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Title: What The Virus Said Author: Anonymous Date: March 26, 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19 Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-01 from https://itsgoingdown.org/what-the-virus-said/ Notes: Originally Published On Lundi.Am, An Autonomous Anti-Capitalist Publication. It Is Written From The Viewpoint Of The Coronavirus Itself As A Means Of Reflecting On The Larger Geo-Political Situation. Translated by Robert “le meilleur” Hurley.
You’d do well, dear humans, to stop your ridiculous calls for war. Lower
the vengeful looks you’re aiming at me. Extinguish the halo of terror in
which you’ve enveloped my name. Since the bacterial genesis of the
world, we viruses are the true continuum of life on Earth. Without us,
you would never have seen the light of day, any more than the first cell
would have come to exist.
We are your ancestors, just like the rocks and the seaweed, and much
more than the apes. We are wherever you are and also where you aren’t.
Too bad for you if you only see in the universe what is to your liking !
But above all, quit saying that it is I who am killing you. You will not
die from my action upon your tissues but from the lack of care of your
fellow humans. If you had not been just as rapacious amongst yourselves
as you were with all that lives on this planet, you would still have
enough beds, nurses, and respirators to survive the damage I do in your
lungs. If you didn’t pack your old people into nursing homes and your
able-bodied into concrete hutches, you wouldn’t be in this predicament.
If you hadn’t changed the whole expanse of the world, or worlds rather,
that just yesterday were still luxuriant, chaotic, infinitely inhabited,
into a vast desert for the monoculture of the Same and the More, I
wouldn’t have been able to launch myself into the global conquest of
your throats. If nearly all of you had not become, over the last
century, redundant copies of a single, untenable form of life, you would
not be preparing to die like flies abandoned in the water of your sugary
civilization. If you had not made your environments so empty, so
transparent, so abstract, you can be sure that I wouldn’t be moving at
the speed of an aircraft. I only come to carry out the punishment that
you have long pronounced against yourselves. Forgive me, but it’s you,
after all, who invented the name “Anthropocene”. You have awarded
yourselves the whole honor of the disaster ; now that it is unfolding,
it’s too late to decline it. The most honest among you know this very
well : I have no other accomplice than your social organization, your
folly of the “grand scale” and its economy, your fanatical belief in
systems. Only systems are “vulnerable”. Everything else lives and dies.
There’s no “vulnerability” except for what aims at control, at its
extension and its improvement. Look at me closely : I am just the flip
side of the prevailing Death.
So stop blaming me, accusing me, stalking me. Working yourselves into an
anti-viral paralysis. All of that is childish. Let me propose a
different perspective : there is an intelligence that is immanent to
life. One doesn’t need to be a subject to make use of a memory and a
strategy. One doesn’t have to be a sovereign to decide. Bacteria and
viruses can also call the shots. See me, therefore, as your savior
instead of your gravedigger. You’re free not to believe me, but I have
come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you couldn’t find. I
have come in order to suspend the operation that held you hostage. I
have come in order to demonstrate the aberration that “normality”
constitutes. “Delegating to others our nutrition, our protection, our
ability to care for our way of life was a madness”…“There is no
budgetary limit, health has no price” : see how I redirect the language
and spirit of your governing authorities ! See how I bring them down for
you to their real standing as miserable racketeers, and arrogant to boot
! See how they suddenly denounce themselves not just as being
superfluous, but as being harmful ! For them you’re nothing but supports
for the reproduction of their system – that is, less than slaves. Even
the plankton are treated better than you.
But don’t waste your time reproaching them, pointing out their
deficiencies. Accusing them of negligence is still to give them more
credit than they deserve. Ask yourselves rather how you could find it so
comfortable to let yourselves be governed. Praising the merits of the
Chinese option compared to the British option, of the imperial-legist
solution as against the Darwinist-liberal method is to understand
nothing about the one or the other, the horror of one and the horror of
the other. Since Quesnay, the “liberals” have always looked with envy at
the Chinese empire ; and they still do. They are Siamese twins. The fact
that one of them confines you in its interest and the other in the
interest of “society” always amounts to suppressing the only
non-nihilist conduct : taking care of oneself, of those one loves and of
what one loves in those one doesn’t know. Don’t let those who’ve led you
to the abyss claim to be saving you from it : they will prepare for you
a more perfect hell, an even deeper grave. Someday when they’re able,
they’ll send the army to patrol the afterlife.
