Category: _b2oreview_blockhover

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Sa’ed Atshan (Stanford UP, 2020)

by Marc Aziz Michael

At the outset of the 20^th century, an odd fever took hold of the civilized world: modern parliaments passed endless legislation ordering Oriental female subjects to discard fashion items covering their faces. From Lord Cromer to Atatürk, “unveiling” Oriental women became a matter of modernity or barbarism, life or death. Political tracts, traveler’s diaries, public health reports depicted the many untoward medical, social or political consequences of the “veil”. Financial incentives or meetings with heads of state rewarded unveiling volunteers. Soviet parliaments in Central Asia opened their meetings with unveiling rituals—dozens of women taking off their scarves while declaring allegiance to secular socialist progress, often reveiling on the way home.

Over a century later, not much has changed. First Lady Laura Bush justified her husband’s Oriental genocides with liberation from the evils of the burqa. “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes”. In 2010, French Law 092, “La République se vit à visage découvert[1]”, banned access to public space for any woman sporting a face-covering—uniting the political landscape around philosophical gems such as president Chirac’s “Like it or not, the veil is a kind of aggression” or Hollande’s “the veiled woman of today…could free herself of her veil and become French.” “To conceal one’s face is to threaten the minimal demands of social life,” concludes the text of the law. Democratic “vivre ensemble”—like the CIA—requires recognizable and identifiable faces. And thus the burqa stands proudly as the only piece of cloth criminalized within the EU.

Once upon a time, the left could easily read this hunger for bare flesh as a symptom of colonial domination. In the 1950s, Martinique-born psychiatrist Franz Fanon diagnosed this political malady of the colonial gaze as an aggressive will to “possess” elusive brown women. “This woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer. There is no reciprocity…She does not offer herself.” The veil drew the abrupt line beyond which colonial eyes failed to penetrate—refusing entry into the nooks of Muslim hearts and minds; a civilizational middle finger, testament to the failure of the West in seducing the Rest with its norms, beliefs, and ideals. Fearing for unsuspecting beachgoers, Prime Minister Valls conveyed this frustration with French eloquence: “The burkini is…the translation of a political project, a counter-society, founded amongst other upon the subjection of women.” In 2020, while the sanitary virtues of the niqab are hotly debated on air, the confused amongst us wonder what kind of faceless shadow society the French government is peddling in with compulsory COVID masks.

Drifting far from Fanon, progressive dogma today equates visibility with representation and justice—rather than occupation. On international women’s day 2011, in the midst the largest uprising in living Egyptian memory, a small group of women in Tahrir staged their own unveiling rituals reminiscent of the good old British days, spectacularly committing to an open democratic existence far from Islamic obfuscations. In another corner of the square, half a dozen queer socialist youths donned slogans asserting their sexual difference publically, spring cleaning their personal and political closets in one swift move. The front of the War on Veils has expanded to queerer shores. The new bearers of the flame of transparent freedoms, the international LGBTQ movement, promotes de-closeting rituals that would leave Marie Kondo blushing. Amidst the 2019 Beirut uprisings, a young man walked through the protests with a banner reading “I am a top; why does the government still fuck me? #timetoswitch”. And on goes the axiomatic train wreck linking visibility and representation to leftist progress, unquestioned and unquestionable. How believable is this proposition on the left today?

Saed Atshan’s recent Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique provides a fertile terrain upon which to ponder the reactionary nature of visibility politics. Cornell West blurbs it “prophetic” for revealing that “justice and freedom against empire and homophobia are indivisible”. In my less religious view, Queer Palestine navigates the thin line separating woke-sex travel-guide and a jargon-inflated coming of age diary about the tribulations of leaving the closet in Arabia for an assistant professor at Swarthmore and a selection of close friends. The whole thing is packaged in queer corporate PR wrapping—Hate Crime Legislation, Marriage Equality and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell—and a veneer of “gayopolitics”: Tel-Aviv, all the tops have gone to Berlin, so why don’t you just let the sexy Arab doms in…

Atshan has somehow convinced himself that his book’s “theoretical” innovations, “ethnoheteronomativity” and “discursive disenfranchisement”, will be of political use to the liberation of Palestine, sexually or otherwise. In his conspiracy, a shady set of “radical purists” he has outgrown—the likes of Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Joseph Massad—dominate Western academe and have been choking the queer Palestinian movement with an unrelenting focus on critical theory and anti-imperialist politics, marginalizing important “leftist” corners of the OPTs. The voice of a sad activist captures the depths of this queer Palestinian plight: “Massad’s criticism of our work is like a cloud that always hovers above me. How do I prove a negative? I am tired.” To combat radical “Western” [sic] theorists and their ploy to “level critiques against subaltern populations in the Global South for the pursuit of their financial livelihoods”, Atshan suggests acknowledging the presence of “ethnoheteronormativity” (syn: homophobia) as a central problem in Palestinian society—saving young queers from emigrating or becoming Mossad collaborators, while condemning the rest of us to another fatuous neologism.

Here, Queer Palestine stumbles upon the problem of empiricism: evidence for Palestinian homophobia proves more visionary than real. “By and large, Palestinian society as a whole does not acknowledge the existence of homosexuals in their midst…As a result, queer Palestinian communities do not provoke repression from patriarchal authorities.” The plot thins: Palestinians do not seem to use “homosexuality” either as a category of lived experience or as a criminological one. Under such conditions, the hatred of homosexuality can remain elusive, and may require unorthodox evidencing. Hamas’s “homophobia”, for instance, Atshan derives from a lone article in the ‘entertainment’ section of Out magazine, entitled “Was Arafat Gay?”—by a conservative Zionist American journalist familiarized with Arabic via Google Translate. Later, Atshan conjures a Pew survey indicating low tolerance of “homosexuality” in the West Bank, and deplores the absence of similar data among Palestinian Israelis, but concludes “it would not be surprising if rates of acceptance among the population were confirmed to be higher than for the Occupied Territories.” It is unclear how Pew managed to survey a population weary of imperial or state surveillance—and for whom, as Atshan admits, the concept of homosexuality holds no meaning—about their attitudes towards homosexuality. It is equally unclear why Atshan assumes, without evidence, higher acceptance rates for Israeli Palestinians—unless proximity to modern occupiers improves the backward Arab mind.

