in the last chapter of the history of the world
The title is of course borrowed from Giorgio Agamben, one of those essayists who mused on the post-Christian culture obsessed with the approaching apocalypse more than any other religious topic.
essays in apocalyptic studies
Closure and permeability. From pneumatic experience to extra-cultural insight in the kairós
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სჯანი / Sjani: Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, no 23/2022, p. 38-48. ISSN 1512-2514, e-ISSN 2346-772X.
http://sjani.ge/?page_id=5134 The aim of the present essay is to revisit and re-examine the inherited modes of thinking about catastrophic events that date back to the Antiquity, and to contrast them with the contribution provided by the present-day post-humanist philosophy in order to answer the question how the lasting effects of the COVID 19 pandemic may be captured through the lens of cultural analysis. To achieve this goal, the author of the article analyses the cultural paradigms established by Christian eschatology. According to religious tradition, the Apocalypse may be defined as the onset of a specific time – the kairós of Christian eschatology, as opposed to chronos, the usual, historical time in which usual events take place. The passage from chronos to kairós happens when the time is ripe for a revelation: in the Apocalypse of Saint John this passage is symbolised by the moment of breaking the Seven Seals of God and the opening of the Book of Secrets (Revelation 6-8). In the specific, apocalyptic time, the usual cultural distinctions, categorisations and ways of doing things, belonging to a secular time, lose their validity. So to speak, Apocalypse is a suspension of culture. This is why the human being confronted with the pandemic conceptualised as an apocalyptic event lacks not only an efficient bodily cure, but also adequate strategies of fear management, solidarity, mourning, etc. Nonetheless, the kairos, i.e. the suspended, a-cultural time of the crisis, offers an opportunity of novel insights, fostering the transgression of hitherto respected cultural limitations. The revelation brought about by the time of crisis may be understood not only in religious, but also in secular terms. It can be captured through the cultural analysis and post-humanist philosophy, such as a recent, yet pre-pandemic essay The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture (2019) by Emmanuele Coccia. He anticipated the importance of the pneumatic immersion-in-the-world, epitomised in this instance by plants. He speaks of “universal transmissibility” and “perpetual contagion”. The importance he attributes to the physiology of breathing, common to all living beings, leads to a philosophy of the organic that operates by a constant inversion of the container and the contained. Pneuma – yet another term with religious connotations, here used as a synonym of unity of all life, not only the human one – introduces a permanent overlap between the organism and the environment, and thus the principle of circulation, transmission and unavoidable contagion. |
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The outbreak of a new disease, designated as COVID-19, brought about not only the consolidation of scientific methods of addressing the global crisis, but also the renaissance of religious patterns of imagination, and more generally, of the cultural heritage accumulated during similar events, such as plagues that had periodically afflicted the mankind. Since the Antiquity, such events have formed an archive of catastrophic memory that remains functional up to the present day. No wonder that humanities, just as medical sciences, are expected to address the issue of the disease and its lasting consequences. What is more, the humanities are expected to provide a “fuller story” (cf. Smith 2021), more encompassing than just a narration celebrating the invention of the vaccine and the triumph of the medical science. The aim of the present essay is thus to revisit and re-examine those inherited modes of thinking about catastrophic events that date back to the Antiquity, and to contrast them with the contribution provided by the present-day philosophy of post-humanism.
In many ways, the surge of the infection is still an event that defies comprehension; it is unexpected, uncontrollable (in spite of our ever-expanding technical means), provoking incertitude and anxiety. It puts the infected man in a liminal situation: despair, forced isolation, dissolution of the usual bonds of solidarity. The death of the hospitalised patient is solitary, deprived of consolation and the physical presence of family members. On the other hand, at the social level, the liminality of the pandemic implies a return of irrationality, surges of unjustified stigmatisation, hostility, and aggression (such as the attacks against medical personnel – identified as “the bearers of the contagion” – that were frequent in Poland and in other countries during the first weeks of the pandemic; cf. Amnesty International 2020). In various places around the globe, episodes of dramatic competition for mingling resources, such as the access to intensive care or the supplies of medical oxygen, have been registered.
Certainly, the liminal condition of the infected man is experienced individually, by a patient who depends on the artificial supply of oxygen or an apparatus inducing respiration. It is a moment in which a human being relies, to an extreme degree, on artefacts, knowledge, and skills – learned competences that could be accumulated only due to the human ability of cultural transmission. Yet paradoxically, the infected man is also thrown into an a-cultural condition, isolated from the community and its rituals. The risk of contagion excludes the usual forms of human solidarity; on the other hand, the so called brain fog that often accompanies the disease attacks the specialised human organ that makes our cultural participation possible. At the same time, the novelty, the unprecedented aspect of the outbreak, the rapidity of the globalization of the new disease put on the brink of cultural normalcy not only the contaminated individuals, but also the communities, the societies, and the mankind as a whole. Frenetically searching the cultural archives for precedents and paradigms, humanity sank in an a-cultural condition of rupture, despair and terror.
The return to pre-modern patterns of religious thought, and also to an ancient language that preserves useful categorisations, is almost an instinctive reaction under such circumstances. It justifies the rethinking of Christian apocalyptic and eschatological legacy that permits not only to capture the ambivalent and paradoxical aspects of a catastrophic event such as the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to find hope and the promise of growth in the middle of despair. If we return to the ancient language transmitted together with Christian legacy, such as the Acts of the Apostles, we are able to say that humanity on the brink of the catastrophe tumbles out of “normal time” that might be designed by the Greek word chronos (xρόνος) and becomes immersed in a “special time” – kairós (καιρός). The Greek antonym of the term designating the “usual”, “everyday” chronology connotes a time of opportunity, a moment of a lucky chance, but also a crisis that may lead to some decisive breakthrough; the term kairós contains both a menace and a germ of promise. The pagans worshipped Kairós as a luck-bringing divinity. On the other hand, the term appears in Christian apocalyptic tradition to designate the eschatological time that enables the access to certain mysteries that remain hidden at all other times. The theological term eschaton (ἔσχατον) refers to the post-historical era of God's overt reign, contrasting with the historical age dominated by the usual presence of adversity, evil and injustice as we experience them in the usual, everyday life – in the chronos.
