Alain Badiou
On the Epidemic Situation
21 mars 2020
From the start, I thought that the
current situation, characterised by a viral pandemic, was not particularly
exceptional. From the (viral) pandemic of AIDS, and passing through the avian
flu, the Ebola virus, and the SARS 1 virus – not to mention several flus, the
appearance of strains of tuberculosis that antibiotics can no longer cure, or
even the return of measles – we know that the world market, combined with the
existence of vast under-medicalised zones and the lack of global discipline
when it comes to the necessary vaccinations, inevitably produces serious and
devastating epidemics (in the case of AIDS, several million deaths). Besides
the fact that the current pandemic situation is having a huge impact on the
rather comfortable so-called Western world – a fact in itself devoid of any
novel significance, eliciting instead dubious laments and revolting idiocies on
social media – I didn’t see why, beyond the obvious protective measures and the
time that the virus would take to disappear in the absence of new targets, it
was necessary to climb on one’s high horse.
What’s more, the true name of the
ongoing epidemic should suggest that in a sense we are dealing with ‘nothing
new under the contemporary sun’. This true name is SARS 2, that is ‘Severe
Acute Respiratory Syndrome 2’, a name that signals the ‘second time’ of this
identification, after the SARS 1 epidemic, which spread around the world in
Spring 2003. At the time, it was called ‘the first unknown illness of the 21st century’. It is clear then
that the current epidemic is by no means the emergence of something radically
new or unprecedented. It is the second of its kind this century and can be
situated as the first’s descendant. So much so that the only serious criticism
that can today be addressed to the authorities in matters of prediction is not
to have funded, after SARS 1, the research that would have made available to
the medical world genuine instruments of action against SARS 2.
So, I didn’t think there was
anything to be done other than try, like everyone else, to isolate myself at
home, and nothing to be said other than to encourage everyone else to do the
same. Adhering to a strict discipline on this point is all the more necessary in
that it provides support and fundamental protection for all those who are most
exposed: all medical staff, of course, who are directly at the front, and who
must be able to rely on a firm discipline, including on the part of the
infected; but also all the most frail, like the elderly, especially those in
care homes; as well as all those who have to go to work and run the risk of
contagion. The discipline of those who can obey the imperative ‘stay home’ must
also find and propose means for those who have barely any ‘home’ or none at all
so that they may nevertheless find a secure shelter. One could envisage in this
case a general commandeering of hotels.
It is true that these duties are
increasingly urgent but, at least on initial examination, they do not require
any great analytical efforts or the constitution of a new way of thinking.
But I am reading and hearing too
many things, including in my immediate circles, that disconcert me both by the
confusion they manifest and by their utter inadequacy to the – ultimately
simple – situation in which we find ourselves.
These peremptory declarations,
pathetic appeals and emphatic accusations take different forms, but they all
share a curious contempt for the formidable simplicity, and the absence of
novelty, of the current epidemic situation. Some are unnecessarily servile in
the face of the powers that be, who are in fact simply doing what they are
compelled to by the nature of the phenomenon. Others invoke the Planet and its
mystique, which doesn’t do any good. Some blame everything on the unfortunate
Macron, who is simply doing, and no worse than another, his job as head of
state in times of war or epidemic. Others make a hue and cry about the founding
event of an unprecedented revolution, whose relation to the extermination of a
virus remains opaque – something for which our ‘revolutionaries’ are not
proposing any new means whatsoever. Some sink into apocalyptic pessimism.
Others are frustrated that ‘me first’, the golden rule of contemporary
ideology, is in this case devoid of interest, provides no succour, and can even
appear as the accomplice of an indefinite prolongation of the evil.
It seems that the challenge of the
epidemic is everywhere dissipating the intrinsic activity of Reason, obliging
subjects to return to those sad effects – mysticism, fabulation, prayer,
prophecy and malediction – that were customary in the Middle Ages when plague
swept the land.
As a result, I feel somewhat
compelled to bring together some simple ideas. I would happily call them Cartesian.
Let us begin then by defining the
problem, which has elsewhere been so poorly defined and thus so poorly treated.
An epidemic is rendered complex by
the fact that it is always a point of articulation between natural and social
determinations. Its complete analysis is transversal : one must grasp the
points at which the two determinations intersect and draw the consequences.