Atshan’s own liberal attacks against Palestinian populations, promoting “queer rights”—meaning violent state intervention into family life, novel techniques of policing, incarceration, and gentrification—in line with imperial political programs, are portrayed as somehow “empowering” and “progressive” for the Global South, whereas Massad or Puar’s critiques of imperial social engineering are presented as disempowering “radical purism”. Despite recognizing the absence of “repression from patriarchal authorities” for queer Palestinians, Atshan nonetheless goes on a crusade to render this queer population ever more visible to the state—a move reminiscent of imperial management of “vulnerable minorities” from “Oriental Christians” to “Eastern women”: imperial powers coaxed these “minorities” into visibility—from forcing special privileges and rights out of the Ottoman empire to overstaffing colonial administrations with these minorities, or later special access to Euro-American visas. This increase in privileges drew unwelcome popular attention to these otherwise integrated populations, until their environment became so hostile that only death or emigration remained.

Atshan’s emulation of imperial ‘divide and rule’ can only pass as “progressive” within a framework equating political struggle with visibility. “[I]n addition to the white gaze I must also contend with the Zionist gaze, the heteronormative gaze, and the radical purist gaze… and this can be suffocating for Palestinian queers.” Some struggle with colonial occupation, police abuse, military strikes, or arbitrary prison sentences and torture. Atshan struggles with deer in the headlight syndrome, and elevates this photosensitivity to a political program. “Because I am a queer Palestinian who is also entrapped in forms of external surveillance, the development of my own consciousness in some ways mirrors the development of this [queer] movement at large.”

This reader wished he had used the development of his consciousness as less of a template: from upper-middle-class background, attending an elite Anglo-Quaker school in Ramallah, moving onto Swarthmore and Harvard, following up with a job at his alma mater, he is hardly a Palestinian everyman. A more critical scrutiny of his peculiar social position, or a cursory reading of a sociology textbook, might have stopped him peddling in Orientalist stereotypes like Muslims believing “unmarried men have not yet completed ‘half of their religion’”; or that anti-imperial radical discourse prevents the advent of human rights in the Arab world—the main thesis of American foreign policy from Nixon to Clinton; or writing on behalf of Arab victims, while dedicating an entire chapter of his book to trashing the only two local queer organizations on the ground, and their female Palestinian founders. The accusations of profiteering waged against Massad and Said—who have defended their political positions at great personal costs—sound like an initiatory bashing ritual to access the highest spheres of American Academe.

What emerges from Atshan’s methodological narcissism is a desire—not for less surveillance—but for the queer community in Palestine to achieve visibility in white eyes, no matter the costs. Atshan bemoans any suggestion toward a politics of invisibility as a relic from a pre-historical past, a cowardly attachment to the closet. “Bare sex”, for instance, is evidently inferior to romantic coupledom. Visibility politics amount to competition for the attention of the world’s elite, through fidelity to their codes of bourgeois respectability. Queer Palestine excels in that respect. The only two examples of “subversive” queer emancipation in the book drown under his thirst for white respectability. The first involves a gay West-Bank couple driven by gay foreign friends on a militarised Israeli road to Tel Aviv, where they breathe romantic seaside air from a hotel balcony, and where the “spirit of queer Palestinian resistance” gets ominously close to the spirit of consumerist entitlement.

The second example has Atshan attend a party where “scripts and body movements could be as outrageous as was possible in a Palestinian context.” Translation: a woman impersonating Leonardo DiCaprio hugs a man embodying Kate Winslet standing at the helm of a boat. This queer reenactment of the Titanic script moves the assembly to tears at the thought of the dangers they escaped by confining their ‘subversive’ performance to a private event. We are now in Hollywood millenarian cult territory, replete with the invocation of queer American ancestor-spirits (Leonardo and Kate), ancient gay esoteric sounds (Celine Dion), and cathartic possession (“outrageous body movements”) healing the traumatic wounds of history. How does this ritual subvert the Israeli occupation, we will forever be left to ponder? More importantly, why would Atshan bother with the long history of Arab drag performances—from Fairuz to Ismail Yassin via Bassem Feghali—who occupied prime-time TV before Ru Paul was a thing, or with any relevant local cultural symbols when hegemonic imperial ones are widely available?

Recognition from the powerless doesn’t taste as good as from those holding the reigns of grants, fame or tenure. While his friends are allowed to play DiCaprio behind closed doors or in Tel-Aviv hotels, Atshan resents that “[radical] queer Palestinian activists find it convenient to shield themselves behind arguments such as, “Coming out and gay pride are Western”. Escaping bloodthirsty Arabs’ gaze while dressed in American garb is good invisibility; escaping Pew surveys and the categories of Euro-American identity, statistics or academe, however, is bad invisibility. How seamlessly visibility converges with market success, and recognition with personal branding, for those in Swarthmore.

There is a tacit understanding within marginalized queer communities that visibility entails a measure of personal risk. Drag culture perfected “reading” as an art form for that reason: with visibility comes exposure, and ritualized insults toughen the skin against the vicissitudes of life at the center of the stage. LGBT troublemakers of times long gone, say Harvey Milk, shook heaven and earth fighting with their lives on the line. Atshan, like many other Arab sex prophets—the likes of Mona al Tahawi—at the first signs of battle, swiftly teleported to safer shores, regrettably throwing many increasingly visible brown lives under the wheels of state torture and repression.

The Sarah Hegazy affair is a prime example of such dynamic. In 2017, the activist raised a rainbow flag at a Mashrou’ Leila concert in Cairo—inspired by the Lebanese band’s openly queer lead singer, Hamed Sinno. Sarah was subsequently arrested, and tortured by state forces. A year later, both Sarah and the lead singer of the band ended up moving to North America—where she committed suicide—and the rest of the population had to reckon with a new law sanctioning homosexual acts with up to 5 years in prison, and new allowances for police to survey social media accounts. Visibility, at the school of middle-class gay, remains exclusively synonymous with success—despite all evidence to the contrary. This is where queer theory meets Chicago economics: ‘Tomorrow sex will be better; but first sacrifices must be made!’ One must break brown eggs to make queer omelettes; somehow, they always happen to be your neighbor’s.

