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Title: Coronavirus Author: Raoul Vaneigem Date: March 17, 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19 Source: Retrieved on 2020-03-26 from http://www.notbored.org/coronavirus.pdf Notes: Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 20 March 2020. All footnotes by the translator. A few corrections made on 21 March 2020 (thanks D.A.).
Challenging the danger posed by the coronavirus is surely absurd. But,
on the other hand, isn’t it just as absurd that a disturbance in the
habitual course of illnesses has become the object of such intense
emotional exploitation and mobilizes the same arrogant incompetence that
years ago kicked the cloud from Chernobyl out of France?[1] Certainly,
we know the facility with which the specter of the apocalypse comes out
of it box to seize upon the latest catastrophe, patch together the
imagery of a universal deluge and plunge the plowshare of guilt into the
sterile soil of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The divine curse served to help power. At least it did until the Lisbon
earthquake of 1755, when the Marquis de Pombal, a friend of Voltaire,
took advantage of the event to massacre the Jesuits, reconstruct the
city according to his conceptions and gleefully liquidate his political
rivals through “proto-Stalinist” show trials. Odious though he was,
Pombal shouldn’t be insulted by comparing his dictatorial feat[2] with
the impoverished measures that democratic totalitarianism is applying
globally to the coronavirus epidemic.
It is cynical to impute the deplorable insufficiency of the medical
means being used to the propagation of the scourge![3] For decades the
public welfare has been compromised, the hospital sector has paid the
costs of a policy that favors financial interests at the expense of the
health of the citizens. There is always more money for the banks and
fewer and fewer beds and caregivers for the hospitals. What acts of
buffoonery can continue to hide the fact that the catastrophic
management of catastrophe is inherent in globally dominant financial
capitalism, which today is combated globally in the names of life, the
planet and the species to be saved?
Without falling into any rehashing of divine punishment (the idea that
nature is ridding herself of humanity as if it were an unwelcome and
harmful pest), it isn’t useless to recall that for millennia the
exploitation of human and terrestrial nature has imposed the dogma of
antiphysis,[4] of anti-nature. Eric Postaire’s book, Les épidémie du
XXIe siècle, published in 1997,[5] confirms the disastrous effects of
persistent denaturation, which is something that I’ve denounced for
decades. Evoking the drama of the “mad cow”[6] (foreseen by Rudolf
Steiner in the 1920s),[7] Postaire recalls that scientific progress, in
addition to disarming us against certain illnesses, can also cause
decades of them. In his plea for a responsible approach to epidemics and
their treatment, he incriminates what Claude Gudin calls “cash register
philosophy” in his preface to the book. He asks, “doesn’t subordinating
the health of the population to the laws of profit, to the point of
transforming herbivore animals into carnivores, risk causing
catastrophes that will be fatal to Nature and Humanity?” We know well
that the rulers have already responded with a unanimous YES. But what
importance does this have when the NO of the financial interests
continues to triumph cynically?
Was the coronavirus really necessary to demonstrate to the most
narrow-minded among us that denaturation in the service of profitability
has disastrous consequences for universal health, which is managed
without distress by a World Organization whose precious statistics
compensate for the disappearance of public hospitals? There’s an obvious
correlation between the coronavirus and the collapse of global
capitalism. It is no less evident that what the coronavirus epidemic
covers over and submerges is emotional plague, hysterical fear, panic
that both hides the deficiencies of the treatment and perpetuates the
evil by frightening the patient. During the great epidemics of the past,
the population did penitence and proclaimed their guilt by flagellating
themselves.[8] Don’t the managers of global dehumanization have an
interest in persuading the people that there is no escape from the
miserable lot that is made for them? That all they have is the
flagellation of voluntary servitude? The formidable media machine can
only rehash the old lie of the heavenly decree, impenetrable,
unavoidable, in which crazy money has supplanted the bloody and
capricious Gods of the past.
