Monday 17 August 2020

It’s Like Shooting Elephants - Fugue Impressions of Coronavirus Biopolitics ... Part II


5.  State of Exception in Philosophy (according to Reiner Schürmann)

 “The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought.  The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality.  The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.” (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black and Red, Detroit, 1983, Chapter 19)


Digression, Detour or Shortcut?:  Is the state of exception in philosophy a form of immunity or autoimmunity?

Philosophy is in a ‘state of exception’.  Schürmann describes the state of philosophy at the end of hegemonic/epochal history (the collapse of ‘normative self-consciousness’) in similar terms to the way Agamben – following Carl Schmitt – describes the law under the conditions of the state of exception: in force but without significance.  In Agamben/Schmitt’s terms: the state of exception is such when the law is suspended but remains in force – meaning for the force of the law to be separated/extracted from the law – the law is suspended and preserved (otherwise the state of exception would be an-archic).  The law is necessary to suspend itself – to unbind or unleash its force from itself. This is the paradox/aporia of the state of exception. In Schürmann’s analysis of principles - the traditional domain or immanent architecture of philosophy/metaphysics since Plato - and their demise, the principle is both the law, principium, and the political authority as princeps.   All this ends.  Or does it? Is it perhaps in a mere state of exception – the force of metaphysics/the principle or principial thinking is preserved by a suspended (not ended) metaphysics?  Perhaps that is the power of Heidegger’s ‘sovereign’ thought – to decide on this state of exception – which had already invaded or established itself or broke out in philosophy – simulating the closure of philosophy or metaphysics.  This would then be the monstrous site to which we are still riveted – from which or in which we are suspended.

Philosophy has had many endings.  Metaphysics is not just at its end – it’s a kind of undead bricolage of ‘devalued’ concepts – as numerous philosophers have intimated – Nietzsche, following him Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida etc.   But Heideggerian philosophy through its being riveted to the Heideggerian or monstrous site (Schürmann) – is itself in a Heideggerian state of exception.  Or the state of exception induced by the Heidegger anomaly – is not a closure of philosophy, the end of an era of a certain way of doing philosophy – it is the suspension of philosophy for an indefinite period. Heidegger announced and induced this suspension – not an end.  Philosophy is ‘condemned’ to perpetually destruct or deconstruct its premises, itself, metaphysics – without ever reaching an end – never overturning the suspension or state of exception into which it has entered.  And just as in the opening line of Schmitt’s ‘political theology’ – sovereign is he who decides on the exception, - Heidegger – for those who perceive philosophy through his hegemonic fantasm of ‘thinking’ or ‘topologies of being’ – is the sovereign who has decided on the exception in the state of philosophy.
Or in Heidegger’s words from Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis):  “We are living in the age of transition from metaphysics to the historical thinking of being.””(cited in Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, Indiana University Press, 2003, p. 516)  Beiträge written from 1936-1938 in the midst of the Nazi state of exception is Schürmann’s prototype, one might surmise, for all subsequent philosophical states of exception or the state of exception in philosophy.

‘The state of philosophy’ is a practising body which Schürmann refers to as the ‘civil servants of humanity’ – implying the existence or constitution through this body of mandarin-philosophers of their own state of exception.  The mandarin-philosopher or bureaucratized philosopher-king mimics or parallels in his/their state those semi-permanent states of emergency or exception of the body politic or political state thus perpetuating their symbioses with the state.  Such mandarin-philosophers (today’s academia) (since Hegel – Schürmann argues) provide evidential moorage for the Prussian or any other state.  But not the state in its ‘normal’ mode or phase – the state in its state of exception.  