“In more recent years, the queer Palestinian movement has shifted toward radical purism, and its growth has plateaued.” One can only imagine all the grassroot Palestinian activists eagerly reading Massad or Puar, converting en masse to ‘radical purism’ and ‘existential paralysis’, and leading the movement into a “toxic plateau” stunting its highest visibility potential, “its natural market share in terms of audience and capacity”. Visibility cannot flirt with respectability unless it has a “sizeable” market share to back it up. So it flirts with the monogamous language of sales, drifting far away from the polyamorous speech of solidarity.

*

Unveiling and de-closeting are European obsessions as old as The Enlightenment, social reform and social engineering. Kant’s definition of the Aufklärung, “dare to know”, enjoined the elite to bring the Light of Reason to the reluctant masses, turning them into a tameable transparency. The grandfather of market thought, Adam Smith, bemoaned the invisibility of human desires, and therefore posited the deployment of the “invisible hands” of the market as the sole rational way of dealing with human opacity for a blind sovereign. Karl Marx clung on to a “scientific” view of socialism, which would empower the proletariat to “see” their “real”, “objective” interests, in beheading the global bourgeoisie. Freud’s lifelong project was to “bring the id into the ego”—make visible the lurking instincts that sabotage human agency.

To convince large swathes of the middle classes that submitting to the gaze of the state and its army of corporate drones was somehow desirable involved sustained ideological work and financial carrots. Kim Kardashian’s fame has its roots in the 17^th century abolition of curtains from Protestant areas of Holland or Germany. Why sport curtains if your living room is like a hospital reception room? Invisible hands do the Devil’s work. An entire culture of self-policing, confession and denunciation spread through these regions of Europe, cutting the costs of surveillance for the prince, and smoothing out their dominion. In Bavaria, neighbors who denounced a fellow peasant to the state for failing to maximize the use of their land would be gifted the land themselves. This protestant cult of visible virtue has trickled down so profoundly as to stay virtually unchanged in debates over online privacy today: why would I need privacy if I’ve got nothing to hide? Instead of land, the rewards come in Facebook likes.

The holy trinity of visibility, recognition, power benefited the few, and hurt the masses—because the elite never nurtured irrepressible benevolence towards the wretched of the earth. And so increased visibility historically translated into greater ease of domination, as well as majoritarian resentments for the  claims of the vulnerable. The scars run deep. African-Americans reflexively shirk away from the lethal gaze of police officers. The bulk of colonial populations shy from corporate Randomized Control Trials. In Arabic, bahth, the word for research, is close to mabaheth, State Intelligence Services. Geolocation, contact tracing, and cyber-bullying have sent even middle-class protestants scrambling for anything resembling privacy. The multitude—bereft of money, status, networks, or access to powerful lawyers—experiences visibility not as a resource in the survival of the fittest, but as a tsunami of social hatred, isolation, and loss of livelihood. The backlash against affirmative action, feminism or queer minorities across the world speaks movingly of the social fragmentation resulting from a politics emphasizing visible differences. For the Kardashians of the world—a privileged few who own the social and symbolic resources to alchemize visibility into increased privilege—visibility remains a mark of virtue.

Starting the 1960s, New Left intellectuals craftily repositioned this tercentennial cult of visibility into the realm of progressive dogma. In an effort to reform Marxist exclusive concerns with working classes and class conflict, these thinkers deployed a more ‘sophisticated’ politics of identity and visibility. This novel emancipatory equation linked visibility to social recognition to political rights. The American civil rights movement insisted that white supremacists see beyond the melatonin veil of Afro-American skin, and extend market and political participation to all. Feminist critiques of patriarchy gathered around “the personal is political”, emphasizing the continuity of patriarchy from the spotlight of the corporate boardroom to bedroom curtains. The most intimate desires were political acts, underwritten by social forces in dire need of change. In the midst of the AIDS crisis, the LGBT movement rallied around ACT UP’s now famous slogan, SILENCE=DEATH, to fight off governmental and societal indifference to their invisible plight. And within democratic theory, the new left’s focus made sense: how could progress occur without visibility, if visibility was a precondition for political representation?

Foucault’s iconoclasm, from Panopticon to history of madness, insisted on the association between visibility and domination. The 19^th century invention of sexuality was a central part of the Victorian state program to render the desires of the population visible, and thus manageable, through constant disclosure and attentive confession. The results, two centuries later, are clear: from the porn industry to night clubs, from compulsory gym memberships to plastic surgery, from steroids and amphetamines to Viagra and anti-depressants, from Incels to BDSM, and from sex work to trafficking. The hyper-emphasis on desire as the fundamental pillar of personal identity and of the “good life” has led to the crumbling of political solidarity, and the advance of competitive consumption. Imagine the hours of weight-lifting, porn-jerking, sexapp-chatting, redirected towards helping the poor and marginalized or fighting corporate predation, and you get a good idea of what the sexual privatization of pleasure has done to life in common.

The Ancient and Medieval worldviews understood desires as accidental movements of the soul; mere weakness of flesh to be occasionally humored with derision. Desires dawdled at the periphery of the self. The invention of sexuality linked desires to personal identity, and thus reinforced the market dogma that desires are the foundations of the self, in need of relentless social scrutiny, medical examination, psychoanalytic questioning, and criminological analysis. Enshrining sexual desires as matters of human rights later facilitated the adjacent notion “there is no alternative” to market liberalism. If there is a right to pleasure—through sex—then there is a political right to all pleasures, including consumption. If desires deserve utmost attention and protection, then what better protection than a liberal market democracy to provide for a storm of ever changing desires? Communism, with its bland display of functional goods and perfunctory sex had historically failed.

