Humanism and Phenomenology (Jérôme de Gramont)
Jérôme de Gramont, professor of Philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris, gives a seminar on Humanism and Phenomenology in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas.
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“I respectfully disagree with Agamben” (Slavoj Žižek on Covid-19) – Aleksander Adamski
Some years ago, Slavoj Žižek was asked to discuss a shattering, traumatic event, an event widely believed to hold world-historic consequence. Žižek began with the following, general qualification:
“When one hears this phrase: ‘nothing will be the same,’ the first approach of a truly thinking person is simply to doubt this.”[1]
The conclusion to be drawn from this remark is that although Pandemic!, the short book of reflections on the Covid crisis that Žižek published in May 2020, was obviously put together at speed, it is not an impulsive first approach. For Žižek, this time round, does think that change is inevitable, and will prove lasting. In wake of the pandemic, writes Žižek,
“We will have to change our entire stance to life, to our existence as living beings among other forms of life. In other words, if we understand “philosophy” as the name for our basic orientation in life, we will have to experience a true philosophical revolution.”[2]
At first approach, and not just to the average ironically distanced philosopher, such a statement reads grossly overblown; in fact, there is nothing overwrought about Pandemic!, which is a serious, almost solemn pamphlet. The philosophical revolution it heralds amounts, of course, to the ethical position Žižek has been elaborating for years, namely a rigorous, conscientious, atheist Christianity. But there is nothing vindictive in Žižek’s delivery, no perceptible delectatio morosa in the fact that an epidemic has, in a number of ways, proven him right.
I
First and foremost, the pandemic validates Žižek’s appeals for communism. Perhaps to the dismay of his belligerent followers (though most of those have long forsaken him), Žižek takes communism to stand for an attempt to institutionalise (and enforce) basic human decency – and the broad definition needn’t be snubbed at.[3] Pandemic! contains a number of simple — no other are needed — argument-examples for the sensibility of collective action (the virus spreads across jurisdictions) and the nonsense of market forces (that incite speculation on the rising price of protective equipment). The book notes how the reality of a situation which boils down to biological survival has bent (if not quite broken) some ideological fantasies and forced even the most reactionary governments to introduce at least tokens of universal income (USA) or nationalisation (UK):
“This is not a utopian Communist vision, it is a Communism imposed by the necessities of bare survival. (…) As the saying goes: in a crisis we are all Socialists. (…) Trillions will be spent violating all conventional market rules.”[4]
In short, Žižek believes there is a chance that the present predicament will cut across ideological distortions and lay bear the old, essential alternative: socialisme ou barbarie.
II
Second, the pandemic proves we need a strong, resolute state, something Žižek has long been arguing for (while, to a degree, making the case against ‘civil society’ – or what in reality may well be a reactionary, bigoted, anti-vaccine, homophobic ‘moral majority,’ from which the force of the state should protect us). In this context, the question of invigilation arises, and provokes the first disagreement with Agamben:[5] in the form of a simple cui bono? Žižek dismisses a reading of the pandemic in the lines of a bio-political state of exception and overtly approves of military discipline in the face of crisis. The crucial work lies in maintaining a spirit of trust between the people and a (powerful) system of state:
“(…) the measures necessitated by the epidemic should not be automatically reduced to the usual paradigm of surveillance and control propagated by thinkers like Foucault. What I fear today more than the measures applied by China and Italy is that they apply these measures in a way that will not work and contain the epidemic, and that the authorities will manipulate and conceal the true data.”[6]
Against Agamben and Foucault, Žižek recalls Kant’s injunction apropos the laws of the state: “Obey, but think, maintain the freedom of thought!” In practice, though, Žižek has to concede that some of those doing the thinking must at times make the choice to disobey; for such a contingency “(…) new activists following in the shoes of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are needed.”[7]
III
