Book review: Slavoj Žižek,Pan(dem)ic! Covid 19 Shakes the World

The Zoonosis

Zoonosis is any transmissible disease from non-humans to humans, in recent terms, the coronavirus (Clark, 2021). Žižek sympathizes, scorns and at times, attempts to find hope for humanity in the book under review. He begins with a biblical reference about the importance of the element of touch to human beings. Between ‘touch’ and ‘touch me not,’ Žižek finds different notes of meaning varying from physical to spiritual. The corporeal distancing might bring people closer in unexpected ways, teaching us to ‘look through the windows within our eyes’ (p. 2). The author points out that while humans retract from society into the safety of their homes for the greater good of the human species, they must give ears to nature and listen to the clear message being transmitted through this pandemic. Žižek points out that humanity is yielding what we sow in nature. The social conditions that made the coronavirus pandemic possible must be analyzed in detail. He proceeds to look at the features of Covid pandemic amidst many other prevailing global crises and speculate on the ripples it will create in the future.

The Endocytosis

Endocytosis is the process by which a virus enters a target cell (Clark, 2021). The endocytosis of the Coronavirus into the human society globally has been one with innumerable responses and reactions. It has affected the very nuclei of human agglutination.

The initial social response to the Corona endocytosis was panic. Pandemic does follow the illogical logic of panic at times. But what leads to the pandemic is an absence of panic at the right time, when caution and prevention should have been the primary measures. Panic is exhausting. The world is sorted into two classes of employees now: essential service and otherwise. What does exhaustion mean to different classes of workers? Tiredness has grappled all of us in the most unprecedented manner. The ‘work from home’ ethics has professionally and personally tasked us with new challenges and means of wariness. But to the author, the most worthwhile tiredness is experienced by medical workers and caregivers who are not merely charged by obsessive career moves. Withal control and supervision by the state are legalized and justified today. One might think whether ‘exaggerated panic’ by the media and government is another hoax to continue power.

As another reaction, the Coronavirus epidemic has awoken some hibernating ideological viruses in the societies like fake news, conspiracy theories, paranoia and racism. One should not be naive to comprehend the destroying effects of a ‘virus’ before it is too late to act. After all, nobody could predict the impacts of ‘digital virus’ and ‘viral’ trends on our web-spaces before their terminal effects infected the technological domain of the living. Today, both the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ realms of life are diseased. The medical need for quarantines and social distancing builds an ideological pressure to sustain explicit borders and protect individual identities and bodies. The fragility of our technology lies in the connectivity it has made between man and man and man and nature. It is a simultaneous connectedness and disconnectedness, a similar dependence and independence. A local disaster grows into a global catastrophe in a limited time. Yet, we are technologically advanced. The need of the time is international coordination, a form of communism.

The author reacts about Dr. Li Wenliang, who first discovered the ongoing pandemic and was censored by the Chinese government. The book laments the fall of free speech in some societies, which inevitably led to the global spread of a containable disease. However, today, what is more important than condemning certain parts of the world is to understand that humanity, as a whole, is in the ‘same boat’ (p. 12) that is heading towards an imminent downfall. Compartmentalization of the world must be replaced with global coordination among world-nations. A collaborative world can only untangle the complexity of the problems. For instance, under the current circumstances of vulnerability, Europe may fall prey to a ‘perfect storm’ (p. 44). A deadly combination of the pandemic, economic crisis and a steady inflow of refugees from Syria will create chaos. The author suggests foremost ‘the strengthening of Europe’s operational unity, especially the coordination between France and Germany’ (p. 45) to prevent this catastrophe. Though almost impossible, European solidarity might cultivate tolerance towards refugees and immigrants. Rather than the generosity and conscious prick of European racism and colonization that caused much of the suffering of the poorer nations, a more effective strategy towards refugees might be a reasonable line of argument that considers their destituteness that will anyhow coerce them to migrate to Europe. What is required is an open-minded, inclusive response.

Survival responses in this specific scheme of life are complicated. The Darwinian ethics of the survival of the fittest has taken center stage. Brutal survival measures are seen with sympathy and regret and are legitimized by experts. The survivalist panic impulses humanity to perceive others as a threat and not as ‘comrades in strggle’ (p. 97). The personal has indeed become political. Though the media and government claim that safety and help are personal affairs today, we need global unity and coordination. We are caught in a triple crisis: medical, economic and psychological.

