Breathing as a political allegory: the COVID-19 pandemic in times of democratic expiration/A respira
| Autor | Pinheiro, Douglas Ant |
Introduction (1)
This article was written by someone under quarantine due to the horizontal distancing policy (2) adopted by local public authorities as a way to flatten the epidemic curve of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease), an infectious disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This new strain of coronavirus, first identified in the chinese city of Wuhan in late December 2019, although causing mild symptoms in 80% of cases, has raised great concern among health authorities since: (i) among the remaining 20% of patients, three-quarters experience a severe respiratory condition that requires oxygen therapy, and the remaining quarter faces critical situations that require assisted mechanical ventilation in a hospital environment (WHO, 2020); (ii) the disease's lethality rate has been around 4%, ten times higher than the virus that caused the pandemic influenza A (H1N1) of 2009 (VEJA, 2020); (iii) SARS-CoV-2 shows a high transmission rate, which made the World Health Organization (WHO) declare it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on January 30, 2020.
International experience has shown, especially in countries such as Italy, Spain and the United States, that there seems to be no state fully prepared to provide respiratory support for such a large number of infected pacients. This is particularly true during the peak of the epidemic curve--which, by the way, justifies the attempt to flatten it through isolation policies as a way to reduce pressure on the health system. The public declarations made by hospitals and health organizations about the criteria for treatment priority in case of bed restrictions inevitably placed mechanical respirators, fundamental in the care protocol for critical cases, in the international social imaginary, a concept until then technical and restricted. Breathing, either protected by face masks in a preventive way or artificially supplemented in treatment, threatened by a disease for which there is still no vaccine or drug of proven efficacy, is no longer just a bodily function, but has rather become a category of analysis of the states' own capacity to act.
Not without reason, Mbembe (2020) defended the universal right to breathe as something that goes beyond the purely biological aspect of it. Since the hegemonic modernity is characterized by a ruthless war against living beings, the right to a breathable life should thus be affirmed not only through recovering the world's natural sources of breath, since mankind and biosphere are indissociable, but also by overcoming any power structure that promotes the early interruption of living breath through necropolitics. Necropolitical states should however not be the only ones tackled, but any state that causes the lives of entire ethnic-racial groups to be precarious through an economy based on hegemony. This arrangement suffocates the individual through disintegrating collective resistance, or through keeping these populations out of breath through the unfair exploitation of their labor force As the air knows no borders, such a right would not be restricted to specific state legal systems, but otherwise addressed at the universality of living beings, including the human person.
Even before this pandemic event, however, an Italian philosopher had already suggested the hypothesis of thinking about breathing as a political category. So impressed with the murder of black man Eric Garner, on July 17, 2014, in New York City, resulting of the use of police brutality by an officer who choked him to death, while the victim repeatedly mumbled "I can't breathe", as well as with the demonstrations that followed in several American cities, in which people chanted Garner's very last words as a motto, the thinker Franco Berardi began to reflect upon the political power not only of breathing, but of its different phases, identified by him as inspiration, conspiracy and expiration. This text will follow the same itinerary given by Berardi's partial categories in order to reflect on the social paths, especially those indicated in the political-legal field, which have been designed to confront the virus that causes COVID-19.
Inspiration: the hyper-inclusiveness of alternatives
The possibility of overcoming chaos does not rely on merit, but on the poetical act. To understand this construction by Berardi (2018: 19-22), it is necessary to return to the lyrical inspiration from which he commences, which is two verses taken from the poem > by Hölderlin-->, in English. To Heidegger (1993: 249), in the German language, the idea of living and building originally shared the same signifier: bauen, deriving from the old term buan--words that should also be related to bin, the verb to be in the conjugations "I am, you are" (ich bin, du bist). Through a different path, Heidegger (2000: 75-76) had reached the same conclusion when he indicated that the noun wesen, in its turn derived from the verb sein (to be), did not originally mean "whatness", but "enduring as present", in such a way that man is as he dwells on this earth.
