My friend Warren Crichlow reminds me that in my recent paper on the invisible flight of the animals (soon to be published in the online journal Alienocene), it is the unexpected crossing of animal and human paths, as the former intrudes upon the human’s own prior violent intrusion of it and its domain, that resembles the scene to which the origin of the current COVID-19 pandemic has been attributed and traced (viz., back to the alive and slaughtered wild animals sold in food markets in Wuhan, Hubei province, China).
In light of this inescapable reality, we must at the same time assert—counter to epidemiological retrospection and stigmatizing blame—that that which cannot be determined by the logic of the origin, may be the source of a beginning again and hence perhaps even of a way out. This is one of the ways in which we can understand Agamben, when he writes in his early book, The Idea of Prose: “That which can never be first let him glimpse, in its fading the glimmer of a beginning”—a statement that I use as the epigraph to my paper.
In the current climate of the unprecedented mass extinction of species, it is the intrusion of the animal and in particular its potent viral load that comes to us, almost as a messenger, to remind us of the force of extinction. This includes the degree to which humans have come to use this force against the natural world, yet in ways that prove to be detrimental to human existence as well. At the same time, it should also remind us that the human is its own viral animal.
Not only a contagious species, but also one open to contagion, which is to say: to the capacity to be contaminated by a virus that in this latest case, seemingly quite easily and suddenly jumped from captured animal to human. And the human, in the ensuing regimes of self-isolation and quarantine discovers itself to be not only “domesticated” but captured (as part of the animal has been released). This viral jump or leap was a transmission event that we must recognize only as being possible due to the receptivity of human bodies to serve as hosts to these (for us) particularly diseased agent-guests. At which point, we are left asking (once again): what is it, exactly that separates the human and the animal?
From here, and in light of the widespread expressions on the part of many of those self-quarantined that they do not know what to do with themselves now that they are “stuck” at home, one might turn to Heidegger on boredom as that which “brings to light the unexpected proximity of Dasein and the animal” (Agamben, The Open, 65). For it is precisely here, in the de-activation that is brought about by boredom that a way out might be found. An exit from operative production to in-operative creative use and care of self, bodies, things, and places—i.e. pure potential (the potential not-to) or means without end.
According to which Agamben, at the end of his book, The Open: Man and Animal (originally 2002), arrives at the following description and prescription:
To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new—more effective or more authentic—articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that—within man—separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man (92).
In the “boredom” brought on by global responses to the viral pandemic, one might discover a sabbatical. Not only from animal-human-human contagion, but from capitalist production, which is the real form of capture.
unbecoming community 