The passage from chronos to kairós happens when the time is ripe for a revelation: in the Apocalypse of Saint John this passage is symbolised by the moment of breaking the Seven Seals of God and the opening of the Book of Secrets (Revelation 6-8). Each of the Seals corresponds to a new vision, such as that of the Four Riders (First to Fourth Seal), the cry for vindication of the Christian martyrs (Fifth Seal), a great earthquake and the rise of the black sun (Sixth Seal), and finally the great silence in heaven (Seventh Seal). The unveiling of those symbolic signs, interpreted in various ways during the subsequent development of Christian esoterica and exegetic tradition, was to be followed by the properly apocalyptic act of pouring “the vials of the wrath of God” upon the earth (Revelation 16:1). Meanwhile, what is to be stressed here is the association of the catastrophe and the unveiling of secrets. The biblical Book of Revelation is the source of a lasting cultural tradition in which the anxiety of catastrophe comes together with the expectation of novel wisdom. Such an association determines the profound ambivalence of Christian eschatology, conceptualising the end of time (chronos, history, “life-as-we-know-it”) as a menace and a promise.
The couple of Greek terms to designate time may also resume two ways of conceptualising the pandemic. Chronos is the “normal time”, a time of logical sequences of causes and effects, events that occupy a given duration, shorter or longer, but never eternal. The defining characteristic of the epidemic/pandemic disease – as opposed to an endemic disease – is chronological, i.e. related to time; the difference lies precisely in the dynamics of the outbreak. An epidemic or pandemic is a disease that appears suddenly on a certain territory or over the globe; the number of cases climbs sharply, but also declines sharply over a period, a measurable duration. This chronological conceptualisation corresponds to the pragmatic approach toward the predicament, and implies hope (any disease with epidemic/pandemic characteristics will considerably diminish or disappear altogether after a certain period of time). Yet on the other hand, human mind also tends to experience the acute growth of the pandemic in a way that has to do with the “non-chronological” modality of thinking: kairós as a time of crisis, even an end of times, a great, final catastrophe that put an end to human history and “life-as-we-know-it”; it is a radical denial of hope and expectation of any subsequent chronologies.
The productivity of apocalyptic patterns of imagination in contemporary culture is enormous; the apocalyptic scenarios return in a great variety of cinematographic and literary narrations, in visual arts and in computer games. No wonder that this way of thinking is also present in the popular way of facing real events. Only with time (the eternal victory of chronos over kairós, the time of normalcy over the time of exception), our manner of facing the rise of the new disease returns to the usual, sequential conceptualisation of events. As the apocalyptic imagination waxes and wanes, we start to see the outbreak as a temporary, secular, not an eschatological event. At a given moment, – even if the number of cases, as well as the number of deaths, remains as high or higher than initially –, the disease loses its power of terrorizing us, because we step from the apocalyptic kairós back into the chronos of normalcy. In the “normal”, non-apocalyptic time, we recover our trust in causes and effects: simple, repeatable, prescribable actions, such as vaccination and washing our hands, improve our situation in the world. They not only increase our chances of survival in the concrete, literal sense, but also protect us from the imaginary catastrophe conceptualised as an end of “life-as-we-know-it”. We are safely back in the cultural realm of paradigms and procedures.
When the world tumbles back into the normalcy from the brink of the apocalypse, what remains to do is to ask what kind of revelation the experience of kairós actually brought to us. What kind of novel thought or idea can be preserved from the apocalyptic time of trial that we have just lived? What novel cognition of ourselves can stay with us after the pandemic?
My starting point to reflect on this question and to search for a novel wisdom that might become available to the post-pandemic humanity (and humanities) is a recent essay The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture (2019) by Emanuele Coccia. Although the book was written some time before the pandemic, the author anticipated the importance of the pneumatic (i.e. connected to our physiology of breathing) immersion-in-the-world, epitomised in his text by plants rather than by humans. At the same time, he speaks of “universal transmissibility” and “perpetual contagion” (Coccia 2019: 68), inherent to the condition of immersion-in-the-world, common to all biological organisms. Certainly, these words acquire quite a new resonance and relevance when we are confronted with the pandemic of a disease attacking human respiratory system. This is why Coccia's essay, as I believe, helps to verbalise the new perspective that has been revealed to us in the pandemic kairós.
The essayist's approach is inscribed in the philosophical coordinates of post-humanism and its rethinking of the organic status of man in the context of other forms of biological existence. The key point of his approach is the physiology of breathing, common to all living beings. The category of breathing entity is more encompassing than the concept of phylum, i.e. the identification of the physiological type of organism that we are, introduced in the 1980s by the post-modern philosopher Félix Guattari. Crossing the limits of phylum that unify human and animals (often treated as non-human subjects or even persons in the language of post-humanism) and focusing on plants, Coccia invites us to abandon the usual anthropocentric/zoo-centric way of thinking. Just to put it in very simple terms, if we abandon our anthropocentric stance, if we focus on plants and their modality of being-in-the-world, we can completely change our perspective. Instead of speaking of Anthropocene, i.e. the epoch in which human activity marks a new geological era in the history of our planet, he speaks of Fitocene, making us remember that the creation of an atmosphere rich in oxygen, the effect of the activity of plants, has been the critical turnover in the history of the planet. Photosynthesis, that Coccia qualifies as “one of the major cosmogonic phenomena” (Coccia 2019: 40).
The pandemic of COVID-19 as a respiratory disease puts in the limelight a forgotten aspect as a basis of the new definition of man: human being is an aerobe (oxygen-breathing) organism. His or her mode of being is thus derived and dependent on the existence of plants. As a consequence, Anthropocene is derived from the Fitocene. The new definition of the human condition must thus accentuate the dependence of man on other forms of existence. On the other hand, the reflection on the transformative power of plants obliterates the typically human distinction between passive “being” and active “doing” or “producing”. Plants create themselves and transform the world in which they are immersed by their sheer breathing, the dynamic balance based on the continuous exchange of gases. The “cosmogonic” photosynthesis is “indistinguishable from the being itself of plants” (Coccia 2019: 40). Similarly, the sheer being of man, independently of his activity as a producer, is already a form of “cosmogonic” transformation, creating a world for other forms of being. Such as the virus.