Pandemic! takes issue with the preposition that an epidemic alleged to affect mostly the elderly invites a relapse into a ‘vitalist’ logic of survival of the fittest. While Žižek fully acknowledges the risk Agamben points out – in short: that decency, dignity, and religious convictions will be readily sacrificed for the preservation of ‘bare life’ – his own stance is surprisingly hopeful. Citing acts of solidarity and the massive engagement of volunteers, especially in Italy, Žižek points out that the threat of death actually can be a uniting force, or at least that the matter is ambiguous, and barbarity is not the only possible outcome. For Žižek, there isn’t a shadow of doubt that the proper ethical injunction is contra-vitalistic and anti-utilitarian, it amounts to the call ‘all hands on board:’
“(…) our first principle should be not to economize but to assist unconditionally, irrespective of costs, those who need help, to enable their survival.”[8]
IV
The pandemic and the ensuing enforced isolation have had positive effects in terms of self-reflection. This is a point Žižek is at great pains to contextualist correctly, and Pandemic! not only acknowledges (at considerable length) the all too real suffering, but repeatedly stresses the entanglement of the migrant, race, and ecological crises with the epidemic. Žižek well understands the social stratifications behind the sort of work that can be done remotely and work we call ‘essential,’ he also touches on the danger of widespread, long-term challenges to mental health. Still, taking his cue from Catherine Malabou,[9] Žižek ponders the ‘epoché’ effect of enforced solitude. At their simplest, the reflections of a meditative lock-down are readily accessible, practically irrefutable: what good is an economic system that collapses the moment we buy only what we really need? Of the vulgar indulgence proper to so-called cruise-ships, Žižek writes succinctly:
“We should not be afraid to note some potentially beneficial side effects of the epidemic. One of the lasting symbols of the epidemic is passengers trapped in quarantine on large cruise ships. Good riddance to the obscenity of such ships say I (…).”[10]
This and other examples point to a simple conclusion: a pandemic epoché reveals that our past ‘normal’ was in fact a-normal throughout: “why do we want things to go back to normal, when in fact things have never been normal?” More still, the ‘dead time’ of withdrawal into lock-down may bring about — to the privileged few, Žižek acknowledges — the sort of ‘Gelassenheit’ that reveals, behind the hectic struggle of everyday life, the basic nonsense of our predicament.[11]
V
The ‘absolute’ ethical stance of unconditional commitment, together with an epoché that undermines the edifice of symbolic (or ideological) meaning, are all proper to the sort of materialist Christian position that Slavoj Žižek has been putting forward for the past twenty years. Uncannily, the current discipline of so-called ‘social distancing’ chimes perfectly with Žižek’s ideal of an ethical community – one need only recall Žižek’s perhaps best-known formulation of this position, from an exchange with John Milbank published in 2011:
“This is where I stand — how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would be a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion.”[12] (emphasis mine)
Pandemic! recalls John 20:17, Christ’s answer to Mary Magdalene: do not touch me, noli me tangere. The point being that, for Žižek, solidarity appears at the point where we acknowledge that we are all alone – and only as such, are all together. Paradoxically, authentic community is brought about by isolation. This, an idea of Žižek’s voiced a decade ago, is yet another point of his thinking that the pandemic appears to vindicate.
An even more basic ‘Hegelian’ arching of opposites in an ‘infinite judgement’ occurs in how, as Žižek observes, the very lowest iteration of life, the blindly self-replicating virus, provokes the very highest, namely the ‘Holy Spirit’ of universal human communion in solidarity.
VI
Renouncing the pose of philosophical distancing and facile scepticism, Slavoj Žižek chose, in his booklet of reflections on the pandemic, to voice hope. Giving the unfolding of events since May, the reader is left wondering whether this attitude can possibly hold. The anticipation his book provokes is certainly not lost on Žižek: granted the pandemic has proven him right on so many counts – will it not prove him wrong just now, on his grand bet on solidarity and change? The second part of Pandemic! is due for publishing in September.
[1] Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek, 1 edition (Cambridge, UK : Malden, MA: Polity, 2003) p 157.
[2] Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World (Polity, 2020) p 78.
[3] Žižek-scholars have been wary of looming ‘functional conservatism’ in Žižek’s writings since the early 2000s, and especially in his rapprochement with Christianity. The ‘problem’ of Žižek’s conservatism is, to the mind of the present author, a paragon of warped tunnel vision endemic to the modern campus.
[4] Žižek (2020), pp 92, 93.
