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That’s how our society works… It was on April 3rd, the article was accompanied by a video on the Boursorama website[note].

April 1, Le Soir, owned by the Hurbain family (133rd largest Belgian fortune with € 169,471,000 in assets)[note]), interviewed Viscount Etienne Davignon who explained what to do to get out of the crisis. Le Soir did not reveal who Etienne Davignon was and did not reveal his pedigree: « President of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), Société Générale de Belgique, L’Union Minière, Vice-Chairman of Accor, Arbed, Tractebel, Fortis Belgium, director or member of the supervisory board of Anglo American Mining, Gilead, ICL, Penichey, Foamex, Kissinger Associates, Fiat, Suez, BASF, Solvay, Sofina, Recticel or CMB-Compagnie Maritime Belge. President of the AUME (Association for Monetary Union in Europe) since 1991, and of the Paul-Henri Spaak Foundation, he is today a member of the Trilateral Commission and Governor of the Ditchley Foundation. « [note], without mentioning his past functions in politics, notably as Vice-President of the European Commission. Thank you Le Soir, thank you Étienne, for making us think. We are waiting for the other Etienne, from Callataÿ, to tell us on the airwaves of La Première or in the lines of La Libre, how to get better[note].

A form of rage rises to your nose? Calm down, open an official newspaper or the television. It will pass you by. You have to swallow the pill, don’t you?

Settling scores at O.K. Covid

Like Nietzsche, Jean-François Gava, occasional contributor to
Kairos
The author of this book, who is also a professor of philosophy at the University of Montreal, uses a hammer to make philosophy, intertwined with solid historical knowledge. Of Marxian filiation at the beginning, he attacks here the left, accused, for more than a year, of passivity — in the best of the cases — or of collaboration — in the worst — with the psychobiopower. Let’s embark on a guided tour of Covidiotie, with a lot of huffing and puffing! And as a precaution, take out your dictionary, it’s Gava in the text, erudite and flowery!

B. L.: For more than a year, I have been dismayed to see the whole of the left aligning itself with the official narrative of the covid, except for two small isolated outbursts from Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the spring of 2020 and very recently. After having been the useful idiot of neoliberalism, has the left not become the useful idiot of covidism?

J.-F. G.: The Left has always been at home on the side of the State of capital, of the State of the capital-society! Since August 1914 at the latest, let’s say, when neither the Nazis nor the Bolsheviks were still playing the useful role of repulsors to explain the 30 million dead of the First World War (according to Kolko). She is quite at home in this totalitarian civilization of encasement, in a general way. She longs for the government, breathes in and out its air, lives only for it. How could it feel the carnage that comes out of its precincts, where it has been sitting for so long? The end of the rule of law (as a legal limitation of class violence) at home (with the colonies once outside) is not even a detail for her, she simply did not realize it after 9/11 and the Patriot Act. How can we expect the guardians of the salaried pedestrians to react? They have always embodied the religion of capital and its blissful faith in progress for the benefit of the working class. At the threshold of the capitalist era, with the French Revolution, the left (the real, historical left) eradicated a caste of premodern exploiters. But today Pasolini is right to say « I am a communist, not a leftist ». No, this internal police force of the labor movement is the worst thing that could happen to it in the 20th century.th century. And we are still paying the consequences. Questioning the official version of the facts, an official discourse, doesn’t even occur to him! While we know that the right, since Edward Bernays, for example, thinks of the construction of a mass psychosis, in which we are wading with this sinister « sanitary » joke.

B. L.: Let’s take the case of the unions, they are totally in line with the government…

J.-F. G.: But party and union are the same boat! Rühle, the great biographer of Marx, had clearly seen during the creeping German revolution of 1918–1923 that the revolution was not a matter of party, nor of trade union (after having briefly believed in the possibility of a unitary, economic-political organization). The advent of machinism, of the OP (professional worker) after 1870, and even worse of Taylorism (and its OS, specialized workers) after the First World War made the Left play the card of the integration of the proletarianized working class in the sense of « deprofessionalized », rather than that of the interruption of modern development, since the tool was demolished to the benefit of the system of machines. Since then, the prospect of interrupting the galloping cancer of the commodification of access to goods and services has been blocked in the developed world. And the Third World has failed in its attempt to imitate it. Everyone sees today that work-for-capital, even and especially skilled work, is a vast piece of shit, and these leftist jerks insist on trying to save it. No, we have to promote compulsory workmanlike teachings, with energized tools no doubt, and therefore return to compulsory professional workman training from secondary school onwards, next to humanities, arts and pure maths, and restore the role of modern sciences in the history of thought to its rightful proportion of cabinet of curiosities. The rise of ecology could have been an opportunity to understand again that the industrial devastation of the thin biofilm, as Latour says, was not an option, even « redistributed correctly » — again: that is, after forgetting that the first victim of the destruction of the biofilm was the human race itself. But no! The workers for their organizations are a full part of this society, with internal interests in this society, instead of forming a counter-society in the enemy camp, with disruptive, incompatible interests, in order to dismantle this vast camp in question. Ecology could have revived the critique of political economy, it was the last missed reminder of interspecific, intraspecific and even trans-class solidarity against the classes themselves. It could have insisted as an implacable indictment against the industrial, that is to say capitalist, way of producing. Instead, if it is the last train taken by the left, it is the one that has for destination the accommodation of the disaster, that is to say the disaster itself. Governmental ecology or greenwashing are the same thing, which themselves are not distinct from disaster capitalism, a capitalism that feeds on the very disaster it engenders, in a final firework display. It is in this sense only a moment of the ongoing nothingness, which shines as its illusory solution. The Greens participate in the active nothingness of capital itself (Sergio Bologna had seen it well) while claiming to be Illich, who is turning over in his profaned grave. The anti-value Marx had already suffered a similar fate with those dogs of Marxists, ignorant as well as Christian (or atheist, which amounts to the same thing, as we shall see).

Today, instead of pointing out the causes of an otherwise benign pandemic (for once?) — deforestation, destruction of the habitat of wild species, industrial breeding and zoonoses -, we are communing with the official version, we consent to the terrorist violence of a psychosis wanted and planned by the governments-sigbited by Big Pharma The left in general never got on the revolutionary ecology train, which the Greens themselves had already abandoned long ago to the derailment and rusting of quasi-clandestinity. Who cares about Illich, Moscovici and so many others who, like them, saw that political ecology could only aim at dismantling the megamachine?

B. L.: The ecologists and the left are simply asking for more intensive care beds…

J.-F. G.: Exactly! They are bogged down in a bad kind of short-termism, since it is the accomplishment of the catastrophe in progress itself that is now in the short term, warns Yves Cochet, among others. Instead of stopping the disaster, they propose to erase the symptoms. Even the self-satisfied mediocrity of these sigisbées and towel-bearers will not pay at all very soon. But rather die than make a decent gesture, even if it is only a thought: that is the law of the world. They want an efficient « super-iatric » society, a vast « rest home », to organize a vast rotten house in reality, an efficient general hospital that cultivates its cripples, its defectives, its human ectoplasms, next to these other wards of the prison archipelago, to use Foucault’s beautiful image, that are what remains of factories and offices. Nice project!

B. L.: Can one be an ecologist without falling into hygienism? On the contrary, public health, and more precisely the non-death of the covid, seems to have become their Holy Grail…

J.-F. G.: You can’t be an environmentalist and a hygienist. Of course, they want « public health », but what they mean by this is the industry of repairing, of patching up these masses of weakened bodies, which is concerned with sending back to work a human herd that looks so much like flocks of frightened sheep, instead of concentrating on prevention and on the foundation of a healthy society, of strong, fulfilled bodies, skilled to the point of the ability to defend themselves. It is the industry of keeping people alive at all costs, as if this were an indication of civilizational progress.

B. L.: Some people say that the current hygienism is a new form of puritanism…

J.-F. G. : If we broaden the conception of puritanism beyond the question of morals, it can indeed characterize the vast modern enterprise of subtracting the subjects of capital from any corporeality embarked in innumerable links with the rest of the living world — of respecting and taking away at the same time. The ideal of the proletarian, from the point of view of capital, is a body without hands and without voice. A body not only not human, but not even animal, in short, because animals are much more skilful than the image of the domestic herd makes them seem. They hunt and make their habitat — without tools, of course. They even play. Umay Tülay and Jean-Claude Paye have analyzed all this.

B. L.: Like the governments that imposed it by default, the left advocates deontology, without even raising the question of utilitarianism. On the part of those in power, appealing to the ethics of the population is a crude manipulation. Titillating people’s altruism, their sense of morality, their empathy, and hammering home the point that all lives must be saved, means that we must also and above all defend the sanctity of all life for self-interest. The covid has not brought us out of individualism! Individualistic submission means obeying in one’s own interest.

J.-F. G.: When an old man dies of a serious illness, is he considered to have been sacrificed?

B. L.: Yes, if it is proven that the impossible was not done to save him…

J.-F. G. : It is true that he is sacrificed in a way a first time, because there is no reason to die regularly from serious diseases outside a pathogenic world. But he is sacrificed a second time, not by dying, but by undergoing the torture of therapeutic obstinacy, which only postpones death atrociously, and in the absence of which any death would be assimilated to professional misconduct, or even manslaughter! What indecency!

B. L.: But refusing to allow the use of prolonged therapy is, according to the left, tantamount to social Darwinism, or even eugenics.

J.-F. G.: I have heard that almost all those who enter the ICU leave with their feet first… In any case, eugenics and euthanasia are obviously confused here, which I think is a beautiful word. Eugenie is also a beautiful name, like Eugene. Then, a society emancipated from slavery is eugenicist by nature. Who is born bad who is not born in irons? These mass murderers without massacre want to see death alive, death in charge. As a result, death as an indispensable moment of life, and subject to life, is unthinkable to them. They want a (non-)world of the living dead.

B. L.: Certainly, but it is the intention that counts: saving lives is the absolute priority, as Jean-François Delfraissy, president of the Covid scientific council in France and a great deontologist, insisted in the spring of 2020. Utilitarians say that we should aim for the greatest good for the greatest number of people, not just the sick, the frail, and the caregivers, and therefore subject health to arbitration as needed. Saying this will earn you the wrath of the left!

J.-F. G.: Well, we are armed with strong shields against these poor fools, our enemies. The debate is really polarized!

B. L.: Yes. A comrade of the social democratic left argued to me that the aim of natural collective immunity was eugenics! Because along the way, the weakest will die. But a civilization worthy of the name never lets down its weak members, under any pretext…

J.-F. G. : The proof that your left defends this « mouroir » that it calls civilization. There is a difference between caring for the frail — children, the elderly, the sick — and therapeutic overkill. Spinoza spoke of deaths without corpses, when the vital functions are maintained while all the human faculties have disappeared. Saving a young accidented life, taking care of an old man or a sick person who has to come back to life, has nothing to do with the maintenance at all costs of a life that must and will naturally pass away… I see there only the incensing of medical prowess inhabited by the Faustian myth that Goethe himself turned into acid derision.

B. L.: False, say the deontologists, there is no question of discriminating against lives, unless we fall into a form of fascism.

J.-F. G.: Blackmailing fascism is all that remains for these bastards. Let’s come back to eugenics, which is the choice of the right birth, not the right death. Between euthanasia and therapeutic persecution, there is no photo, for me. The latter is equivalent to torture. One could then say that deontologists are pro-torture! I prefer a beautiful death to an ugly one, and even more so to torture which claims to prevent death! Therapeutic persecution is moreover an insult to all those who die in the prime of life. Under the guise of « civilization », it is, on the contrary, barbaric beyond description! If I feel a community of destiny with others, the very idea of dying for it is not a sacrifice; my life continues in the common. One dies to continue oneself in others. It is a plural self, not an egotistical self, a trans-individual bubble, if we want to speak like Sloterdijk. But in spite of the incantations, one feels very little solidarity in this society whose sinister and comical achievement is to culminate the concern for the other in its avoidance!

B. L.: I would argue that atheism, in these pandemic circumstances, is not an advantage, because one finds oneself in a purely desiccating materialism where the only tangible reality is one’s own biological life, to which one clings all the more and for whose preservation one demands that all of society « cut itself in half.

J.-F. G.: classical or « materialist » atheism (de-animist in reality, because the dead matter of atheists is not matter) is the opposite of the « great » religions only in appearance. In reality these religions are counter-religions, according to Latour, or derived religions according to the Egyptologist Assmann: if what you take care of — a very elegant definition by Latour, again, of religion — makes you sweep away what others take care of, and this is the whole meaning of conquering religions, then you install hell on earth. The earth is emptied of its teeming interests in favor of an impalpable afterworld and the destruction of all earthly composition of those interests; that heaven is empty, on top of that, does not change the matter: atheism accomplishes counter-religion as surely as this one does, with the terrible additional consequence that no foul promise of an afterworld is kept any longer. Atheists sow the same hell as the counter-religions, from which they come, whose atrocity they purify in a way. But Bataille and Reich had seen all this a long time ago, we must reread the true revolutionary authors of the XXth century!