A widespread way of conceptualising the pandemic is that of an event in which man is confronted with “an invisible enemy”, a radically different form of existence. Of course, humans try to control this situation by such means as masks, social distancing and vaccination, expecting to eliminate the viral entity conceived as their opponent. Meanwhile, any expectation of total victory is far from realistic. The outcome of the pandemic implies rather an interaction and mutual adaptation in which the other form of being, the virus, mutates and survives in spite of human actions, decisions and efforts. One of the possible final results of the pandemic may be the establishment of a sort of equilibrium, in which COVID-19 becomes a widespread, but usually not mortal disease, just as the common cold, a viral disease that has never been eradicated by the humanity. Philosophically speaking, the problem of the pandemic should thus be approached as a problem of coexistence and co-evolution, in which the physio-ontological condition of being a breathing organism (and thus admitting alien elements such as viruses into the human body) is the defining factor in the relationship of man with other forms of existence. The human should be seen not as a closed fortress, but rather as a permeable being. It requires a crucial shift of the dominant perspective concerning our way of being in the world. And perhaps the hypothesis of a Virocene as a concurrence to the concept of Anthropocene.
The definition of man based on breathing leads to a philosophy of the organic that operates by a constant inversion of the container and the contained. Pneuma (πνεῦμα) – yet another Greek term that may refer not only to the physiology of breathing, but also to the spiritual and theological realm of Christianity, in reference to the “breath of life” insufflated by God into the human at the moment of creation – is of paramount importance. Pneumatic character of human existence (in both physiological and theological sense) introduces a permanent overlap between man and something greater than man, between the organism and the environment, between an aerobe being and the oxygenated atmosphere in which he or she is immersed. It sharpens the sense of the dependence of man, as well as the principle of circulation, transmission and unavoidable contagion. Coccia's conclusion is of paramount importance for the pandemic times, bringing an acute awareness of bodies being constantly penetrated by viruses: “The impenetrability we have often imagined as the paradigmatic form of space is an illusion: wherever there is an obstacle to transmission and interpenetration, a new plane is produced that allows bodies to reverse the inherence from one to the other, in a reciprocal interpenetration. (...) Everything enters and exists from everywhere: the world is an opening, an absolute freedom of circulation – not side by side with, but through bodies and others. To live, to experience, or to be in the world also means to let oneself be traversed by all things” (Coccia 2019: 68). This statement may acquire a tragic resonance after the onset of the pandemic, yet becomes even more illuminating. As a pneumatic, i.e. breathing being, man cannot utterly isolate himself or herself, rejecting the essential condition of coexistence.
Coccia couldn't predict such an event as the pandemic at the moment he wrote his essay, but it happens that the rethinking of the human condition he proposed is extremely productive in the present circumstances. In the secular time (not-kairós), the dominant physiological pattern that finds a cultural reflection, as suggested by Coccia, is ingestion (consumption, incorporation). The physiology that we experience though nourishment and its cultural derivates (possession and accumulation, primarily of the neolithic food, and later on of all kinds of consumable goods) determine our economy and our way of building the sensation of safety in the world. Meanwhile, the respiratory character of the COVID-19 disease destroys our safety among a profusion of material possessions. Our assets, physiologically based on the desire of stocking an abundant supply of food, become irrelevant as soon as we may lack the only basic element that we have never transformed into a commodity: the oxygen. Paying attention to our primary need of oxygen that comes before our need of nourishment, we discover the essential vanity of our accumulative obsessions.
In a suggestive chapter featuring Tiktaalik rosae (a species that palaeontologists regard as a fossil link between fishes and the earliest tetrapods coming out of the primordial ocean to colonise the dry land), Coccia comes back to human origins in a way that corresponds, in a subversive way, to the Biblical commandment: “fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1,28). Nonetheless, the earth is filled and subdued not by man as a species, but as a primary vertebrate form of life. What is more, Coccia claims that we have never ceased to live an existence of immersion: “The relation between a living being and the world can never be reduced to one of opposition (or objectification) or to one of incorporation (which we experience in nourishment). The most primal relation between the living being and the world is that of reciprocal projection: a movement through which the living being commissions the world with what it must make of its own body and whereby the world, on the contrary, entrusts the living being with the realization of a movement that should have been external to it. What we call technique is a movement of this type. Thanks to it, the soul [esprit]1 lives outside the living being's body and makes itself soul [âme] of the world; conversely, a natural movement finds its origin and ultimate form in an idea of the living being. This mutual projection takes place also because the living being identifies itself with the world in which it is immersed” (Coccia 2019: 33-34).
The identification with the world as a consequence of the existential condition of immersion fosters the rethinking of human body, previously conceptualised as an interior, a bulk, a closed, intestinal reality. If the fear of contagion brings about the experience of absolute exposure, the actual disease, lived mainly as a breathing trouble, fosters the awareness that the human being is and must remain open to the world around him or her in a constant pneumatic exchange. Visceral closed-ness, creating a body as an inner, intimate, controllable space is nothing but an illusion. The onset of the illness forces the deconstruction of the human as an essentially claustrophiliac being. In secular, non-apocalyptic time, we build houses and offices, create interiors in which we spend most of our time. We construe exclusive intimacies, transforming portions of the world that are closest to us into the same sort of material extension of our closed, visceral bodies. This process of interior-making implies as well the symbolic activity, concept production, emotions. Our activity as cultural creators leads to the transformation of the world into an inner space, an interior in which we try to keep all other beings in a tame, neutralized condition. The advent of uncontrollable virus forces a radical redefinition of the human as a maker of controllable interiors. The disease reveals our tragic oneness with the external environment derived from the physiology of breathing that excludes any possibility of definitive bodily closure and enforces the difficult trust that becomes the condition of immersion in the environment, a difficult trust in the world as a whole in spite of the hostile presence of the virus.
