Annie Gowen, “A Jan. 6 pastor divides hs Tennessee community with increasingly extremist views,” The Washington Post, March 31, 2022, ➝. See also, Jaclyn Preiser’s earlier Washington Post article of July 27, 2021, reporting on Locke’s insistence that his parishioners “ditch their masks.” ➝. See too, segment on Locke where he goes from “There is no pandemic” to false allegations about the “aborted fetal tissue in all these vaccines,” ➝.
In a similar vein, Patrice Maniglier theorizes the “ontology of the virus” through a Latourian lens as “multiversal,” its internal multiplicities (the multiplicity of viruses, produced by the constant mutation of genes, viral variants and entangled endosymbioses), are be conceived as horizontally distributed across heterogenous assemblages encompassing every type of entity and agency: animate and inanimate, inert and active. See Patrice Maniglier, Le philosophe, la Terre et le virus: Bruno Latour expliqué par l’actualité (Paris: Les Liens Qui Libèrent, 2021), 51–62.
Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World (London: Polity, 2020). Žižek’s take on the “zombie” virus is in line with his very particular interpretation of the death-drive, which in a departure from Freud, attaches it to the concept of undeadness: “The Freudian death drive has nothing whatsoever to do with the desire for self-annihilation, for a return to the inorganic absence of all tension of life; rather, it is the very opposite of dying - a name for the 'undead', eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless iteration of wandering in guilt and pain. The paradox of Freud's 'death drive', then, is that Freud is using it to denote its very opposite, namely the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, an uncanny excess of life, an 'undead' urge that transcends the (biological) cycle of Life and death, persisting from arising and passing away. The real lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never just 'just life.’” See, Slavoj Žižek: Parallax (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 61.
I borrow the expression “tauto-teleological” from Catherine Malabou who uses it in her book Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie (Paris: PUF, 2022), 188.
Elissa Marder, “The Shadow of the Eco: Denial and Climate Change,” unpublished paper, Feb. 20, 2021. My thanks to Elissa for sharing this work, which was originally delivered as a talk at a Das Unbehagen conference on “Psychoanalysis and Ecocide,” February 23, 2021, ➝. A different version of the talk, “The Shadow of the Eco. Climate Change and Psychoanalysis,” was delivered at Columbia University on March 11, 2022, ➝. Emphasis mine.
Ibid.
Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 106-107. Emphasis mine.
Didier Fassin, When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 115. See too, Michael Specter’s influential 2009 study Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives (New York: Penguin Press, 2009).
Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” (1925). In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XIX, The Ego and the Id and Other Works (1923–1925) (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 235. In this volume, see too Freud’s essay “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis” (1924), 183–190.
Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l’Imaginaire ou l’Autre scène (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969).
Alenka Zupançiç, paper at conference “In the Wake of the Plague: Eros and Mourning,” Dartmouth College, April 21, 2022.
Jacques Lacan, “I’ve just been to the butcher’s,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan III, The Psychoses (1955–1956), trans. Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 46, 47, 52. Lacan’s most fundamental text of reference is “Introduction and Reply to Jean Hyppolite’s presentation of Freud’s Verneinung,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan I, Freud’s Papers on Technique (1952–1954), trans. John Forrester, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 52–61.
Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 22-23. See my discussion of the differend in “Armed Response: Translation as Judicial Hearing,” e-flux Journal 84 (September 2017), ➝.
In more strictly psychoanalytic terms this “both-and” dissolves Freudian dualisms according to which neurotic negation (expressed in symptoms of failed repression, egoic self-preservation and defense, a negation of the unconscious to the end of preserving a connection to reality) is opposed to psychotic denial (expressed as dominance of the id to the point of total denial of external reality).
Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, “Lyotard and the Trolls: The Differend, Sophistry, and the Right,” Philosophy Today (February, 2022). In the case of doubt-seeding, we can say with Lacan that the subject is not psychotic, just subject to a hallucination. “Introduction and Reply to Jean Hyppolite’s presentation of Freud’s Verneinung,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan I, 59.
This strategy will be especially familiar to readers of Naomi Oreskes’ and Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), which tracked the honing of deniability as a political technology in the 1960s and 1970s.
Max Stirner outlined this in his controversial book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and its Own) (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1845).
Sigmund Freud, “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis,” op. cit. 184.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (London; Vienna: The International Psycho-Analytic Press, 1922), 33.
This is relevant to the larger “ethics of the (infected) neighbor,” as diagnosed by Kenneth Reinhard in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
See Marc Tracy, “As Mamet Returns to Broadway, His Claims on Pedophilia Get the Spotlight,” The New York Times, April 13, 2022.