[5] Agamben’s much-publicised remarks on the pandemic are accessible in Italian: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia and in English: http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/. Additional ‘clarifications’ added at a later date in Italian https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-chiarimenti and in Adam Kotsko’s translation https://itself.blog/2020/03/17/giorgio-agamben-clarifications/.
[6] Žižek (2020), p 76.
[7] Comp. Žižek (2020), pp 7, 66, 75.
[8] Žižek (2020), p 87.
[9] Malabou’s quarantine reflections (English): https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/to-quarantine-from-quarantine-rousseau-robinson-crusoe-and-i/
[10] Žižek (2020), p 45.
[11] Žižek (2020), p 57.
[12] Slavoj Žižek and others, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. by Creston Davis, Reprint edition (Cambridge, Mass. London, England: The MIT Press, 2011) p 303.
The Pandemic – an Intellectual Challenge
PANELISTS:
Vittorio G. Hosle – University of Notre Dame
Ferdinando Menga – Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli
Francesco Valerio Tommasi – La Sapienza Università di Roma
MODERATOR:
Stefano Biancu – LUMSA Università di Roma – Doctoral Program in Contemporary Humanism
What Ethics after Covid-19? (Stefano Biancu)
“What can I know?” “What must I do?” “What may I hope?” are the three questions that, since Kant’s time, are recognized as essential in every attempt to think about human existence and reality. Three questions to which the experience of the pandemic has taken away any simple answer.
- What is in our control and what is not.
Many times, during the pandemic, the situation appeared out of control. The Kantian question on what we can know could be translated as follows: what is in our control and what is not? You control what you know, what you do not know controls you.
The virus has forced us to grieve over the illusion that we can have everything under our control. It has also unfolded right before our eyes the necessity to do all the possible good things that are in our power. The virus – in other words – has made evident to us our condition of both vulnerable and responsible beings.
We are vulnerable: something we do not control can, at any time, hurt and even destroy us. No life insurance can protect us from that. On the other hand, the vain attempt to immunize ourselves from any risk brings more disadvantages than the expected benefits. If you avoid every risk in order to protect life, you end up destroying the life you want to protect and preserve.
An accepted vulnerability is also what gives us access to the greatest experiences of our humanity. Investing your energy in a project that – despite everything – may fail; expressing your convictions freely, even if they may not be accepted and later you will have to pay for them; declaring your love to a person who may not return it; choosing to share your life with a person who may one day hurt you; trusting a friend who may not understand you or even betray you; being generous with someone who may take advantage of it. These are all experiences of an accepted vulnerability that exposes us to the risk of suffering and failure, but which also opens up the only gateway to our humanity, making us truly alive. At the end of our existence, we will know that we have lived inasmuch as we have accepted our vulnerability. Missed opportunities are as many sacrifices on the altar of the pretension of not exposing us to the risk of suffering and failure.
If the fact that we cannot control everything makes us vulnerable, the fact that we can control something makes us responsible to ourselves and to others. We are not almighty and yet, for our part, we are responsible.
The choice to quarantine entire countries around the world, putting at risks the world economy, was a choice of responsibility for the benefit of all, and in particular the most vulnerable. In the near future, we will have to be as much responsible towards those made vulnerable by the economic crisis.
From here, ethics will have to start again: from accepting that not everything is under our control and that the pretension of protecting ourselves against all risks kills life. But also from accepting the responsibility of doing all the good which is in our power to do: in favour of all and in particular the most vulnerable.
- What we must do.
We have called them heroes – doctors, nurses and healthcare workers who, in the dark days of the pandemic, have put their lives at risk to save others’. Proportionally, similar risks were taken by many other workers. None of that was included in their employment contracts and yet none of these heroes have ever claimed – and presumably ever even thought – that they did something beyond the call of duty.
What we have experienced will urge us to radically change our understanding of duty. We need to recognise that duty is broader than what is required by a rule or by the rights of a third party. Up to now we have considered solidarity, fraternity, love as supererogatory attitudes: i.e. good, but not strictly due. The experience of the pandemic has shown us that, beside the “minimum necessary” of what is due (what someone can demand from me), there is also a “maximum” that is just as necessary. No one – individual or institution – can demand it from me and yet I know that it is somehow due. I must do it.