Unexpectedly, the plant-like features shared by man enable what Coccia defines as the “cosmic contemplation” of complete, immersive being-in-the-world. Experiencing and developing a solidarity with plants may provide a novel insight, an extra-cultural wisdom to be learned from plants rather than from other humans under the pressure of the kairós. As Coccia remarks, “plants do not run, they cannot fly; they are not capable of privileging a specific place in relation to the rest of space, they have to remain where they are. Space, for them, does not crumble into a heterogeneous chessboard of geographical difference; the world is condensed into the portion of ground and sky they occupy. Unlike most higher animals, they have no selective relation to what surrounds them: they are, and cannot be other than, constantly exposed to the world around them. Plant life is life as complete exposure, in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment” (Coccia 2019: 5). No human being is able to live on the surface of his or her skin as a plant does; we privilege the volume of our bodies over their surface. It is the other way around with plants. They epitomise absolute absorption, spreading in the environment, penetrating the space that surrounds them not only with their stems, branches, petioles and translucent leaf blades, but also with roots and root-hairs, curling tendrils, rhizomes and runners. They are the very figure of openness, as much as we are the very figure of a visceral closed-ness, creating an inner, intimate space that is vital to us. Contemplating the plant-like modality of existence, we can learn how to go beyond our typically-human relationship with the outer world, shaped by our inner, visceral logic of burrow-builders, creating interiors in which we spend most of our time. In the chronos, the non-apocalyptic time, we believe that our capacity of producing interiors may grant us safety. The kairós of the pandemic is the moment of anagnorisis, the metaphorical “opening of the eyes” in which man passes from ignorance and delusion to knowledge, discovering his or her exposure to the environment, the essential impossibility of building a protective interior of any kind whatsoever, since our own bodies are not the paradigms of such safe, isolated interiors; rather to the contrary, our bodies speak of our permeability and oneness with the environment. The process of home-making implies both the manipulation of the physical matter and the symbolic activity of creating concepts, associations, emotional investments. Yet our way of living in the world, as Coccia claims, still does not differ from that of the primordial organic molecules immersed in a fluid medium that fostered the beginnings of life on Earth. The awareness that we have lived under the regime of Virocene almost since the beginnings not only of humanity, but also of our whole aerobe and vertebrate phylum may be an element of the difficult hope that a life of exposure and immersion is possible.
In the ultimate instance, it is a path leading to a radical transgression into the domain of extra-cultural experience, as far as all human culture may be defined as an attempt at transforming the world according to the endlessly repeated, claustrophiliac pattern. Our activity as cultural creators used to be directed toward the transformation of the world into an inner space, an interior in which we strived to maintain not only all other beings, but also the very concept of otherness in a tame, neutralized condition. In post-pandemic times, these premises of human culture start to reveal their shortcomings. Deluded by their world-transforming powers, the humans strive to furnish and control their own environment, while plants, that absorb the resources they need for their growth, give an example of adhesion to their environment. As Coccia says, they are “the most intense, radical, and paradigmatic form of being in the world; […] they embody the most direct and elementary connection that life can establish with the world” (Coccia 2019: 5), comparable to a “cosmic contemplation” in which any distinction of object and substance is totally absent. This new proposal sounds almost as a form of a secular mysticism. Is it possible to assimilate the lesson of plants in such a way as to modify our being-in-the-world in a trans-human and an extra-cultural way? Read in the light of the pandemic experience, Coccia's thought reveals its radical, transgressive potential.
As it has been said, the apocalypse may be defined as the onset of a specific time: the kairós of Christian eschatology, yet also of Giorgio Agamben's commentary on the St Paul's Letter to the Romans (cf. Agamben 2005). It is also a time in which the broadly accepted cultural distinctions, categorisations, and procedures (the usual ways of doing things) lose their validity; they belong to the secular time of chronos. The pandemic, or any other circumstances interpreted as an apocalyptic event, may thus be seen as an instance of suspension of culture and cultural distinctions, such as those between man and animals, studied by the Italian philosopher in the famous essay The Open (cf. Agamben 2003). No cultural ritual, no paradigm, no procedure rooted in the chronos may properly fulfil eschatological aims. The human confronted with the pandemic seen as an immersion in the kairós lacks not only an efficient bodily cure, but also adequate strategies of fear management, solidarity, mourning, etc. Nonetheless, the kairós, i.e. the suspended, a-cultural time, offers an opportunity of novel insights, fostering the transgression of hitherto respected cultural boundaries and limitations. It offers an opportunity of establishing a new culture, with novel conceptualizations, paradigms, procedures, and rituals.
Now, when the pandemic onset of respiratory disease gradually becomes an endemic predicament, the kairós flows back into the riverbed of chronos. Yet the labour of integrating the broken Seal of the Book of Secrets into a new conception of ourselves has just begun. This reflection may focus on the individual experiencing the fear of contagion and the actual disease, rather than collective phenomena accompanying the pandemic. COVID-19 isolated human destinies from one another, put in the limelight the solitude as the central aspect of human condition. Alone with his or her body, human individual experienced the trauma of permeability, in which the closed, subjectivised, culturally produced body became a space open to biological fluxes and viral replication. Certainly, the experience of being infected and the trauma of permeability are not positive in themselves, but they can lead to some form of post-traumatic growth, fostering new awareness of an immersive being-in-the-world, the predominance of pneumatic existence over ingestion, incorporation, consumption, the primary importance of breathing. This is how, in this reflection, the pandemic opens the boundaries of man's cultural condition and enables the search for extra-cultural modalities of being human.