Schürmann seems to allude directly to such a state of exception of philosophy in a passage in the Conclusion of Broken Hegemonies:
At the end of hegemony – a fantasm goes through the stages of its demise - atrophy, phenomenological inanition and mortal contraction:
“I have spoken of destitution to describe what happens to such a fantasm when it loses its force of law. (approaching the zone of suspension of law – it loses its force – but the force changes into a ‘force of necessity’ stronger than force of law).  Diremption signifies the loss of every hegemony – the possibility that we have been living for more than a century. (RS calls these inter-hegemonic times, but at the end of the hegemonic fantasm of modern consciousness – there are no further fantasms arising – the end of epochal history. sm)  In the destitutions and in Diremption, the ultimate trait of mortality is manifested, along with the singularizing condition that manifests itself in everydayness as dispossession. (…) It is a dispossession of habitable phenomenalities that remains systematically operative in every positing of an integrative law.  The law thereby finds itself already placed in abeyance, already forbidden. (this is what approximates the state of exception of the hegemonic fantasm. sm)” (Broken Hegemonies, ibid., p. 623)

Philosophy’s state of exception immunizes it against the force of its own law which would come to an end – were it not needed to uphold the state of exception.  Is that also a condition of autoimmunity?  As such Philosophy or Metaphysics at its end would be the identity or coincidence/collision of its powers of immunity and autoimmunity.   

Reiner Schürmann

6.  Nailed to the Dance Floor

An excerpt from Foucault’s Hermeneutic of the Subject – found semi by chance – when searching for ‘bio’  - describes the type of fitness one needs now in the Coronavirus biopolitical state of exception according to the stoics who professed another fitness or athleticism as the one found in the Christian tradition:
“I will quote you a text from Marcus Aurelius, but you will also find the theme in Seneca and Epictetus, and so on: "The art of living [what he calls the biotic: he biotike; M.F.] is more like wrestling than dancing, in that you must stay on guard and steady on your feet against the blows which rain down on you, and without warning."  This contrast between athleticism and dance, wrestling and dance, is interesting. The dancer is of course someone who does his best to achieve a certain ideal that will enable him to surpass others or to surpass himself. The dancer's work is indefinite. The art of wrestling consists simply in being ready and on guard, in remaining steady, that is to say, not being thrown, not being weaker than all the blows coming either from circumstances or from others. I think this is very important. It enables us to distinguish between the athlete of ancient spirituality and the Christian athlete. The Christian athlete is on the indefinite path of progress towards holiness in which he must surpass himself even to the point of renouncing himself. Also, the Christian athlete is especially someone who has an enemy, an adversary, who keeps him on guard. With regard to whom and to what? But with regard to himself! To himself, inasmuch as the most malign and dangerous powers he has to confront (sin, fallen nature, seduction by the devil, etcetera) are within himself. The Stoic athlete, the athlete of ancient spirituality also has to struggle. He has to be ready for a struggle in which his adversary is anything coming to him from the external world: the event. The ancient athlete is an athlete of the event. The Christian is an athlete of himself. This is the first point.” (Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Lectures at the College de France, 1981-82, edited by Frédéric Gros, translation Graham Burchell, New York 2005 p. 322)

(Is this distinction so clear-cut – Nietzsche’s Zarathustra dances his way down the mountain – his sayings are his dance – but he is the antithesis of a Christian – he wonders at the old hermit he meets alone with his God, in need of no human company.  Zarathustra muses – hasn’t he heard that God is dead? Or another Nietzsche saying:  I should not believe in a God who does not dance. The Christian God is nailed to the dance floor. On the other hand isn’t the wrestler also a dancer? Just staying upright under blows requires a dancer’s technique.)