The term “safetyism” crops up in the face-off between Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, coauthors of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), and Michael Roth, author of Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Lukianoff and Haidt denounce campus “coddling” and “vindictive protectionism,” while Wesleyan college president Roth proposes “safe enough spaces” (after Winnicott’s “good enough parent”) centered on inclusion and respect. Roth traces the origin of safe space back to postwar industrial psychology when emigré social psychologist Kurt Lewin was asked to help workers and supervisors adapt to a feminized workplace at the Harwood Manufacturing textile plant. Lewin associated safe space with an environment that allows for participatory decision-making on productivity and absenteeism without fear of retaliation or retribution. The safe space concept migrated from the factory to the therapist’s office, and with the help of social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, become a rallying point of feminism (the Bluestocking feminist bookstore as safe space), black empowerment and LGBTQI emancipation. Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 30.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Un trop humain virus (Montrouge: Bayard, 2020), 8.
Another, more positive way of theorizing “communovirus” or neoviralism for that matter, might emphasize a model of community-in-virus. This is arguably found in the community of barebackers. It came together around the rejection of the repressive moral apparatus of safe-sex and has been known to willingly share HIV as an affirmative gesture of investment in a future dying-together. See, Tim Dean Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic! 2: Chronicles of a Time Lost (London: Polity, 2020), 10.
The title plays on Gracchus Babeuf and Sylvain Maréchal’s “Manifesto of the Equals” (Le Manifeste des Egaux), (1796), which referenced an insurrection against the Directorate known as “The Conspiracy of the Equals.”
Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure, 32, 33 respectively. Schuster ponders whether Freud’s theory of the death drive refers “to a demonic compulsion to repeat? Or to an aggressive force of self-sabotage and self-destruction? Or to a metaphysical biology that makes of life a painful detour of inorganic matter?,” 32. He also provides a reading of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain that vividly illustrates this notion of “life as a disease,” or life not as “Vibrant Matter” (Jane Bennett), or “Bodies that Matter” (Judith Butler) but as “Sick Matter,” 35. Schuster writes: “During his unexpectedly long stay in the Swiss mountain retreat, the novel’s main character, Hans Castorp, is exposed to different views on the relationship between sickness and health, body and mind, suffering and sprituality, but remains undecided. In the section of chapter V titled ‘Research,’ Castorp undertakes his own scientific inquiry, reading numerous volumes on anatomy, physiology, and biology: What is life? What is its origin? By what mysterious leap did the first living protoplasm come into being? This investigation into the earliest stirrings of life eventually leads him from biology to physics, the gulf between the organic and the inorgqanic harking back to the perhaps even more mysterious and unfathomable breach between the material and the immaterial. At the end of this episode, Castop comes to a thought that perfectly captures Freud’s patho-biological speculations, while daringly pushing them one step further. ‘Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter?’”
“une dénégation cette fois non déconstruite de l’anarchisme.” Malabou, Au voleur!, 162.
Ibid., 191.
Ibid., 193.
Ibid., 200–201.
Ibid., 163.
Ibid., 190.
Ibid., 188.
Ibid., 316.
Ibid., 323.
Ibid., 394.
Benjamin Bratton, “Agamben WTF, or How Philosophy Failed the Pandemic,” Verso, July 28, 2021, ➝.
Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (London: Verso, 2021).
Hausdorf further deplores Bratton’s unwillingness to recognize Agamben as one of the few intellectuals willing to “criticize excessive state power, dismantle simplistic industry scientism, and profess decentralization and medical autonomy against the dubious manifestations of the state.” Nicolas Hausdorf, “Revenge of the Unreal,” IM-1776, July 20, 2021, ➝.
J.J. Charlesworth, “`A System to be Managed’: The Problem with Benjamin Bratton’s Antihumanism,” ArtReview, November 9, 2021, ➝.
John Pistelli, review of the The Revenge of the Real, blogpost August 3, 2021, ➝.
This question solicits a rereading of Umberto Eco’s essay “Faith in Fakes,” and other writings on the semiotics of lying as a mechanism of fiction, falsification, error, secrecy, and conspiracy.
From an interview relating to his talk on “Artaud et la Théorie du Complot” at an event organized in 2014 by Pierre Michon. “‘Des phrases qui sauvent la peau’: Entretien with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem,” Inferno, September 29, 2014, ➝. During the pandemic he will launch a full-blown conspiracy theory that the pandemic is a genocidal plot hatched by the totalitarian biopolitical state. In addition to his broadside Colaricovirus: D’un génocide non conventionnel (Exuvie, 2022), and an incendiary open letter to the Mayor of Turenne (➝), Mehdi Belhaj Kacem released a torrent of Covid-denialist videos at the height of the pandemic that were banned from internet diffusion but continued to circulate on alternative media. A more muted version of his Covid-denialism appears in the anonymously published Manifeste conspirationniste allegedly coauthored by members of the now defunct Invisible Committee. Joseph Confavreux, reviewing the book in Mediapart (January 27, 2022) denounced it as a mass of meta-conspiratorial delusions in the name of collective revolt that promotes the hypothesis of a preplanned pandemic orchestrated to give cover to mass surveillance by the global order, ➝.
Slavoj Žižek writes: “We in the West less and less accept death as part of life, we see it as an intrusion of something foreign that can be indefinitely postponed…” Pandemic! 2, 11.