B. L.: We must postulate a transcendence. If one is in immanence, it is despair, and consequently the risk is to throw oneself into the arms of doctors and experts without discernment…

J.-F. G.: We can imagine a trans-individual immanence, with no other back-world than the communities from which we come and where we are reincarnated. It is possible not to despair without believing in God, but by taking care of our worlds while composing with those of others, and not only of one’s own little individual envelope. There is a despairing atheism that can be counterbalanced by Romain Rolland’s oceanic feeling. Trans-individual immanence saves religious feeling while sweeping away all pantheons. But in the end, immanence as that which has its principle in itself — provided that « self » is understood as the possible composition of all « selves », Gaia, in short — and transcendence, not as that which lies beyond the sensible-intelligible but as the (trans-) crossing of individual limits for that which counts as earthly in the eyes of individuals, are not only quite… composable with each other, but characterize in a complementary way a renewed religious vision, which includes in religion its capacity to compose with all the others.

B. L.: To get out of this rut, we would need an
aggiornamento
global. Alas, the masses, on the contrary, have allowed themselves to be manipulated by a psychobiopower that has sold them the deontology by opportunism, betting that this is the discourse that will work. And it worked! He has succeeded in taking the masses by surprise, after decades of hyper-individualism…

J.-F. G.: But what ethics? What counter-argument? These sheep of Panurge only commune in the politically aroused terror of being reached in their only and miserable individual envelopes, as Hegel said. Where is the solution of continuity with liberalism? It is the apotheosis of atomism, on the contrary! Immunity as the only religion at the expense of all com-munity: take care of me, avoid me! This is the Crown of creation, to use the ironic title of the rock band Jefferson Airplane, the apotheosis of this accomplished modern thanatocracy (well accomplished, I would say: that we really move on…). An im-munitarism that is all the more blind because it ignores its maximum exposure, not to the power of others, as in com-munism, but to the destructive power of capital armed with its state (its « Republic » etc.).

B. L.: Utilitarianism is a consequentialism…

J.-F. G.: Yes. But governments are not concerned about all the consequences of their management choices, such as bankruptcies, depressions, suicides, including of children, and divorces, which are not the least of the traumas. They have aggravated a pre-existing situation. How far will they go in inoculating the individualistic plague, while preaching solidarity? The ultimate in sociability has become the avoidance of others in order to protect them. Has there ever been a more complete perversion of all intelligence? It is comical in its absurdity, as well as being Orwellian. This could be the maxim of a chemically pure liberalism: take care of others, stay away from them!

B. L.: There is also an inversion of Eros and Thanatos, since in the prevailing opinion, the apostles of Thanatos are those who refuse to obey the « sanitary » measures. Whereas Thanatos is found on the contrary in all those hygienists, those pandemicists who want to prevent living in the name of « life ». They are carriers of death, not only social death, but in fine the death of bodies, those of others and of their own, since by depriving human beings of authentic links, they die slowly. This was evident in the Ehpads in 2020.

J.-F. G.: Absolutely. By banishing death, we finally put it in power. This is the covidism of the covidae and of all the inoculated, as the biologist Kaarle Parikka says. Hide this death that I cannot see! The best way to hide it is to make it govern, to install it in the living itself by destroying all links. Death in power is the life of the living dead, that is to say, of the living promised to death by the destruction of all bonds; in the long run, it is true death that triumphs anyway, but not only in individuals, as in the terrible vision of modern atheists, but in everything: the death that will triumph will no longer be even conceivable as a moment of the life of the species, since it will strike the species itself. Our « totalitarian » civilization, of tendentiously total domination, founded on the eradication of memories and of the transmission of the past as fertilization of the future, cannot accept true death, which reveals in an obscene way the emptiness of this same civilization. This expulsion of death, which is only the work of death in power, « the » death moving blindly within itself, as Hegel said about the industrial « market » emerging before his eyes, actually ensures its triumph for the species itself: not only in the figurative sense of a life devoid of meaning because without links between its individual moments, but because a life that connects nothing is doomed to death altogether. The death of the power of this civilization of the living dead, which is nothing less than perennial, in reality announces only the disappearance of the species…

B. L. : On France-culture, Jean-Pierre Dupuy affirmed that death is an absolute exteriority, and there can be no question of considering it as part of the cycle of life. One more intellectual fallen in the covidian faith…

J.-F. G. : You mean, in imbecility! If we think that everything ceases when we die, if nothing we have worked for is perpetuated, survives us and makes us survive, what meaning can we still give to our life? What a pity to see thinkers who were once so penetrating wallow in decay…

B. L.: What lies in the background of the whole affair is the anguish of death, which is then rationalized, in the Freudian sense, in speeches, arguments, postures…

J.-F. G. : I think that the anguish of death is proportional to the emptiness of current lives. The emptier the life, the more one fears, with good reason, to abandon it and to fall into definitive oblivion.

B. L.: That’s what that old nihilist Roland Jaccard says: the more you have a lousy life, the more you cling to it. As psychiatrist Jean Furtos says, being obsessed with not dying does not help one live.

J.-F. G. : A life deprived of deep and lasting joys, that is the crux of the problem. This is what capitalism has promoted with Calvinism and its general encasement in view of a predestination to be revealed. This psychosis has come to power. Max Weber was right, although he abjectly considered that it did not take away anything from the superiority of the West. Nothing less than Calvinist terror was needed to engender this world, which is not sick, as if it had ever been healthy, but simply monstrous — a monster is a sterile individual, who can leave no offspring — and which is happily ending before our eyes, each day more surely.

Interview by Bernard Legros, May 2021.

State of the struggles (2)*

For almost three years, in terms of political awareness and the constitution of new social bonds, we have witnessed something quite exceptional, which gives hope about the possibilities of real change in society[note]. The Covid event has indeed played, in spite of itself, a role of political lever allowing an awareness that was made concomitantly to the destruction of certain myths that were essential to a lasting voluntary enslavement. 

The main myths that allowed and still allow us to maintain our model of society are :

The state is there to do us good;

The purpose of the media is to inform us; 

Allopathic medicine[note] is at the service of people’s health and well-being; 

Educational institutions train citizens;

Governments and multinationals want to be « green », concerned about the biosphere.

If it is certain that nothing will be the same as before, it is no less certain that those who benefited most from these collective illusions will do everything possible to perpetuate the mass submission that these illusions ensured. Covid-19 was an experiment on a planetary scale, the tools that were useful for its implementation will be, and are already, recycled to be applied to other fields, such as the  » fight against global warming « . Klaus Schwab, mentor of governments (Macron, Trudeau, De Croo, etc.), has explained it well in his various books-agendas, including the famous Covid-19: the great reset[note].

The social division

The beginning of the Covid-19 event in March 2020 stunned individuals, creating two groups that became more distinct with time: those who from the beginning, or afterwards, were not anchored to the official discourse, and the others, who accepted the injection — and sometimes that of their children, and obeyed without resistance to governmental injunctions, justifying them personally if necessary. For the latter, the more time passes, the greater the risk of never admitting to the manipulation they have undergone[note] — one can also think that the time put to realize the spectacle that constituted Covid-19 is inversely proportional to the degree of conscience of the individual before this period (that is to say: the more he was with the knowledge of the world, the more quickly he dropped out of the official narrative of Covid, and vice versa).

For the first group, all the illusions listed above that were still blinding the subject did not collapse at the same time, but being intrinsically linked, like dominoes, the fall of one could only lead to that of the others. But these illusions fulfilled a role for the subject — as for the symptoms in neurosis -, assuring him a certain balance, precarious but necessary to life in society. This has not been without effect: their disappearance causes a form of imbalance in the person which can, roughly speaking, take two forms:

A personal disillusionment, which can manifest itself by depressive symptoms due to the collapse of a world, of this violent exit of the « Truman show », accentuated by a feeling of impotence;

a partial or complete change of life, anchored on the revealed certainty that the person was previously an active participant in the evil that must now be fought.

The awakening was brutal, which explains why some people still get lost in the labyrinth of the new found consciousness and go to pick here and there in all the available information, not always being able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, the perfect caricature being the one who will reject all « official » information and will acquiesce to the rest without checking (internet being also at this level a form of infinite reference of disinformation). Critical thinking is built over time.

The fact remains that Covid acted as a federator, a relational ferment that brought all those who disagreed with each other into agreement. The « end » of the Covid narrative revealed differences among people, galvanized as they were by the struggle against Covid omnipresence (and omnipotence). This is a good thing, as has been said, but it is also what marks the fragility of the construction. Because once the « great evil » Covid-19 has been removed from the media and political life (overnight, from the beginning of the war in Ukraine), people find themselves among themselves facing their differences. The focus on the Covid had indeed partially obscured who they were, and who they were not; they now discover that the other is sometimes different from what they thought, often idealized. The relegation of the C‑19 to the background of our lives, in addition to seeing a certain number of resistant people disappear, has thus brought to light conflicts and caused depressive passages that the overactivity had put on hold. This return of individual suffering has also been marked by an intellectual cacophony, where the flow of « new » information (new to the individual), creates a global confusion, making it go from 9/11 to gender ideology, stopping at man on the moon and the power of finance, without explaining — and sometimes understanding — each of these points too well.

We thus discover that the other was not only a being reduced to fight against the same thing as us — the Covid-19 Event -, that it is different, a third. And it is precisely this otherness, this difference, which tries to be denied today, the State wanting to reduce us to monads interchangeable at will, and modifiable to the liking of individual desires. All in agreement, all together.

What to do then? Realize that change will only be possible if everyone accepts to lose something. That all this will not be done without debate, without disagreement, without struggle, because as Slobodan Despot says in an interview to be published in the next Kairos[note],  » consensus is a foretaste of the peace of the cemeteries . However, we prefer to focus on what brings us together rather than on what can separate us. 

Those who want to impose their world on us want us to divide ourselves, to waste our time in quarrels that take us away from the most important thing, they also want us to be sad, good« consumer » subjects. 

Let’s not give them this gift. 

*This article is the second in a series on the state of the struggles. Find the first one here: https://www.kairospresse.be/les-fous-ne-sarreteront-pas/

« Only free men are very grateful to each other.« Spinoza
We have to agree: most of the blogs of the resistance (the « conspiracists », as the innumerable CIA offices established in the West to supervise almost all the mainstream media say), are often very badly written. My explanation on this subject is disarmingly simple: God (if you’ll pardon the expression) does not discriminate between people. Those who are struck by the grace of truth have won the lottery, period. They have been given the opportunity to feel the deep political truth of our apocalyptic era; no matter how they are extracted, they must participate in the unveiling of this truth. There is simply no choice: it is a task, a vocation that cannot be cut. Many educated people, scholars, graduates, etc., will have understood absolutely nothing about the crisis we have been going through for the last two and a half years; and many modest people, with hesitant spelling or syntax, « commoners » as Kant would have said to illustrate the notion of « respect » (basically: a big-headed scholar who does the opposite of what he or she says deserves nothing but contempt, an uneducated peasant who obeys the moral law with his or her finger respect), understood perfectly what it was all about. The truth speaks through their mouths, no matter how clumsy the language.

Thank God (if you’ll pardon the expression), there are also considerable talents of the pen in the resistance, and even genius. We will see that it is an understatement to say so. As Nerval wrote (and I quote from memory), the Republic of Letters is the only one that must be tinged with aristocracy: for the one of intelligence and talent will never be contested. The proof (roborative) right away.

But before we get into the subject immediately, let us note that the title of this article (« Our rentrée littéraire »), does not refer to any strict « actuality ». All the works I will report on have been published this year, but rather before the summer. This is salutary: if there is something that, for more than half a century, has predisposed us to attend without slackening the installation of a totalitarianism of which those of the twentieth century were only the antipastis, it is one of the principal predicates that Debord attributed to the society of the spectacle: what he called « the perpetual present ». « What the Show can stop talking about for three days is like that which does not exist. For it then speaks of something else, and so it is that which, in sum, exists. » In the insipid world of French literary people, it is quite the same: one « literary event » keeps chasing another, and, of all the media circus that has been covering all authentic intellectual life for half a century, there is never anything left. Daily newspaper supplements, award folklore, media tours… Everything is done so that truly singular, innovative writing never emerges, and leaves room for almost totally standardized and sanitized books, those that are so precisely called « current events ».

The last two and a half years have thus made official what I had sensed for a long time: from now on, everything important that is created, in literature as elsewhere, will be done, until an event of worldwide magnitude liberates us, in hiding. And this is, all in all, very good: in times of absolute consensual coercion (I always say that consensus is when the assholes suck our blood), of totalitarianism new lookFreedom and sovereignty, without which no creation worthy of the name is possible, must live hidden, in order to live happily. And, compared to the steamroller of the « perpetual present », to dig in societal basement another temporality, which escapes the sacrosanct « current events of the day ».

And the least luxury allowed by such a temporal hygiene is that, among the hundreds of books and the few dozens of magazines that I could read on the subject that concerns us (the « Covid », what else?), one can in the long run sort on the shutterand select only the very best, the cream of the crop, the literary VIPs of the resistance. We then see with wonder a real alternative culture taking shape, a kind of aristocraticunderground , with feathers all more incisive, original, and enthusiastic than the others. I have therefore chosen to chronicle three books and one review.