Ancient askesis says Foucault is steeled through Logoi – remembered and transformed into muscles and sinews for the rescuing act at the moment of danger. This is reminiscent of Benjamin’s Logoi from “On the Concept of History” describing the consciousness of the historical subject in the moment of danger: It’s the 6th Thesis – and has a very ancient stoic ring to it – memory is not just knowing how things were – rather it is the recollection and knowledge which light up at the moment of danger and turn into action:
“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, as it unexpectedly thrusts itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” (Translation ©Dennis Redmond, 2005, @www.marxists.org)
(“Vergangenes historisch artikulieren heißt nicht, es erkennen ‚wie es denn eigentlich gewesen ist’. Es heißt, sich einer Erinnerung bemächtigen, wie sie im Augenblick einer Gefahr aufblitzt. Dem historischen Materialismus geht es darum, ein Bild der Vergangenheit festzuhalten, wie es sich im Augenblick der Gefahr dem historischen Subjekt unversehens einstellt. Die Gefahr droht sowohl dem Bestand der Tradition wie ihren Empfängern. Für beide ist sie ein und dieselbe: sich zum Werkzeug der herrschenden Klasse herzugeben. In jeder Epoche muß versucht werden, die Überlieferung von neuem dem Konformismus abzugewinnen, der im Begriff steht, sie zu überwältigen. Der Messias kommt ja nicht nur als der Erlöser; er kommt als der Überwinder des Antichrist. Nur dem Geschichtsschreiber wohnt die Gabe bei, im Vergangenen den Funken der Hoffnung anzufachen, der davon durchdrungen ist: auch die Toten werden vor dem Feind, wenn er siegt, nicht sicher sein. Und dieser Feind hat zu siegen nicht aufgehört.” (in Gesammelten Schriften I:2. Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main, 1974)

Reprise: The self-isolating zoe/bare life suspected of being infected with Coronavirus is homo sacer par excellence.  Out of reach, off limits for everyone - denied treatment or contact with medical personnel – until he reaches the hospital phase – needs respirators or help breathing – which he can be denied if he falls out or into the ‘triage’ – or possibly as in the case of many care home inhabitants is not even allowed into hospital to avoid “clogging up NHS hospitals” (a phrase used by Professor Sir David King, former chief scientific advisor early on in the pandemic). But even in hospital homo sacer’s ostracism follows him like a shadow – thus it was – a great dispensation/interruption in the iron logic of total separation, pariahhood, abandonment when the health minister Hancock granted the populace of homo sacers the right in hospital to say goodbye to their dying relative.
*
As Foucault notes – with the rise of ‘biopower’ the question of classical sovereignty and its juridical powers fades, while the power the modern state exercises directly over the population is what sustains its sovereign existence.
“But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. (…) this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomenon of population.” (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, An Introduction, Vol 1, translated by Robert Hurley, New York, 1978, p. 137) 
As opposed to earlier historical universalistic/cosmopolitan class struggles – the International, the Paris Commune etc, general anti-imperial/anti-colonial movements - the counter-power of the biopolitical masses accrues/arises like the biopolitical regime/hegemony it mimics or apes - at the level of life or bare life whether such masses are mobilised by sexuality, gender, race or ethnic origins.

How are these biopolitical masses at the same time ‘human capital’ – another term Foucault explores in his studies of neoliberalism?  Neoliberalism like capitalism is a multiplicity of regimes dwelling under one name – it is at once an economy composed of entrepreneurial monads – dubbed human capital – each promoting his/her proper brand of self.  A brand or ownership of self is a unit of immunity in a neo-Lockean sense.  Social media or the society of the spectacle is where these brands promote themselves - compete and circulate.   Social media grants the human capital entrepreneur an immortal astral virtual body.  The same ‘human capital’ - when neoliberalism switches to its ‘noir’ face – immediately reverts to its physical herd body – disposable, dispensable bare life – subject to both the economic ‘triage’ of the recession – and the medical ‘triage’ of the health services.  

Since neo-liberalism is inherently the biopolitical regime of capital which rules ‘bare life’ –why quibble if ‘bare life’ is technically inside or outside of capital as Balibar would argue with Agamben:
“No form of life as agency, activity and passivity, even suffering, even dying, can be lived outside a commodity form and a value-form that is in fact a moment in the valorization process of capital. This is not a reduction of the individual’s life to ‘bare life’, as Agamben calls it. In a sense it is just the opposite: the denaturalization of life, or the production of a ‘second nature’ – albeit not in any form (since every human culture is a ‘second nature’), but in purely capitalist form.” (Balibar, ibid. , pp. 56-57)

One could also say - ‘Bare life’ and its ‘reproduction’ is the ‘unnatural’ or ‘denaturalized’ form in which the biological substance of the population becomes the subject/object of this edition of the capitalist state (under the state of exception) and its direct immediate governance of bodies.  


