Coronavirus and the Politics of Life:

Part Two

And there was once a wicked time when intellectuals grew feeble-minded and declared life to be the highest good. But now the dreadful time has come when every day proves that death begins his reign of terror when life becomes the highest good

Hannah Arendt[1]

Yarkov Halik

In part one of this essay, I made reference to the analogies, common now, between the Coronavirus pandemic and a state of war. Which of course begs the question: how exactly could one go to war against a disease? A political order is a human order to the extent that the enemy confronted on the battlefield is at once a member of a fighting force who can expect to be killed and a person to whom one can speak. And because a spoken word is the opening onto justice,[2] it’s as a speaking being that the enemy has legal rights. But if the enemy is an anonymous force that can never be personally confronted, how could justice exist? You cannot reason with a life-process. In the wake of the Coronavirus, it may feel like humanity is under siege. But this is not war in any conventional sense of the word. And it certainly doesn’t aid our understanding of what’s at stake when people attempt to address the threat of biological extinction with theological or humanistic rationalizations. Let us, rather, stick with the sense of the aporia which this situation presents. Only then will we be able to recognize that a beguiling paradox is at work here.

Let’s remember that any virus represents the very potency of life itself. A virus is a biological process which goes on within, and indeed presupposes, life. And yet it’s also in the very same measure life become a pathological force. In other words, the virus erupts as life and within life, but is already, in this living form, a life-process which negates life. Or, to put it somewhat differently – a virus is that organic development by which life itself becomes the engine of its own destruction, just as an auto-immune disease represents the moment when the life-forces in a living body start to attack its own vital substance. In this respect, death is not something hostile to life, attacking it from without. Rather, it is already present in the form of pathogens, death-directed life forces which lie ready to ambush the vitality of a living being, destroying it from within, as it were.

At this point, a parallel arises that is at once striking and uncanny: that between the coronavirus carrier and the suicide-bomber. The latter, regardless of their particular theological or ideological motivations, is at base a life which, resolved to create destruction, endeavours to take as many other individuals as possible with them on their own death-laden trajectory. The suicide bomber is, in effect, a lethal fragment of living vitality that discharges itself on the life of others with the intention of killing them. As with the person infected by the coronavirus – who has effectively, from the point of view of the virus itself, become an incubator of death – the suicide bomber is the most intensive activation of life become a veritable force of annihilation.

Nothing demonstrates more clearly the immense conundrum of a politics of living being than this likeness, showing how when life and living being become the highest value, one may expect all kinds of disturbing reversals. For instance, in the cross-fire of political commentary about the Coronavirus, one often hears talk of a looming conflict between attempts to mitigate against potential economic catastrophe and the intrinsic value of human life. Certain strict economic measures might stop the virus dead in its tracks but kill the economy, whereas those who baulk at crippling the economic system risk putting many millions of lives at risk. This antimony, however, is only apparent, because in reality these two terms – economics and human life – are one and the same. Karl Marx understood labour and work as a metabolic exchange with nature that reproduces and preserves the species. In this sense, Marx anticipated the death of classical political theory, swallowed up in the modern age by the idea of political economy. The latter, arising in the late-18th century and at the dawn of our bio-political era as a sort of hybrid conceptual monster, attests to that coupling of life and power which is at the heart of bio-politics.

The common denominator between the virus and the economy is that both are effectively a life-process writ-large; and with the complete evacuation of moral, social, and metaphysical concepts, nothing remains to mediate between them but biology. This only bears witness, however, to a general trend. For instance, to take just a few examples: the growing prominence of issues of ethnicity and gender, the centrality of public health care as a privileged index of the functioning of economic systems, and the priority which political parties accord to maintaining the homogenous composition of national entities. What is evident here is a tendency to flatten the political into the biological. Likewise, the fact that international political conflicts seem to be perpetually turning into ‘human rights crises’ is indicative not so much of an epidemic of tyrannical political despots but the extent to which we’ve unable to conceive of politics in any way other than bio-political.

Still, there will be those who insist on hammering away at the problem with obsolete concepts. Economics, we are told, represents a relative value, whereas the lives of individuals are an absolute. In which case, how could one even contemplate a trade-off between human survival and ‘mere’ economic considerations? In the meantime, they forget that the concept of value itself has an economic origin. Carl Schmitt touched on this conundrum in a short pamphlet called ‘The Tyranny of Values’:

“Since 1848, there has been a synchronism as remarkable as it is shocking, a simultaneity, an osmosis and symbiosis between the philosophy of values and the philosophy of life . . . Life is, if not the highest, still one of the higher values of every philosophy of life. For over a hundred years now, the twin pair, life/value and value/life, makes its presence felt in a tightly interwoven contemporaneity . . . In the value system and the vocabulary of racial outlooks, value and life appear intimately bound on a higher plane. Thus, while addressing the Press on the 10th of November, 1938, Hitler spelled out an ‘incomparable value’ for the benefit of everybody, and indeed, of the Germans: the German people was ‘the highest value that there is on this entire earth’”.[3]

Historical content aside, Schmitt’s remarks indicate something crucial. And this is that, henceforth, these two terms – life and value – have become interchangeable. The bio-political paradigm presumes that human life is, in Hitler’s words, “the highest value that there is on this entire earth”. In the meantime, because this paradigm reduces individuals to mere instances of a ‘life-process’, it degrades the actual existence of man as a personal being, just as it elevates the species to the status of an ultimate value.