I’ll start with the most literary of all the books I’m going to talk about. It is a certain Guillaume Basquin, author of several essays (on cinema, on cult writers such as Jean-Jacques Schuhl or Jacques Henric), of a first « novel » which has nothing to do with a novel (Paper book), director of the Tinbad publishing house (where the book is published, 2022) and of an eponymous magazine (which I have not yet been able to consult) and a specialist of Joyce (and of many other things, as we shall see).

The book is entitled: The Splendid Story. What is it about? Let’s let the main person concerned speak, in the back cover: « The splendid story is (…) the title of a book project abandoned by Arthur Rimbaud. » Which « spent his days reading and writing at the British Museum », to make this book « a real success ».the true history, literally and in every sense« The last sentence is from Rimbaud himself. Basquin, in this noble wake, proposes to « tell in the most polyphonic way possible the real background of History, on more than forty centuries, until the global accident of the instantaneous communications that was the crisis of the coronavirus, while mixing the languages in a Babelian way ».

Excited by this attractive program, we open the book. The dedication that zeroes in on the very first page doesn’t beat around the bush, and sounds a bit like the « You who enter, leave all hope » that opens Dante’s The Divine Comedy :« For my conspiratorial friends, not for the public. » One continues, and here is that one finds oneself in front of a radical distortion of the syntax, the typographical rules, the current punctuation, etc.: « I imagine the beginning of a book / in the beginning was neither the verb nor the emotion nor the sex: in the beginning was the cum! I imagine the beginning of a book / in the beginning was neither the verb nor the emotion nor the sex: in the beginning was the cum! & the cum was in the man ». We are on the move. From the outset, references that will recur throughout this book-monster telescope: the rhythm of Céline, the verbal syncopations of Guyotat. But we will meet many other references in this whirlwind text: Dante, Rimbaud, Guyotat and Joyce of course, the Bible, Greek and Roman authors, Hegel, Marx, Villon, Shakespeare, Sade, Chateaubriand, Lautréamont, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Artaud, Debord, Sollers, Daney, Canetti, Deleuze, Beckett, Schuhl, Boccaccio, Proust, Orwell, Huxley, Melville, Rabelais, Cervantes, Agamben, Pasolini, Genet, Hölderlin, Foucault, Burroughs, and so on.

This avalanche of authors, to which Basquin does not hesitate to measure himself to show us that he does not have the covid of the eyes, are as well abundantly cities throughout the torrential textual flow that grabs the reader by the throat from the very first page: but without ever the slightest quotation marks, and without most of the time saying whose sentence it is. It’s a kind of blind test for the literate reader, a kind of Sollers with sympathetic ink (Sollers exasperated a whole part of the public of his time by spending his time quoting the authors they read; not me, so exquisite is his taste in the selection of quotations: he is a virtuoso scholar of the rarest kind, comparable only to Borgès) One thinks especially of Isidore Ducasse, the real civic name of the Count of Lautréamont: « Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. » And so to Debord and the situationists, great readers of Lautréamont: what they called détournement, that is to say, extracting a sentence from its context and placing it elsewhere, like a textual Marcel Duchamp. Walter Benjamin, a major writer-philosopher who will return more than once in this article, dreamed of making a book that would be composed of nothing but quotations; and Thomas Mann spoke of human existence as being a « life in quotation », which was a good idea, especially in these times: some prefer to quote the WHO, governments and the media mainstream, others prefer to quote Rimbaud, Artaud or Debord. There is some of this in L’histoire splendide, but in « trance » mode. And so I’ll do the same thing in abyme: this article will be largely « quotational » (but with quotation marks!). More generally, I will quote a lot of passages from the authors I review, to make people want to read them.

The real killer of The Splendid Story, which makes it irresistible, is its pace. Intoxicating, varied, virtuoso, it is he who envelops all the other immense qualities of the text (style, encyclopedism, modern lyricism, implacable lucidity on the time). This is why, more than Lautréamont, even more than Joyce, it is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (an unjustly ignored classic of Anglo-Saxon literature in French-speaking countries) that L’histoire splendide reminds us most of. The same constant cheerfulness of tone, the same airy grace of phrase, the same digressive freedom, the same almost psychedelic burlesque.

The book is divided into five parts. In the beginningThe first, whose opening sentence we quoted above, is a sort of hallucinated self-presentation of the author, coupled with an exposition of his project, resolutely turned, like a war machine, against the franchouillarde merchandise sold under the label of « novel »: « to limit oneself to a single story — a story — what an overignominy! » Later in the book, Basquin will say that « the novel as conceived by almost all my colleagues — colleagues in quotation marks that I cannot render here without this periphrase — is a moribund & worn-out genre by repetitions — of no interest to me — fi of the traditional plot! » No, this novel for newsstands (i.e. of the same level as the indigestible propaganda paper they contain), very little for Basquin (further on he will write: « there is no difference in substance between a newspaper & a vomitory: when one has puked it up / one feels better / & there is no other possible treatment »). These novels do everything to spare their reader’s comfort, in the sense of railway of freedom (« you are free to go where I tell you to go » says to us in substance the system since two years and a half, that is to say since always), is what the mass tourism is to the expedition in Amazonia. No, because « nothing is more frightening than a labyrinth that has no center — this book is exactly that labyrinth ». This literary Amazonian jungle, this real textual UFO in the current editorial train, we have it well and truly at hand. The proofs in a row.

The second part of the book is entitled, appropriately enough, « A Thousand Novels ». It takes the lion’s share of the books. It is divided, indeed, in thousand fragments, whose durations go from a few words to a few tens of scandalized sentences, there again without traditional punctuation, and of a poetry sometimes almost unbearable: « the knowledge killed the sun / & transformed it into a ball of gas / sown with spots — the knowledge killed the moon: it is not any more but a small dead earth — riddled with extinct volcanoes as by the small pox ». Or again: « I am a swallower not of swords, but of sabers — I compile the Egyptian mysteries / the Greek & Latin oracles / the rites and predictions of the Druids ». Or again: « incantation is the original form of poetry — & that’s why Pierre Guyotat was one of the greatest poets of the last half-century: the soldiers / helmeted / open legs / trample / restrained muscles / newborns swaddled in scarlet shawls ». You’d think you were there, especially in these times…

Nuggets like that, you will find hundreds of them in this river-fractal, abyssal part. This whole part makes us think of an equivalent, in language experience, to the Descent into the Maelstrom of Poe, my poet of bedside, and that Basquin could have perfectly « diverted » in his metapoetic symphony: « The edge of the whirlpool was bordered by a broad belt of luminous foam; but not a parcel slipped into the mouth of the terrible funnel, the interior of which, as far as the eye could plunge there, was made of a liquid wall, polished, brilliant and of a jet black (.…), turning on itself under the influence of a dizzying movement », and so on. It is exactly this kind of dizzying sensations that the reader of The Splendid Story is exposed to, mentally. And he asks for more.

I have deliberately used the word durations above : so much the question of musicality, one will have understood it, is essential to understand the nature of this book. There is regularly, in mirror, a side of « Traité du style », and this new rhythm that one meets in Basquin’s writing is explained point by point, for example the reasons why he maltreats the punctuation: « the punctuation it is the clutch / the clutch of the writing — the equivalent of the claws of the projector in the system of the cinematograph — ». Then, « 243: for a new bookish physics: the book will be quantum or it won’t be! » And Basquin totally keeps his promise: it is impossible, in a small article, to even scratch the surface of the poetic, semantic, epistemological and cognitive wealth of such a book. The equivalent, indeed, of a quantum bomb on the brain. To make the transition to the third part (and also to the fifth), let us quote fragment 216: « zombie comes from the Creole zombi which designates a dead person who has risen from the grave & made a slave of a voodoo sorcerer: this sorcerer’s name is for example Bill Gates ». That’s poetry in the strongest sense: to say everything, in one sentence. And, here, the entirety of an era is summarized in a single sentence as lightning.

I promise you, but this is the most impossible thing to put in an article: it is the way Basquin manages to make periods drawn from forty centuries of anthropological journeys collide. For example, fragment 57: « during the international crisis of covid-19 / nothing was more stupefying than the whole masked Chinese PC — the postmodern Gorgon appeared to us well under this form — very few were those to oppose him / like Perseus formerly / a modern magic shield: to close all the taps all the pipes / absolutely infected / of the continuous information ». Or again, even more dense and tangled, fragment 639: « in Epidemics / real dangers & false alarms by Pr. Didier Raoult I learn this: Napoleon’s Grand Army / during its retreat from Russia / was largely decimated by a typhus epidemic spread by lice — about 30% of the soldiers were infected according to a retrospective study by taking samples from the teeth of corpses in a cemetery in Vilnius — Raoult reminds us of an episode of War & Peace of Tolstoy where Peter observes the enemy soldiers throwing their lice into the fire / which cracks — as if very often epidemics play a considerable role in History / killing most of the time much more than weapons / from the Peloponnesian War to the Great War of 14–18 / passing by the invasions of the Americas by our forefathers — & if / in this crisis of the covid-19 / China had defeated us without shooting a single bullet? » Or, less historically dense, but even more edifying for today: « finally / and after much reflection / the worldwide reaction to the new coronavirus resembles in many aspects (CONfinements and masks for all) the so-called four pests campaign — rats / flies / mosquitoes & sparrows — from 1958 to 1962 in China when Mao decided the killing of all birds flying in the sky of the People’s Republic of China & that because the birds of the sky were stealing the wheat / corn & rice grains that belonged to men — verbatim: our comrades must kill the birds because they are thieves and no one steals the food of the citizens with impunity / I say: not even the birds of the air have the right to steal the bread of men & working animals / & if the birds don’t understand this / then we kill them all / as we kill criminals — every Chinese comrade has the right to kill the bird that dares to land on the soil of the People’s Republic to steal grain — but when there were no more birds in China to eat the worms & but when there were no more birds in China to eat the worms & insects / locusts devoured the crops & the land of China produced nothing — all the crops were compromised & there was a great famine & the country of China became desolate & ruined: 30 million starved to death — that’s what happens when you see things from one angle — lack of dialectical thinking & great leaps forward often breed monsters & produce the Evil you didn’t want to do. » I would simply contest the last point: it is not at all sure that Mao, who was more of a perverse sadist than a « well-meaning » psychotic like Hitler or Stalin (because Hitler and Stalin wanted to The fact that Mao, who had been in power for a long time, and who was sincerely concerned about the good of his people, and therefore « sticks » much more to Basquin’s conclusion than the case of Mao), did not bring down this absolute calamity, along with a few others (Cultural Revolution, etc.), on his country in a completely deliberate way. In any case, one can only appreciate the relevance of the comparison with what we have been enduring for the last two and a half years, and which makes one think of Pr Perronne’s remark: as if, in order to chase a fly out of the room, we had set the house on fire. This is why Mao’s famous phrase, which his groupies repeat over and over again, « a spark can set the plain on fire », has always seemed to me to have been understood in the wrong way, as a call to revolt which, by some lucky butterfly effect, could turn into an insurrection. Rather, it appears to me, in retrospect, as the perverse syllogism of the most convinced and self-conscious exterminationism ever. And if you replace « Mao » with « Gates », you can no longer have any doubt about the intentional nature of these policies of devastation; but I’ll come back to that later.

Let’s have a feast among friends, by concluding the chronicle of the most seismic part of the book, the richest, the most infinite (it’s a book I’ll reread regularly all my life, like all the classics), by this tribute to philosophy (but Basquin can have some pretty harsh words about it, cf. fragment 384, I will answer him elsewhere), and a dedication by proxy: « philosophy teaches us to doubt what seems obvious to us — propaganda / on the contrary / teaches us to accept as obvious what it would be reasonable to doubt — Aldous Huxley — any resemblance with the current situation of covid-19 would of course be quite fortuitous I dedicate this thought to Jean-Dominique Michel ».

The third part, therefore. It is soberly entitled Terror, and intends to establish the roots of the evil that has been eating away at us for decades, and has been exposed to the public since March 2020. It is, of course, the revolutionary Terror, initiated during the French Revolution and continued until Pol Pot or the Shining Path, passing through fascism and Nazism, to culminate in an absolute way in covidism, covidiotism, covidarchy or covidocracy, as one will want to call it. From the very first lines of this part (« since the world is the world & since men kill each other, never a crime has been committed without its author having found an appeasement & I knew that I would meet the names of not only Nietzsche, but Joseph de Maistre, Baudelaire’s favorite essayist, specialized in the polemic against the French Revolution, and a stylist of the first rank (like all the authors I am talking about here). Bingo.

As a philosopher, I like in art (literature, music, painting, cinema…) the strength to violently deport myself out of my comfort zone, to see if my conceptual conceptions are robust enough to resist such experiences. I say this in passing, because this third part is undoubtedly the most philosophical of the book.