The unleashing of police barbarism upon peaceful demonstrators has amply
shown that military law is the only thing that functions efficiently.
Today it quarantines women, men and children. Outside: the coffin.
Inside: the television, an open window on a closed world! This is a
practice that is liable to aggravate existential anxiety because it
gambles on the emotions that have been flayed by anguish and exacerbates
the blindness of impotent anger.
But even the lie gives way to general collapse. Governmental and
populist cretinization has reached its limits. It cannot deny that an
experiment in is progress. Civil disobedience grows and dreams of
societies that are radically new because they are radically human.
Solidarity frees from their individualist sheepskins those individuals
who no longer fear thinking for themselves.
The coronavirus has revealed the bankruptcy of the State. Well, there’s
a subject for reflection (at least) by the victims of enforced
confinement. At the time of the publication of my Modestes propositions
aux grévistes,[9] friends once again showed me the difficulty of
following my suggestion for the collective refusal to pay duties, taxes
and levies. But then the recognized bankruptcy of the swindler-State
attested to an economic and social deterioration that renders absolutely
insolvent small- and middle-sized companies, local commerce, those with
modest incomes, family-owned farms and even the so-called liberal
professions. The collapse of Leviathan has succeeded in convincing
people more rapidly than our resolutions to bring it down.
The coronavirus has done even better than that. The cessation of
production-caused pollutants has lessened global pollution; millions of
people have been spared a programmed death; nature is able to breathe;
the dolphins have returned to frolicking in Sardinia; the canals in
Venice, purified of mass tourism, now once again contain clear water;
the stock market is collapsing. Spain is resolved to nationalize private
hospitals, as if it has rediscovered social security, as if the
[Spanish] State has recalled the welfare state that it destroyed.
Nothing is assured, everything begins.[10] Utopia still crawls on all
fours. Let’s abandon to their heavenly inanity the billions of
banknotes[11] and hollow ideas that spin round above our heads. The
important thing is to “take care of our affairs ourselves” by letting
the wheeler-dealer financial bubble burst and implode. Let us not lack
boldness and confidence in ourselves!
Our present isn’t the confinement that survival imposes on us; it is the
opening to all possibilities. It is due to panic that the oligarchic
State is forced to adopt measures that even yesterday it decreed were
impossible. It is to the call of life and the earth to be restored that
we want to respond. Quarantine is good for reflection. Confinement
doesn’t abolish the presence of the street; it reinvents it. Cum grano
salis,[12] let me think that the insurrection of everyday life has
unexpected therapeutic virtues.
[1] On 26 April 1986, one of the reactors at Chernobyl in the Ukraine
exploded and caused a radioactive cloud to spread all over Europe. Some
TV weather forecasters in France suggested that the cloud would stop at
the German border and “miraculously” spare France.
[2] The French here, coup d’éclat, might be a pun on coup d’etat
(seizure of the State). See for example François Hollande’s criticism of
Nicolas Sarkozy circa 2007:
- sarkozy-denonce-par-hollande.html.
[3] The French here, fléau, also means curse and plague.
[4] In the works of Rabelais, Physis is joyful and unashamed and
Antiphysis is hateful and destructive.
[5] Not yet translated into English.
[6] Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is a neurodegenerative disease that
affects cattle. Caused by the consumption of meat-and-bone meal, “mad
cow disease” broke into public consciousness in 1990s.
[7] Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) was an Austrian philosopher and social
reformer. Vaneigem is alluding to Steiner’s conception of biodynamic
agriculture.
[8] Cf. Raoul Vaneigem, “The Flagellants,” Resistance to Christianity
(1993):
.
[9] Published by Vericales in 2004, not yet translated into English.
[10] An echo of Rien n’est fini, tout commence, a collection of
interviews with Vaneigem published in French in 2014 and translated into
English by NOT BORED! as Self-Portraits and Caricatures of the
Situationist International (2015).
[11] English in original.
[12] “With a grain of salt” (Latin in original).