The extra-cultural stance that I postulate may be only a momentary insight derived from the acute, liminal experience of our existence as pneumatic, i.e. open, permeable body that does not actually occupy space excluding other forms of existence, not even creates space that may be invaded by other forms of existence, but rather creates a world for other, radically different forms of existence, on the brink of bios and non-bios (the virus as the liminal form which replicates without being properly alive). This illuminative extra-cultural insight, complementary to the usual cultural condition, is related to apocalypse as a liminal time of exception and transition. Undoubtedly, culture shall prevail: any apocalypse is characterised by suddenness, disruptiveness, but not by an extensive duration. Repetitive procedures, such as vaccination, will put an end to the pandemic, or rather transform the disease into an endemic one, re-establishing the apparent, illusory efficiency of cultural paradigms. Nevertheless, the extra-cultural insight achieved in the kairós may durably transform and enrich our awareness as humans, if we deepen it through reflection. We should not let the apocalyptic revelation slip out of our grasp, even if it may be difficult to accept, traumatic and profoundly transformative.
The definition of culture implied in my reflection accentuates is repeatable and learnable character. Culture is a repertory of transmissible paradigms and procedures that constantly mediate the relations between the human and the world. It acts as an extra-organic integument, performs a protective closure, separating the body from its environment and fostering the illusion of secluded, exclusive subjectivity. Under normal circumstances, humanness is almost consubstantial with such a cultural condition. Only the extreme, liminal experiences and states, such as uncontrollable disease reveal the denuded human, stripped of his or her cultural carapace. Also the current pandemic may be treated as a liminal event revealing the human stripped of the cultural. It offers an occasion to rethink the limiting character of the cultural, and in particular, of the culturally reproduced illusion of closure of our bodies. As a consequence, it may lead to a new conceptualisation of both human body and human subjectivity as permeable, open, exposed to fluxes.
1The distinction esprit – âme that appears in the French original of Coccia's essay is blurred in its English translation.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Amnesty International. Global: Health Workers Silenced, Exposed, and Attacked. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/07/health-workers-rights-covid-report/ (access: 5.12.2021).
Coccia, Emanuele. The Life of plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
Smith, Christopher. Plagues and Classical History – What the humanities will tell us about COVID in years to come. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/08/plagues-and-classical-history-what-the-humanities-will-tell-us-about-covid-in-years-to-come/ (access: 5.12.2021).
In many ways, the surge of the infection is still an event that defies comprehension; it is unexpected, uncontrollable (in spite of our ever-expanding technical means), provoking incertitude and anxiety. It puts the infected man in a liminal situation: despair, forced isolation, dissolution of the usual bonds of solidarity. The death of the hospitalised patient is solitary, deprived of consolation and the physical presence of family members. On the other hand, at the social level, the liminality of the pandemic implies a return of irrationality, surges of unjustified stigmatisation, hostility, and aggression (such as the attacks against medical personnel – identified as “the bearers of the contagion” – that were frequent in Poland and in other countries during the first weeks of the pandemic; cf. Amnesty International 2020). In various places around the globe, episodes of dramatic competition for mingling resources, such as the access to intensive care or the supplies of medical oxygen, have been registered.
Certainly, the liminal condition of the infected man is experienced individually, by a patient who depends on the artificial supply of oxygen or an apparatus inducing respiration. It is a moment in which a human being relies, to an extreme degree, on artefacts, knowledge, and skills – learned competences that could be accumulated only due to the human ability of cultural transmission. Yet paradoxically, the infected man is also thrown into an a-cultural condition, isolated from the community and its rituals. The risk of contagion excludes the usual forms of human solidarity; on the other hand, the so called brain fog that often accompanies the disease attacks the specialised human organ that makes our cultural participation possible. At the same time, the novelty, the unprecedented aspect of the outbreak, the rapidity of the globalization of the new disease put on the brink of cultural normalcy not only the contaminated individuals, but also the communities, the societies, and the mankind as a whole. Frenetically searching the cultural archives for precedents and paradigms, humanity sank in an a-cultural condition of rupture, despair and terror.
The return to pre-modern patterns of religious thought, and also to an ancient language that preserves useful categorisations, is almost an instinctive reaction under such circumstances. It justifies the rethinking of Christian apocalyptic and eschatological legacy that permits not only to capture the ambivalent and paradoxical aspects of a catastrophic event such as the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to find hope and the promise of growth in the middle of despair. If we return to the ancient language transmitted together with Christian legacy, such as the Acts of the Apostles, we are able to say that humanity on the brink of the catastrophe tumbles out of “normal time” that might be designed by the Greek word chronos (xρόνος) and becomes immersed in a “special time” – kairós (καιρός). The Greek antonym of the term designating the “usual”, “everyday” chronology connotes a time of opportunity, a moment of a lucky chance, but also a crisis that may lead to some decisive breakthrough; the term kairós contains both a menace and a germ of promise. The pagans worshipped Kairós as a luck-bringing divinity. On the other hand, the term appears in Christian apocalyptic tradition to designate the eschatological time that enables the access to certain mysteries that remain hidden at all other times. The theological term eschaton (ἔσχατον) refers to the post-historical era of God's overt reign, contrasting with the historical age dominated by the usual presence of adversity, evil and injustice as we experience them in the usual, everyday life – in the chronos.
The passage from chronos to kairós happens when the time is ripe for a revelation: in the Apocalypse of Saint John this passage is symbolised by the moment of breaking the Seven Seals of God and the opening of the Book of Secrets (Revelation 6-8). Each of the Seals corresponds to a new vision, such as that of the Four Riders (First to Fourth Seal), the cry for vindication of the Christian martyrs (Fifth Seal), a great earthquake and the rise of the black sun (Sixth Seal), and finally the great silence in heaven (Seventh Seal). The unveiling of those symbolic signs, interpreted in various ways during the subsequent development of Christian esoterica and exegetic tradition, was to be followed by the properly apocalyptic act of pouring “the vials of the wrath of God” upon the earth (Revelation 16:1). Meanwhile, what is to be stressed here is the association of the catastrophe and the unveiling of secrets. The biblical Book of Revelation is the source of a lasting cultural tradition in which the anxiety of catastrophe comes together with the expectation of novel wisdom. Such an association determines the profound ambivalence of Christian eschatology, conceptualising the end of time (chronos, history, “life-as-we-know-it”) as a menace and a promise.