The insights are in any case dazzling: « it is in the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that we ended up cutting the necks of young priests & enthusiastic young noblemen — it is in the name of Karl Marx that the Stalinist dictatorship spilled torrents of workers’ blood — & it is in the name of the boomers that we destroyed a year of our youth’s life in 2020–21 ». So be it! Impeccable diagnosis, and without appeal. But it cannot be ruled out that Rousseau or Marx (as well as Darwin, for example) have been made to say a lot of things that they never said. We will come back to this in its place. What counts here is the transition to the denouement of the book, the « sanitary crisis »: « there seems to be nothing left but the Terror to make us think that something is still going on & that’s why the covid-19 has occupied so much the pages of the media: the sanitary Terror is the last fight between men ».

We approach the denouement, with an « intermission » (Why I write such good booksagain, « hijacking » a chapter of theEcce homo of Nietzsche), a fourth part that fits in two pages: the fifth part, entitled « Diary of Containment » (well seen!), which begins as follows: « in the beginning was the virus close to the Big Bang clap ». A torrent follows, as at the end ofUlysse of Joyce, of prose devoid of the slightest punctuation: an « interior monologue » on the delirious and irrational world of the covid-19, and its grotesque parody of the Kantian categorical imperative (« live, think and act, in all circumstances, in such a way as not to catch the flu »). Even if Basquin went, in the antepenultimate part, of his diatribes against the French Revolution, there is here a small side « Committee of Semantic Public Salvation », and the nominal guillotine is at least generous. The whole world of Davosian biopolitical collaboration is represented: Macron, Buyzin, Véran, Lacombe, Preciado, Barrau, Salomon, Cohen, Thunberg, Cohn-Bendit, Zizek, Blanquer, Coccia, Bergoglio, Depraz… The heads roll one after the other at the feet of the reader, to his great delight. I’m not going to talk here about catharsis, of which I’m a specialist, but I don’t think less of it; and here, it’s very heavy, and very good.

There are still many vibrant tributes to the Jean Moulin of contemporary biopolitics, namely Didier Raoult, the most defamed public figure of all time in the French-speaking world. Let’s rewind a bit to the second part, which set the tone: « Professor Raoult invited to Pujadas at LCI / best of : there is no science without intellectual conflict — there is no scientific progress without polemics (from the Greek polemos / war / then polemikos / which concerns war) — defeatism (nothing can be done / so stay home & take Doliprane) / it’s the same as Pétain in 1940 facing the Germans: a cowardly capitulation: there is nothing more to do / we surrender: very little for him — I salute you here / old Raoult! »(The wink here — I spoke earlier about blind test with sympathetic ink — is to the Songs of Maldoror, where a whole sequence chants « Hail, old Ocean! »).

Let’s go back to the concluding part, which quotes Raoult himself: « when the informant multiplies by 20 a risk of mortality & divides by 100 another risk we are no longer in an exaggeration we are in another fucking world Dr Raoult we think all the same you are a genius ». On the other side, the message is rather: « you are all going to shut your mouth or fuck it (…) the absolute dream as no totalitarian state has ever dreamed of ».

The book concludes with a biting Epilogue , where the « normal » punctuation is finally restored. There are concrete proposals to give back to all the collabos of the « covid crisis » the change of their coin, and that I leave to the reader’s dilection.

Because that’s what it’s all about: the first world civil war in our history, as I’ve been saying to the public for a year and a half. Basquin : « it’s like guerrilla warfare as theorized by T.E. Lawrence of Arabia : a rebellion can be led by 2% active elements & 98% passive sympathizers — the few active rebels must possess qualities of speed / endurance & ubiquity / as well as the technical independence necessary to destroy or paralyze enemy communications ». First target: « the idiot in chief Bill Gates ». If you think I’m enthusiastic, think again: rereading myself, I still find myself too tender with this announced, and absolute, masterpiece of the history of literature; if of course the earth has not been transformed into a radioactive crater by then, so that Ukraine can enter NATO.

Let’s move on to the second book, Les indomptables, subtitled: Au-delà de l’effondrement (Talma, Paris, 2022), and prefaced by Louis Fouché. The author, Tristan Edelman, is a « total work of art » in his own right: before being a new and prominent writer, he is a choreographer, musician and energeticist. He has the IQ of an Oxford physicist, the erudition of Borgès, the physique of a Greek god (he is fifty years old, but one would give him just thirty-five). The common thread of his book, also very digressive and multi-polar (but in a very different style from the previous one, more intimate and slower), is the death of his two parents.

The book is in the form of a Journal. One thinks of an improbable mix of Montaigne (for the eclecticism and the variety of styles used), of Lévi-Strauss (for the meticulousness of the anthropological details) and of Genet of Journal du voleur (for a certain poetics of wandering). It is divided into two parts: Niki and Bernard. These are the two first names of his parents; in the case of his mother, it is an abbreviated nickname for « Nicole-Edith ». Both of Tristan’s parents died in 2020, the fateful year we all know, so this is a book of mourning, a kind of free-face death poem.

The first part accompanies Niki’s long agony through countless hospitals, each more sinister and cruel than the last. This breakdown of the health care institution precedes the « covid crisis, » as the book begins in January 2020. As soon as Tristan’s mother enters the system, she begins to experience a real way of the cross, a medical Golgotha. One thinks very strongly of Sokourov’s sublime film (argh! a Russian! Rauss!), Mother and Son, of which Les indomptables would be a kind of literary remake .

What Tristan’s prose shows is the decay of not only the public but also the private hospital: « The private one is necessarily better, since we pay a lot. They have acquired the latest high-performance technical equipment for pneumopathy; let’s not be picky. The most important thing: equipment, efficiency, expertise and money! Humans are secondary, harmful: they make mistakes. » Tristan falls from the sky, and quickly realizes that the private sector is not catching up with the public sector in any way. « I enter the clinic. A filth made of sterilizations and invisible detritus. I want to puke. Too many people. Immigration is piling up. A tension in the waiting and in the reception. Saturated staff seem to wander by chance. » He goes to his mother’s room. « At the bottom of the bed, entangled in the dirty pipes, bathed in a yellowish chiaroscuro, with that lingering smell of urine and bleach, I glimpse my mother’s face. Staring intently at the wall, she bites her lips. Underfed, abused, ignored, she struggles with depression. In a few days, she has lost a lot of weight. »

Faced with this private fiasco, our hero (what else can we call him?) takes his mother away from this lousy clinic to Bichat. The catastrophic reception, the interminable wait, the impossibility of knowing in time what was happening to her mother are described: in the end, « two consecutive strokes. The first in the private clinic Pasteur before the passage in the ambulance, where she loses the use of the body, the second in the public hospital Bichat, during the admission where she loses the use of speech. »

Tristan oscillates from then on between chronicle of the hospital ordeal, and retrospective digressions where he draws up the portrait of his mother: her passion of the first hour for political activism (and the numerous related readings, in particular Marx and Lenin), her complex relationship to the word and to writing, the obsessive link which unites her to the truth and to reality, her passion for psychoanalysis, her sickly modesty: « Unable to get physically close to her children, unable to express her emotions directly, unable to contact her wounded body and her failing memory, she had listened to the depths of her word until she melted into it. »

Tristan sees every day, ever more appalled, that the hospital is doing his mother far more harm than good: « I should have kept her at home! » It turns out that we have the real subject of the book, a subject that is particularly close to my heart in my philosophical work: Evil (System of the Pleonectic, Diaphanes, Berlin, 2020, eponymous entry). « The words of Hanna Arendt, « Banalization of evil », resonate differently: the more massive the crime, the less it is considered a crime. It becomes a fatality that leads to resignation. One of the effects of industrialization is to make crime odorless. To make it politically correct by means of blackmail, infantilization and guilt-tripping. To set in motion a cascade of disaccountability which falls on the citizen, so that he feels guilty of a barbarity which escapes him. Sometimes, we open our eyes. The future of an awareness. In my case: through pain. » One thinks here very strongly of Nietzsche’s word: « To understand the world from suffering: that is the tragic. »

Because yes! There is indeed, in Tristan’s book, the rediscovery of the way, forgotten by the philosophical tradition (from the exclusion by Plato of the Poet out of the City), of a tragic wisdom. Here again, nothing that could touch my philosophical fiber more: since I work in the wake of those who, like Hölderlin, Schürmann or Lacoue-Labarthe, will have wanted to reopen the access to this tragic knowledge that the essential of the philosophical tradition will have wanted to forget.

« Here, then, the health system is destroying Mam: intubation, artificial ventilation, taking anticoagulants late in life, endless protocols, examinations, antibiotics, injections, impossibility of sleep and recovery, poor nutrition, misdiagnosis, erroneous information, lack of nursing staff, lack of beds… Result: physical and mental decay. » And such is the « modern tragedy » according to Schürmann: the pathetic . Already two centuries ago, Hölderlin had genially announced what would be this « pathetic condition » of the modern subject: where the tragic death, for the Greeks, took a flamboyant, heroic and sacred form, we, we are summoned to raze the biopolitical walls, and to endure an atone, miserable and sordidly profane death: « Because it is there the tragedy, for us, that we leave the world of the living, packed in a simple box ». What Jean Beaufret still called, commenting rightly Hölderlin, the « tragedy of the slow death ».

As expected, the pandemic and its even more deleterious effects, like a kind of cerebral Theban plague, are invited into the modern Tragedy of « covid-19 ». From biopolitics, the reflections of the book slowly but surely slide towards politics, tout court: the « instrumentalization of the Covid virus » is organized everywhere so that, « from the fear of death and blackmail to social survival, an oligarchy always more concentrated, relying on the confidence and the submission of the crowds, organizes the terror. This has as its goal a banal restructuring of industrial Capital towards digital, the training of peoples for collective normalization, the acceleration of the utopia of the new man in the mode of cyberconformism. »

Here I irresistibly thought of the words of a contemporary thinker, philosopher and psychoanalyst, whom I have followed closely for more than two decades, and who answers to the name of Pierre-Henri Castel. His public silence about the events of the last two and a half years surprises me, so much what he wrote these last years, which is an innovative and sharp analysis, there again, of the question of Evil, was prophetic (I advise in particular, and all business, the reading of one of the most important books of philosophy of the last years, Pervers, analysis of a concept, Ithaques, Paris, 2015). Let’s judge instead: « It would be absolutely unreasonable, it would even be politically absurd and dangerous not to start from this hypothesis: the powerful know. They didn’t wait to read this. This is why, instead of talking about insensitivity and blindness, or even denial or auto-intoxication with pseudo-science, we should also seriously consider, in the face of the Evil that is coming, the possibility of a conscious and deliberate lie on the part of a few whose interest we underestimate, not only in denying, but in aggravate (to their benefit) social and natural imbalances. For (…) it is enough that only a few of us go ahead of us today on the path of our growing certainty of the end, and all the very real practical effects of this growing certainty will follow in cascade, up to the last ones, that is, to the worst. »(Le Mal qui vient, Cerf, Paris, 2018).

Like Basquin, Tristan observes the shipwreck of the overwhelming majority of intellectuals in the face of the blatant installation of a delirious biopolitical tyranny, with a scathing irony: « New blow of fate: the millennium virus! Without surprise, here are our ersatz intellectuals of the left who go straight to confine themselves by criticizing from their balconies « the bad management ». Always their balconies. Very few have questioned the total confinement and the madness of the 2.0 project which is as big as Pinocchio’s nose in the middle of the face. There is indignation after the fact. We criticize afterwards. We think afterwards. (…) They who speak of « event », of « situation », of « capital », of « fascism »… well… when that happens under their big tense nose, they remain interdicts. The beak nailed. A yellow vest, a crown virus, a lot of cops in the street, and here they are, staggering with their mouths open. The same people who were doing acrobatics about the free secular Republic without a veil on their face, here they are bawling in a plastic mask, a dose of artificial RNA in their blood and a QR code as a tattoo. » Cruel and severe, but perfectly fitting. The left-wing intellectual roars like a lion, but acts like a sheep.

Tristan then accosts (after very beautiful asides on his long stays in Vanuata and Brazil) the crucial event that were, for him, the Yellow Vests. He denounces the slanderous work of the media, the fierce repression of the government, as well as the misunderstanding of the overwhelming majority of the left, « radicals » included. As a yellow vest told me one day: « The extreme left? They are white bourgeois graduates, who only speak to other white bourgeois graduates, while claiming to speak of the people, for the people and in the name of the people ». Tristan’s Marxist-Leninist mother, after a very brief moment of hesitation due to her ideological formation, joined the movement and threw herself into the arena of rallies, demonstrations and traffic circles. « For a Marxist-Leninist like my mother (…), it was unbelievable to listen to her defend the peasants and not only the workers, to defend the small entrepreneurs and shopkeepers and not only the wage earners and the civil servants, to defend the whites and not only the immigrants »: I know some who, on the side of the bourgeoisie of the « radical chic », should learn from it… The analysis that Tristan develops on the Yellow Vests is one of the most accurate, in the sense of accuracy and in the sense of justice (hello Etienne! Chouard by name), that I have ever read from the pen of an intellectual.