No one can demand love from me, but if I do not love – and do not act accordingly – I do not respond adequately to the appeal that comes to me from the other. Nor do I live. It is not only for believers that love is a commandment – it is to live as humans. It is from here, from a broader understanding of duty, that ethics should restart after the Covid-19.
- What we may hope.
“It’s gonna be okay”, we have repeated ourselves like a mantra. But we have ended up repeating it with less and less conviction. A column of military trucks taking away the coffins of the dead ones has also taken away our illusions. By the end, not everything will have gone well, at least not for everyone.
Yet the experience of the virus, which has left a huge pile of human rubble, has shown us that – despite everything – we can hope, and therefore we must do so. At the condition that we do not understand “it’s gonna be okay” as “nothing bad will happen to us”. Hope is not the illusion of not being vulnerable, i.e. immune from evil and pain. Rather, it means hoping that all this immense pain will have a meaning – that bad things do not happen in vain. A meaning, perhaps not immediately evident, must be there. And it is up to us to act so that it will be there.
For this hope, which does not illusorily remove vulnerability but accepts it, we are all responsible. It will depend largely on us if all this will make sense – if from this rubble we will be able to rebuild a different and better human world. In the name of a love which is certainly a “maximum”, but a “necessary” one.
Vulnerability and Responsibility (Stefano Biancu)
I am a Professor, I work with words. I know how to fill in any kind of space or time gap with words. I know how to catch the attention of an audience through funny words or emotional phrases. I know how to skirt issues smartly when I do not have all the answers. I have learned all of that, these are the tricks of my job.
But now I have no more words. The words I used to have are not enough to express what I am witnessing, what we are going through. They are not enough and they even bother me. I would like to escape from all this, but I do not know where to go, for we are all in the same boat: the neighbour next door and the faraway neighbour who lives in the other hemisphere.
The only word still left in my mind is “why?”. Why all this? Why in these proportions? I have no answer to this question, and this time I cannot skirt the issue smartly.
Who is responsible for that? To my students I always explain that an action is not a “mere fact”. It presumes a free and responsible agent, someone I can hold responsible for their action, someone I could ask to justify their action, to make it fair to my eyes.
But today there is no one we can hold responsible for what is happening to us. All attempts to find a culprit – someone who can answer for what is happening – seem to be vain. The virus is not even a living creature. It kills and destroys even lacking the motivation – questionable but understandable – of having to survive: mors tua, vita mea.
We have tried to find some culprits: pollution, some kinds of husbandry practices with animals, the lies of the Chinese government, the inefficient organisation of our country, the cuts in the healthcare system budget, and even the runners. At some point, it looked like it was them – the runners – the cause of the catastrophe. If you run while people are dying, you must be the one to blame. I must confess that, as long as it was permitted, I was one of the runners, too. I used to run to feel alive and I did it without putting anybody’s life at risk. Because of this, I know runners are not the ones to blame. We are very mean to each other, desperately searching for a culprit. Let’s find that someone and the problem will be solved!
Here lies the tragedy: this time there is no one to blame. There is no one who can answer for all this. Some choices – wrong or delayed – may have made the situation worse, or may not have sufficiently limited the damage, but no one is really guilty of all this death and destruction. And in lack of a response, we do not even have words anymore. And yet we need words as much as we need the air that the virus takes away from those who are attacked by it.
It is not true that everything will be fine. This time the cure will inevitably have some very serious side effects. We are saving lives by putting others’ at risk. The choice between pandemic and famine is an unsolvable dilemma, just as it is having to decide who must live and who must die. At the moment the most important principle is to concentrate on the most urgent threat, but this argument will not be valid forever. Very soon hunger and solitude could start killing just like the virus. We do not know what to say, everything is so uncertain.
Everything will be fine, this is what we have been saying to ourselves repeatedly like a mantra. But now we know that not everything will be fine, at least not for everyone. The human cost of this sad event will be very high for many, and for some it will be even higher. Also in this case the motto we were holding on to – “everything will be fine” – collapsed, dragged away from a trail of military trucks crammed with coffins.
