pandemic 2

PANDEMIC!
a university symposium I was to participate in has just
been postponed to September. The catch is that, even if life
does eventually return to some semblance of normality,
it will not be the same normal as the one we experienced
before the outbreak. Things we were used to as part of
our daily life will no longer be taken for granted, we will
have to learn to live a much more fragile life with constant
threats. We will have to change our entire stance to
life, to our existence as living beings among other forms
of life. In other words, if we understand “philosophy” as
the name for our basic orientation in life, we will have to
experience a true philosophical revolution.
To make this point clearer, let me quote a popular
definition: viruses are “any of various infectious agents,
usually ultramicroscopic, that consist of nucleic acid,
either RNA or DNA, within a case of protein: they infect
animals, plants, and bacteria and reproduce only within
living cells: viruses are considered as being non-living
chemical units or sometimes as living organisms.” This
oscillation between life and death is crucial: viruses are
neither alive nor dead in the usual sense of these terms,
they are a kind of living dead. A virus is alive in its drive
to replicate, but it is a kind of zero-level life, a biological
caricature not so much of death-drive as of life at its most
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