The imaginative blockage is arguably intensified today, as pandemic conditions intersect with and are exacerbated by other social and material processes whose visibility and intelligibility are in no way transparent, not least the economic dynamics of capitalist globalisation and the vicissitudes of political power. And the remedies they think up are barely suitable for a head cold. They don't think on the right scale for plagues. They settle down to an epic as they would to a picnic. The pressure that an epidemic, as both reality and allegory, can put on our cognitive and moral mappings is something that Albert Camus had incisively captured in his Notebooks, in preparatory remarks towards the writing of The Plague:ĭevelop social criticism and revolt. From the differential exposure to death engineered by racial capitalism to the foregrounding of care work, from attention to the lethal conditions of incarceration to a drop in pollution visible to the naked eye, the ‘revelations’ catalysed by the pandemic seem as limitless as its ongoing impact on our social relations of production and reproduction.īut the widespread, incessant, mediatised acknowledgment that we are living through an unprecedented crisis can also fool us into thinking that our political and ethical imaginaries are already capable of distinguishing the old from the new, that our recognition is not a misrecognition, our sight an oversight, our connaissance, to put in French, a méconnaissance. The character, duration and sheer scale of the SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 pandemic is a particularly comprehensive illustration of this old, ‘apocalyptic’ truth. It is commonplace when commenting on crises of various stripes to note their capacity suddenly to reveal what the seemingly smooth reproduction of the status quo leaves unremarked, to frontstage the backstage, rip the scales from our eyes, and so on. The State as organized tuberculosis if the germs of the plague were to organize, they would found the world Kingdom.
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