7.  A brief genealogy of biopolitics

Herd immunity – what does it mean – 60% of the herd will have had to have been infected?  Is that true in China – 600,000,000 cases?  Where are they?  How can it be over?  In Wuhan there was a total of 4ooo fatalities approximately – the lockdown was over after 2 months – in the UK we are very far from over and there are 14,000/30,000 (onwards and upwards) fatalities (at the latest count 60,000 give or take).  The virus seems to behave differently in the various local settings.  It can’t just be the virus itself – or a mutation causing the vast difference in fatalities.  The Umwelt must also play a part – human and otherwise ecological predispositions and the epidemiological bureaucracy, medicine etc. The mathematical modeller and neuroscientist Karl Friston of University College London speaks mysteriously of epidemiological ‘dark matter’ or individuals not susceptible at all to the virus (see Laura Spinney, “Covid-19 Expert Karl Friston: “Germany may have more immunological “dark matter”’, Guardian 31 May 2020)   Somewhere I read that in the UK despite appearances (highest fatality toll in Europe of approx 60,000) maybe even half to 80% of the population is naturally immune!?  Is ‘dark matter’ the Messiah?  But how to know if you’re one of the lucky many?  If you knew and could prove it - you could enter the Brahman caste of the covid-19 immune, sell your genome … Japan might be the epicentre of dark matter – despite having the oldest population in the world and Tokyo being one of the most densely populated cities on earth – it has had only a thousand or so fatalities since the beginning of the pandemic.  They were lax with testing and per law could not declare a full-fledged state of exception.  Perhaps it is the deeply engrained Shinto worship of ancestors, which bestows the Japanese with ancestral immunity?  Even if contagion does not reproduce through hereditary genetics – perhaps immunity does?

We can tell we’re in the throes of a biopolitical conversion/transitioning of government.  The medics (doctors, bio-scientific advisors, chief medical officers, biomedical science in all its manifestations, NHS managers) have become our rulers – elevated far beyond their usual status of being ‘just’ our doctors or scientists or grey bureaucrats.  At the daily Coronavirus briefings they flank the government minister or prime minister – the primus inter pares.  The medics are the unelected sovereigns of the state of exception.  The chief scientific advisor Sir Patrick Vallance besides being a doctor is also a former head of research at Glaxo/Smith/Kline – so that in his person he unites big pharma-business and the dominant medical camarilla.  That the chief ‘scientific’ advisor is a medical drug researcher and not an astrophysicist or geologist or some non-biological scientist shows that the biopolitical trajectory is already deeply embedded/ensconced in government.  His predecessor Mark Walport belongs to the same biopolitical group –, a former director of Wellcome Trust and a specialist in immunology. (see their respective Wikipedia entries)

The position/authority of the new medical rulers in the British biopolitical state of exception resembles structurally the role of the NS doctors in the NS regime.  This follows quite logically and historically from the biopolitical template: when politics’ or government’s most urgent ‘pastoral’ task is to self-transform (mutate) into an immunological/immunizing machine.  The doctor rulers become the exception in the exception – their power is far greater than the police or other enforcement bodies.
The Holocaust was perpetrated as a medical public health intervention against the “Jewish virus” or contagion under the supervision of doctors – to produce immunity or immunize the German racial community. As Esposito writes – the doctors were in charge of all phases of the extermination, the selection of newly arrived Jewish victims (‘triage’) on the ramp in the death camps, the ‘switching’ on of the gas (the opening of the gas valve, the NS ‘respirator’), extraction of gold teeth, supervising the cremation – besides of course the ‘medical experiments’.  “If ultimate power wore the boots of the SS, auctoritas wore the white coat of the doctor.” (Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political, “Nazism and Us”, Fordham University Press, 2013, p. 82) 