More than any other movement of the soul, lust provides a fertile terrain for governments arguing desires are political affairs in need of regulation. Left unattended, sexuality can be linked to a number of unspeakable dangers that threaten to bring society to its knees. Too many unsatisfied, “hysterical” women could threaten to turn into serial killing mothers. Too many paedophiles could lead to a generation of broken children. Too many homosexuals, to the plummeting of the fertility rate of the nation, and to a weakened military force. Too many interracial couples, to the disappearance of the white race. Too many “deadbeat dads” and “welfare queens”, to proliferating street gangs and the end of private property. Sexual perversions constitute one of the swiftest routes to national annihilation in the bourgeois imaginary, and therefore a site of prime surveillance. Thus, the queer, internal enemy came to complement fears of the barbarian at our doors.

To a large degree, this history of sexuality and political domination remains a Eurocentric one. Sexuality has not been the most successful export of European imperialism. The case of Egyptian ‘journalist’ Mona Iraqi is instructive. She ran an “investigative” show called ‘The Hidden”. In 2016, she anonymously denounced the Beit El Bahr bathhouse for homosexual depravity to authorities. Her crew seamlessly captured the ensuing police raid on camera—filming multiple angles while the naked men were arrested on charges of public debauchery. A few days before the planned airing of her episode about invisible sex practices on Egyptian TV, her Facebook wall suffered a massive wave of popular discontent: few understood the necessity to pry into the sex lives of strangers, apart from satisfying Iraqi’s thirst for sensationalism and fame. The backlash was enough for Iraqi to pull the planned airing. A few months later, she announced the show would air on International Aids Day. In the meantime, it had been reframed as an investigation into male-to-male sexual practices spreading HIV between men, then to their wives at home, and eventually to the whole of the unsuspecting nation. Framed as a public health investigation into lurid corners of Cairene life, the show aired with minimal resistance. Nonetheless, the court cleared Iraqi’s victims of all accusations, and their families successfully litigated against Iraqi for defamation—earning her a six months prison sentence.

Despite the post-colonial state’s constant click-bait assertions that gangs of “queers” are threatening to ruin the country, despite international journalistic and NGO reports discussing the existence of queers in the hearts of darkness, despite PornHub itself, the concept of sexuality still fails to take hold outside of a cosmopolitan section of Third World upper-middle classes. In the words of a Congolese UN chief of Security, “How did white men convince us that polygamy is unnatural, but that homosexuality isn’t?” Although many international observers decry this as a cause for concern for invisible minorities, the absence of sexuality and its numerous techniques of control over “normal” desires might present political opportunities to avoid the reactionary fate of Euro-American liberal politics. Fighting authoritarian leaders and their heavy handed legal prohibitions could turn out much easier than struggling against the social apathy of naturalized consumerism and normalized desires.

The rise of homophobic homicides in 1970s San Francisco provides a good example of the reactionary prison of sexuality. In the words of an activist, visibility “may be our most basic achievement in the 1970s, but it also means that every homophobe in America knows what you look like and where to find us.” This trend only started receding in the 1980s, with the growing gentrification of the city, and the expulsion of the Catholic working classes from the city center, to the relief of many LGBT activists. As Dan White—Harvey Milk’s murderer and a Catholic-Irish working-class politician—explains in his prison notebooks, “The people in my neighborhood felt that gays have made things even harder for big families because they don’t have any children to worry about and several of them can put their salaries together and pay more rent than a single family, and this has the effect of driving up prices.” Are the victims of homophobic violence to blame for siding with their bourgeois benefactors—the police, redlining banks, and racist property developers? Perhaps. Or perhaps the choice between “being ourselves”/brown-nosing the bourgeoisie and “staying in the closet”/fighting the fight is no choice at all.

*

“There’s a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.” Leo Bersani’s injunction to put the good old in-out back in its rightful position—at the periphery of our selves—sketches the outlines of an escape route from the prison of sexuality. Sex is not dangerous, transcendental, or particularly worthy of our time. Left to the confinements of mortgaged bedrooms, monopolized kisses and chemically-enhanced sexcapades, it would drown in its own standardized, repetitive boredom. Bonobos—our go-to sex experts—for all their indulging in the activity, seem not to enjoy it for much longer than 13 seconds at a time, perhaps for a reason. For the mythology of sex as the ultimate pleasure to survive, drama is needed—dressed in Oriental garb, surrounded by the specter of repression, and propped up by the closet and its multifarious police agents. Nothing like some mild impediment to consumption—the prohibitive pricing of a Louis Vuitton bag—to fan the flames of a refined governmental technique of control. The cult of sexuality is the negative psychology of the market state, a ham-fisted injection of regular doses of passion to avoid us falling into the blandness of a life of mere interests. Letting our desires recede to the shady backburners of our minds, where we can’t see, be obsessed or discuss them much, invites unexplored avenues of resistance.

Could invisibility and opacity be plausible political strategies for another leftist program? Socialist universal rights are one such technique of political invisibility that benefits the most vulnerable without bringing the spotlight onto any particular plight. Trans women’s participation in female competitions wouldn’t be much of an issue if every professional athlete was given a livable wage instead of overpaying the 3 standing on the podium. Why campaign for an equal “right to drive” for women to drive in Saudi Arabia when the universal right to “free public transportation” awaits in a silent corner? If mobility matters to women in particular, it also matters to the poor majority. Why insist on disciplining Palestinian families in accepting their “queer” kids—Atshan’s human rights plea—rather than focus on all “vulnerable” children? Instead of imposing bourgeois sexual identity categories backed by the force of law, why not promote a universal right to housing and income so that all teenagers rejected from home (and adults) can live off the streets, and away from the warm embrace of Israeli intelligence services? Can the homeless only betray the homeland if queer?

The same could be said of the gay marriage campaigns focusing on discriminatory treatment at the bedside of an agonizing unwedded lover. Instead of pushing for marriage equality, these self-proclaimed leftists could have fought for the abolishing of the legal and economic privileges of contractual love. The latter could appeal to much broader populations—widow(er)s, single-parents, the never-married, the married-and-repenting—and would have the added advantage of making inheritance more difficult for everyone—an old progressive goal. Egalitarian social, economic and political aims could be achieved by making vulnerable groups less visible, rather than more. But the bourgeoisie wants to buy and sell more cars, to shape working-class masculinities, to maintain familial structures of property and privilege, and to compete for millions at sports tournaments. And so we all foot the bill.

