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The most contagious is fear

2020-02-17T16:52:09.927Z


The bombardment of images of people with masks, wrapped even in plastic, unleashes fears. Dread spreads even more when the news circulating is false or alarmist


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At this point, virtually everyone has heard of the coronavirus. Even if the germ has not reached your country or your imagination, it has already become a kind of blank canvas on which anything can be projected, from our deepest fears to prejudices and stereotypes about the East. It seems as if everything that was repressed came back with a virus that is already modeling the popular imagination - and even apocalyptic - of the year 2020.

But precisely when we are bombarded with dystopian images of cities, airports and cruise ships in quarantine, and panic and paranoia spread rapidly, it is when we have to stop and reflect. The outbreak of a virus is usually the best universal indicator of the functioning of our societies. If dreams are, in Freud's words, the "royal road to the unconscious," a global phenomenon such as the appearance of a pathogen is the royal road to the world unconscious.

In view of the popular fantasy about the coronavirus, it is worthwhile to make a critical rereading of Death in Venice , Thomas Mann's novel originally published in 1912 in which a mysterious contagious disease (which is later revealed to be cholera) It spreads through the tourist “paradise”. Aschenbach, protagonist of the story, finds out at the end that this “horror of diversity” (prejudiced characterization towards the East is done by Thomas Mann himself) emerged in India and spread throughout Asia to reach the Mediterranean and Venice. The novel also suggests that on the islands of Brioni (now Croatia) and in Venice, the infected were being quarantined.

Indeed, Venice was one of the first cities to perfect a maritime isolation system, and Italy has a long history of sanitary confinements, used in principle to cordon off people who could carry a disease, but soon become a system for prevent foreigners, minority groups, Jews and Arabs from entering the cities. What started out of fear of the disease ended up not only stigmatizing, but also segregating, certain groups of people. For example, in 1836, Naples ended the free movement of prostitutes and beggars, who were automatically considered to be carriers of infections.

The darkest continent is not China, India or Congo, but the human unconscious

Currently it is obvious that the Chinese have touched them. It is not surprising that the Vice President of the Italian Senate, Ignazio La Russa, a member of the Brothers neo-fascist party of Italy, recently recommended using the fascist salute as an "antiviral and antimicrobial" remedy to avoid getting the coronavirus. After all, what is fascism but to treat others as if they were contagious viruses? Fear resembles a virus: it is invisible, but when placed under a microscope it can increase millions of times in size. That was what happened on a train in Italy, as explained by the professor at Imperial College London, Tommaso Valletti. When a Chinese teenager climbed into the convoy, a woman commented out loud: “We are already there. We are going to infect everyone ”, to which the boy responded in perfect Italian with a Roman accent:“ Madam, in my whole life I have only seen China on Google Maps ”.

At the same time, in France, a local newspaper published the following headline: " Alerte jaune " (yellow alert), followed by "Le péril jaune?" (The yellow danger?), And showed an image of a Chinese woman with a mask. The newspaper quickly apologized, but, as at the time of Death in Venice , the "horrors of diversity" had already begun to occupy the European imagination. In response, French citizens of Asian origin have been quick to publish photos of themselves holding social media posters that read “j e ne suis pas a virus” (I am not a virus).

Several laboratory technicians in Linyi, in Shandong Province, on February 10. STR / AFP via Getty images

Obviously, the darkest continent is not China, India or Congo, as in the stereotypical fantasies about the East now reactivated, but the human unconscious. So far, reactions to the coronavirus have revealed less about the microorganism than about ourselves.

A virus is never just a biological agent that reproduces in the living cells of an organism, but is invariably part of an ideology that builds the "other" as a disease. Consider, for example, in the recent Cordon series (2014), co-produced by Belgium and the Netherlands. The story begins with the arrival of an illegal Afghan emigrant to the Belgian city of Antwerp inside a container. Shortly after an outbreak of a deadly virus occurs. Although it is later discovered that the government has been responsible, the "horrors of diversity" are present again. Recall also the American version of the series, titled Containment , of the year 2015. It turns out that a Syrian is a carrier of a highly contagious virus. He is always the "other": first Afghan, then Syrian and now Chinese. Science fiction is becoming real: there has not been much waiting for the famous populist strategist Steve Bannon to realize that the coronavirus is a perfect tool to meddle again in the US elections, calling it a "biological Chernobyl."

However, it would be a mistake to believe that the European and American extreme right are the only ones who are using the coronavirus to "prove" that they were right to insist on closing the borders and implanting a state of permanent exception. Even the conventional media in the West are complicit in treating "China as a disease," as the recent covers of Der Spiegel and The Economist illustrate. The German magazine featured a person dressed in a red protective jumpsuit and a gas mask, with an Iphone in his hand and the headline ' Made in China '. For its part, the heading of The Economist asked: "To what extent will it get worse?", Next to an image of the Earth with a mask with the Chinese flag. If the disease, as Susan Sontag taught us in her transcendental essay The disease and its metaphors (1978), has to be understood as a metaphor to be deconstructed, what are these covers metaphor for?

Although it originated in China, the coronavirus, in any case, is not made in China , but a product of global capitalism. Just as, under colonial regimes, epidemics spread across the networks of roads, railroads and canals of world empires, the deadly virus is not spreading because of China (not "Chinese"), but because our world has never been as connected as it is today and because everything can be interrupted, including the free movement of people, except the circulation of capital.

Since the fascists are already calling for borders to be closed and that global capitalism can stop everything except the free movement of goods, we have to be aware that the pandemic of fear is more dangerous than the virus itself, because already It is being used by those who are not willing to waste a good opportunity, even if it is a pathogen.

Srećko Horvat is a Croatian philosopher. He is one of the founders of DiEM25, a movement that asks to democratize Europe. On February 25, the Paidós publishing house publishes' Poetry of the future. Why a global liberation movement is the last chance of our civilization. '

Viral lies

Falsehoods are transmitted faster than the truth, according to a reference study published in Science . The Covid-19 coronavirus epidemic has shown that the health sector is particularly sensitive to this dangerous proliferation capacity. Only during the three days that followed the quarantine of the city of Wuhan, on January 23, more than 13,000 entries published on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit spread conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, according to Storyful data, a firm that analyzes social network content, collected on the Axios website. THE COUNTRY

Source: elparis

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