The denouement itself begins, as in any tragedy: the end of the medicalized agony, the implosive death in the Hölderlinian « box ». These are pages of anthology. « In the center of the twilight between dog and wolf, I wake up. When the terrible hour whispers the secrets of your life. The signs line the windows. The gaps of the shutters write what must be written. (…) I return in her room. I place myself beside her. Suddenly, she stands up and takes my hand. She looks me straight in the eyes. (…) It is the strongest moment of my life. The most striking. A brand that you discover and that has always been there. A brand that accompanies you from birth. Maybe even before. The seal of continuity between life and death, between birth and the end. That from which, outside the grammar and logic of linear time, the flow of memories is elaborated. Listen to this silent mark. I listen to this silence. Here is the crucial point of a life and of an era. The ultimate meeting point of the transmission. The last message, the key to the enigma. I listen to this link on which we imagine the wildest and most contradictory constructions. » I can only encourage the reader to discover the following, which is truly sublime, in the sense of philosophical of the adjective: that which exceeds on all sides our capacity to measure an event, that which puts in failure our reason, that which carries the meaning of the words to the limit of the syncope.

Let’s move on to the second part, entitled Bernard, after his father’s first name: and that’s why I have always said Tristan here, and not Edelman. This is not out of misplaced familiarity (well, a little, and I’ll conclude this article on that!), but because Father Edelman was a jurist and essayist of great renown (« to the point of being designated by his peers — during his lifetime — as the greatest French jurist »). It seemed to me that in all respects, given the nature of the book, it was more appropriate to call him by his first name (Tristan of course, not Bernard).

Incipit The forced isolation of confinement exasperated melancholy, physical deterioration and the need for contact. Many of the older people who lived through World War II let themselves deteriorate during confinement. This is known as the slippage syndrome. They do not want to relive the absolute horror. The sensation of such a repetition is unbearable. They prefer to consciously or unconsciously let themselves slip — to death. »

Bernard Edelman is one of the victims of the « slip syndrome ». He is Jewish. He is a legal genius. He understands perfectly well what is taking place. His son visits him, he can’t write anymore, he wanders in his library like a ghost, himself haunted by his own memories: horror in abyme. He said to his son: « You see, during the war, when I was a hidden child, I experienced bonds as a threat. Today, everything is done to destroy the bonds. Before, I was in the cellar, now I’m in solitary. I am a helpless witness to isolation through terror. I feel like I’m going backwards. I don’t envy you my son. You’re in the prime of your life and you’re going to have to deal with an end of the world. »

Tristan then begins to retrace the path of the Ashkenazi Jew who is anxious to assimilate to France: he must show his love for France, for the Republic, for the institutions, and above all for « Europe-the-good-idea », which today leads us to the worst catastrophes imaginable. This « categorical imperative » of the newly-educated immigrant, Tristan explains, can only lead to a state of permanent anxiety: «  ‘the integrated’ will have to show the greatest possible zeal, but there is always more, and no one is indispensable.

Comes the Augustan, or Rousseauist, part of the confessional part. To give an idea of the intimate bond between him and his father, Tristan does not mince words: « My father took care of me like a mother. A Jewish mother who fills you up without worrying about your ability to receive. » Bernard keeps projecting himself into Tristan, « who puts you on top while you are still dragging yourself down ». « Then comes puberty: you are suddenly a rival, a wild animal. (…) However, Der mamen (in Yiddish, mom in all her glory) always wishes the best for you and, above all, that you be the best, even though it will always be impossible to be better than her. » Everything is said in this typically Jewishly humorous sentence (Tristan, even though he is not initially « technically » Jewish since his mother was goyim, was converted to Judaism, by ds Lubavitchs). But it’s not over yet, little Tristan is still growing. And, as a teenager, we move into the « all stepmom and no dad » phase. Let us judge rather: « The father is absent behind the Balzacian stepmother. It is no longer fashionable feminiarchy but an old school matriarchy : untimely judgments, acts of verbal violence, physical assaults, military rituals, food punishments, confinement, seclusion, psychological belittlement… »

Here, one is entitled to wonder if the fact that Tristan’s mother was a goyim does not explain this early « mortal transference » of the father into the figure of a « whipping mother », as Tristan also says (I have written a lot about sadomasochism in my philosophical work, we can talk about it again). Let’s remember that Niki, the mother, was a psychoanalyst, and that Tristan told us about her extreme modesty and her total stinginess in terms of physical signs of affection. The father coming to substitute himself, baldly as it is necessary, to the lack left by the maternal function, the result was run in advance. I may be wrong in this exercise of wild psychoanalysis; let Tristan prove me wrong.

Here, for dozens of pages, begins a « novel within a novel », more exactly a book within a book, since it is not a novel, and even more exactly a novel within a book, but not just any novel: a novel in the form of a dialogue, as was done in the eighteenth century. I might as well say that this is the most philosophical passage of the book, and therefore the one that speaks to me the most; and, for this very reason, it is the one I will speak about the least (as with Basquin…). Because, as in those dialogical novels of the eighteenth century, in the manner of Diderot (one scandalously underestimates the crucial importance that Rameau’s Nephew or Jacques the Fatalist had on the German philosophy that was to follow by a generation), the subject is almost impossible to summarize in a brief space. So I admit to myself that I am defeated: these dialogues are so dense, so rich in intellectual nuggets, that I give up trying to render their content. Above all, they obey a logic that is so specific to them, and the whole of the comments, on nearly forty pages, are so closely related to each other (i.e. it is impossible to understand the content of such and such a page without having read the whole I’ll just draw up a kind of (non-exhaustive) menu: starting with an essay on the fable of the wolf and the lamb, we’ll discuss themes as diverse and as hot as private property (hello Davos), reason and instinct, law, war, bioethics, technoscience, transhumanism, culture, the wage-earning system, progressivism, neoliberalism, sacrifice, intellectuals…

As with the previous part, the denouement arrives with velvet steps. Tristan describes how, long before the « Covid crisis », his father accepts his own death, first resolving to be a civic undead. « He knew that human madness could come back at any time and turn everything upside down. That it could erupt again and send you to the death camps. » Penetrating considerations on the relationship to language follow: « France was the French language. The French language was its first and last reference point. Writing was the consecration of the language. Its shield against reality, its escape from reality. » This whole passage speaks to me, who learned everything in Arabic until the age of eight: the French language as a weapon. « Rationality was an effective weapon, but language had the last word. To write well is to think well (…) Modernity hates language. It prefers the algorithm. »

The father’s agony thus begins with a loss of confidence in the prophylactic powers of language: « I saw his blood flow into the cartridges of the pen, his skin melt into the papers of the books, and his soul leave for the melancholy heights of the utopian sign. (…) When he confided in me, ‘I can no longer find meaning in writing,’ I understood that this was serious. He had lost the axis of his life. The end was near. He was no longer moving from his pigeonhole, his ivory tower, his tomb. (…) I understood that if I wanted to have — at last — a real dialogue with my father, I had to go back, and dive in my turn, to the holy place of the crime, where he had disappeared in the greatest discretion: his library. » A few poems follow: one by Bernard, one by Niki, one by Tristan. Curtain.

The book concludes with an epilogue, which begins as follows: « Time of crisis. Dear friends are dying. Too many brutal myocarditis and rapidly degenerating cancers. I am in permanent mourning. (…) Governments try to impose the idea that being a citizen with full rights is a temporary merit and that becoming a second-class citizen, an outcast, an outcast is a choice. » Tristan then describes the innumerable positive encounters he has had with the covidist swindle, to rebuild the world on a healthy basis, building new associative structures on all levels: « We understand, with our commando of jurists, parliamentarians, journalists, heads of networks and organizers of demonstrations, that we have arrived at the limit of the law, of democracy, of free information and claims. When a government crushes, with undisguised pleasure, the Constitution, the liberties, the information and the people, it is necessary to move on to another form of counter-power along with another form of society. « Amen.

The third and last book canonized by this column announces the color without sparing us: La fin du monde moderne, by Salim Laïbi (Fiat Lux, Marseille, 2020). Of all the authors we deal with here, Laïbi is, by far, the one with the most sulphurous reputation. Because of his past frequented pans (Soral, Dieudonné, Nabe…), because of his pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism, Laïbi is a golden example of what Debord called a « bad reputation »(Cette mauvaise réputation, Gallimard, Paris, 1993), in intellectual circles and far beyond He may have explained himself at length, and not with the spoon, about his past mistakes (Nabe has a foaming hatred for him, Soral considers him today as his « worst enemy in the world »); he may have developed, via dozens of authors from his very fine publishing house (Fiat Lux), a very intelligent, learned and rational vision of Islam and « Arabness », nothing has done. In the society of the Spectacle, the most normative that ever was, despite its incessant and hollow promotion of « democracy », « plurality » and « tolerance », reputation and brand image are everything, anathema and excommunication, without appeal.

I don’t care, or nothing. In these apocalyptic and genocidal times, no one will prevent me from seeing Salim (we did an interview, at his request, on my Colaricocovirus (Exuvie, Thervay, 2022); he didn’t know me until then, I knew him), nor especially from saying the greatest good of his work For a very simple reason: Salim is in my eyes a Hero and a Righteous, just like, say, Dr Perrone or Dr Mac Cullough, Dr Zelenko or Dr Ochs. This man is saving lives, and not just a few. He is, and has been for a longer time than those I have just mentioned, one of the most formidable whistleblowers active in France today; for this, there is almost a price on his head in the mainstream media. In particular, his knowledge of the criminal workings of the pharmaceutical industry has very few equivalents not only in our country, but worldwide.

Laïbi writes as he speaks (he makes many digital programs that are very followed in the entire French-speaking world): with a gouaille sui generis. His language is a kind of Algerian Creole where the French language is constantly contaminated by improbable turns of phrase, imprecise adjectives, incongruous punctuations, brilliant neologisms (the « doctators », the « zeticians »). There really is a « Laibi slang ». Since French is clearly not Salim’s first language, he visits French as a alienand, as Deleuze would have said, it « makes the language stutter » from the inside, which is the condition, adds Deleuze, of all style. Hence the almost always « tightrope walker » character of the Laibian sentence: at any moment it threatens to lose its balance and to fall, and it always finds in extremis a strange expression that « catches » it at the last moment, and gives the whole sentence its drawstring singular. The Laibian sentence does not cease to stumble, and however always ends up falling on its feet, in the metric sense of the term: there still, it is this absolute unicity of the rhythm of the sentences of an author which strikes them of the seal of the style.

The style being the man, as everyone knows, Salim’s explosive temperament in life is transferred to his writing, whose energy irresistibly infects the reader, plunging him into a strange euphoria, despite the horror of all that is described. And for good reason: more than any other author on the subject, Salim has chosen to treat it with burlesque, with a panoramic scope worthy of a grand opera (like Wagner, or Richard Strauss first period): so we laugh a lot while reading this book to the disproportion of its subject. For maximum comic effect, Salim never stops using the psychiatric register: in fact, March 2020 marks the date in the history of humanity when the whole world went totally mad (with, as an experimental preview a few months earlier, the China of Xi Jiping, Bill Gates’ friend). The book describes an open-air planetary asylum, and it’s as hilarious as a Monthy Python sketch on LSD.

It is thus by a striking paradox that Laïbi joins the great « monsters » of the French language that were Rabelais or Céline, so terribly droll too, and with whom Salim shares a stratospheric sense of imprecation (jealous, Marc-Edouard? Hold on to the brush, I’m taking off the ladder). Proud of his « Arabness » like Artaban, Laïbi is nevertheless a French author, in the fullest sense of the adjective. Yes, we are dealing with a phenomenon that defies the laws of nature, a sort of modern Leon Bloy muslim .

Moreover, of the three books chronicled here, The End of the Modern World is by far the most extraordinarily documented and sourced. Blended into an incoherent verbal flow, we get a kind of messy and exhilarating French equivalent of the instant classic of another Hero, Robert F. Kennedy Junior, and his The Real Antony Fauci (Children Health Defense, Peachtree, 2021): once you have read both, it is difficult to know who is better than the other in terms of encyclopedic knowledge of « covidology ». They are, in any case, two irreplaceable epistemological and cognitive bibles for the fight we are all leading together (« Yeah! Yeah! »).

The book is divided into six chapters, a conclusion, plus numerous appendices. For reasons of textual economy (this article is already quite long!); because the first chapter takes the lion’s share (almost half of the book!); because the whole book is, I repeat, an inexhaustible geyser of knowledge impossible to summarize in an article; but, above all, because the five other chapters deal with something else than the « Covid Crisis ». Strictly speaking, I will content myself here, to make the reader’s mouth water, with going through this chapter, plus a comment on the conclusion, and a few words on the swarming appendices.