For example, the initial fulcrum of
the current epidemic is very probably to be found in the markets of Wuhan
province. Chinese markets are known for their dangerous dirtiness, and for
their irrepressible taste for the open-air sale of all kinds of living animals,
stacked on top of one another. Whence the fact that at a certain moment the
virus found itself present, in an animal form itself inherited from bats, in a
very dense popular milieu, and in conditions of rudimentary hygiene.
The natural trajectory of the virus
from one species to another thereby transits towards the human species. How
exactly ? We don’t know yet, and only scientific studies will tell us. Let us,
in passing, revile all those who circulate typically racist fables online,
backed up by counterfeit images, according to which everything stems from the
fact that the Chinese eat bats when they’re still almost alive…
This local transit between animal
species that eventually reaches human beings is the origin point of the whole
affair. After which there simply operates a fundamental datum of the
contemporary world : the rise of Chinese state capitalism to imperial rank, in
other words an intense and universal presence on the world market. Whence
innumerable networks of diffusion, evidently before the Chinese government was
able to completely isolate the point of origin, namely an entire province with
40 million inhabitants – something it ultimately succeeded in doing, but too
late to stop the epidemic from departing on the paths – and the planes, and the
ships – of global existence.
Consider a revealing detail of what
I call the double articulation of an epidemic: today,
SARS 2 has been stifled in Wuhan but there are very many cases in Shanghai, in
the main due to people, generally Chinese nationals, coming from abroad. China
is thus a site in which one can observe the link – first for an archaic reason,
then a modern one – between a nature-society intersection in ill-kept markets
that followed older customs, on the one hand, and a planetary diffusion of this
point of origin borne by the capitalist world market and its reliance on rapid
and incessant mobility, on the other.
After which we enter the stage in
which states try locally to stifle this diffusion. Let us remark in passing
that this determination remains fundamentally local, while the epidemic is
instead transversal. Despite the existence of some trans-national authorities,
it is clear that it is local bourgeois states that are on the frontline.
We touch here on a major
contradiction of the contemporary world. The economy, including the process of
mass production of manufactured objects, comes under the aegis of the world
market – we know that the simple assembly of a mobile phone mobilises work and
resources, including mineral ones, in at least seven different states. And yet
political powers remain essentially national in kind. And the rivalry between
imperialisms, old (Europe and US) and new (China, Japan…) excludes any process
leading to a capitalist world state. The epidemic is also a moment when the
contradiction between economics and politics becomes flagrant. Even European
countries are not managing promptly to adjust their policies in the face of the
virus.
Prey to this contradiction, national
states attempt to confront the epidemic situation by respecting as much as
possible the mechanisms of Capital, even though the nature of the risk compels
them to modify the style and the actions of power.
We’ve known for a long time that in
the event of a war between countries, the state must impose, not only on the
popular masses, as is to be expected, but on the bourgeoisie itself,
considerable constraints, all in order to save local capitalism. Some
industries are almost nationalised for the sake of an unbridled production of
armaments that does not immediately generate any monetizable surplus value.
Many bourgeois are mobilised as officers and exposed to death. Scientists work
night and day to invent new weapons. Numerous intellectuals and artists are
compelled to supply national propaganda, etc.
Faced with an epidemic this kind of
statist reflex is inevitable. That is why, contrary to what some say, the
declarations by Macron or Prime Minister Edouard Philippe regarding the return
of the ‘welfare’ state, spending to support people out of work, or to aid the
self-employed whose shops have been shut, demanding 100 or 200 billions from
the state coffers, and even the announcement of ‘nationalisations’ – none of
this is surprising or paradoxical. It follows that Macron’s metaphor, ‘we are
at war’, is correct : in war or epidemic, the state is compelled, sometimes
trespassing the normal run of its class nature, to undertake practices that are
both more authoritarian and more generally targeted, in order to avoid a
strategic catastrophe.
This is an entirely logical
consequence of the situation, the aim of which is to stifle the epidemic – to
win the war, to borrow once again Macron’s metaphor – with the greatest
certainty possible, while remaining within the established social order. This
is no laughing matter, it is a necessity imposed by the diffusion of a lethal
process that intersects nature (whence the preeminent role of scientists in the
matter) and the social order (whence the authoritarian intervention, and it
couldn’t be otherwise, of the state).