The couple of Greek terms to designate time may also resume two ways of conceptualising the pandemic. Chronos is the “normal time”, a time of logical sequences of causes and effects, events that occupy a given duration, shorter or longer, but never eternal. The defining characteristic of the epidemic/pandemic disease – as opposed to an endemic disease – is chronological, i.e. related to time; the difference lies precisely in the dynamics of the outbreak. An epidemic or pandemic is a disease that appears suddenly on a certain territory or over the globe; the number of cases climbs sharply, but also declines sharply over a period, a measurable duration. This chronological conceptualisation corresponds to the pragmatic approach toward the predicament, and implies hope (any disease with epidemic/pandemic characteristics will considerably diminish or disappear altogether after a certain period of time). Yet on the other hand, human mind also tends to experience the acute growth of the pandemic in a way that has to do with the “non-chronological” modality of thinking: kairós as a time of crisis, even an end of times, a great, final catastrophe that put an end to human history and “life-as-we-know-it”; it is a radical denial of hope and expectation of any subsequent chronologies.
The productivity of apocalyptic patterns of imagination in contemporary culture is enormous; the apocalyptic scenarios return in a great variety of cinematographic and literary narrations, in visual arts and in computer games. No wonder that this way of thinking is also present in the popular way of facing real events. Only with time (the eternal victory of chronos over kairós, the time of normalcy over the time of exception), our manner of facing the rise of the new disease returns to the usual, sequential conceptualisation of events. As the apocalyptic imagination waxes and wanes, we start to see the outbreak as a temporary, secular, not an eschatological event. At a given moment, – even if the number of cases, as well as the number of deaths, remains as high or higher than initially –, the disease loses its power of terrorizing us, because we step from the apocalyptic kairós back into the chronos of normalcy. In the “normal”, non-apocalyptic time, we recover our trust in causes and effects: simple, repeatable, prescribable actions, such as vaccination and washing our hands, improve our situation in the world. They not only increase our chances of survival in the concrete, literal sense, but also protect us from the imaginary catastrophe conceptualised as an end of “life-as-we-know-it”. We are safely back in the cultural realm of paradigms and procedures.
When the world tumbles back into the normalcy from the brink of the apocalypse, what remains to do is to ask what kind of revelation the experience of kairós actually brought to us. What kind of novel thought or idea can be preserved from the apocalyptic time of trial that we have just lived? What novel cognition of ourselves can stay with us after the pandemic?
My starting point to reflect on this question and to search for a novel wisdom that might become available to the post-pandemic humanity (and humanities) is a recent essay The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture (2019) by Emanuele Coccia. Although the book was written some time before the pandemic, the author anticipated the importance of the pneumatic (i.e. connected to our physiology of breathing) immersion-in-the-world, epitomised in his text by plants rather than by humans. At the same time, he speaks of “universal transmissibility” and “perpetual contagion” (Coccia 2019: 68), inherent to the condition of immersion-in-the-world, common to all biological organisms. Certainly, these words acquire quite a new resonance and relevance when we are confronted with the pandemic of a disease attacking human respiratory system. This is why Coccia's essay, as I believe, helps to verbalise the new perspective that has been revealed to us in the pandemic kairós.
The essayist's approach is inscribed in the philosophical coordinates of post-humanism and its rethinking of the organic status of man in the context of other forms of biological existence. The key point of his approach is the physiology of breathing, common to all living beings. The category of breathing entity is more encompassing than the concept of phylum, i.e. the identification of the physiological type of organism that we are, introduced in the 1980s by the post-modern philosopher Félix Guattari. Crossing the limits of phylum that unify human and animals (often treated as non-human subjects or even persons in the language of post-humanism) and focusing on plants, Coccia invites us to abandon the usual anthropocentric/zoo-centric way of thinking. Just to put it in very simple terms, if we abandon our anthropocentric stance, if we focus on plants and their modality of being-in-the-world, we can completely change our perspective. Instead of speaking of Anthropocene, i.e. the epoch in which human activity marks a new geological era in the history of our planet, he speaks of Fitocene, making us remember that the creation of an atmosphere rich in oxygen, the effect of the activity of plants, has been the critical turnover in the history of the planet. Photosynthesis, that Coccia qualifies as “one of the major cosmogonic phenomena” (Coccia 2019: 40).
The pandemic of COVID-19 as a respiratory disease puts in the limelight a forgotten aspect as a basis of the new definition of man: human being is an aerobe (oxygen-breathing) organism. His or her mode of being is thus derived and dependent on the existence of plants. As a consequence, Anthropocene is derived from the Fitocene. The new definition of the human condition must thus accentuate the dependence of man on other forms of existence. On the other hand, the reflection on the transformative power of plants obliterates the typically human distinction between passive “being” and active “doing” or “producing”. Plants create themselves and transform the world in which they are immersed by their sheer breathing, the dynamic balance based on the continuous exchange of gases. The “cosmogonic” photosynthesis is “indistinguishable from the being itself of plants” (Coccia 2019: 40). Similarly, the sheer being of man, independently of his activity as a producer, is already a form of “cosmogonic” transformation, creating a world for other forms of being. Such as the virus.
A widespread way of conceptualising the pandemic is that of an event in which man is confronted with “an invisible enemy”, a radically different form of existence. Of course, humans try to control this situation by such means as masks, social distancing and vaccination, expecting to eliminate the viral entity conceived as their opponent. Meanwhile, any expectation of total victory is far from realistic. The outcome of the pandemic implies rather an interaction and mutual adaptation in which the other form of being, the virus, mutates and survives in spite of human actions, decisions and efforts. One of the possible final results of the pandemic may be the establishment of a sort of equilibrium, in which COVID-19 becomes a widespread, but usually not mortal disease, just as the common cold, a viral disease that has never been eradicated by the humanity. Philosophically speaking, the problem of the pandemic should thus be approached as a problem of coexistence and co-evolution, in which the physio-ontological condition of being a breathing organism (and thus admitting alien elements such as viruses into the human body) is the defining factor in the relationship of man with other forms of existence. The human should be seen not as a closed fortress, but rather as a permeable being. It requires a crucial shift of the dominant perspective concerning our way of being in the world. And perhaps the hypothesis of a Virocene as a concurrence to the concept of Anthropocene.
