Mapping our dystopia

Posted on May 6, 2020 by Julius Gavroche

We continue to share translations from the not bored collective which are generously forwarded to us.

Ongoing reflections on the politics of a pandemic …

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Santiago López Petit: Coronavirus as theatre of truth

Posted on April 29, 2020 by Julius Gavroche

Humanity is entering a phase of its history in which truth is reduced to a moment in the movement of the false. True is that false speech that must be kept true even when its untruth is proven. But in this way it is language itself as the place of the manifestation of truth that is confiscated from human beings. They can now only mute the movement – true because real – of the lie. To bring this movement to a stop, everyone must have the courage to seek without compromise the most precious asset: a true word.

Giorgio Agamben, Sul vero e sul falso (Quodlibet 28/04/2020)

From Lobo suelto!, a reflection on the Covid-19 pandemic, by Santiago López Petit …

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Achille Mbembe: The necropolitics of a pandemic

Posted on April 24, 2020 by Julius Gavroche

… the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics

From a brazilian newspaper, an interview with Achille Mbembe …

Mbembe is known for having coined the term “necropolitics”.  In the essay of the same name, he analyses the way in which governments decide who lives and who dies, and in which way they will die.

Necropolitics reveals itself in the fact that the virus does not affect everyone in the same way.  There is a debate about prioritising care for the young and letting the old die.  And there are still those, such as Jair Bolsonaro, who insist that the economy cannot stop even if a part of the population must die to guarantee productivity.  “Will some die?  They will die.  I am sorry, that’s life”, he said recently.  The capitalist system is based on the unequal distribution of the opportunity to live and die, claims Mbembe.  The logic of sacrifice has always been at the heart of neoliberalism; it has always functioned with the idea that some are worth more than others.  And who is without value can be discarded.

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Giorgio Agamben: A Question

Posted on April 23, 2020 by Julius Gavroche

A further contribution for the understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic from Giorgio Agamben. We again thank the not bored! collective for this translation.

This is a text which we partially shared in an earlier post.

A Question

Giorgio Agamben(1)

For the city, the plague marked the beginning of the corruption. . . . No one was disposed any longer to stay on the road that he had previously judged to be the best, because he believed that perhaps he would die before getting there.

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, II, 53.(2)

I would like to share with whomever has the desire to join the discussion a question upon which, for more than a month now, I haven’t stopped reflecting.(3) How can it happen that an entire country,(4) without realizing it, collapses ethically and politically because it has been confronted with a disease? Each of the words I have chosen to formulate this question has been carefully considered. Measuring the extent of the abdication of our ethical and political principles is indeed very simple: it is a question of asking oneself about the limit beyond which we are not disposed to abandon them. I believe that the reader who will take the trouble to consider the following points cannot but agree – without realizing it or feigning not to realize it – that the threshold that separates humanity from barbarity has been crossed.

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Gianfranco Sanguinetti: A virus removes the veil of bourgeois democracy

Posted on April 23, 2020 by Julius Gavroche

Sanguinetti proposes a reading of the COVID-19 pandemic which argues that the coronavirus has brought the pretensions of liberal, bourgeois democracy to an end. We now enter upon an age of open despotism.

However problematic such a division of epochs is – for “bourgeois democracy” has always been “despotic” for some, for all, at different moments in its history -, it is the tearing away of the veil of “democracy” that marks a new beginning.

This is another translation from the not bored! collective which has come to us, and which we share below.

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COVID-19: Translating a pandemic politically (2)

Posted on April 17, 2020 by Julius Gavroche
The mass burial of coronavirus victims on New York City’s Hart Island

Arundhati Roy, in an eloquent article on the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in india, concludes by writing …

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. (Financial Times 03/04/2020)

How we walk through the portal then will determine our future, we are told. Those possible futures may be neatly separated into the “pessimistic” and the “optimistic”, a separation that cuts across the “right-left” political divide. And on the “left”, there is no shortage of enthusiastic anticipation of the brighter world to come.

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Raoul Vaneigem: Life against capital and its pandemics

Posted on April 13, 2020 by Julius Gavroche

With gratitude to the notbored collective for sharing their latest translation of a very recent text by Vaneigem with Autonomies, we in turn share the same …

People of the World, One More Effort!

Raoul Vaneigem(1)

The world changes from the bottom up

The shock of the coronavirus(2) has only carried out the judgment that the totalitarian economy founded on the exploitation of people and nature has announced against itself.

The old world is fainting and collapsing. The new one, dismayed by the heaping up of the ruins, doesn’t dare clear them out. More frightened than resolved, it struggles to find the boldness of the child who learns to walk. As if screaming about the disaster for so long has left the people without a voice.

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Reading the coronavirus with Ivan Illich

Posted on April 12, 2020 by Julius Gavroche

Autonomies welcomes a text generously shared by David Cayley (www.davidcayley.com), Canadian writer and radio host (Toronto), and author for many years of the Ideas program for the CBC Radio programme “Ideas”.

Questions about the current pandemic from the point of view of Ivan Illich

08/04/2020

Last week I began an essay on the current pandemic in which I tried to address what I take to be the central question that it raises:  Is the massive and costly effort to contain and limit the harm that the virus will do the only choice we have?  Is it no more than an obvious and unavoidable exercise of prudence undertaken to protect the most vulnerable?  Or is it a disastrous effort to maintain control of what is obviously out of control, an effort which will compound the damage being done by the disease with new troubles that will reverberate far into the future?  I hadn’t been writing for long before I began to realize that many of the assumptions I was making were quite remote from those being expressed all around me.  These assumptions had mainly come, I reflected, from my prolonged conversation with the work of Ivan Illich.  What this suggested was that, before I could speak intelligibly about our present circumstances, I would first have to sketch the attitude towards health, medicine and well-being that Illich developed over a lifetime of reflection on these themes.  Accordingly, in what follows, I will start with a brief account of the evolution of Illich’s critique of bio-medicine and then try to answer the questions I just posed in this light.

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Pandemic Visions

Posted on April 12, 2020 by Julius Gavroche

With the generosity of the author, we share a “fiction” which is threateningly and increasingly indistinguishable from “reality”.

The Pandemic Community

Nil Mata Reyes, 2020

01. Welcome to the pandemic community, a form of social belonging structured by the participatory and prophylactic logic of networked machines. The aim of life in the pandemic community is to be intimately “in touch” yet safely out of reach, to be fully networked in hygienic isolation and thus to be fully isolated by hygienic networks.

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Giorgio Agamben: Social Distancing

Posted on April 7, 2020 by Julius Gavroche

From the online site, Quodlibet …

Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve.

Michel de Montaigne

Since history teaches us that every social phenomenon has or may have political implications, it is appropriate to carefully record the new concept that recently made its entry into the political lexicon of the West: “social distancing”. Although the term was probably produced as a euphemism to substitute for the crudeness of the term “confinement” used so far, one must ask oneself what a political order based on it could be. This is all the more urgent, as it concerns not only a theoretical hypothesis. And, if it is true, as many are saying, that the current health emergency can be considered as the laboratory in which new political and social structures that await humanity are being prepared.

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