Anarchists have long developed cultures of passing under the radar, carving up spaces of invisible freedom outside of state and corporate surveillance. The tuber drew its cult following amongst free peoples due to its capacity to thrive beneath the protective veil of the soil, and thus beneath the gaze of tax-collectors or scavenging invaders. Tribal social structures have long prized forms of extreme social disaggregation, based on scattered household units and subsistence agriculture, which Ernst Gellner has baptized the “divide that ye not be ruled” strategy. If Ottomans preferred dealing with Christian or Jews rather than heterodox sects; if Brits constantly invented tribal traditions as imperial administrative units, it was because amorphous, unstructured populations were much harder to rule—having no one common language but a complex mesh of adjacent idiolects, no demonstrable leader to bargain with, and nomadic mobility that made them hard to pin down.

The same could be said of the near complete corporatization of LGBT movements in Europe against the multifarious Arab governmental anxieties “deviant” populations inspire: it is easier to deal with a structured gay community and its parliamentary representatives—bribing them with an impoverished diet of Grindr and marriage equality—rather than a multitude of discontented invisible subjects stirring up constant trouble. Without the attachment to visibility and identity politics, the current juncture contains great potential: instead of fearing the proliferation of incoherent ‘tribes’, we can let ourselves divide until we become an unidentifiable and ungovernable thorn in state and corporate bottoms. In the late 90s, when an epidemic of contagious spirit possessions took over Indonesian factory workers, panicked industrial owners were forced to sacrifice chickens to assuage angry ancestral spirits, and feed the laborers.  Perhaps it is time to let our desires grow tuber-like, veiled by our own disinterest; or perhaps to let them take possession of us at the most unpredictable times, like privilege-hacking vengeful spirits.

While for most of human history invisibility has been a primary resistance art for the poor and powerless, over the last few centuries invisibility has become the prerogative of the chosen few. While everyone is forced into tighter identity handles, top corporate predation happens increasingly in the dark, behind closed doors. The luxury of withdrawal behind walled castles, ivory towers, and gated communities—immune from social regulations and the most deleterious effects of the marketplace—is now the landmark of true wealth and power. Ironically, the niqab obeyed this very elitist logic. It gained in popularity amongst rich Arab and Central Asian populations to distinguish their women from those who would be available for sex work to occupying European soldiers. During the 80s, the hijab found its way onto the hearts and heads of aspiring urban middle-classes, marketed as granting exclusive status and positional advantages on a saturated marriage market. If unveiling campaigns are so important in European eyes, it is because the veil mirrors the white elite’s own logic of power through invisibility—but in a monstrous form.

“Perseus wore a magic cap so that the monsters he hunted down might not see him,” Marx writes. “We draw the magic cap down over our eyes and ears so as to deny that there are any monsters.” If predators hunt behind the cloak of darkness, the prey survives with camouflaging strategies. It is not surprising that predators denigrate both camouflaging and conspiracy as futile and primitive ways of ruining their fun. The veil is an adaptive strategy of survival in the face of much predation. Renunciation—the strategy of willfully reducing desires and consumption to their most invisible minimum—has been the only radical green political strategies of the 21^st century to create an effective threat to corporate domination. Instead of denigrating the veil, wishfully denying the existence of monstrous power relations in the world, a progressive politics would insist on the importance of invisibility for the vulnerable masses, and on compulsory transparency for the rich and powerful. Instead of fighting “homophobia in Palestine” with increased policing and incarceration, let us fight its actual causes: militarism caused by Israeli occupation; the patriarchal family linked to the maintenance of private property relations; masculinity as aggression due to the demands of class conflict. The prey will adapt to shed its camouflage when the predators have been neutralized, when political economic structures are put in place that prevent massive accumulation of capital and power. Atshan’s book is no more than the continuation of centuries of unveiling campaigns, the degraded symptom of a neoliberal politics of visibility and identity. So instead of drawing the cap over our eyes, let us focus political energies to fight the very visible monsters who won’t let us be our best selves.

Marc Aziz Michael teaches Sociology, Middle Eastern Studies and Gender Studies at the American University in Beirut. He has previously taught at NYU and NYU in Abu Dhabi. Beyond academic venues, his writings have appeared in Al Jazeera, Jadaliyya, The World Today, CounterPunch, OpenDemocracy. He is currently writing a book about the history of commercial banking. In his spare time, he is training as a group analyst.

[1] “The Republic must be lived face on display”

EDIT (2/11): An earlier version of this piece referred to the location of the Friends School attended by Sa’ed Atshan as Jerusalem rather than Ramallah.

by Eric Reinhart

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. — Walter Benjamin, Thesis VIII from “On the Concept of History”

 I speak, precisely, of “messianicity without messianism”… a certain messianic destitution, in a spectral logic of inheritance and generations, but a logic turned toward the future no less than the past, in a heterogeneous and disjointed time. — Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons” (250) and, after the ellipsis, Specters of Marx (181)

Over the last year, a new biopolitical sense in which emergency is rule and cellular being ties each of us to an inescapable collectivity has spread across much of the planet. From rural Bihar to Manhattan, this emergent spatio-temporality has mobilized unprecedented collective action—albeit not without resistance—under conditions of a pandemic. In our best moments, it has corresponded to a condensation of urgency and relationality in a fledgling sense of ourselves as a biomassive body politic, what we could call a state of pandemicity. As economies flail, billionaires multiply their fortunes, states struggle to quell surging discontent, and popular political imaginations become bolder in their defiance of racially overdetermined threats to life at the hands of virus, economic precarity, and police, the solidity of the global racial-capitalist order is widely being put into question. If the sudden suspension of routine imposed by a virus has awakened us to political possibilities and to others that formerly felt so far away, perhaps this nascent phenomenon of pandemicity could endure beyond the pandemic. Could we sustain a state of pandemicity without pandemic?