This first chapter is soberly entitled: Covid-19 and the media. Laïbi had not read Debord when he wrote this book (he seems to have made up for it since then, following our intervention), but finally, his analysis places him in line with the situationist critique of the Spectacle. I told you there was a lot of laughter in this book, and Laibi starts off very strong, highlighting an anonymous quote from the internet: « The third dose increases immunity, so after the fourth dose you are protected. Once 80% of the population has received the fifth dose, restrictions can be relaxed, because the sixth dose prevents the virus from spreading. I am calm and believe that the seventh dose will solve our problems and we have no reason to fear the eighth dose. The clinical phase of the ninth dose confirms that the antibodies remain stable after the tenth dose. The eleventh dose ensures that no new mutations will develop, so there is no longer any reason to criticize the idea of the twelfth dose. »

The chapter begins by beating the chronology of the film-catastrophe scenario « Covid » (because we know that it was indeed a story written in advance, a « plandemy »). Like Michel Jonasz in the jazz box, Laïbi immediately launches into the description of « Absurdistan », when for example « we learn that a libertine sauna is congratulated by the police for its respect of the sanitary protocol, whereas the restaurants are still closed since 10 months! The Ferris wheel of Lille will be allowed to turn, but without an audience! »

Laïbi then goes on to dissect point by point (and, I repeat, his knowledge of the question is truly encyclopedic, this man is a rabid stakhanovist) the lies and the numerous blunders of the « Covid » governance. The wreckage of the public hospital disguised as « France is ready, we have a perfectly solid health system » by the tooth puller Véran, by the removal of 90.630 general practitioners when they should have been the first to be requisitioned if the « pandemic » had really been a pandemic; tens of thousands of suspended caregivers disguised by the same Véran as 3,000; announcements of hospital bed openings when thousands are being closed… the reader is already bombarded with damning information. The journalists, « manipulators and mythomaniacs », do everything to amplify the facts and figures when it suits the government, then to minimize them when it suits them too. The AFP, with a thousand examples to support it, plays a role that makes the state apparatus of Big Brother look like hopscotch.

Then comes the « Lancetgate », « the greatest scientific fraud of the century, certainly of all human history ». In reality, Laïbi shows us, this total corruption of scientific literature goes back much further, and he gives us the history of this long decadence, which Debord will summarize in a few sentences as always canonical: « When the all-powerful economy went crazy, and the spectacular times are nothing elseIt has eliminated the last traces of scientific autonomy, inseparably on the methodological level and on the level of the practical conditions of the activity of the « researchers » » (Comments on the society of the spectacleGérard Lebovici editions, Paris, 1988). Laïbi: « The most important lie will of course be the one about mortality. INSEE has published a paper estimating that 68,000 people will die from Covid-19 in 2020! Except that there is a tiny problem, a slight concern that requires urgent resolution. According to the official figures of the INED or National Institute of Demographic Studies, there will be 55,257 more deaths from all causes in 2020 than in 2019. How is it possible that there will be 13,000 additional deaths due to Covid-19 alone? It is impossible, it is mathematically inconceivable. (…) While Italy was presented as one of the worst performers in terms of Covid-19 mortality, it turns out that of the 130,468 deaths recorded by government statistics at the time of this report (Oct. 5, 2021), only 3783 would be due to the virus itself. The comorbidities were numerous and serious: 65.8% with high blood pressure, 23.5% with senile dementia, 29.3% with diabetes, 24.8% with atrial fibrillation, 17.4% had diseased lungs, 16.3% had had cancer in the last 5 years, 15.7% with heart failure… »

We then move on to the autopsy of the rule of law in our beautiful country, so notoriously « democratic » (as in all the French-speaking countries: Belgium, Quebec…), assassinated in the name of a total war against the flu, without the enormity of the thing making the bulk of our fellow citizens squirm. Laïbi points out the aberration that consists in setting up from scratch a « Defense Council » to fight against a virus: « it doesn’t make any intellectual sense », but authorizes as we know the government to cut back on all your rights until they are totally suppressed, so that you are left with only « duties ». The constitution of an equally artificial « scientific council » for the so-called Good of all is no less insane, if we look closely: « « Ms. Clarisse Sand, a lawyer at the Paris bar, explains in a video (…) how the Scientific Council that is destroying the French economy and the mental health of the French in complete illegality since it respects absolutely no rules governing its operation! » Laïbi then makes a copious inventory of the judicial anomalies that have dotted the Covidian saga. Then he moves on to the « Mc Kinsey case », this American consulting firm that already has chemical holocausts on its conscience in its country of origin. Among the many proofs of the case, the one of conflicts of interest, as with the Scientific Council; except that to counter this argument, « the Parisian press has invented a new concept adapted to this grotesque situation, that of conflict of interest by « weak interference »! So we have a conflict of interest, but it’s okay, it’s not too pronounced. It’s very small, insignificant, barely visible up close and even then, with a magnifying glass. » (Incidentally, that last sentence is a perfect sample of the « tightrope walker » nature of secular style, which I mentioned above).

Then comes the turn of our darlings, the TV doctors, starting with the champions in the field, the most corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry; the first one, a very high ranking freemason, has inherited a name that is disturbingly similar to the most famous pedocriminal of the Middle Ages, Gilles de Rais. « Now let’s talk about the conflicts of interest of media doctors, the talking heads, what the Americans call KOLs, or key opinion leaders . We are going to deal here with a few cases, the most illustrious ones, those of Karine Lacombe and Gilbert Deray. There are a good thirty of them that everyone can recognize on TV sets because they spent their time blabbering on the air instead of going to treat the sick while affirming that the situation was dramatic and that the deaths were counted in thousands. (…) I was even surprised to see on TV some morticians several times in the same day, early in the morning and late in the evening (Bruno Mégarbane)! » « Heroine » of the unprecedented slanderous persecution that has, for two and a half years, relentlessly targeted Prof. Raoult, by name the pathetic Karine Lacombe, Laïbi sets the record straight in one sentence, summarizing all the serious deontological delinquency of which the media « doctors » will be guilty: « By publicly speaking and expressing herself publicly on the subject, Karine Lacombe has never stated her links of interest, thus depriving the public of crucial information able to allow it to make up its mind about the credibility of the remarks she has made. » « Concerning Gilbert Deray, it is even more unhealthy, because this head of nephrology has nothing to do with Covid-19! Internet users have posted, notably on the social network Twitter, information concerning obvious conflicts of interest between Gilbert Deray and the company Gilead. However, he had posted on his Twitter account on June 26, 2020 at 7:02 pm a message in which he denied any conflict of interest with Gilead following an article published by the news website France Soir. » Here we are.

After having paid for the medical « heads of gondolas » of the televised platforms, Laïbi still mentions a phenomenon consubstantial with the society of the Spectacle: « the perpetual present » once again, which allows the Spectacle not only to lie shamelessly about almost everything, but even to replace the lies of the previous day by new ones every day that God (if you pass me the expression again) makes. « One can be wrong except that the cathodic morticians seem to be devoid of any humility and never apologize at all. On the contrary, they will come back 5 days later with new predictions a la Madame Soleil, all as wrong as the previous ones with the same arrogance. »

In the series « champion of Raoult-bashing« We obviously want Patrick Cohen. This one describes Raoult, after having presented him years ago as one of the greatest microbiologists and infectious disease specialists in the world, now portrays him as « the meeting point of the power of social networks, unbridled media coverage and », hold on to your hat (I would underline), « of one of the worst bouts of misinformation and anti-science offensive.« Response from our semantic pistolero « Slim » Laïbi: « While this clown doesn’t even know what a virus is, let alone differentiate it from a bacterium, while he has no idea what a statistical average, a chi‑2 or even a linear regression is, he dares to accuse Prof. Raoult of doing anti-science! »

Laïbi is unparalleled in his ability to detect the innumerable contradictions contained in the covidist mythology and its « medical terrorism », as he puts it. Anyone who has opened even one book on modern psychiatry knows that psychosis always arises from what mental health clinicians call double bindThe double constraint: two contradictory psychic injunctions, each of which pulls in the opposite direction of the other, and thus cuts the subject’s consciousness in two, making him psychotic. But, with the covidolepsy that has taken hold of a majority of our fellow human beings (not for long, if they are « vaccinated »…), it is no longer two, but ten, a hundred, a thousand contradictory injunctions that bombard the subject at any moment, H24 and 7 days a week. In the very last appendix of the book, Laïbi gives a few crunchy samples: « confine yourselves, but go to work / don’t meet, but show solidarity / stay at home, but do sports / the mask is useless, but it is nevertheless compulsory / to protect our children, let’s accept to mistreat them / to save our seniors, let’s let them die of loneliness in EHPADs / to avoid crowds, let’s close small stores / to reserve our health, let’s close gyms / to save our hospitals, let’s ruin our economies, etc. » My favorite being: « by staying home, I save lives ». And this is one of the most profound historical innovations of « covidism »: it is the very first time that a power, globally coordinated (another historically unprecedented phenomenon), consciously decides to do everything to make the population totally insane.

But the contradiction, Laïbi shows us, is in fact on all levels. For example, and still in the psychiatric register that supports all the devastating humor of the book: « Let’s go even further into the delirium. If the state and the teletubbies — real little doctors — had really wanted to save the lives of the French, they would have had to go further, much further in this hysteria and start by immediately closing down all McDonald’s and other restaurants in junk foodThis is because not only are they the cause of several million deaths each year, but they are also responsible for the most serious comorbidity in Covid-19, obesity. The latter is responsible for high blood pressure and diabetes. It is worth remembering that cardiovascular diseases are responsible for nearly 30% of deaths in France, just after cancers. That’s 180,000 of the 600,000 deaths in France each year; far more than Covid-19. » « And bang in the gums, » as Beckett wrote. Referring further to famine, Laïbi mercilessly demonstrates that « the sociopaths who make the world believe they want to save our lives have been allowing the deaths of nearly 10 million people every year — a majority of them children — for decades and everyone thinks it’s normal. »

After long pages devoted to demonstrating the ineffectiveness of confinements (another case of the school of public psychiatry, since the same authorities who impose this measure officially recognize that 80% of contaminations are in the family environment), then to the apocalypse of the side effects due to vaccines (notably on the serious dysfunctions of the pharmacovigilance, deliberately organized so that the least possible testimonies do not go back to the ANSM: well-ordered genocide begins with…), to the fundamental stupidity of the vaccine passport (again and again the psychiatric treatment of the public, by forcing them to do absurd things, since the vaccine does not prevent contamination, nor transmission, nor serious forms of the disease, as promised by the laboratories), and finally to the scandal of the EHPAD (sadistic mistreatment, Rivotril, etc.)

Here, Laïbi dwells on the terrible precedent of the product Oxycontin, an opioid (we remember that Mc Kinsey was involved in this « genocide », as Laïbi does not hesitate to write). Everything is already there: falsification of data showing that this « medicine » made its consumers addicted; mythology on the positive effects of this poisonous product; thundering advertising campaigns and heavy corruption of medical staff; concealment, as long as possible, of the disastrous side effects, in addition to the almost systematic addiction; etc., etc. Any resemblance… Laïbi: « But where it becomes demonic, where it really becomes a criminal mafia system, is when you see that all the associations and other pain academies in the USA are also funded by Purdue Pharma [the producer of Oxycontin, NDMBK] (…). They are all financed by the company and they all produce documentation that will be used to promote their deadly poison (…) But where it is truly satanic is when you realize that even the patient associations, also financed by Purdue Pharma, promote synthetic opioids! (…) Curiously, only 2300 complaints have been filed against Purdue Pharma while deaths are counted in the hundreds of thousands! » Any resemblance…

After this edifying pharmacological parenthesis, Laïbi returns to the consequences of the « lamentable and disastrous management of this crisis », such as the pauperization of the population because of the confinement: « 1 million poor people coming from all social strata (contractors, craftsmen, temporary workers, students…), that everyone can observe during the distribution of food baskets (…) the economic collateral damage is dramatic. It is also common knowledge that poverty leads to more illnesses and that unemployment is a cause of increased mortality ». Moreover, and this is what demonstrates, among many other proofs, that all this is perfectly concerted and deliberate, under the cover of a « health crisis », the total destruction of the French public health system, which was one of the best in the world four decades ago, has intensified as never before in the last two and a half years; notably of course with the dismissal of the horrible « antivaxx » caregivers by the modern biopolitical Inquisition.

As long as we are talking about a new look Inquisition, it is impossible not to come to the main executors of the dirty work in France of the governmental policy: the Order of Physicians. As everyone should know, but almost no one does, which says a lot about the state of our « democracy » (we’re not laughing), this institution was created in 1941 by Marshal Pétain, first to excommunicate Jewish health care personnel as quickly as possible, then to ensure that the goyim did not associate under any circumstances with Jewish women and men (as for treating them…). Everything was, in this respect, under high surveillance, and the friendly atmosphere of denunciation that marked the collaboration finds here a kind of very concentrated sample, and revealing of all the rest. In this respect, too, it can be said that institutions are not fundamentally different from human beings or animals: they have a DNA, persistent, whose « character » has resurfaced with force in recent years, relativizing even the atmosphere of permanent snitching and slander that prevailed under Vichy. I am writing these lines on the same day (September 13, 2022) that Professor Perrone was summoned to this famous Order.

But the historical liabilities do not end there. Laïbi tells us a lot about the other precedents of the said Order. For example: « The Order of Physicians, it is indeed this official corporation which was condemned by the justice for having protected during decades a serial rapist, the gynecologist André Hazout! Indeed, the Order will finally decide to strike him off only after his own condemnation by the Court of Appeal for his lack of reaction and despite the numerous complaints sent by the victims for decades. On the other hand, as soon as it is a question of professors Even, Joyeux, Perrone or Raoult… the decisions rain down and are very severe. » The writer I’ve been thinking about the most for the past two years? Sade, whom I have commented on quite a bit in some of my books (and Castel, the thinker I quoted above, even more than me). Institutionalized cruelty and torture, atrocity in power, the « society of the friends of Crime », said the divine Marquis.

