Читать книгу An All-Too-Human Virus - Jean-Luc Nancy - Страница 7

Giorgio Agamben, an old friend, declares that the coronavirus scarcely differs from a normal case of the flu. He forgets that we have a vaccine for the ‘normal’ flu that has proved its effectiveness. It must still be adapted every year to viral mutations. For all that, the ‘normal’ flu still kills people – and the coronavirus, for which no vaccine exists, is much more likely to have a lethal outcome: proportionally (according to sources similar to those cited by Agamben), about thirty times more likely. The least one can say is that this is no minor difference.

Giorgio assures us that governments are looking for pretexts to introduce every imaginable state of exception. He does not mention that the exception becomes the rule in a world in which technological interconnections of all kinds (movements, transfers of all kinds, infusions or propagations of substances, etc.) reach a hitherto unknown level of intensity, one that increases along with the population. The growth of the latter in rich countries also involves longer lifespans and an increase in the number of elderly people and, in general, of people at risk.

Make no mistake about the target here: an entire civilization is at stake, there is no doubt about it. There is a sort of viral – biological, computerized, cultural – exception that ‘pandemicizes’ us. Governments are not the sad agents of this exception, and lashing out at them looks more like an exercise in diversion than real political reflection.

I noted that Giorgio is an old friend. I regret to bring in a personal memory, but in doing so I’m not departing, in essence, from a register of general reflection. Almost thirty years ago, the doctors said that I needed a heart transplant. Giorgio was one of the very few people who advised me not to listen to them. If I had followed his advice, I would undoubtedly have died quite 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

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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