The year 2020 is the year of the Corona virus. The world is preoccupied with the epidemic of COVID-19. Governments are shutting down schools, restaurants, entertainment and shopping centers, postponing or cancelling sport events, concerts etc. The world is self-isolating to prevent the spread of the virus. In the midst of all this fear-crazed yet rational insanity, I feel the need and desire to speak as a philosopher. It is difficult to respond to the present moment as a philosopher because we (philosophers) have an insatiable obsession with being right, correct and speaking the truth. Yet the fact is in an empirical world (as it changes day to day) it is impossible to trust a declarative statement for too long. Everybody is making assertions, and yes some of them seem to be more reasonable and less harmful than others. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly complicated to separate what is to be done from what is not to be done. Self-isolation is good (stay home), improving our immune system is good; gatherings of more than a certain number of people are bad. Yet can we all stay home? Is it not necessary for some to be outside so that others can stay in? What would be human cost of self-isolating even if we postpone the economic costs, as we should? We need each other but we need to be separated from each other. How can we respond to this unusual state of exception? Philosophy is fundamentally to be defined as a way of life for me and how we should live seems to be an impossible question both literally and metaphorically. Yes, we need to survive in order to live but is mere life, as Agamben questioned, the only life that is left for us?Nowadays, I guide my life in terms of a question and that question is a philosophical question: What is a virus? Is it alive or not?
The question of whether a virus is alive has puzzled scientists. Molecular biologist Luis P. Villarreal looks at changes in what they have thought over time. “For about 100 years,” he writes, “the scientific community has repeatedly changed its collective mind over what viruses are. First seen as poisons, then as life-forms, then biological chemicals, viruses today are thought of as being in the gray area between living and non-living.” https://daily.jstor.org/are-viruses-alive-define-life/
As a philosopher, I wonder whether answering this question one way or the other is as thought-provoking as contemplating the question itself. If we tentatively accept the fundamental undecidability of whether a virus is alive or not, it might be a thoughtful path to follow. Viruses attach to a living organism and live off them, as a kind of living being. Yet they do not fulfill all the criteria of life either. They are what Derrida would call ghosts somehow hovering between life and death. The concept of ghost is a theme that Derrida has pursued for a long time. While the logic of the idea goes all the way back to Derrida’s early career in terms of his deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, as well as a number of binary oppositions including presence and absence, life and death, literal and metaphorical, Derrida formulated the idea of ghosts most explicitly in Specters of Marx in terms of the political. With the proliferation of recording technologies, ghostly existence became hauntingly ordinary yet no less fascinating. In the movie Ghost Dance by Ken Mcmullen, Derrida explains his idea of hauntology succinctly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nmu3uwqzbI alluding to his own death. When Derrida died in 2004, Johann Hari wrote a rather nasty article called “Why I won’t be mourning Derrida” in which he likened deconstruction to a virus (https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/why-i-wont-be-mourning-derrida-543574.html). Another gentleman Nikos A. Salingaros also wrote an essay called The Derrida Virus, in which he argued that deconstruction was a virus (https://patterns.architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-172779). These authors seem to believe that calling Derrida a virus gives them the right to dismiss him and deconstruction. Rather than engaging with these “arguments” and making the unfortunate claim that Derrida is not actually a virus, one could accept that Derrida is a virus and ask so what? In fact, Derrida himself accepted this term for very different reasons.
I often tell myself, and I must have written it somewhere – I am sure I wrote it somewhere- that all I have done, to summarize it very reductively, is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology, a virology, the virus being many things. I have written about this in a recent text on drugs. The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication. Even from the biological standpoint, this is what happens with a virus; it derails a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding. On the other hand, it is something that is neither living nor nonliving; the virus is not a microbe. And if you follow these two threads, that of a parasite which disrupts destination from the communicative point of view – disrupting writing, inscription, and the coding and decoding of inscription – and which on the other hand is neither alive nor dead, you have the matrix of all that I have done since I began writing.
(“The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” by Peter Brunette and David Wills in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture ed. by Peter Brunette and David Wills, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p.12).