This is an echo of Jacques Derrida’s notion of “messianicity without messianism,” which embraces the form of religious intensity and urgency attached to divine justice while refusing to fill it in with positive content, insisting instead on limitless responsibility and openness to otherness. But pandemicity without pandemic also challenges the abstract purity of Derrida’s deconstructive ethics; it insists on looping his notion of responsibility back through what were for Derrida the “too Heideggerian, too messianico-Marxist or archeo-eschatological” (2001: 298) desires of Walter Benjamin in order to bring the ethical demand of the other into a knot with our urgent material present.

In his response to critics of Specters of Marx, Derrida marks a difference between his own concept of messianicity without messianism and the way in which Benjamin’s “weak messianic power” is linked to “determinate historical-political phases, or indeed, crises” (1999: 253). “In my view,” Derrida writes, “the universal, quasi-transcendental structure that I call messianicity without messianism is not bound up with any particular moment of (political or general) history or culture” (254). On the other hand, Derrida emphasizes in Specters that the possibility of justice is tied to “anachronic disjointure,” “the very coming of the event,” and “the very condition of the present and of the presence of the present” (33). He observes, via Marx, that historical “rupture produces the institution or the constitution, the law itself… violence that interrupts time, disarticulates it, dislodges it, displaces it out of its natural lodging: ‘out of joint’” (37). Différance unfurls in the “here-now” without lateness or delay, in imminence and in urgency; as justice, it “does not wait” (37).[1] These are not situated historical statements, but it is hard to imagine that they do not necessarily implicate historical specificity—if only for historical time’s interruption—in order to obtain any political traction or effect.

There is a deconstructive logic subtending Derrida’s argument against linking messianicity without messianism to historical-political moments.[2] To index messianicity to historical-material specificity would be to “reduce the event-ness of the event, the singularity and alterity of the other” and risk reducing justice “once again to juridical-moral rules, norms, or representations, within an inevitable totalizing horizon (movement of adequate restitution, expiation, or reappropriations)” (1994: 33-34). Derrida’s objections to Benjamin’s historical materialism are thus not reflective of a lack of concern for violence against others. Instead, they support a delicate care for an other kept at a protective distance in a thinking that is characteristically principled—the hallmark of deconstructive ethics.[3] But Derrida acknowledges that Benjamin’s historically grounded argument “makes sense, at least, given the political context and the date of his essay (the Hitler-Stalin pact at the beginning of the war)” (1999: 253). In 1993 and 1999, however, Derrida published Specters and “Marx & Sons” from a rather different position: within the comfort of American and French universities during what might be hesitantly called, at least from a Euro-American vantage, the inter-historical decade after “the end of history” and before the violent reassertion of history’s discontents in 2001.[4]

Today, without comparison to the position of Benjamin amidst violence that remains beyond logics of commensurability, we find ourselves in another irruptive moment of world-seizing destruction in which there is again an immediate demand to suspend the purity of deconstructive arguments by venturing pragmatic, determinate interventions linked to a historical materialism with positive content. The political temporality ventured here returns, as is only now possible by way of Derrida, to Benjamin’s historical-materialist weak messianic power and his recasting of the state of emergency through the tradition of the oppressed. It is in this spirit that I have joined many during this pandemic in devoting myself to immediately applied work tethered to a pragmatic ethics of effect that draws on specific empirical grounds—in my case, US policing and carceral policy as key drivers of Covid-19’s destructive spread through marginalized neighborhoods and the public at large—in an effort to recall and redeploy both Benjamin and Derrida together towards a strategy of pandemicity without pandemic.[5]

In such a conjunction of empirical science and the political-ethical claims of a thinking that would reach to a beyond of the world as it is, we must hold onto deconstruction’s ethical resistance to self-assured positivist logics and its insistent appeal to difference—to that which is other to the knowable and sayable. To be faithful to this ethical imperative and to protect the space of its possibility demands a perpetual oscillation between Benjamin’s insistence of operating “within the measure of the possible”—conceivable political-material acts that insist on now-time—and Derrida’s emphasis on the impossible of différantial ethics: a cycling between the grounded political act and a genuine thinking at the edge of the known and knowable, each preparing a way for the other.

Pandemicity and Weighted Time

What is pandemicity? I am repurposing this term from its invocations in epidemiological literature. In articles such as “What Is a Pandemic?” by Anthony Fauci and his infectious disease colleagues, for example, “pandemicity” appears in passing to denote the arrival of an epidemiological state of pandemic—a state only achieved when certain geographical and temporal thresholds are exceeded in the spread of a previously contained epidemic.[6] Pandemicity thus inaugurates the state of a pandemic’s being and, from the human perspective, the state of being through or subject to a pandemic. It is to this latter resonance that I am appealing: pandemicity as the collective state of social-political being that has recently irrupted and subsumed large swaths of the world at an unprecedented scale and pace.

What is distinctive about this state beyond its collectivity is its temporality. Pandemicity is, at its core, an awareness of our social lives and organismic being as urgently enmeshed in global biosocial dynamics. The immanent and imminent threat of infection multiplies exponentially if not checked, threatening a runaway scenario beyond any human capacity to control—an infection curve that morphs into a straight, vertical line. Every wasted moment compounds, promising accelerations of disease and death. This exponential temporality has widely installed––although, clearly, not in all––a common biopolitical consciousness and has mobilized collective (in)action at a unprecedented scale: over the last year, well over half the world’s population has accepted varying degrees of deprivation to confine themselves for indefinite periods of time. As a result of this pandemic demobilization, we have become aware of ourselves as part of a planetary body, a common biomass—still hierarchized and differentially at risk, certainly, but nonetheless part of a biological network from which we cannot escape membership. In this new sociality under the collectivizing temporality of pandemicity, the body of the other has become both more other and more intimate than ever. It constantly threatens to transgress its boundaries and multiply into our own cellular constitution by passing through the air upon which we all depend for breath––a breath haunted by images of police murders irrupting out of slow structural violence against Black Americans illustrative of how this air is systematically and sadistically denied to so many across the globe.

We have acquired a mutual awareness far beyond that which any voluntaristic humanitarian project has ever achieved. Under pandemicity, an increasing number of people suddenly suffer from an incapacity to disavow the being of the other, even those others who had heretofore been so easily consigned to disposability.[7] We are literally plagued by the other and forced into confrontation with the historical-material inequalities that render some bodies especially vulnerable, and in so doing, ultimately render us all biomassively at risk.