The definition of man based on breathing leads to a philosophy of the organic that operates by a constant inversion of the container and the contained. Pneuma (πνεῦμα) – yet another Greek term that may refer not only to the physiology of breathing, but also to the spiritual and theological realm of Christianity, in reference to the “breath of life” insufflated by God into the human at the moment of creation – is of paramount importance. Pneumatic character of human existence (in both physiological and theological sense) introduces a permanent overlap between man and something greater than man, between the organism and the environment, between an aerobe being and the oxygenated atmosphere in which he or she is immersed. It sharpens the sense of the dependence of man, as well as the principle of circulation, transmission and unavoidable contagion. Coccia's conclusion is of paramount importance for the pandemic times, bringing an acute awareness of bodies being constantly penetrated by viruses: “The impenetrability we have often imagined as the paradigmatic form of space is an illusion: wherever there is an obstacle to transmission and interpenetration, a new plane is produced that allows bodies to reverse the inherence from one to the other, in a reciprocal interpenetration. (...) Everything enters and exists from everywhere: the world is an opening, an absolute freedom of circulation – not side by side with, but through bodies and others. To live, to experience, or to be in the world also means to let oneself be traversed by all things” (Coccia 2019: 68). This statement may acquire a tragic resonance after the onset of the pandemic, yet becomes even more illuminating. As a pneumatic, i.e. breathing being, man cannot utterly isolate himself or herself, rejecting the essential condition of coexistence.
Coccia couldn't predict such an event as the pandemic at the moment he wrote his essay, but it happens that the rethinking of the human condition he proposed is extremely productive in the present circumstances. In the secular time (not-kairós), the dominant physiological pattern that finds a cultural reflection, as suggested by Coccia, is ingestion (consumption, incorporation). The physiology that we experience though nourishment and its cultural derivates (possession and accumulation, primarily of the neolithic food, and later on of all kinds of consumable goods) determine our economy and our way of building the sensation of safety in the world. Meanwhile, the respiratory character of the COVID-19 disease destroys our safety among a profusion of material possessions. Our assets, physiologically based on the desire of stocking an abundant supply of food, become irrelevant as soon as we may lack the only basic element that we have never transformed into a commodity: the oxygen. Paying attention to our primary need of oxygen that comes before our need of nourishment, we discover the essential vanity of our accumulative obsessions.
In a suggestive chapter featuring Tiktaalik rosae (a species that palaeontologists regard as a fossil link between fishes and the earliest tetrapods coming out of the primordial ocean to colonise the dry land), Coccia comes back to human origins in a way that corresponds, in a subversive way, to the Biblical commandment: “fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1,28). Nonetheless, the earth is filled and subdued not by man as a species, but as a primary vertebrate form of life. What is more, Coccia claims that we have never ceased to live an existence of immersion: “The relation between a living being and the world can never be reduced to one of opposition (or objectification) or to one of incorporation (which we experience in nourishment). The most primal relation between the living being and the world is that of reciprocal projection: a movement through which the living being commissions the world with what it must make of its own body and whereby the world, on the contrary, entrusts the living being with the realization of a movement that should have been external to it. What we call technique is a movement of this type. Thanks to it, the soul [esprit]1 lives outside the living being's body and makes itself soul [âme] of the world; conversely, a natural movement finds its origin and ultimate form in an idea of the living being. This mutual projection takes place also because the living being identifies itself with the world in which it is immersed” (Coccia 2019: 33-34).
The identification with the world as a consequence of the existential condition of immersion fosters the rethinking of human body, previously conceptualised as an interior, a bulk, a closed, intestinal reality. If the fear of contagion brings about the experience of absolute exposure, the actual disease, lived mainly as a breathing trouble, fosters the awareness that the human being is and must remain open to the world around him or her in a constant pneumatic exchange. Visceral closed-ness, creating a body as an inner, intimate, controllable space is nothing but an illusion. The onset of the illness forces the deconstruction of the human as an essentially claustrophiliac being. In secular, non-apocalyptic time, we build houses and offices, create interiors in which we spend most of our time. We construe exclusive intimacies, transforming portions of the world that are closest to us into the same sort of material extension of our closed, visceral bodies. This process of interior-making implies as well the symbolic activity, concept production, emotions. Our activity as cultural creators leads to the transformation of the world into an inner space, an interior in which we try to keep all other beings in a tame, neutralized condition. The advent of uncontrollable virus forces a radical redefinition of the human as a maker of controllable interiors. The disease reveals our tragic oneness with the external environment derived from the physiology of breathing that excludes any possibility of definitive bodily closure and enforces the difficult trust that becomes the condition of immersion in the environment, a difficult trust in the world as a whole in spite of the hostile presence of the virus.
Unexpectedly, the plant-like features shared by man enable what Coccia defines as the “cosmic contemplation” of complete, immersive being-in-the-world. Experiencing and developing a solidarity with plants may provide a novel insight, an extra-cultural wisdom to be learned from plants rather than from other humans under the pressure of the kairós. As Coccia remarks, “plants do not run, they cannot fly; they are not capable of privileging a specific place in relation to the rest of space, they have to remain where they are. Space, for them, does not crumble into a heterogeneous chessboard of geographical difference; the world is condensed into the portion of ground and sky they occupy. Unlike most higher animals, they have no selective relation to what surrounds them: they are, and cannot be other than, constantly exposed to the world around them. Plant life is life as complete exposure, in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment” (Coccia 2019: 5). No human being is able to live on the surface of his or her skin as a plant does; we privilege the volume of our bodies over their surface. It is the other way around with plants. They epitomise absolute absorption, spreading in the environment, penetrating the space that surrounds them not only with their stems, branches, petioles and translucent leaf blades, but also with roots and root-hairs, curling tendrils, rhizomes and runners. They are the very figure of openness, as much as we are the very figure of a visceral closed-ness, creating an inner, intimate space that is vital to us. Contemplating the plant-like modality of existence, we can learn how to go beyond our typically-human relationship with the outer world, shaped by our inner, visceral logic of burrow-builders, creating interiors in which we spend most of our time. In the chronos, the non-apocalyptic time, we believe that our capacity of producing interiors may grant us safety. The kairós of the pandemic is the moment of anagnorisis, the metaphorical “opening of the eyes” in which man passes from ignorance and delusion to knowledge, discovering his or her exposure to the environment, the essential impossibility of building a protective interior of any kind whatsoever, since our own bodies are not the paradigms of such safe, isolated interiors; rather to the contrary, our bodies speak of our permeability and oneness with the environment. The process of home-making implies both the manipulation of the physical matter and the symbolic activity of creating concepts, associations, emotional investments. Yet our way of living in the world, as Coccia claims, still does not differ from that of the primordial organic molecules immersed in a fluid medium that fostered the beginnings of life on Earth. The awareness that we have lived under the regime of Virocene almost since the beginnings not only of humanity, but also of our whole aerobe and vertebrate phylum may be an element of the difficult hope that a life of exposure and immersion is possible.