Even though Hari and Salingaros rely solely on the negative connotations of the designation of virus, we can embrace the term in the way Derrida used it and engage with it more productively. Since everybody seems to hate viruses nowadays, it might not be a good way to defend deconstruction as a virus. Yet this is precisely what I want to do. So, my question is what could COVID 19 as a virus make us think, just like Derrida as a “virus” made us think? The idea of a virus can make us aware that we are neither alive nor dead, that these are not really opposites and our living/dying is a process that we share with others. This conceptual framework is also affirmed by scientific discourse as “more than half of our body is not [even] human” https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43674270. Other humans somehow attach themselves to us as viruses and live off of us and we are all dying as a process. My survival is based not only on the death of the others but also on their survival. Perhaps agent Smith in Matrix was right in claiming that human beings resemble viruses: AGENT SMITH I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I’ve realized that you are not actually mammals.… Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.… There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.… Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are… the cure. I always thought that this was a very insightful description of human life. Yet it was uttered by an agent who wanted to not only control, but also “cure” humans. Yet those agents did not win, we were not cured. What I suggest is that perhaps in a dialectically ironic way our salvation is not avoiding the idea that we resemble viruses but to embrace it. Yet this does not mean, as Agent Smith suggests, that we should be eradicated as viruses, but perhaps accept our virality. We are each other’s host. We need each other but we also have the need to act as an intelligent virus. It is through this “intelligence” that we kill each other, but by killing each other are we not killing ourselves? Hence the opposition between the self and the other should not be appropriate for viruses. My survival is not the survival of the fittest as if my fitness could be separated from yours but we need to rely on each other, as we already do now, in order to survive as a virus. A number of people pointed out how the coronavirus demonstrates our interdependency, which might lead to global solidarity. Obviously, this interdependency is also quite apparent at times that we are not confronting an epidemic. What corona epidemic actually shows that our interdependency resembles the parasitic nature of viruses rather than coming together of rational minds. We rely on each other the way viruses rely on human body in order to survive, but also kill the very body and themselves in the process.
The virality of human existence is an analogy. I am not arguing that we are exactly the same as viruses. There are many features that separate humans from other living organisms as well as half-living/half-dead chemical-biological beings. In modern philosophy, one of these features is understood as self-consciousness, self-reflexivity, or self-interpretation. Humans have a relationship to themselves in the form of awareness, consciousness, knowledge and interpretation. We understand our existence in a certain way and this understanding is constitutive of our very existence. Heidegger claims that every existential understanding is also a misunderstanding, not in a Hegelian dialectical way that we come to the next correct state by negating the specific past, but that un-concealment itself is a form of concealment. That means we are not viruses but we can and perhaps could understand our communal existence in term of virality. If virality is somehow juxtaposed alongside of consciousness, we could question our fundamental assumption that we as conscious beings will solve our global, existential problems. It is this presumption that drives “rational minds” crazy nowadays. Why do we not do what is right by the planet? Why do we not save the planet? Why do we not execute a reasonable political system? Why do we not use science in order to solve the problems we have now? Why do people not stay home and do the right thing? Yet there is no one good human kind and a bad human kind, or rather these sides are not really opposed to each other. We are all operating with the assumption that we are conscious organisms capable of making such distinctions. It is our very “rationality,” common sense and goodness that brought us to this moment of global crisis, perhaps we should embrace our virality and think against thinking itself. In a rare moment of poetic gesture Heidegger writes “three dangers threaten thinking…the evil and sharpest danger is thinking itself/ it must think against itself, which it is only seldom capable of doing.” Perhaps we can start thinking against our thinking itself. The very thinking processes that brought about the possibility of destroying our planet cannot save us. We need to think against this way of thinking and no longer think the survival of our planet as a technical problem. By this I mean that most of the “rational” discourses concentrate on scientific methodology. Yet even if we accept the political power of scientific discourse over others, we cannot ignore the intrinsic connection between the scientific discourses and technological advances and economic-global crisis of the 21st Century. It is not the absence but rather the dominance of scientific discourse (and more importantly practice) that is equally responsible for our climate, as well as our economic condition, today. My fear of this coronavirus is that our thinking will go back exactly where it was before. We will continue to rely on or even strengthen the processes that led us to this crisis in the first place. This would be the worst outcome of this (already really bad) ordeal.
The moments in which societies undergo existential crises are surprisingly rare. The theme of the crisis of the 20th Century was war. The last virus outbreak was in1918 at the end of the First World War. Today we formulate all our social problems in terms of war: war on drugs, war on terror, war on climate change etc. Yet this rhetoric, as well as the strategies deployed as a result, obfuscate the fact that war is always won by those who do not fight. I am not making an empirical point here: yes, men and women went to war, killed the enemy and won the war. Yet many people, structures, institutions benefit from those wars and they are the true winners in the sense of taking advantage of the war machine. As Macron described the strategies against COVID-19 as a war (“Macron Declares France ‘at War’ With Virus, as E.U. Proposes 30-Day Travel Ban” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/world/europe/coronavirus-france-macron-travel-ban.html, we could immediately discern that some of us would lose this war and some of us would benefit from it. Yet what does it mean to declare war on a virus? Is it not also declaring or rather re-declaring the war we perpetuate onto each other?
Perhaps human existence should be understood as a virus. Humans always expressed their existence in terms of positive characteristics as superior to other species. Yet what if we were fundamentally a virus that is obsessed with survival by being a parasite on this planet? What if we are neither alive nor dead, neither a living nor a non-living being? How would that change our understanding of our relationships to each other? What if we cannot exist without being a parasite attaching to a living organism only to find out we are also parasites playing living hosts to each other and failing? There is a kind of ethical injunction circulating on social media, which goes roughly like this “Behave as if you have the virus and you don’t want to infect anyone else.” One could modify this injunction and say: “behave as if you are the virus and trying to live with everyone else who are also viruses.”
ferit güven 