Might these suddenly organized, transnational billions represent a new political horizon? It is with this thought that pandemicity appears as that which could offer a political ethos that, if it is to be sustained, cannot depend upon the presence of a pandemic for its mobilization.

Now-Time: The Temporal Convergence of Symptoms

Pandemicity without pandemic is an echo of the political-ethical appeal of messianicity without messianism that seeks to maintain fidelity to Derrida’s demand for justice in the here-now by attempting to ground it in our historical-political present.[8] It insists upon a historical-materialist conceptualization of the present that acknowledges and dismantles dominant humanitarian ideologies of activity-as-busyness, aid, and infantilized-racialized others—frames that reproduce neocolonial structural relations between North and South. In its conjunction with historical-materialism and the viral body, pandemicity without pandemic thus both affirms and differs from Derrida’s formulation of messianicity without messianism and its critique of logocentrism; it resists the temptations of paralysis that often arise from the quasi-transcendental-religious structure of messianicity, différance, the promise, and the event that is always yet to come.

Pandemicity without pandemic stresses instead the active immediacy of the always-already in Benjamin’s recognition of the emergency as rule rather than exception. We are always already late arriving on the scene, compelled to confront an accumulated force of violence that began inflicting devastation before we managed to take notice. The catastrophe is not looming. It has already arrived, and we are it. It is not specter, but flesh—our own bodies circulating in the rapid networks that we have established and enforced to accumulate to ourselves wealth, knowledge, and the bodies and time of others.

A pandemic has irrupted from the world we have made, but it is, from the tradition of the oppressed, only an extension of an always-already-unfolding catastrophe of deprivation and death. It has been declared exceptional, and in many ways it is, but for tens of thousands of people who die from completely preventable disease of poverty every day under conditions that constitute the “normal” to which we can now only fantasize about returning, the catastrophe of the present is in keeping with the rule that has long governed.[9] The difference is that a now-generalized pandemic reality has ruptured the smooth surface of the sea in which the suffering of the oppressed has been submerged, hidden from view and drowned out by the commerce and comfort that sails above. The indiscrimination of viral replication and the peculiar terror of our aerosolized cells mean that today we cannot help but see—even if some persist in violently refusing this truth that demands responsibility—the bodies upon which we have for so long supported our own segregated world.

Pandemicity calls for an ethics of action-oriented urgency that is responsive to the exponentially-weighted now—the multiplication of death in the spacing of time—that cannot accept delay.[10] What messianicity and pandemicity hold in common is a sense of apocalyptic urgency; what they compel is the total struggle for life that seizes us when breath itself is threatened. The final words of Eric Garner and George Floyd—”I can’t breathe”—as they were violently murdered must haunt and hover over the time of those of us who remain, and in whom the power of the act endures and cannot be deferred. In a historical present when breathlessness has become the symptom par excellence of racial violence, a viral pandemic, and the darkening blood-red noonday summer skies of ecological devastation aflame, we must renew an insistence on thought tethered to action in the massive now-time upon which everything—past, present, future; life, death—rests but does not wait.

Eric Reinhart is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Harvard, MD candidate at the University of Chicago, and an advanced candidate at The Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. His doctoral research traces the constitutive interrelation between modern psychiatric, racial, and aesthetic ideas from their shared origin in 18^th-century German anthropology to their consequences for everyday practices and US political formations today. He is also Lead Health & Justice Researcher with Data and Evidence for Justice Reform (DE JURE) at The World Bank, where he focuses on carceral-community epidemiology, systemic prejudice, and criminal punishment systems both in the United States and internationally. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Health Affairs, The British Medical Journal, and Jacobin Magazine.

Works Cited

*Barsky, Benjamin; *Reinhart, Eric; Keshavjee, Salmaan; and Farmer, Paul. “Vaccination in Jails and Prisons Is Not Enough: The Need for Adjunctive Decarceration.” Forthcoming.

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: On the Concept of History, Writings 1938-1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 2004.

Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” in Acts of Religion. Edited by Gil Anidjar. New York and Lond: Routledge, 2001.

_____. “Marx & Sons” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Edited by Michael Sprinker. London and New York: Verso, 1999.

_____. “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul” in Without Alibi. Edited and translated by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford University Press, 2002.

_____. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

_____. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.

Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Books, 2005.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. Simon and Schuster, 2006.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Off the Beaten Track. Edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Khan, Azeen. “Aneconomy, Indirection, Undecidability: Derrida’s ‘Principled’ Critique of the Death Drive” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2020 31(1): 135-162.

Khanna, Ranjanna. “Disposability.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2009 20(1): 181-198.

Morens DM, Folkers GK, Fauci AS. “What is a pandemic?” The Journal of Infectious Diseases (2009)200(7):1018-1021.

Reinhart, Eric and Alam, Eram. “The neocoloniality of who cares: US underinvestment in medical education exacerbates global inequities.” The British Medical Journal (BMJ) 2020;371:m4293.

Reinhart, Eric and Brauner, Daniel. “A critique of clinical economy: reassessing value and care during covid-19” The British Medical Journal (BMJ) 2020;370:m2878.

Reinhart, Eric and Chen, Daniel. “Epidemiological Consequences of Jail Cycling in Marginalized Communities: Mass Incarceration and Structural Racism during Covid-19.” Forthcoming.

_____. “Effects of Jail Decarceration and Anti-Contagion Policies on Covid-19 in the United States.” Forthcoming.

_____. “Incarceration And Its Disseminations: COVID-19 Pandemic Lessons From Chicago’s Cook County Jail” Health Affairs 39, No. 8 (August 2020): 1412-1418

Reinhart, Eric. “Essential and Disposable: Covid Labor, Race, and Structural Misogyny.” Forthcoming.

Reinhart, Eric. “Politicizing Public Health: More Please.” Forthcoming.

Reinhart, Eric. “Stop Unnecessary Arrests to Slow Coronavirus Spread.” The New York Times. July 2 (online) and July 6 (print), 2020.

