Slavoj Žižek's Virulent Polemic Against Covid-19, and Stuff!

Slavoj Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek's Virulent Polemic Against Covid-19, and Stuff!

By John Kendall Hawkins

"I used to be Deleuzanal, but, now, I'm not Saussure."

- Toilet stall wall riddle, next to Nietzsche Is Peachy

Someone must have called Slavoj on his Radphone in the middle of the night and said go over to your window and look up at the sky; he did, and there it was: the Rad-Signal lighting up a silver Z. Some thought it was a call for Zorro; some said Zarathustra. Slavoj is a little bit of both. The voice on the phone continued on loudspeaker, "There's a virus afoot, Slavoj, we need your wisdom." He thanked the caller, an anxious acolyte, and hung up the phone. He climbed out of his phone-booth pajamas and raced over to his word processor and typed like a maniac on a mission from the entity formerly known as God.

Because he's a genius, he was finished in an hour, saved the pdf, and sent it to his publisher: Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World. The exclamation mark there to build up the threat he faced. Could this be his kryptonite?! Or his finest philosophical hour? The world waited for the master's work with baited breath. Read it and seep.

In his introduction, Slavoj Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek starts off Pandemic! by quoting from the Bible, John 20:17, "Noli me tangere," the one where Jesus has Arisen and Mary Magdalen recognizes him and comes a-running to give him a hug, and he says,"Whoa, don't touch the threads, Mary. I'm a Made man now." Or, he has a virus; maybe her simplex has rubbed off. We're all herpes hosts; it erupts once in a blue moon, like original sin, to remind us we still have moral work to do. Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek says we mustn't touch each other, but, at the same time, if we use this historical moment properly, "there is a hope that corporeal distancing will even strengthen the intensity of our link with others."

Who's zoomin' zoomin' who? (Watch for her Genius premiere next month.)

Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek makes the all-important point that "we are all in the same boat now." This is a truism, and explains why he gets the Big Bucks. One pictures the maiden Titanic asea, but, now, without the worry of icebergs ahead. Rather, the worry is whether there'll be any ports ahead not under water. The Upstairs/Downstairs of Das Boot, held together by a melancholy stringed quartet, Cate and Leo, twin figureheads at the prow of the new flying dutchman we call the world. "Hegel wrote," writes Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek, "that the only thing we can learn from history is that we learn nothing from history, so I doubt the epidemic will make us any wiser." Or, we've nothing to fear from history but fear of history itself.

Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek says, "There is no return to normal, the new 'normal' will have to be constructed on the ruins of our old lives, or we will find ourselves in a new barbarism whose signs are already clearly discernible." This is probably true, if the Plague lasts long enough. We read the pressures are mounting: domestic abuse, already a crisis in America, is bound to go into full swing; jobs are dropping like flies; cantaloupes (meaning all migrant agro) lie unpicked and bleeding in the sun; talking heads buddy up with news broadcasts from their cribs (presumably). One head says, through Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek, "What iswrong with our system that we were caught unprepared by the catastrophe despite scientists warning us about it for years?" Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed.

Panels pick apart the symptoms and point pingers, and "The usual suspects are waiting in line to be questioned: globalization, the capitalist market, the transience of the rich." We make bells of our hands and wring them, Bobby Dylan-style, for all of us who are Left. Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek says, Frank Wells told his brother H.G. that the feckin' White Devil pommies had wiped out the aborigines of Tasmania, and that's what inspired War of the Worlds, and that "Perhaps an epidemic which threatens to decimate humanity should be treated as Wells's story turned around: the 'Martian invaders'" and that it's ironic that "we are now threatened 'by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth,' stupid viruses which just blindly reproduce themselves-and mutate."

Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek asks, "Why are we tired all the time?" Some of the answers are terrifying. But he posits that most folks are so caught up in pleasing The Man, polishing his apples with a smile, and as Wordsworth sighs, "We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!" Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek says,

When a medical worker gets deadly tired from working overtime, when a caregiver is exhausted by a demanding charge, they are tired in a way that is different from the exhaustion of those driven by obsessive career moves. Their tiredness is worthwhile.

You don't want to know how tired I am, nor how seasick.

Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek takes some time to pot-shot the Israelis. Suddenly, with the arrival of Covid-19, Yahu's nits are all largesse with the PLA, and are now 'helping' in Gaza, "not out of goodness and human consideration, but for the simple fact that it is impossible to separate Jews and Palestinians there." The new rule: any Palestinian looking to give a hug to a "muscle tough" border guard will be shot. The Kamila Shamsie debacle is noted, the author "retroactively stripped" of a literary prize, says Ã... ½iÃ... ¾ek, ostensbly for "participating in"boycott measures against the Israeli government for its Palestinian policies since 2014." Nothing to do with the virus (or does it?).

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