The feature can be located at Identities Journal
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A couple weeks ago I went to the market to stock up on food our family would need to get through the coming weeks now that we were ordered to “stay-at-home and shelter.” A trip to the market is now an encounter with your mortality. Now everything in the world is present-at-hand or broken because the relations between things that allow them to be unconscious and ready-to-hand in a seamless network of meanings and references has been broken. Every humble thing of the world is now menacing. I now notice everything. As I touch the foodstuffs I wonder if they have the virus on them. Is the virus now on my hand? Have I passed it to the steering wheel of my car and then to the doorknob? I bring the groceries into my home. Counters need to be wiped down with bleach wipes. Packaging needs to be removed. Death lurks everywhere and the friendly objects of the world are now all threatening. My simple act of going to the market has endangered myself, my family, and people I do not even know. The things of the world are no longer allies but potential agents of the virus. We wait five to fourteen days, wondering if we have caught it and are just still asymptomatic. We are no longer Haraway or Clark’s cyborgs or prosthetic gods, for the world of things that made our life possible is broken. The world is broken.
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In returning from the market I discover the earth beneath the world. I discover the earth first and foremost through the virus. Plagues were supposed to be something relegated to the past of history. They belong to the past such as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They were supposed to be the stuff of another here, another world, at least in first world countries that enjoy so much privilege. Plagues today were always supposed to be the affliction of less developed, poverty stricken nations. No doubt this has contributed to the ability of developed nations to neglect and ignore those people. Yet the earth continues to rumble beneath this world that we thought we had vanquished through culture.
[JBR comment: I get why he says vanquished, but I don't feel nearly the surprise, if that's the word, he seems to express here (though I am certain that he is not in the least surprised beyond the rhetorical demand of this bit of prose), because the past decades of awareness of global warming, fished-out oceans, etc etc have taught me that what we claimed to have vanquished has in fact been always-already unvanquishable, and that we have merely fucked up our chances of surviving on it. Our including so many species beside out own.]
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I discover the earth second through all of the things that we rely on and upon which our lives are rendered possible, that have now become obtrusive either as absent when needed or present in their menacing possibility as carriers of the virus. Everywhere there is an absence of toilet paper. Lacan taught us that the symptom is structured like a language, that it speaks, that it expresses a message or a series of signifiers. It is odd that toilet paper, of all things, should have been that which people hoarded. It is as if at some level they registered the earth that rumbles beneath the world, that renders the world possible, and chose a thing that marks the intersection of nature and culture to say what they did not have words to say. We spoke through a symptom.
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