Another observable phenomenon is the restoration of ‘capitalist animism, of treating social phenomena such as markets or financial capital as living entities’ (p. 53) in the face of a medical war. The writer advocates for revamped communism instead of old-style communism, as the right response to the global emergency. The traditional communal strategies have proved themselves ineffective and aptly demonstrated their limitations. The present crisis clearly shows global solidarity and cooperation are essentially focused on the survival of all, and it probably is the only rational egotist thing to do. On the brim of such a calamity, we must not fall into barbarism or survival animosity but rise in unity, empathy, and compassion.

Radical social changes were once shunned as impossible, but the pandemic has paused the world and made something the fast-moving twenty-first century thought was impossible possible. There is an emancipatory element in tragedies. Just like how quarantines can liberate us from the monotony of the capitalistic routine of earning and spending and probably lead us into introspective spaces, the pandemic as a whole might show the nation-states their vanity and derailment from ethics and moral codes. Thus, some unpredictable positive consequences might be present in this pandemic too. Catherine Malabou rightly wrote that sometimes a ‘social bracketing’ is necessary to perceive alterity. Žižek seconds her to note that the pandemic and the consequent social distancing will aid humanity to slow down and perceive alternate systems of thinking and a better methodology of living. An optimistic perspective that could be a potentially beneficial result of the COVID pandemic is to hope for ‘an ideological virus of thinking of an alternate society, a society beyond the nation-state, a society that actualizes itself in the forms of global solidarity and cooperation’ (p. 48). This specific utopian society thinks in Zizek’s reformulated communism which is tweaked and perfected to everybody’s benefit. Žižek’s vision of the new communism is one of ‘disaster Communism’, an antidote to disaster capitalism. ‘It is through our effort to save humanity from self-destruction that we are creating a new humanity. It is only through this mortal threat that we can envision a unified humanity’ (p. 114). In short, one must experience darkness to value light.

The Latency

The viral latency denotes the ability of a pathogenic virus to lie dormant within a cell (Clark, 2021). Borrowing from Kübler-Ross, who, in her On Death and Dying, proposed the famous schema of the five stages of how we react upon learning that we have a terminal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, the writer applies the five schemas on the pandemic that exploded in 2019. He questions when humanity will arrive at the final level of acceptance and learn that viral threats loom over us perpetually. The virus will never be exterminated but will lay latent. This particular decimating event must remind us about the absurdity and contingency of our lives and the spiritual edifices. Indirectly caused by the ignorance and arrogance of humanity, an apocalypse will someday be an uncontainable fact. Unless and until humans learn from today’s mistakes, tomorrow’s lesson will be fatal.

Even if life does eventually return to some resemblance of normality, it will not be the same normal as the one we experienced before the outbreak. ‘Things we were used to as part of our daily life will no longer be taken for granted; we will have to learn to live a much more fragile life with constant threats. We will have to change our entire stance to life, to our existence as living beings among other forms of life’ (p. 87).

In the epilogue, Žižek leaves two of his letters with his friends Gabriel Tupinamba and Andreas Rosenfelder as votes of hope for the new life emerging every day. Those marked by the pandemic will heal, and humanity will learn from its mistakes, evolving into the aspired better species.

The Real Pandemic

Pandemic results from an epidemic that has grown past geographic boundaries (Clark, 2021). It might seem that Žižek, accidentally or not, has missed to cross the geographical boundaries the virus crossed. The prime question is who this book is written to. Though it talks about the third world problems, it is moved away from the third world reality in many senses. A closed and clouded western readership might have found the discussion sensible in their homely comfort. A consolidated Eurocentric approach will not and must not dictate the terms for global solidarity. One may point out, the third world within its margins has done comparatively good than what Žižek hurriedly supposed in the initial stages of the pandemic. For instance, Kerala in India innovatively decentralized the COVID management in the state to contain and assess the spread of the virus. The state has sponsored Neighbourhood Groups (NHGs), at the lowest rung, led exclusively by women, called kudumbasree which is represented by marginalized subjects including women and transgenders as frontline warriors that valorizes democracy further. Such a model can be looked at for its impact by scholarship in the West as a working social prototype. Somewhere one might feel that the book is attempting to do too many things in one go. It, at once, stirs fear in the reader by placing the epidemic in a complicated cobweb of global disturbances; social, political, and philosophical, and attempts to leave a note of hope at the end. It discusses the meaninglessness of spiritual edifices and the meaningfulness of spirituality when the physical fails to impart any sense.

Nevertheless, Žižek induced a dialogue about a global crisis that has stolen millions of lives and endangered most of the world, especially the non-west, in his book.