Historically, there is a genealogical convergence/confluence of English liberalism (Locke), eugenics (Galton), social Darwinism, Houston Chamberlain and Nazism. The Nazis’ great admiration for the British Empire is well known – they emulated its overt and underlying race theories and their ‘classic’ Roman inspired administrative models.  The Nazi historian Otto Graf, published his popular work Imperium Britannicum in 1937 – it was reprinted for the 5th time in 1941.   In it he gushes over Britain as the “heir of Rome” – admiring the British finesse in ruling vast regions with a relatively small imperial administration.  Especially the way they could instil their colonial subjects with an imperial zeal of their own:  “Whether black, brown or yellow they were proud to be permitted to lick the boots of their masters in English.  What an art of politics; what a genius hand at ruling people, to awaken even in such creatures a feeling of pride!” (Otto Graf, Imperium Britannicum, From Island-State to World Empire, Leipzig 1941, p. 28, translation sm) Graf was only echoing a view prevalent amongst Britain’s academics and colonial civil servants: In his inaugural lecture in 1912 the Cambridge English professor A. Quiller-Couch called Britain ‘the spiritual heir of Rome” – and the historian Sir Charles Lucas said in his study of ‘Greater Rome and Greater Britain’ (1912) – both peoples have “an innate capacity for ruling”. (cited in Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997, London, 2007 p. xvii)
The Nazi SS administrators might have seen themselves in turn as the ‘heirs of the British Empire’ when they set up their Generalgouvernement in Poland or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and their other diverse forms of occupation in the territories they conquered.
Certain prominent British figures reciprocated this fraternal warmth of feeling - notably the founder of the boy scouts, Lord Baden-Powell. The birth control advocate and agony aunt – Marie Stopes was also a Nazi sympathiser, (she sent love poems to Hitler) and a eugenicist, a ‘neo-Malthusian’ in the language of the time. Birth control was for Stopes an instrument, a first step toward the fashioning of a superior race.  Another prominent eugenicist was Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England from 1920-1944 – one of the notorious rakish ‘free-spirited’ ‘lords of finance’ of the pre- war period.  Not only was he a close friend of the Nazi finance minister Hjlamar Schacht and godfather to one of his grandchildren.  Norman and his wife Priscilla Reyntiens Worsthorne The Lady Norman CBE JP were both eugenics and mental health activists.

(Note: In Britain psychiatry was strongly intertwined with eugenics, as were other medical fields such as obstetrics and gynaecology for obvious reasons. Eugenics was/is considered a legitimate element/tool of social, biological and medical reform.
The British eugenics society has had an illustrious roll call of members including Winston Churchill as honorary president, Havelock Ellis, John  Maynard Keynes (Director 1937-1944, Vice-President 1937), Marie Stopes, Arthur Balfour, Julian Huxley, members of the Darwin family to name a few.  It still exists in London under the name ‘Galton Institute’. Until recently UCL had a lecture hall named after Galton.)

Beyond his activities as a public persona, Norman used his powers as Governor of the Bank of England to help Nazi Germany expropriate the gold reserves of Czechoslovakia.  
In 1939 after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he aided the 3rd Reich’s sale of stolen Czechoslovakian gold reserves and the transfer of these funds (at least 700 million pounds worth much more then) to various German accounts in particular to the German Reichsbank account at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland. All of this history flows into the DNA of the NHS,  its genetic memory – before that the Malthusian notion of population control.


