Coronavirus, the technosanitary Leviathan is destroying society
Our home is in danger, since it is the last bastion of resistance. It is a paradox: the house, which is usually the place that preserves the private and intimacy stolen from the public, is now becoming the last bastion of resistance of social relations otherwise forbidden in the public space guarded by the technosanitary Leviathan.
As we know, it produces the abolition of the neighbor and of the public space by decree, since in the neighbor and in the public space it sees only vectors of contagion. Generating immunity in fact means deconstructing the community: immunitas and communitas proceed according to a logic of mutual exclusion. As we have emphasized several times, the illogical logic of capitalism is fulfilled, on the anthropological and social level, in the new unsociable sociability of a society rarefied by socially distanced and telematically connected atoms.
Society really no longer exists, replaced as it is by monads confined by decree in their home or otherwise condemned to keep the distance from the other perceived as a virus (homo homini virus). For this reason, as I said, only the intimate and private space of the house, the inviolable home of the citizens, survives today as a place for possible relationships, encounters, communities. In other words, precisely inasmuch as it is uncontrolled by power for now, the house remains the possible cell of the reorganization of human relations and of human resistance against a power that is more inhumane every day.
As Agamben writes, the necessary reaction to the dehumanization of human relations produced by therapeutic capitalism must pass through the creation of a parallel community within society, that is to say, of a society of free and supportive people in which the fear of losing one’s life does not prevail over the desire for a free and dignified life.
From this follows a noteworthy consequence: the house becomes the space for the reorganization of the social, also of its survival and its rebirth according to new and unexpected communities of citizens and free citizens who continue to live according to reason and freedom even in the inhuman framework of the new therapeutic order. Thus, an “empire within an empire” is produced, to take up a happy expression of Spinoza.
In light of this, not only can it be reasonably argued that the desirable reaction to the global coup will mature starting from the houses as resistance fortresses, but also that the power of the new therapeutic order will sooner or later have to intervene to regulate even that last free space with its regulations. In summary, if the reaction starts from the house, it is against the house that the repression of power will break down.
On closer inspection, the premises have already been laid: when they tell us, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, how many people we can bring into the house, of what type and according to what modality, even intimating us not to give hospitality to subversives who have rejected the sacrament of the sacred blessing with serum, the violation of our home, even if only on an ideal level, has already occurred.
Again in the name of superior medical and scientific reasons, of course, as is the case with a regime that asks us every day to trade freedoms and rights in the name of public health safety. The further step, which could take place at any time, will consist in the passage from the ideal to the material, that is to say in the direct control by the authorities of what happens inside our homes, so that even there reigns without any hic sunt leones the order of the technosanitary Leviathan.
Whenever there is a solution, the ruling power works to neutralize it.
Diego Fusaro (Turin 1983) teaches history of philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for High Strategic and Political Studies) and is the founder of the National Interest association (www.interessenazionale.net). Among his most fortunate books, “Welcome back Marx!” (Bompiani 2009), “The future is ours” (Bompiani 2009), “Thinking otherwise” (Einaudi 2017).
#Covid #home #danger #bastion #resistance