An All-Too-Human Virus

Jean-Luc Nancy, Cory Stockwell, David Fernbach , Sarah Clift

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English

Polity Press
05 November 2021

Philosophy; Society & Social Sciences

In the past, pandemics were considered divine punishment, but we now understand the biological characteristics of viruses and we know they are spread through social interaction. What used to be divine has become human – all too human, as Nietzsche would say.

But while the virus dispels the divine, we are discovering that living beings are more complex and harder to define than we had previously imagined, and also that political power is more complex than we may have thought. And this, argues Nancy, helps us to see why the term ‘biopolitics’ fails to grasp the conditions in which we now find ourselves. Life and politics challenge us together. Our scientific knowledge tells us that we are dependent only on our own technical power, but can we rely on technologies when knowledge itself includes uncertainties? If this is the case for technical power, it is much more so for political power, even when it presents itself as guided by objective data.

The virus is a magnifying glass that reveals the contradictions, limitations and frailties of the human condition, calling into question as never before our stubborn belief in progress and our hubristic sense of our own indestructibility as a species.

By: Jean-Luc Nancy
Translated by: Cory Stockwell, David Fernbach, Sarah Clift
Imprint: Polity Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 188mm, Width: 122mm, Spine: 13mm
Weight: 136g
ISBN: 9781509550227
ISBN 10: 1509550224
Pages: 100
Publication Date: 05 November 2021
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Publisher’s Note Preface Prologue I. An All-Too-Human Virus II. “Communovirus” III. Let Us Be Infants IV. Evil and Power V. Freedom VI. Neo-Viralism VII. To Free Freedom VIII. The Useful and the Useless IX. Still All Too Human Appendix 1: Interview with Nicolas Dutent Appendix 2: From the Future to the Time to Come: The Revolution of the Virus (with Jean-François Bouthors) Sources of the Texts

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940 - 2021) was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg.

Reviews for An All-Too-Human Virus

‘Into the craw of the pandemic, every tomorrow seems to have slid. Nancy here attempts to breathe out. In articulating the contradictions we confront and rendering the tentativeness of our situation palpable, he scans for an opening.’ Professor Joan Copjec, Brown University