When you trace the genealogy of biopolitics, its austere promontories from Hobbes, to Locke and Bentham – adding Malthus, Darwin and Galton, Sir Julian Huxley, Hubert Spencer and Houston Chamberlain - biopolitics or the government of ‘life’ itself - is (crudely speaking) practically an English invention. The rudiments of its sovereignty originate in Hobbes’ bleak answer to regicide and revolution in the Leviathan, its biological-anthropological underpinnings evolved during the British Empire’s long ‘scientific’ rule over vast portions of the globe and its population – affording much opportunity for the gathering of ‘big data’.  Against this rich background - a small group of Victorian scientists from an inbreeding middle and upper class connected to University College London could cultivate an incestuous scientific discourse.  Together they invented a variety of meanwhile ‘discredited’ or obsolete sciences like eugenics, or the field of ‘zoology and comparative anatomy’, a precursor or tributary of Darwin’s theory of evolution or Hubert Spencer’s ‘social Darwinism’ and its ‘survival of the fittest’.  Galton, the ‘father of eugenics’ was Darwin’s first cousin – descending from a common paternal grandfather Erasmus Darwin.  Robert Grant a major proponent of ‘zoology and comparative anatomy’ influenced the young pigeon fancier to be Darwin who heard his lectures on medicine at Edinburgh University and admired his evolutionary work on sponges.  Malthus’ On Population about the population’s ‘necessary’ cyclical food catastrophes (the so-called Malthusian catastrophe) flowed back into Darwin’s idea of natural selection in the ‘economy of nature’.
As he writes in his autobiography:
“In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.”(Charles Darwin, Autobiography, Darwin Online, p. 120)

Not to forget H G Wells’ inspired visions of ‘scientific’ animal to human transitioning experiments in The Island of Dr Moreau – “Are we not Men?”.   Biopolitics à l’anglaise is a branch of teratology.  


8.  Let him drink or let him go

Malthusian pragmatism in the slogan – protect the NHS.  Use ‘moral restraint’ – refrain from using the services or demanding services of NHS – anyway suspended indefinitely – ‘routine’ operations, cancer treatment and screening, normal ‘emergencies’ like heart attacks, appendicitis, stroke – and any GP visits – so that the NHS is not overwhelmed: the exponential growth of pressure of the pandemic on the NHS – but merely arithmetical growth or quantity of the facilities and staff of NHS – like exponential growth of population – arithmetical growth of food – leads to hunger, misery – population then later decimated by war, famine, epidemics – so that a time of abundance – more for less people can return. During this time of ‘neglect’ (benign or otherwise) NHS develops more means and capacity to deal with the exponentially growing caseload from the epidemic including erecting 4 new Nightingale Hospitals which are promptly ‘mothballed’ – for what higher purpose?  In the London Nightingale Hospital there is a ward dedicated expressly to triage.  The neglected ‘routine’ side of the NHS deteriorates and creates ‘excess’ morbidity of its own.
Perhaps this 'collateral morbidity' contributes to the epidemic indirectly – those medically neglected individuals are less likely either to withstand the virus or survive their original (underlying) diseases.  The non-epidemic part of the caseload reduces itself naturally – the ones excluded from the treatment for the virus and hence die also reduce the burden of the NHS – which is thus relieved of that portion of population which goes beyond its means. Its capacities thus doubly enlarged – more facilities – less patient demand (through viral death and neglect or slow death) – that is how the population protects the NHS by shedding its surplus contingent of patients.

Cicero’s concept of ‘herd immunity’ – let him drink or let him go.  
Deleuze – becoming animal, the pack  (A Thousand Plateaus) – what about the herd?
The exclusion of a group, denied inclusion in herd immunity  - such a group remains exposed to whatever turn the virus may take.
Total Triage

9.  The Invisible Hands of the Virus

The current situation has nothing to do with autocrats, autocracy or authoritarian leaders – all of its aspects, details, virulence, eruptive spontaneity, switches and dramaturgical twists are inscribed in the biopolitical paradigm itself - inflected in a quasi natural (istic) necessary unavoidable ‘state of exception’ – with the express and vital urgent aim to obtain ‘immunity’ – nothing in common except the dire need to separate – or become immune to the general affliction racing through communitas.  
Esposito cites Canetti: “It is as if that fear of being even accidentally grazed has been made worse, that fear that Elias Canetti located at the origin of our modernity in a perverse short circuit between touch, contact and contagion.  The risk of contamination immediately liquidates contact, relationality and being in common.” (Roberto Esposito, “Immunization and Violence” in Terms of the Political, ibid. p. 59)

It doesn’t matter who is in charge – it is almost an acephalous state of exception – showing also the limits of Carl Schmitt’s ‘sovereign is he who decides on the exception’.  It is a state of exception without a sovereign.  Neither is the pandemic a war in the Schmittian sense of the Friend/Enemy divide.  The enemy is within. Or rather – there is no inside or outside – which is the essence of community – a permanent intimate/solipsistic epidemic.

