon.
The wait for an effective treatment has become so arduous that the head of state of ‘great Russia’ has judged it appropriate to pre-empt the laboratories by announcing the completion of a vaccine that is still in the test phase. Broadly speaking, heightened anxiety and feverish competition have combined to whet the desire for power. The virus catalyses forms of solidarity but also tensions, judging by the difficulties that Europe’s decision in favour of a joint aid package worth €500 billion (the implementation of which must still be overseen) has had to overcome. The telluric movements of global geopolitics are being felt in all their intensity, together with the no less telluric movements of technoeconomic powers.
Tellus, the Roman divinity of earth, also associated with the underworld, holds the powers of life and death.
*
2. The virus is single-handedly revealing a world that for a long time now has been feeling the distress of a profound mutation. What is at stake is not simply the organization of forms of domination: an entire organism feels sick. What is being called into question is an obstinate confidence in the belief in progress and in unpunished predatory behaviour – but without any new conviction arising about the possibility of inhabiting the