Curiously, Agamben (2019), departing from Benveniste's work, followed the same path in the Latin language. The verb "to inhabit" would be a frequentative of habeo, that is, "to have". However, not all languages differentiate the verbs "to be" and "to have", making use, in this case, of linguistic formulas that, with small variations, indicate a state--either that of being someone or that of possessing something. Therefore, the verbs "to be" and "to have" share a strong semantic proximity bond, which could be perceived through some of the words derived from habeo: skillful (ability to do something), habit (way of behaving recurrently) and inhabit, which, in the monastic tradition, bequeathed the expression secum habitare, that is a certain way of being and living regarding oneself. Living, then, would not only be the pragmatic action of residing in a place, but a particular ontological category, since the human, an inhabitant, remains in this world in its own way. Agamben's argument, analyzing the Auschwitz concentration camp, designed by an architect trained at the Bauhaus, Fritz Erl, sought to question how modernity could have allowed an architecture based on the impossibility of housing; but, surely, the same reasoning can be applied to hegemonic spatialities that deny to the subaltern the possibility of a dignified permanence in the world.
Taking up Hölderlin's verses, there are, therefore, two distinct movements in human life: that of meritorious action and that of poetic dwelling. Merit is related to the human trait of showcasing their own value, considering the parameter agreed upon by individuals in a given social context, and therefore receiving recognition, praise and reward (BERARDI, 2018: 19). Merit is based on a measurable intersubjective social and linguistic agreement, which makes it possible to foresee the action to be taken in order to obtain the expected reward. In the meritorious act, there is a level of predictability regarding the reaction of others due to a collectively accumulated and sometimes standardized semantic capital. Because it is based on strict ties between signifier and meaning, in the name of ordering efforts, the meritorious act leaves little room for the insurgent and the deviant, who need to be either framed or rejected for the sake of the mostly consensual meritorious control pact. The meritorious act guarantees legal security while order is maintained, but it does not seem to offer reliable alternatives when chaos obscures the horizon of expectation.
At this moment, experience seems not to be enough to provide quick answers--which not only promotes a rupture in historical time (KOSELECK, 2011; HARTOG, 2013), but also affects how man dwells in space. Although it was preceded by five other public health emergencies of international importance, namely, the influenza A (H1N1) pandemic, the international spread of poliovirus (still ongoing), the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the congenital Zika virus syndrome and the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, also ongoing (VENTURA et al., 2020: 6), the COVID-19 pandemic seems to cloud the predictability of social, political and legal reaction. Liberal traditions that praises individual's self-sufficiency are contrasted with imposing measures of "vertical" or "horizontal" distancing, calling into question people's ability to deal with the atomistic logic of social design; states that have historically been fair trade advocates and critics of piracy have renounced their own principles to either surpass the purchase price of contracts already signed between other governments for urgent medical supplies or to block shipment delivery of such products when they transit through their territories (DW BRASIL, 2020); labor and contractual legal institutes that have been perfected for decades are unable to offer adequate responses to defaults resulting from a stagnant economy due to the impossibility of the current flow of people, services and goods. The pandemic thus frays the limits of the meritorious act. The inspiration needed to overcome the unforeseen challenge can only derive from a poetical act.
"To live on this earth poetically" corresponds to a new measure of man facing the divine, nature, the unknown. Although the notion of measurement is usually linked to a quantitative and numerical issue, what is proposed is not a geometrization of experience, but the ability to place oneself between heaven and earth, between the unexpected and the experienced, redefining the very parameter of measurement. Poetically dictating is the way to place oneself between the finite and the infinite, enabling the inclusion of the strange within the familiar (HEIDEGGER, 1971: 220-226), through a measure that is not thought of as distance, depth, height or amplitude, but rather as our own...
Para continuar a ler
PEÇA SUA AVALIAÇÃOCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