This is followed by scrupulous and fascinating investigations on the hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin « affairs », which I happily skip, even if these passages are really reminiscent of a much more rock’n’roll, and French-Algerian, version of Kennedy-the-nephew’s Real Antony Fauci . I’ll go straight to this dazzling quote, which indeed makes Laïbi the worthy unconscious heir of Debord (who used a lot, in his definitive descriptions of the Spectacle, the word « conspiracy »): « Covidism is a real threat to the mental health of the French. The only culprit for the establishment of this cult is nothing else than the ultra powerful media apparatus. While the cults of the three heavenly religions have only managed to set up a single weekly mass, the covidist cult has managed to celebrate a daily mass, 24/7 for the past two years. » These sentences irresistibly reminded me of the sentences of an immense German Jewish writer and thinker, Walter Benjamin, who lived very poor and died of suicide on the Spanish border while fleeing the Nazis: « Capitalism is perhaps the only form of a cult that is not expiatory, but guilt-inducing… a monstrous guilty conscience that ignores redemption transforms itself into a cult, not to expiate its fault, but to make it universal… and to end up taking God himself in the fault… »

Continuing the deconstruction of the Spectacle with the argumentative scalpel, Laïbi attacks this time the unfortunately sedentary scam, in our « democracies » in rabbit skin, of the polls. The awakening is hard in this respect too, like the prophetic sentence of Goebbels: « Politics is the plastic art of the State »; and the polls constitute, within the ultra-subsidized media apparatus (otherwise none of these television channels, of these national radios, or none of these so-called « big daily newspapers », would survive for one minute more, so much they struggle every day to find takers), the most pudgy fingers of the manipulation of the masses. Laibi: « It must be said that these famous polls allow for hours of ranting on TV sets when there is virtually nothing to say. » As the title of the great filmmaker Douglas Sirk’s masterpiece says: Écrit on wind: and the polls are, always have been and always will be cognitive zephyrs, a simulation of a great collective fart, which allows the government to say to the media: « This is what the people think! He wants to vote for this, or for that, he is for or against this measure, he is rather fleshy, uh no, he is rather fishy: semantic flatulence that has no relation with reality. From the Show. Laïbi: « It’s a way to occupy space and time and to dress up one’s words with mathematical figures that will give them a semblance of credibility, at least that’s what the stage editocrats believe when never in history have the media had so little credibility. Even the media’s trust barometer is manipulated by the media, everything is corrupted to the core. »

Laïbi then analyzes the role of « dress rehearsal » that the film and television industries have played for decades in the indoctrination of the people, by getting them used in advance, by brainwashing, to the psychotic state nonsense they have been subjected to for the last two and a half years. Laïbi cites Walking Dead, or TWD , for example. How can we not agree with this analysis? I only want to add this: in addition to these anticipatory visions and therefore educators of horror that so many films and television series promote (and I talk about it a lot in my philosophical work because, like Salim, I consider the subject to be crucial), there is also, in a way at least Also visible, for four decades or so, the feeding of the media geese with stupid programs, stupid songs, stupid books, with an intensity reinforced year after year. A medieval beggar had access to Culture only once a week: by going to the Church, where the Show had all the same a different look than Loft Story or Les Anges de la télé-réalité (or, four decades ago, Dallas or Dinasty), and where the liturgical songs, it was incontestably something else than the sonorous turnips of Gold or Patrick Bruel, that we are obliged to undergo incessantly in the conditions of the « modern world ». I refer to Benjamin’s quote above: Capitalism as the most extreme and brazenly buffoonish Cult that has ever appeared on earth: culminating today in the open-headed delusion of « covidism ».

Let’s not throw any more away. All of the above is only a timid overview of the amount of information that Laibi provides us with in a continuous stream, over nearly five hundred very tight pages. And let’s go straight to the conclusion, which has a Leninist title: What to do? Answers: first, to unite and create links. « We must therefore counter this strategy of division and atomization of society into isolated individuals by recreating the network (…). If we take the example of this health crisis and the extreme difficulty for the sick to find, for example, Ivermectin to treat themselves, the network can allow it without much difficulty via a simple phone call. (…) We will also have to think about putting bartering back at the center of our commercial relations. It will not only be a question of exchanging goods, but also skills. (…) African societies have been operating in this way for a long time and this is what allows them to survive in hostile environments, being governed by thugs. Moreover, absolutely no one can stop you while the money is traceable and the mafia state can stick its nose in at any time. » Laïbi, who devoted a whole chapter of his book to the coming cataclysmic economic crisis (« we know that the ATMs will be emptied very quickly »), a chapter not covered in this article, prescribes us to buy gold, to stock up on food (« at least three months »), to make a vegetable garden in one’s garden if one has one. The second answer given by Laïbi to the Leninist question is to secede (a very good book published by Fiat Lux is called Secession, the Art of Disobedience, by Paul-Eric Blanrue). It is a clearly anarchist program, even if the adjective is never used. « The state has been transformed over the years into a monster as incompetent as it is insatiable, incapable of providing any welfare to society. (…) Governments are methodically destroying every day what has worked for decades. The deputies vote more and more laws that slow down any initiative. Worse still, this State which is supposed to manage correctly the affairs of the citizens becomes voracious since it takes more than 50% of the GDP of the country’s wealth while repeating all day long (…) on the media that the coffers are empty and that it is always necessary to have more taxes, contributions, taxes. Of course, the more taxes you pay, the less public service there is. » Secession has therefore become « the only possible and desirable solution to get out of this chaos and the stranglehold of this state; it is all the more urgent as we are currently observing the end of the rule of law for the past two years, which takes away all credibility. From the moment that the government tramples, in a single decision, as much the Penal Code, as the Public Health Code, the Constitution and the various international agreements and conventions signed, it must no longer be respected; on the contrary, it must be fought, denounced and rejected with determination. » This would not have been out of place under the pen of a Bakunin… Laïbi then denounces the phantasmagoria of universal suffrage and representative democracy, which, as mentioned above, only allows the parliamentary « elite » to pass laws that are each day more absurd and restrictive than the next. On this point Laïbi has a remark that tickles my philosophical ear: « Common laws must be few in number, extremely limited, in accordance with a known principle of law: « Freedom must remain the rule, restrictions the exception.« And indeed, in my philosophical work, where the question of game I demonstrate, on the basis of the reading of the The stolen letter that the best games are those in which the rules are the easiest to assimilate. For Poe, as for me, checkers is in this respect a much better game than chess, or Whist than Bridge. And, in the same reflection, I explicitly say that this truth about games must serve as a concrete paradigm policy The coming social contract must be minimalist, and, as Laïbi says, « freedom must be total for all, except for the great principles (theft, murder, rape…) ». Here again, it is quite explicitly that, in my reflection on the game, I use its paradigm to propose a radical conception of freedom, on which I will not dwell here, simply referring the reader to it (Pleonectic systemop.cit., eponymous entries « Game » and « Freedom »), eager to understand what could be a concept modernIt is a clear, distinct and fully intelligible form of freedom.

In short: I can only welcome with my usual libertarian enthusiasm Laïbi’s conclusive program. The book ends with thirty or so fascinating appendices, including numerous statistical graphs, columns by Laïbi himself (often vitriolic, on the intellectual loukoum Caroline Fourest for example), inflammatory rights of reply to media slander mainstream (Salim spends a lot of time in court, and almost always wins), texts of other authors (Agamben, Vigano…), one or two open letters… I have a particular weakness for Appendix 15, which shows drawings of 5- to 6‑year-olds who watch less than one hour of television per day, and then children of the same age watching more than three hours of television per day. It speaks for itself. My son being about that age (he’s about to turn seven), I dedicate this article to him. Because he told his mother, a few months ago, simply to never turn on the TV again, too anxiety-provoking for his taste. I congratulated and rewarded him for that, afterwards. There are hereditary reflexes that cannot be explained: for my part, I haven’t turned on the television for more than twenty years.

Three fuoriclass books, as we say in Italian, and, to finish this chronicle, a review. Ligne de risque is one of the best French literary reviews of the last thirty years, and certainly the most singular. It was placed, at its beginning, under the invocation of Lautréamont, and under the patronage of Philippe Sollers (still him, our beloved Pope of the literature!). Moreover, it has only gotten better with time (the previous issue, Unveiling of the Messiah, was very high quality). The proof: the last issue is simply exceptional(Ligne de risque nouvelle série, number 3, Sprezzatura editions, Brest, 2020). It is entitled: Insights on the Immonde, and is subtitled: or the road to servitude. In only seventy-two pages, we have an impeccable analysis of recent events, and one that provides an even different perspective than the three books we have just read. The Editorial sets the scene: « From one end of this wandering star that is the earth to the other, a strange virus, from March 2020, has suddenly deprived of interest everything that was not him. Assuming absolute power over an information bubble that is constantly being inflated to its own emptiness, it has imposed itself on us on all levels, like a domineering ruler who would put the defeated under his yoke. He was the talk of the media, and even in private conversations, he was the talk of the town. Under the aegis of rulers who were both perverse and absurd, we were constantly assailed by agonizing orders and exposed to contradictory recommendations, constantly biting at each other. In short, we have been worked, as they say in witchcraft. We have been touched; first of all our psychic apparatus. Our ideas and our ways of feeling, we shuffled them; we deeply modified our conducts, and likewise our automatisms. »

The summary, in addition to the Editorial, includes: a text called Notes on the cancellation in progress (to which I will return very quickly), another In the name of science, signed by Sandrick le Mager, which analyzes in a very fine way the unfolding of the events, and on a world scale. The third text is a selection of large excerpts from the Senate’s Information Report n°673, where the program of installation of the most delirious totalitarianism that has ever been is confessed at each line (« if a « dictatorship » saves lives while a « democracy » mourns its dead, there are undoubtedly other questions to be asked », genre. One will appreciate the use of quotation marks, which sound like two slips of the tongue). Then comes a tasty anthology of quotations from collabintellos of covidian cretinism, from Onfray to Badiou via Gulcksmann, Einthoven and many others. Finally, a short text by Julien Battisti against the electronic book, much less irrelevant than it seems at first sight, as we will soon understand.

I have chosen to focus on the jewel in the crown of this issue, Notes sur l’annulation en cours, signed by the magazine’s main animator, François Meyronnis. Meyronnis is a rare, discreet author of a handful of essays, including a prophetic De l’extermination considérée comme un des beaux-arts in 2007 (Gallimard, « L’infini », 2007), and of a few novels, most recently the magnificent Le messie (Exils, 2021), which I will discuss elsewhere. The text is therefore entitled: Notes on the current cancellation, and begins as follows: « I have been saying this for a long time, and my contemporaries were tapping their temples with their index fingers, or at least refusing to take the message seriously. My point was simple, however, and ever more obscenely blatant: the world has ended. She has already took place. » Meyronnis dates this beginning of the end of the world from 1914, of a process of self-annihilation which, despite the many red alert signs that have arisen since then, seems never to slow down, and on the contrary to go from acceleration to acceleration (pseudo academic theorists, « of the left » as it should be, thought they were original, a few years ago, when they wrote a Accelerationist Manifesto to argue that, all in all, the ever-increasing technological acceleration should be pushed to the limit, like pressing the pedal on a car without a steering wheel).

Meyronnis evokes, at the end of the « der des der », a Viennese intellectual who is as crucial as he is unknown to the general public, Karl Kraus, and who writes a play on this subject. « The title alone proclaimed a terrible truth, still valid today — The last days of humanity. Obviously,only a handful of seditious of the intelligence had the ears to grasp the scope of such a visionary word; among them, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin and Elias Canetti », Basquin often quoting the latter in The story is splendid.

