[D66] Confinement doesn’t abolish the presence of the street; it reinvents it - Raoul Vaneigem

[R.O.]

http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28741

Date of publication at Tlaxcala: 22/04/2020
Original: Coronavirus : le confinement n’abolit pas la présence de la 
rue, il la réinvente 
<http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28737>
Translations available: Español 
<http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28738> Italiano 
<http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28739> Ελληνικά 
<http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28740>


  Coronavirus : Confinement doesn’t abolish the presence of the street;
  it reinvents it


  <http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut=7067&lg_pp=en>

	
	
Raoul Vaneigem Ραούλ Βανεγκέμ 
<http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut=7067&lg_pp=en>

Translated by *NOT BORED! 
<http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut=7204&lg_pp=en> *

Challenging the danger posed by the coronavirus is surely absurd. But, 
on the other hand, isn’t it just as absurd that a disturbance in the 
habitual course of illnesses has become the object of such intense 
emotional exploitation and mobilizes the same arrogant incompetence that 
years ago kicked the cloud from Chernobyl out of France?^1 Certainly, we 
know the facility with which the specter of the apocalypse comes out of 
it box to seize upon the latest catastrophe, patch together the imagery 
of a universal deluge and plunge the plowshare of guilt into the sterile 
soil of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The divine curse served to help power. At least it did until the Lisbon 
earthquake of 1755, when the Marquis de Pombal, a friend of Voltaire, 
took advantage of the event to massacre the Jesuits, reconstruct the 
city according to his conceptions and gleefully liquidate his political 
rivals through “proto-Stalinist” show trials. Odious though he was, 
Pombal shouldn’t be insulted by comparing his dictatorial feat^2 with 
the impoverished measures that democratic totalitarianism is applying 
globally to the coronavirus epidemic.

It is cynical to impute the deplorable insufficiency of the medical 
means being used to the propagation of the scourge! ^3 For decades the 
public welfare has been compromised, the hospital sector has paid the 
costs of a policy that favors financial interests at the expense of the 
health of the citizens. There is always more money for the banks and 
fewer and fewer beds and caregivers for the hospitals. What acts of 
buffoonery can continue to hide the fact that the catastrophic 
management of catastrophe is inherent in globally dominant financial 
capitalism, which today is combated globally in the names of life, the 
planet and the species to be saved?

Without falling into any rehashing of divine punishment (the idea that 
nature is ridding herself of humanity as if it were an unwelcome and 
harmful pest), it isn’t useless to recall that for millennia the 
exploitation of human and terrestrial nature has imposed the dogma of 
antiphysis,^4 of anti-nature. Eric Postaire’s book, /Les épidémies du 
XXIe siècle/, published in 1997,^5 confirms the disastrous effects of 
persistent denaturation, which is something that I’ve denounced for 
decades. Evoking the drama of the “mad cow”^6 (foreseen by Rudolf 
Steiner^8 in the 1920s), Postaire recalls that scientific progress, in 
addition to disarming us against certain illnesses, can also cause 
decades of them. In his plea for a responsible approach to epidemics and 
their treatment, he incriminates what Claude Gudin calls “cash register 
philosophy” in his preface to the book. He asks, “doesn’t subordinating 
the health of the population to the laws of profit, to the point of 
transforming herbivore animals into carnivores, risk causing 
catastrophes that will be fatal to Nature and Humanity?” We know well 
that the rulers have already responded with a unanimous YES. But what 
importance does this have when the NO of the financial interests 
continues to triumph cynically?

Was the coronavirus really necessary to demonstrate to the most 
narrow-minded among us that denaturation in the service of profitability 
has disastrous consequences for universal health, which is managed 
without distress by a World Organization whose precious statistics 
compensate for the disappearance of public hospitals? There’s an obvious 
correlation between the coronavirus and the collapse of global 
capitalism. It is no less evident that what the coronavirus epidemic 
covers over and submerges is emotional plague, hysterical fear, panic 
that both hides the deficiencies of the treatment and perpetuates the 
evil by frightening the patient. During the great epidemics of the past, 
the population did penitence and proclaimed their guilt by flagellating 
themselves.^9 Don’t the managers of global dehumanization have an 
interest in persuading the people that there is no escape from the 
miserable lot that is made for them? That all they have is the 
flagellation of voluntary servitude? The formidable media machine can 
only rehash the old lie of the heavenly decree, impenetrable, 
unavoidable, in which crazy money has supplanted the bloody and 
capricious Gods of the past.

