[D66] Slavoj Žižek’s Virulent Polemic Against Covid-19

[Antid Oto]

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

By
John Kendall Hawkins
counterpunch.org
11 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.counterpunch.org%2F2020%2F04%2F08%2Fslavoj-zizeks-virulent-polemic-against-covid-19-and-stuff%2F>

    “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 Žižek 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. Žižek 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.”

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