If it’s a war at all it’s the population against the population – an impression deepened by certain remarks of the Health Minister Hancock.  
In the daily government briefing on 22nd May 2020 Hancock called the new army of trackers tasked with hunting down the contacts of alleged infected persons – his ‘boots on the ground’ – as if some sort of D-day against the population were now imminent.  The population is its own worst enemy – each is a pariah for the other (a few household and bubble members excepted).  All the ethical theories of the Other (Levinas, Derrida) seem to falter under the rule of the virus.

The Prime Minister Boris Johnson was seriously ill with the virus,  then on a long leave of convalescence and even since his return many commentators such as Simon Jenkins have been worried that “no one is in charge”.  Tory politicians speculated that he is not quite the same ‘in the head’, that the prime minister is now ‘frightened’ of the virus because of his own ordeal. Who could blame him?  That he is a ‘changed man’ ‘has lost his vim’.  It doesn’t bode well for his ability to ‘rule’.  He has become a virus vampire, bit by the virus he is now one of its lieges – as Deleuze writes, when werewolves die they turn into vampires.   
Certainly his unnatural devotion to his intimate advisor Cummings seems an unhealthy reversal of the Hegelian master servant (Herr-Knecht) relation.
Or did Johnson actually die in hospital and the Boris Johnson who came back is an impersonator or revenant – and he can’t get rid of Cummings because he would tell everyone?
If there is any sovereign or sovereignty at work – it is the virus itself.  It dictates all the moves and evasions – towards it (‘herd immunity’) and away from it – lockdown or quarantine.  The virus speaks through ‘science’ and ‘medicine’ – they are its interpreters, disciples, pupils and adjuncts.  “Let us learn from it.”  The virus rules through its invisible hands – like the market – no one autocrat is in charge of it either - but there are many retainers of its invisible powers.  The market is the Katechon – the virus the Antichrist?
Medicine - Science is the Katechon – to prevent the worst they create the bad.  
"Are we not men?"

Those corollary unavoidable? deaths through neglect of other medical services and selection/triage in the treating of virus cases  will haunt the NHS for years.  Much of the triage took place in advance through the cessation of all ongoing medical treatments and emergencies (like tooth pain) potentially causing many secondary fatalities indirectly due to the virus – but slow enough though so not to appear in the virus count.
(see Shaun Lintern, “Coronavirus: Pensioner backs ‘do not resuscitate’ legal action against Matt Hancock after ‘brutal’ phone call with GP” in Independent, May 19, 2020; Michael Buchanan and Judith Burns, “Coronavirus: ‘Start public inquiry now to prevent more deaths’”, BBC News; Colin Drury,” ‘We’re collateral damage’: how the cancellation of 2 million NHS operations ahead of the Coronavirus peak has left patients feeling forgotten and scared” in Independent, April 15, 2020, Denis Campbell, Cancer patients will live for less time because of NHS care suspension in Guardian, 16 August 2020)

After the triage of those who will be treated for the virus – comes the post first covid-19 wave triage or rationing of treatment for those patients languishing in the immeasurable bottomless ‘backlog’ of the NHS: “We’re talking about longer waiting times for elective procedures and probably explicit rationing of certain work.  That’s going to go down like a rat sandwich.”
(in Shaun Lintern, “NHS on life support: Up to one in six will be on waiting lists as health service turns to private hospitals”, Independent, June 6, 2020)
Actually, the paradox of the Katechon – by preventing the worst (delaying the peak) – they prolong or postpone not just the Antichrist but the coming of the Messiah.  The vaccine? Dark matter?
The Coronavirus (pandemic) is a garden of endlessly forking paths, each fork a dying animal.

End of part 2 (of 3)

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