In the ultimate instance, it is a path leading to a radical transgression into the domain of extra-cultural experience, as far as all human culture may be defined as an attempt at transforming the world according to the endlessly repeated, claustrophiliac pattern. Our activity as cultural creators used to be directed toward the transformation of the world into an inner space, an interior in which we strived to maintain not only all other beings, but also the very concept of otherness in a tame, neutralized condition. In post-pandemic times, these premises of human culture start to reveal their shortcomings. Deluded by their world-transforming powers, the humans strive to furnish and control their own environment, while plants, that absorb the resources they need for their growth, give an example of adhesion to their environment. As Coccia says, they are “the most intense, radical, and paradigmatic form of being in the world; […] they embody the most direct and elementary connection that life can establish with the world” (Coccia 2019: 5), comparable to a “cosmic contemplation” in which any distinction of object and substance is totally absent. This new proposal sounds almost as a form of a secular mysticism. Is it possible to assimilate the lesson of plants in such a way as to modify our being-in-the-world in a trans-human and an extra-cultural way? Read in the light of the pandemic experience, Coccia's thought reveals its radical, transgressive potential.
As it has been said, the apocalypse may be defined as the onset of a specific time: the kairós of Christian eschatology, yet also of Giorgio Agamben's commentary on the St Paul's Letter to the Romans (cf. Agamben 2005). It is also a time in which the broadly accepted cultural distinctions, categorisations, and procedures (the usual ways of doing things) lose their validity; they belong to the secular time of chronos. The pandemic, or any other circumstances interpreted as an apocalyptic event, may thus be seen as an instance of suspension of culture and cultural distinctions, such as those between man and animals, studied by the Italian philosopher in the famous essay The Open (cf. Agamben 2003). No cultural ritual, no paradigm, no procedure rooted in the chronos may properly fulfil eschatological aims. The human confronted with the pandemic seen as an immersion in the kairós lacks not only an efficient bodily cure, but also adequate strategies of fear management, solidarity, mourning, etc. Nonetheless, the kairós, i.e. the suspended, a-cultural time, offers an opportunity of novel insights, fostering the transgression of hitherto respected cultural boundaries and limitations. It offers an opportunity of establishing a new culture, with novel conceptualizations, paradigms, procedures, and rituals.
Now, when the pandemic onset of respiratory disease gradually becomes an endemic predicament, the kairós flows back into the riverbed of chronos. Yet the labour of integrating the broken Seal of the Book of Secrets into a new conception of ourselves has just begun. This reflection may focus on the individual experiencing the fear of contagion and the actual disease, rather than collective phenomena accompanying the pandemic. COVID-19 isolated human destinies from one another, put in the limelight the solitude as the central aspect of human condition. Alone with his or her body, human individual experienced the trauma of permeability, in which the closed, subjectivised, culturally produced body became a space open to biological fluxes and viral replication. Certainly, the experience of being infected and the trauma of permeability are not positive in themselves, but they can lead to some form of post-traumatic growth, fostering new awareness of an immersive being-in-the-world, the predominance of pneumatic existence over ingestion, incorporation, consumption, the primary importance of breathing. This is how, in this reflection, the pandemic opens the boundaries of man's cultural condition and enables the search for extra-cultural modalities of being human.
The extra-cultural stance that I postulate may be only a momentary insight derived from the acute, liminal experience of our existence as pneumatic, i.e. open, permeable body that does not actually occupy space excluding other forms of existence, not even creates space that may be invaded by other forms of existence, but rather creates a world for other, radically different forms of existence, on the brink of bios and non-bios (the virus as the liminal form which replicates without being properly alive). This illuminative extra-cultural insight, complementary to the usual cultural condition, is related to apocalypse as a liminal time of exception and transition. Undoubtedly, culture shall prevail: any apocalypse is characterised by suddenness, disruptiveness, but not by an extensive duration. Repetitive procedures, such as vaccination, will put an end to the pandemic, or rather transform the disease into an endemic one, re-establishing the apparent, illusory efficiency of cultural paradigms. Nevertheless, the extra-cultural insight achieved in the kairós may durably transform and enrich our awareness as humans, if we deepen it through reflection. We should not let the apocalyptic revelation slip out of our grasp, even if it may be difficult to accept, traumatic and profoundly transformative.
The definition of culture implied in my reflection accentuates is repeatable and learnable character. Culture is a repertory of transmissible paradigms and procedures that constantly mediate the relations between the human and the world. It acts as an extra-organic integument, performs a protective closure, separating the body from its environment and fostering the illusion of secluded, exclusive subjectivity. Under normal circumstances, humanness is almost consubstantial with such a cultural condition. Only the extreme, liminal experiences and states, such as uncontrollable disease reveal the denuded human, stripped of his or her cultural carapace. Also the current pandemic may be treated as a liminal event revealing the human stripped of the cultural. It offers an occasion to rethink the limiting character of the cultural, and in particular, of the culturally reproduced illusion of closure of our bodies. As a consequence, it may lead to a new conceptualisation of both human body and human subjectivity as permeable, open, exposed to fluxes.
1The distinction esprit – âme that appears in the French original of Coccia's essay is blurred in its English translation.
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