Coronavirus and the Lawless Real
When Freud, on his way to America, said — although there is no evidence to suggest that he actually did say it — “they don’t realize we are bringing them the plague,” he was, in a sense, placing psychoanalysis on the side of the plague. This is already enough to demonstrate that Lacan’s rejection of the goal of the cure or of healthiness (and so on) is in the spirit of the Freudian discovery.
Today’s plagues — coronavirus or otherwise — operate in a similar way. They introduce us to the real of the geopolitical symptom. The real threat today is not coronavirus, but the real itself, which, in a sense, gives way to the coronavirus and to all other kinds of terrifying and lawless epidemics. As we struggle to plug up the real or to avoid it (through various techniques of biopolitics, such as temperature scans at airports), we also risk failing to face the structures which gave rise to them. If airports and train stations used to be places of demarcation between one space and another they are now fuzzy spaces in of themselves, spaces that are constantly tormented by the real.
It is capitalism and the pragmatic philosophy which underpins capitalism that offers itself once again as the antidote. Some news stories are quick to suggest that coronavirus was a consequence of an unchallenged dictatorship, implying that capitalism — and the market which compels practitioners to rush to invent another gadget, another scientific antidote or cure — is the only sane alternative. This naive narrative can only think of capitalism and dictatorship, without recognizing that capitalism succeeds precisely because of the alternatives.
Pragmatism was never really a philosophy any more than capitalism was ever really a political economic structure. Thus, when radicals talk about “alternatives to capitalism” they completely miss the point that even Marx spelled out: capitalism *is* the alternative. Capitalism offers itself endlessly as the alternative to more dogmatic and anarchic political forms. It sells itself not by its conviction or its inherent liberties but rather by its ‘cash-value’ (to use the phrase of the American pragmatists). In other words, its value is measured precisely by its consequences. Those capitalists who argue that Marx was a consequentialist should therefore first look at capitalism’s consequentialism.
Capitalism sustains itself today precisely in these two ways: (1) by offering itself as a pragmatic alternative, and (2) through make-shift solutions to underlying traumas. These traumas have their bases increasingly within the real: whether they are natural/environmental crises or biological crises, all politics today collapses into the real. Increasingly, the state — as a transcendental symbolic construct — demonstrates that it is inadequate to contain the lawless real. Pragmatic capitalism — and the discourse that sustains it, which Lacan outlined as his “fifth” discourse — makes fleeting operations upon that real.
We should interrogate this new discourse of biopolitics.
