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<address><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28741">http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28741</a><br>
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<td style="background-color: #D3B09A; width:100%; "><font
class="navigation_cadre">Date of publication at
Tlaxcala: 22/04/2020 </font> </td>
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<td style="background-color: #ffffff; width:100%;
height:20px;"> <font class="navigation_cadre"> Original: <a
href="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28737">Coronavirus
: le confinement n’abolit pas la présence de la rue, il
la réinvente</a><br>
Translations available: <a
href="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28738">Español</a>
<a
href="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28739">Italiano</a>
<a
href="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28740">Ελληνικά</a>
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<h1><font class="titre_pp">Coronavirus : Confinement doesn’t abolish
the presence of the street; it reinvents it</font> <br>
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<h1> <a
href="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut=7067&lg_pp=en"><img
src="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/upload/aut_7067.jpg"
height="150" border="0"></a> </h1>
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<td colspan="3" align="center"> <font class="auteur"> <a
href="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut=7067&lg_pp=en">Raoul
Vaneigem Ραούλ Βανεγκέμ</a> </font>
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Translated by <b>
<a
href="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut=7204&lg_pp=en">NOT
BORED!</a> </b>
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<p style="font-size: 18px; margin-left: 40px; margin-right: 40px;
font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 18px;">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?<sup>1</sup> 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. </span></p>
<p style="font-size: 18px; margin-left: 40px; margin-right: 40px;
font-style: italic; text-align: center;"><img
src="http://tlaxcala-int.org/upload/graphistes/g_3571.jpg"
alt="" width="500" height="500"></p>
<p>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<sup>2</sup>
with the impoverished measures that democratic totalitarianism
is applying globally to the coronavirus epidemic.</p>
<p>It is cynical to impute the deplorable insufficiency of the
medical means being used to the propagation of the scourge! <sup>3</sup>
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?</p>
<p>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,<sup>4</sup> of anti-nature.
Eric Postaire’s book, <i>Les épidémies du XXIe siècle</i>,
published in 1997,<sup>5</sup> confirms the disastrous effects
of persistent denaturation, which is something that I’ve
denounced for decades. Evoking the drama of the “mad cow”<sup>6</sup>
(foreseen by Rudolf Steiner<sup>8</sup> 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?</p>
<div>
<p>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.<sup>9</sup> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Modestes propositions aux grévistes</i>,<sup>10</sup><i>
</i>friends once again showed me the difficulty of following<i>
</i>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>Nothing is assured, everything begins.<sup>11</sup> Utopia
still crawls on all fours. Let’s abandon to their heavenly
inanity the billions of <i>banknotes</i><sup>12</sup> 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!</p>
<p>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. <i>Cum grano
salis</i>,<sup>13</sup> let me think that the insurrection
of everyday life has unexpected therapeutic virtues.</p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">Translator's Notes</p>
<div class="WordSection1">
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">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.</p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">2 The French
here, <i>coup d’éclat</i>, might be a pun on <i>coup
d’etat</i> (seizure of the State). See for example
François Hollande’s criticism of Nicolas Sarkozy circa 2007:
<a
href="https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20070723.OBS7855/le-coup-d-eclat-permanent-de-sarkozy-denonce-par-hollande.html">https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20070723.OBS7855/le-coup-d-eclat-permanent-de-sarkozy-denonce-par-hollande.html</a>.</p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">3 The French
here, <i>fléau</i>, also means curse and plague.</p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">4 In the works of
Rabelais, Physis is joyful and unashamed and Antiphysis is
hateful and destructive.</p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">5 Not yet
translated into English.</p>
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<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify"> </p>
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<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">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.</p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">8 Rudolf Steiner
(1861-1925) was an Austrian philosopher and social reformer.
Vaneigem is alluding to Steiner’s conception of biodynamic
agriculture.</p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">9 Cf. Raoul
Vaneigem, “The Flagellants,” <i>Resistance to Christianity</i>
(1993): <a
href="http://www.notbored.org/resistance-34.html.">http://www.notbored.org/resistance-34.html.</a></p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">10 Published by
Verticales in 2004, not yet translated into English.</p>
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<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify"> </p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">11 An echo of <i>Rien
n’est fini, tout commence</i>, a collection of interviews
with Vaneigem published in French in 2014 and translated into
English by NOT BORED! as <i>Self-Portraits and</i> <i>Caricatures
of the Situationist International </i>(2015).</p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">12 English in
original.</p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right:
10px; font-style: italic;" align="justify">13 “With a grain of
salt” (Latin in original).</p>
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<br>
Courtesy of <a href="http://www.notbored.org/coronavirus.pdf"
target="_blank">NOT BORED!</a><br>
Source: <a href="https://lundi.am/Coronavirus-Raoul-Vaneigem"
target="_blank">https://lundi.am/Coronavirus-Raoul-Vaneigem </a><br>
Publication date of original article: 21/03/2020<br>
URL of this page : <a
href="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28741">http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/article.asp?reference=28741</a>
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