We are familiar with this dehumanization in the name of humanity from those “total wars” of modern technological civilization. The political conflicts of the 20th century, which led to mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale, were fought on the basis of value-absolutes; that is, they were wars between ideologies, each of which advanced a total claim on reality. In our bio-political era, the value-absolute is not so much life as the equivalence of life and death.

For instance, it’s certainly no accident that the so-called Beveridge Plan, perhaps the largest public health program in human history and the origin of the modern Welfare State, was elaborated in the middle of a war that produced 50 million dead. What’s important, then, is not simply that the Coronavirus pandemic might well kill millions but that it’s a phenomenon which takes place in a period of human history in which this equivalence between life and death is unmistakeable.

The Coronavirus has activated the deep principle of bio-politics, which is the conatus essendi, a concept that Spinoza defined, many centuries before Freud or the birth of modern biology, as the drive by which “each entity strives to persevere in its own being”. We totally misunderstand the connatus by referring to it as selfishness, just as it’s immune to altruism and all the traditional categories of virtue. We are dealing here with something that is far more fundamental, the deep ontological ground and power-house of all living being. It will not be countered with the blustering moralizing pronouncements of public intellectuals and government leaders, that in these difficult times ‘we must all pull together’. In the imperturbable atavism of the conatus, something that is totally non-psychological, which defies all conventional religious, moral and socio-political wisdom, has been revealed, once and for all. It is, without doubt, the arcane of bio-politics.

At the height of the Nazi Terror, Arendt warned of the dangerous assumption that biological life is “the highest good”.[4] When individuals are preoccupied with asserting their ‘right-to-be’, human existence is in danger of becoming a modality of that gross life-force which continues on its way, shoving aside everything in its path. In this respect, both nature and history are the medium of a self-sufficient and self-satisfied being, “revelling in its exception, solicitous of its own happiness – or its own health”, a being which, “persisting analytically, or animally, in its being”, in “the ideal vigour”[5] of its identity, always seeks to enhance its own powers, capacity and position in the world. The great problem with bio-politics is that in never questioning this ontological prioritization of the ‘I’, it makes “individual self-preservation the presupposition of all other political categories, from sovereignty to liberty”.[6]

As the opening onto a world which “affirms and firms itself up in the life of human individuals and in their struggle for existence”,[7] bio-politics is an egology, the camouflage for an egoistic striving for personal salvation whose ferocious “concern to be”[8] jeopardizes the ethical, “menacing” the fundamental “generosity” of compassion with the “inhuman necessities of being in man and in economy”.[9] Let us be clear, however, that what is at issue with this egoism is not so much an “ugly vice” of the subject as the ontological fixation which sustains the “persistence and insistence of beings in the guise of individuals jealous for their part”.[10]

Insofar as a virus is impervious to all social, moral, political and theological categories, it epitomizes the silent bio-political revolution which, unbeknown to most, has long been gathering momentum in our midst. And so, the ‘war’ against the Coronavirus is a war that unfolds under the horizon of ontology, in the name of Being, and that means “in the name of fundamental philosophical doctrines” (Nietzsche). Hence a memorable formulation of Emmanuel Levinas, that may well serve as the leitmotif of our bio-political era:

“Political totalitarianism rests on an ontological totalitarianism”.[1]

[1] Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism, 206.

[1] ‘Not One Kaddish Will Be Said’ (1942), in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 163.

[2] “Justice is the right to speak” (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, 269).

[3] The Tyranny of Values, 6. Originally published in 1959.

[4] ‘Not One Kaddish Will Be Said’ (1942), in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 163.

[5] Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 177.

[6] Robert Esposito, Bios. Biopolitics and Philosophy, 9.

[7] Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 177.

[8] Levinas, Entre Nous, xii.

[9] Emmanuel Levinas, in Robbins [ed.], Is It Righteous to Be?, 120.

[10] Emmanuel Levinas, In the Time of Nations, 110. Italics in original; likewise, Arendt comments that for Heidegger, with the focus of ontology on the fundamental ‘being-there’ (Dasein) of the human, the issue is “not that it simply is, but, rather, that in its being its primary concern is its being itself” (Essays in Understanding, 179).