MONSTERS, PANDEMICS AND GENOCIDE:

THE NEW DEVICES OF THE VIRUS POLICY

Abstract

In a world which, due to the possibility of viral contagion, it is proximity that dictates the rules of death, life (biological and social) takes on the increasingly prominent aspect of blind necessity. Death strikes fatally, as in the world imagined by Kafka, where bureaucracy also punishes in the absence of explicit prohibitions. The pandemic thus serves the ideological instrumentalization of various types: from the horrible denialist policies, which tend to favor, in a cynically programmed way, the genocide of those who, in the face of an unprecedented state of exception of democracies, would like to suspend most of the individual liberties. In all this, the voice of critical thinking capable of linking the pandemic to the serious ecological crisis we are going through remains absent. Deforestation on a global scale probably accounts for the origin of the jump in species carried out by the virus. Wild animals, no longer finding an appropriate habitat, approach the anthropized landscape, producing – in a rapid sequence of adaptation and mutation of the virus of which they are innocent carriers – the distancing of human beings and from themselves. The paradox, therefore, is that of natural proximity (degraded due to our irresponsible productive activities) that generates social distancing.