The unleashing of police barbarism upon peaceful demonstrators has amply 
shown that military law is the only thing that functions efficiently. 
Today it quarantines women, men and children. Outside: the coffin. 
Inside: the television, an open window on a closed world! This is a 
practice that is liable to aggravate existential anxiety because it 
gambles on the emotions that have been flayed by anguish and exacerbates 
the blindness of impotent anger.

But even the lie gives way to general collapse. Governmental and 
populist cretinization has reached its limits. It cannot deny that an 
experiment in is progress. Civil disobedience grows and dreams of 
societies that are radically new because they are radically human. 
Solidarity frees from their individualist sheepskins those individuals 
who no longer fear thinking for themselves.

The coronavirus has revealed the bankruptcy of the State. Well, there’s 
a subject for reflection (at least) by the victims of enforced 
confinement. At the time of the publication of my /Modestes propositions 
aux grévistes/,^10 //friends once again showed me the difficulty of 
following//my suggestion for the collective refusal to pay duties, taxes 
and levies. But then the recognized bankruptcy of the swindler-State 
attested to an economic and social deterioration that renders absolutely 
insolvent small- and middle-sized companies, local commerce, those with 
modest incomes, family-owned farms and even the so-called liberal 
professions. The collapse of Leviathan has succeeded in convincing 
people more rapidly than our resolutions to bring it down.

The coronavirus has done even better than that. The cessation of 
production-caused pollutants has lessened global pollution; millions of 
people have been spared a programmed death; nature is able to breathe; 
the dolphins have returned to frolicking in Sardinia; the canals in 
Venice, purified of mass tourism, now once again contain clear water; 
the stock market is collapsing. Spain is resolved to nationalize private 
hospitals, as if it has rediscovered social security, as if the 
[Spanish] State has recalled the welfare state that it destroyed.

Nothing is assured, everything begins.^11 Utopia still crawls on all 
fours. Let’s abandon to their heavenly inanity the billions of 
/banknotes/^12 and hollow ideas that spin round above our heads. The 
important thing is to “take care of our affairs ourselves” by letting 
the wheeler-dealer financial bubble burst and implode. Let us not lack 
boldness and confidence in ourselves!

Our present isn’t the confinement that survival imposes on us; it is the 
opening to all possibilities. It is due to panic that the oligarchic 
State is forced to adopt measures that even yesterday it decreed were 
impossible. It is to the call of life and the earth to be restored that 
we want to respond. Quarantine is good for reflection. Confinement 
doesn’t abolish the presence of the street; it reinvents it. /Cum grano 
salis/,^13 let me think that the insurrection of everyday life has 
unexpected therapeutic virtues.

Translator's Notes

1 On 26 April 1986, one of the reactors at Chernobyl in the Ukraine 
exploded and caused a radioactive cloud to spread all over Europe. Some 
TV weather forecasters in France suggested that the cloud would stop at 
the German border and “miraculously” spare France.

2 The French here, /coup d’éclat/, might be a pun on /coup d’etat/ 
(seizure of the State). See for example François Hollande’s criticism of 
Nicolas Sarkozy circa 2007: 
https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20070723.OBS7855/le-coup-d-eclat-permanent-de-sarkozy-denonce-par-hollande.html.

3 The French here, /fléau/, also means curse and plague.

4 In the works of Rabelais, Physis is joyful and unashamed and 
Antiphysis is hateful and destructive.

5 Not yet translated into English.

6 Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is a neurodegenerative disease that 
affects cattle. Caused by the consumption of meat-and-bone meal, “mad 
cow disease” broke into public consciousness in 1990s.

8 Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was an Austrian philosopher and social 
reformer. Vaneigem is alluding to Steiner’s conception of biodynamic 
agriculture.

9 Cf. Raoul Vaneigem, “The Flagellants,” /Resistance to Christianity/ 
(1993): http://www.notbored.org/resistance-34.html.

10 Published by Verticales in 2004, not yet translated into English.

11 An echo of /Rien n’est fini, tout commence/, a collection of 
interviews with Vaneigem published in French in 2014 and translated into 
English by NOT BORED! as /Self-Portraits and/ /Caricatures of the 
Situationist International /(2015).

12 English in original.

13 “With a grain of salt” (Latin in original).



------------------------------------------------------------------------

Courtesy of NOT BORED! <http://www.notbored.org/coronavirus.pdf>
Source: https://lundi.am/Coronavirus-Raoul-Vaneigem 
<https://lundi.am/Coronavirus-Raoul-Vaneigem>
Publication date of original article: 21/03/2020
URL of this page : http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28741
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