You ought to thank me, rather. Without me, for how much longer would
those unquestionable things that are suddenly suspended have gone on
being presented as necessary ? Globalization, competitive exams, air
traffic, budgetary limits, elections, sports spectacles, Disneyland,
fitness gyms, most businesses, the National Assembly, school barracking,
mass gatherings, most office jobs, all that automatic sociability that
is nothing but the reverse of the anxious solitude of the metropolitan
monads : all of that was rendered unnecessary, once the state of
necessity asserted its presence. Thank me for the truth test of the
coming weeks ; you’re finally going to inhabit your own life, without
the thousand escapes that, good year bad year, hold the untenable
together. Without your realizing it, you had never taken up residence in
your own existence. You were there among your boxes, and you didn’t know
it. Now you will live with your kindreds. You will be at home. You will
cease to be in transit towards death. Perhaps you will hate your
husband. Maybe your children won’t be able to stand you. Maybe you will
feel like blowing up the décor of your everyday life. The truth is that
you were no longer in the world, in those metropolises of separation.
Your world was no longer livable in any of its guises unless you were
constantly fleeing. One had to make do with movement and distractions in
the face of the hideousness that had taken hold. And the spectral that
reigned between beings. Everything had become so efficient that nothing
made any sense any longer. Thank me for all that, and welcome back to
earth !
Thanks to me, for an indefinite time you will no longer work, your kids
won’t go to school, and yet it will be the opposite of a vacation.
Vacations are that space that must be filled up at all costs while
waiting for the obligatory return to work. But now what is opening up in
front of you, thanks to me, is not a delimited space but a gaping
emptiness. I render you idle. There’s no guarantee that yesterday’s
non-world will reappear. All of that profitable absurdity may cease. Not
being paid oneself, what would be more natural than to stop paying one’s
rent ? Why would a person unable to work go on depositing their mortgage
payments at the bank ? Isn’t it suicidal, when you come down to it, to
live where you can’t even cultivate a garden ? Someone who doesn’t have
any money left doesn’t stop eating as a consequence, and who has the
iron has the bread. Thank me : I place you in front of the bifurcation
that was tacitly structuring your existences : the economy or life. It’s
your move, your turn to play. The stakes are historical. Either the
governing authorities impose their state of exception on you, or you
invent your own. Either you go with the truths that are coming to light,
or you put your head on the chopping block. Either you use the time I’m
giving you to envision the world of the aftermath in light of what
you’ve learned from the collapse that’s underway, or the latter will go
extreme. The disaster ends when the economy ends. The economy is the
devastation. That was a theory before last month. Now it is a fact. No
one can fail to sense what it will take in the way of police,
propaganda, surveillance, logistics, and remote working to keep that
fact under control.
As you deal with me, don’t succumb to panic or denial. Don’t give in to
the biopolitical hysterias. The coming weeks will be terrible,
oppressive, cruel. The gates of death will be wide open. I am the most
devastating production of the devastation of production. I come to
reduce the nihilists to nothingness. The injustice of this world will
never be more outrageous. It’s a civilization, not you, that I come to
bury. Those who desire to live will have to construct new habits, ones
that are suitable for them. Avoiding me will be the occasion for this
reinvention, this new art of distances. The art of greeting one another,
which some were short-sighted enough to see as the very form of the
institution, will soon not obey any etiquette. It will sign beings.
Don’t do it “for the others”, for “the population” or for “society”, do
it for your people. Take care of your friends and those you love.
Rethink along with them, decisively, what a just form of life would be.
Organize clusters of right living, expand them, and I won’t be able to
do anything against you. I am calling for a massive return, not of
discipline, but of attention. Not for the end of insouciance, but the
end of all carelessness. What other way remained for me to remind you
that salvation is in each gesture ? That everything is in the tiniest
thing.
I’ve had to face the facts: humanity only asks itself the questions it
can no longer keep from asking.