That some massive lacunae appear in
the midst of this effort is inevitable. Consider the lack of protective masks
or the unpreparedness in terms of the duration of hospital isolation. But who
can really boast of having ‘predicted’ this kind of thing ? In certain regards,
the state did not prevent the current situation, it’s true. We can even say
that by weakening, decade after decade, the national health system, along with
all the sectors of the state serving the general interest, it acted instead as
though nothing akin to a devastating pandemic could affect our country. To this
extent the state is very culpable, not only in its Macron guise, but in that of
all who have come before him for at least the past thirty years.
But it is nonetheless correct to
note here that no one had predicted, or even imagined, the emergence in France
of a pandemic of this type, except perhaps for a few isolated scientists. Many
probably thought that this kind of thing was good for dark Africa or
totalitarian China, but not for democratic Europe. And it is surely not
leftists – or gilets jaunes or even trade-unionists – who
enjoy a particular right to hold forth on this point, and to continue to make a
fuss about Macron, their derisory target for the last while. They too had
absolutely not envisaged this. On the contrary, as the epidemic was already on
its way from China, they multiplied, until very recently, uncontrolled
assemblies and noisy demonstrations, which should disqualify them today,
whoever they may be, from loudly condemning the delays taken by the powers that
be in taking the full measure of what was happening. Truth be told, no
political force in France really took this measure before the Macronian
state.
On the side of this state, the
situation is of the kind in which the bourgeois state must explicitly,
publicly, make prevail interests that are in some sense more general than those
of the bourgeoisie alone, while strategically preserving, in the future, the
primacy of the class interests of which this state represents the general form.
In other words, the conjuncture compels the state to manage
the situation by integrating the interest of the class whose authorised
representative it is with more general interests, on account of the internal
existence of an ‘enemy’ that is itself general – in times of war this may be a
foreign invader, while in the present situation it is the virus SARS 2.
This kind of situation (world war or
world epidemic) is especially ‘neutral’ at the political level. The wars of the
past have only triggered revolutions in two cases, which may be termed outliers
with regard to the imperial powers of the time : Russia and China. In the
Russian case, this was because Tsarist power was in every sense, and had been
for a long time, retrograde, including as a power
potentially adapted to the birth of a genuine capitalism in that immense
country. And against it there existed, in the shape of the Bolsheviks, a modern
political vanguard, strongly structured by remarkable leaders. In the Chinese
case, internal revolutionary war preceded the world war, and the Chinese
Communist Party was already, in 1940, at the head of a popular army that had
been tried and tested. By contrast, in no Western power did the war trigger a
victorious revolution. Even in the country that had been defeated in 1918,
Germany, the Spartacist insurrection was quickly crushed.
The lesson to be drawn from this is
clear : the ongoing epidemic will not have, qua epidemic, any
noteworthy political consequences in a country like France. Even supposing that
our bourgeoisie – in light of the inchoate grumbling and flimsy if widespread
slogans – believes that the moment has come to get rid of Macron, that will in
no way represent any change worthy of note. The ‘politically correct’
candidates are already waiting in the wings, as are the advocates of the most
mildewed form of a ‘nationalism’ as obsolete as it is repugnant.
As for those of us who desire a real
change in the political conditions of this country, we must take advantage of
this epidemic interlude, and even of the – entirely necessary – isolation, to
work on new figures of politics, on the project of new political sites, and on
the trans-national progress of a third stage of communism after the brilliant
one of its invention and the – interesting but ultimately defeated – stage of
its statist experimentation.
We will also need to pass through a
stringent critique of every perspective according to which phenomena like
epidemics can work by themselves in the direction of something
that is politically innovative. Over and above the general transmission of
scientific data about the epidemic, a political charge will only be carried by
new affirmations and convictions concerning hospitals and public health,
schools and egalitarian education, the care of the elderly, and other questions
of this kind. Only these might possibly be articulated with a balance-sheet of
the dangerous weaknesses on which the current situation has shed light.
In passing, one will need to show
publicly and dauntlessly that so-called ‘social media’ have once again
demonstrated that they are above all – besides their role in fattening the
pockets of billionaires – a place for the propagation of the mental paralysis of
braggarts, uncontrolled rumours, the discovery of antediluvian ‘novelties’, or
even fascistic obscurantism.
Let us not give credence, even and
especially in our isolation, except to truths that are controllable by science
and to the grounded perspectives of a new politics, of its localised
experiences as well as its strategic aims.
Translated by Alberto Toscano