Richardson, Eugene. “Pandemicity, COVID-19 and the limits of public health ‘science’” BMJ Global Health. 2020 Apr 1;5(4):e002571.

Rottenberg, Elizabeth. For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.

UNICEF. Levels and Trends in Child Mortality. United Nations Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), Report 2020. Available at https://data.unicef.org/resources/levels-and-trends-in-child-mortality/.

World Health Organization. “Children: Improving Survival and Well-Being.” WHO Fact Sheets. 8 September 2020. Available at https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/children-reducing-mortality.

[1] As Derrida famously declares, différance “responds without delay to the demand of justice. The latter by definition is impatient, uncompromising, and unconditional. No différance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now” (1994: 37).

[2] This historical-determinate resistance—that which Derrida’s most direct intellectual forebearer, Heidegger, so disastrously failed to heed by lending his early support to a National Socialism that he imagined he could shape—is how Derrida guards against the assignation of historically delimitable content to the other and to a fixed concept of justice that would then risk resting it “on the good conscience of having done one’s duty [such that] it loses the chance of the future, of the promise or the appeal, of the desire also (that is its ‘own’ possibility)” (1994: 33).

[3] And this spirit of a rigorous deconstructive ethics we must keep alive as a horizon (or what Heidegger calls ‘Earth’ in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” for example) beyond our known worlds and beyond metaphysics. At the same time, we must insist upon an active responsibility in the here-now in order to follow deconstructive mandates in determinate action and not in theory, even a decisionist theory, alone.

For a recent elaboration of the stakes of Derrida’s “principled” critique, see Azeen Khan’s “Aneconomy, Indirection, Undecidability: Derrida’s ‘Principled’ Critique of the Death Drive” in differences (2020).

[4] The decade spanning 1991 to 2001 might be thought as a certain historical extreme in modernity in precisely its relative non-historicality. This decade follows Fukuyama’s “end of history” triumph of capitalism and precedes history’s violent return to Euro-American consciousness aboard four jetliners in 2001. It is a decade in which the major international conflicts were what Frantz Fanon described as “internecine feuds” in “On Violence” in The Wretched of the Earth—conflicts like the Rwandan genocide and the Balkan conflagrations fought on the ground of ethnic, regional struggles for domination of one subordinated group over another, but without a conflict over clearly competing conceptions of history, reason, or progress that were used as explicit justifications for the Cold War and the neocolonial energies asserted over the postcolonial world in the wake of formal decolonization. Derrida’s historical-determinate resistance might be thought, to some degree, to be a symptom of this inter-historical decade. His abstention from historical content, for example, quickly fades following 2001; see, for example, his interview in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2004).

[5] For example, see my research in Health Affairs with Daniel Chen: “Incarceration And Its Disseminations: COVID-19 Pandemic Lessons From Chicago’s Cook County Jail.” Related research remains ongoing in several forthcoming quantitative public health research articles on both US and international contexts. For an explanation of our initial study’s immediate policy implications, crafted with uneasy compromises in search of maximum practical effect amidst American political reality, see my short essay in The New York Times, “Stop Unnecessary Arrests to Slow Coronavirus Spread.” Further efforts to mobilize the emergent present towards a post-pandemic future rearranged by an enduring pandemicity are reflected in my other recent attempts that focus on politics, social medicine, and global health: “A critique of clinical economy: reassessing value and care during covid-19”; “The neocoloniality of who cares: US underinvestment in medical education exacerbates global inequities”; and “Politicizing Public Health: More Please” and “Essential and Disposable: Covid Labor, Race, and Structural Misogyny” (both forthcoming).

[6] Morens DM, Folkers GK, Fauci AS. “What is a pandemic?” The Journal of Infectious Diseases (2009)200(7):1018-102. After drafting the present essay in March 2020, I came upon Eugene Richardson’s closely related appropriation of the term pandemicity in his recent commentary in BMJ Global Health, “Pandemicity, COVID-19 and the limits of public health ‘science.’”

[7] See Ranjanna Khanna’s essay “Disposability” in differences.

[8] For Derrida, it is together with psychoanalysis, and particularly its emphasis on an engagement with the alterity of unconscious processes, that deconstructive thought most forcefully compels action in the face of autoimmunity and the ineradicable hauntological violence of the death drive. This deserves fuller elaboration than brief commentary here allows; it is, however, important to my suggestion that Benjamin’s historical-materialism requires the supplement of psychoanalytic deconstructive thought in order effectively account for and respond to manifest violence and cruelty. For a selection of texts upon which I am relying in this claim, see Derrida’s essays in Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1998) and “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul” in Without Alibi (2002). Also see work by two analyst-scholars: Elizabeth Rottenberg’s For the Love of Psychoanalysis (2019) and Azeen Khan’s “Aneconomy, Indirection, Undecidability: Derrida’s ‘Principled’ Critique of the Death Drive” (2020). I thank Alan Bass for emphasizing the importance of acknowledging Derrida’s psychoanalytic positions in order to make clear why deconstruction remains an indispensable supplement to historical-materialist ethical discourses.

[9] See, for example, this report on the 10,000 daily preventable deaths of children in the Global South: World Health Organization. “Levels and Trends in Child Mortality” (2020), available at https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/children-reducing-mortality. Based on estimates from UNICEF, even this figure of preventable childhood mortality is likely a significant underestimate: https://data.unicef.org/resources/levels-and-trends-in-child-mortality/.

[10] Pandemicity has no time for the futural predication of Derrida’s yet-to-come or the stasis of undecidability. It is, nonetheless, only by appropriating Derrida’s ethics of the incalculable and insisting on its conjunction with his own stress on the here-now—a nod to Benjamin’s messianic zero-hour [Stillstellung: also translatable as “shutdown”] and now-time [Jetztzeit]: that time when “thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions” and yields to a particular historical present with revolutionary potential to “explode a specific epoch [and life] out the homogenous course of history”—that pandemicity makes its ethical claims on us. (See Benjamin’s Thesis VII.) Pandemicity without pandemic is an extension of that claim such that it might endure beyond a given present.