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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.

Anonymous

What The Virus Said

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.