What will ever give words back to us in the midst of this void of answers? In this situation in which it seems that, whatever we do, we are mistaken or at least we do not solve anything? In this continuous killing of illusions for which every day it becomes more and more obvious that not everything will eventually be fine?
Now more than ever, it has become clear that hope is not a passion, not just a feeling. It is the result of a decision, a choice. Today we can choose hope. In what we are experiencing, we are more vulnerable than responsible. There are more things beyond our control than in our control. And yet there is one thing we are responsible for: our hope.
Hope is not the illusion that evil will not strike us, the illusion that we are not vulnerable. It is the confidence that this immense nonsense can make sense. Words will come back to us. But for this sense and for these words we will be responsible.
All of this will make sense if we do not waste this extreme time of isolation and quarantine. It will make sense if we use it to work on ourselves, now that the situation requires that we face our real selves without any social filter. The manager, the worker, the janitor, the top model are alone, confronting themselves the same way. This time will make sense if we use it to build up on our human relationships, now that the social relations have thinned out. It will make sense if each of us, according to our possibilities, contributes to dream and design a different world. Different politics, different economy, a different Europe, even a different ethics.
A kind of ethics that will have measure up with those impassably vulnerable and responsible beings which the virus has revealed we are. A kind of ethics for beings who do not have everything in their control but who must do the good they can, far beyond what the rights of a third party or the obligations of a law may require.
Everything that in the past we considered supererogatory – that is to say, good but not required – has now become a daily duty. That is the necessary response to the appeal of the most vulnerable ones, and the essential condition to live as humans. The commandment of love – the supererogatory par excellence –, that something that nobody can demand from you – has always been considered valid only for the believers. Today, it has imposed itself as the living core of ethics. Sine amore non possumus.
Perhaps the happy ending will not be what we imagined while saying to ourselves that everything would be fine. We are vulnerable. But another happy ending is still possible and it is within our reach. And for that, we are responsible.
Webinar on COVID 19 in Italy, Hong Hong and USA (Stefano Biancu)
A discussion on the impact of the COVID 19 virus in Hong Kong, Italy, France and the United States. The panel reflects on the different ways the virus is impacting life around the world.
Covid-19 – Control and Responsibility (Stefano Biancu)
When the Little Prince said “The essential is invisible to the eyes” he was not thinking about a virus. Yet a virus invisible to the eyes is today urging us back to the essential, depriving us of many things that, at least at our latitudes, we were used to taking for granted: security, health, social relations, freedom of movement and even freedom of worship. But, most of all, it is depriving us of the control on our lives: the virus forces us to grieve over the illusion of having everything under control.
At the same time, the virus requires that we recognise what is in our control – what we can do – and to act accordingly. After weeks of random and scattered announcements, a rational message is finally prevailing in the public discourse: the threat that the virus carries is not so much about the personal existence of most of us, but about the capacity of resistance of the health care system. With regard to this threat, we must all act responsibly in order to limit as far as possible an infection that would put health facilities in crisis, and it would also endanger the existence of those who are weaker because of their age or other diseases.
The virus therefore requires that we learn to distinguish between what is under our control and what is not: not everything is under our control nor it will ever be. But, as far as we are concerned, we must all act responsibly, taking care above all of the weakest. In short, the virus imposes on us that we become adults, that we grieve over a childhood dream of almightiness and that we take in charge the existence of those who are most exposed and defenceless. Incidentally, this is even more true for those Catholic voices that raise against the alleged abuse of a State that closes churches to defend the public health. They fail to understand which is the priority between man and the Sabbath and to understand where the body of Christ lies. This is idolatry.
The emergency requires now that we work together without any discordance and without any looting. Once this is over, it will be possible and necessary to evaluate the different responsibilities in the management of the epidemic. This is especially to ensure that the lesson will be learnt and that in the future we are better prepared for similar emergencies: in terms of health management, public communication, measures of financial support.
But there is one condition to learn the hard lesson of coronavirus. Each of us should learn that not everything is in our control, but that something is in our power and we must do that something. We owe it to all and in particular to the most fragile and the most defenceless ones.