The central question of this whole affair comes up again, the one that haunts the whole of my philosophical work: that of the Mal. But here is what Meyronnis writes: « Considering the world history of the previous century, one thing is obvious — it is the fact that the world has become more and more complex. something has happened to evil. This has resulted in a displacement of the evil, whose strange light now shines on our terminal era; a milky and morbid light, which draws its radiation from this double focus: Auschwitz and Hiroshima. »

Meyronnis’ sentence is slow, aristocratic, precise; it hits the bull’s eye every time. And Meyronnis, by beginning his text with the evocation of the atrocities of the twentieth century, which we are in the process of surpassing with our hands and on all sides, leads us, under the cover of a « health crisis » put together from scratch, to nothing less than a gigantic digital concentration camp. « Whether we realize it or not, we have become the cattle heads of cybernetics. With the force of lightning, the spectral instant of the networks expels us from the present, depriving us of the past as well as the future. (…) Indeed, how could we be alive enough to counteract this enormous fraud? Which goes hand in hand with the connection of all places on the planet; and with the ensuing hegemony of the distance-free , riveting our bodies to possible annihilation. »

It is against this background, says Meyronnis, that we must understand the so-called « pandemic », as its imprescriptible condition of possibility. Without the digital cybernetic spider’s web taking almost all anthropological flies in its threads, no « pandemic » at all (we know the famous slogan of the demonstrations: « the media are the virus »). « As the crowned virus began to soak our brains, we had no idea that this enemy of man would soon rule from the northern to the southern pole, passing through all the meridians; nor that we would worship him like a pagan god, like an omnipresent and sooty voodoo. » Benjamin…

Meyronnis then beats the recall of the measures: confinement, distancing, closing of almost everything, masks, and, to crown the psychiatric grotesquery, « each Frenchman [devait] sign to himself a detailed authorization to leave his home, under penalty of fine; and worse, in case of recidivism. The absolute ridiculousness of this last measure, its debasing character, did not provoke any uprising, not even a hurrah of protests: all it did was expose itself to the jeers of a handful of recalcitrants (…). But far from tempering the servility of the conformists, such sarcasms were received with the greatest harshness by the relays of power; as if the ironists were endangering, with their lightness, the precious health of the human flock. »

Meyronnis sees perfectly how, under cover of an inept « war against the virus », even though it is « remarkably non-lethal », we will have witnessed, dazed, a tectonic shift of civilizational paradigm. Witness: the banning, for a few months, of funeral rites, one of the most sacred seals, since the Neanderthals, of what a human being is. « Provided that the corpse was assumed to be a carrier of the virus, it was not usually the object of any funeral: the corpse was treated, no more and no less, as a waste product. » To support this major civilizational shift, the « government (…) began to lie every day with frenzy, supported in this enterprise by the voluble underworld of the media. Nuts were being turned in our heads, and the lie factory was running at full speed. »

« The nut turners began by explaining to each Earthling that he or she was out in the open, exposed to the crown virus, and therefore under threat of death. »

Evoking a perceptive expression of Huxley — the « neo-Pavlovian conditioning » -, Meyronnis goes into detail about some of the techniques of this conditioning, such as the nudge: « Not falling into the defects of a

ordinary propaganda, it instills in our minds links, dictates answers, arouses ideas and images that we have not formed. » And Meyronnis comes very quickly to the purpose that was, from the beginning, that of this gigantic staging, and of this conditioning: the « vaccines », « made in a hurry ». As Reiner Fuellmich puts it: if you believe that the « vaccines » were created for the virus, you remain in the insane fog of the official narrative. If you understand that it is the virus that was created for the « vaccines », everything suddenly makes sense, everything becomes coherent.

It is thus indeed the installation of what Meyronnis, borrowing the term from Agamben (quoted several times in the text), calls a Device. After the introduction of the health pass, the aim is becoming clearer, and is close to being admitted: « Whether we are happy about it or sorry about it, the electronic pass was imposed as the gateway to all social life. Unless you have it, no access to a normalized existence. » The « non-vaccinated » became pariahs, the dregs of the city; and « President Macron had finally proclaimed, with his usual aplomb, that an enlightened mind could only deny him the title of « citizen » ». All this, with the learned assent of our intellectual « elites » (to say nothing of the media), never stingy in sermons stamped with the seal of their beautiful soul, of their belonging to the camp of the Good, and of the perpetual watch to « never again ». Swallowing by there, and in all good conscience, the most abject political regime to have reigned in France since Vichy. Also in other French-speaking countries (greetings to Belgian friends).

« Prerogative of the Device: it stands on all sides at once. Indissociable from the advent of the digital, it is always fluid, occupies no determined position (…) », but is the creation of « strong globalized oligarchies, and these serve it, while serving themselves. Thus, in the absence of a general command, there are at least staffs, connected to each other and efficient. Professor Schwab, president of the Davos Forum, is usually recognized as one of the main syndicators of the global oligarchies. Now this German of power has published, as early as 2020, a report on the health crisis with a French comparse, subtitled in the language of the comparse — The Great Reinitialization. »

We know the rest: the hologrammatic « pandemic » represents a turning point, an unprecedented civilizational shift. « To start again from scratch is the order of the day. (…) Many things will remain from our old life; only, in the distance, according to a « new obsession with cleanliness ». Certainly, we will still exchange with human friends, colleagues — but through a laptop or a console. According to our guides, and they are right, the algorithmic grip will grow. (…) We will be afraid of each other: we will feed on this fear. We will wear biometric bracelets. We will be more and more gregarious, but we will be careful not to get too close. (…) As Bill Gates, the great oligarch, announced, we will enter the age of ‘software substitution’. »

After another recap of the earthquakes of the twentieth century and beyond (the two world wars, the Cold War, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dismantling of the USSR, the World Trade Center, the subprime crisis), Meyronnis takes an even closer look at the true nature of the global coup d’état of March 2020. « Thanks to His Majesty the virus, the Device, implacably, organized its playground at new costs. Nothing else matters in what is happening, while the fourth-hand placers of the opinion, suffocating us in the layette of our cowardice, put the accent on the sanitary aspect only. Yet this one has but a minuscule impact compared to what is indeed happening around us, and growing steadily. »

Meyronnis goes on to mention a statement by Elon Musk, at the same time as the beginning of the « health crisis », where we learn that « the language, according to the American billionaire, had only five to ten years left, at the most », which is happily relayed by our national Laurent Alexandre, the official preacher of the ten doses for all. But such was the struggle of Ligne de risque for twenty-five years, which made it stand out from the usual editorial lot: a struggle for the unveiling of the truth through language. Not only an aesthetic and literary fight, but also a political and philosophical one. Now, for France alone, language has been undermined for a long time, for four decades at least; that the definitive installation of the Spectacle has been accompanied by a commodification of literature, and thus by a pauperization of language, of style, of semantics; in a country that historically counts more major writers and poets than any other, and that therefore had more to lose than any other in this organized linguistic shortage. The Spectacle is only interested in its own binary, stereotyped language, which still wants to pass itself off as « democracy »; whereas the last two and a half years have shown that we are no longer free to do anything, on pain of anathema: neither to think, nor to question, nor to speak in a language of our own.

The program of the fourth transhumanist Reich is thus spelled out as follows: « the indefinite multiplication of the computing power of computers leads to the imperative need to « merge » the brain with the new digital architectures. It is a question of « increasing our capacities by stuffing neurons and synapses with electronic components. (…) Hence Musk’s proposal, which is as frightening as it is nonsensical: to swallow, along with the world, the word that carries it. Let’s be honest: this does not bother the reticulated petit-bourgeois very much. His conception of language is so poor and shabby that he hardly flinches when a cybernetic billionaire announces his end with the nerve of a salesman. Also, if « speech is all about using what average, why not get rid of this tool, if the Neuralink implant gives better results? » In the eyes of a transhumanist — who will make the appellation « Nazi » pass, in a few years or decades, almost as a compliment -, « to cross the word and be crossed by it, nothing more superfluous. With ardor, he chooses this other option: to cross the Device and be crossed by it. »

The secret design of the false « pandemic » is then shown under a blinding light; and Meyronnis, in abyme, to realize a performative tour de force with this text to the prose of goldsmith, and to the thought sparkling of lucidity: to make happen, at the right time, the truth by the word. Since it is obvious that the « pandemic », planned for decades by the « owners of the world » (Debord), is an attack under false flags, a communicational Trojan horse, which will have only aimed at smoothing the ground for « the development, step by step, of this cybernetic biocracy advocated by the masters of the earth ». It’s a bit like « Zorglub at WHO ».

« Another comparison gives to the so-called « sanitary crisis » the light that allows to grasp, for a moment, its real contours: we had tried to blur them under the guise of a public health problem, and here they suddenly appear with their jagged edges, meandering however, full of elbows and zigzags. Indeed, the contours are those of a perfect crime (…). It is about nothing else than to complete the remodeling of the world from the virtual to engulf what persists nevertheless of attested and observable, but also of living! »

What’s next in the program? Zuckerberg (who consonates with « Zorglub ») announced on October 28, 2021: the future will be Meta or it will not be. The « Metaverse » completes the installation of humanity in the artificial paradises of the digital and the virtual: to paraphrase Debord, when the « Metaverse » will have been connected on all the « available brains », all that was directly lived will have definitively moved away in a representation. « The Metaverse is a parallel 3D world, to which we have access through a visiocasque. What we discover there resembles an immersive experience, where each element of our sensory reality is simulated. (…) A computer program will artificially elaborate this virtualized pseudo-world, where billions of turkeys, farcical of their deception, will be able to interact live, impaled every second by this mystification which will make them live in a reality having for only consistency the algorithms (…). One more detail — Meta, the name of Zuckerberg’s holding company, certainly refers to its object: the Metaverse. But this word, in Hebrew, has a meaning that is not insignificant if we think of Middle-earth. Indeed, he means: the ‘Dead’. »

Apocalypse etymologically means: unveiling, at the right time. And what did the « writers, artists, intellectuals » do when they witnessed this literal apocalypse, this unveiling of truth unprecedented in our history? They have hastened to cover themselves with ridicule and dishonor, swallowing the fable of the « pandemic », and endorsing the « measures » by barking at the media pack (or « mediatist », as Meyronnis likes to write). At a minimumThey « looked away; they received prizes, decorations, to reward their chastening; they chatted, cackled, jabbered, generally about dull superfluities. (…) Like ostriches, they hid their heads, and still hide them; because they have absolutely no receptacles to welcome the event that is marching on them, as on the whole of the speaking beings, with an ever increasing rapidity. » The preoedipal hogwash that takes the place, in France, of president (married, as everyone knows, to a zombie ninja turtle), has warned them, however: « The beast of the event is here. »

The solution? For starters, « don’t lose all aplomb in the face of spurious and poisonous words, words such as ‘conspiracy’ and ‘conspiracy’; for they serve only to impose them on airheads. » Which makes me think of another word of Debord, in this immense book of unveiling that is Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle (op. cit.), published 34 years ago, and yet it is as if it were yesterday: « The conspiracy has become so dense that it is spread out almost in broad daylight. » The « conspiracy theorist » is the one who has the misfortune to have kept one of the most precious things of existence, his childish soul; and to point out, like the child in the fable, even when the adults don’t move, that the King is naked as a worm, and the plot against humanity, perfectly transparent.

André Bercoff had asked me, in his program, about the fact that, in my Colaricocovirus (op.cit.), I wrote that « Hitler or Pol Pot are scouts next to Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates. » So I hand over to Meyronnis, it’s telepathic (that telepathy of styles, which no Artificial Intelligence will ever manage to coordinate): « We’re moving away from the Stalins, the Hitlers, the Mao’s; now appear monsters like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, to name the most fearsome leaders of Silicon Valley. » Meyronnis then responds to the argument that with these latter, the « Zorglub » 1, 2, 3, 4… of Silicon Valley, we are not dealing with the mad dictators mentioned above: « One might say: they are much less bloody than their predecessors. (…) their influence is rarely accompanied by an outburst of brutality; not everything is murder, torture and abuse in their rise. » Certainly. But in a sense, it’s much worse: Hitler or Stalin (Mao, I’ve shown, is different) didn’t hide, or so little, where they were going with it; they went forward openly, said what they did and did what they said, and really believed do well. With our « Zorglub », nothing of the sort: everything is wrapped up in a rhetoric of benevolence and public interest (especially, of course, « health »), and even philanthropy. As one commentator bitingly put it: saying that Bill Gates is a philanthropist is like saying that Jack the Ripper is an anatomy buff. That’s why I had retorted to Bercoff: « That’s why Colaricocovirus is subtitled: An unconventional genocide. À Knowing that we no longer use machine guns, gas chambers, or machetes as in Rwanda; but containment, masks and injections. » This is not only much more effective, but much more devastating: containment has brought our economy to its knees, plunged hundreds of millions of people around the world into misery, traumatized children and teenagers in the poorest segments of the population. The masks, too: they have dumbed down and martyred our teenagers and especially our kids, while stuffing into their brains that, for the first time in the history of all Civilizations and all Cultures without a single exception, it was no longer their elders who were responsible for them, but they for their elders; and that if they had to die of guilt for that, then so be it. Finally, the experimental injections, making the Earth an open-air Laboratory, have provoked an avalanche of often atrocious undesirable effects; the extent of the damage does not only compare with the abominations of the twentieth century: it will be realized that it will have exceeded them, when the accounts are more or less done. Hence the term « unconventional genocide », as we say « unconventional war »: and as the magnitude of all that will have happened in the tiny turn of two and a half years is obvious to a growing part of the population, there is nothing better than to declare a good old conventional war (except for the nuclear escalation, although there is the precedent of Hiroshima), to quell, as far as possible, the greatest humanitarian scandal of all times, by an even greater holocaust. As the great Vera Sharav says: « The ‘never again’ is now. »

The word of the end, it is well the least, to Meyronnis: « Of this « crisis », one will retain one day that it was the psychological moment of the virtualization; and that this process tends itself only to a cancellation of the beings and the things, taking besides the appearance of a structure in level. What would this motto be, indeed, if not an injunction to remove everything, to suppress everything; and to do it gradually, step by step. With coldness and method. But also with a rage increased tenfold by its own violence. »

Let’s summarize: masterful text. Of a mastery of which our university caciques have become, in their quasi-totality, incapable, if we except Agamben, Esfled, Weber and some other lost black sheep.

Let us add finally that to those who, because I am closely or remotely linked to all the authors mentioned here, would accuse me of cronyism and of passing the buck (Basquin has devoted a magnificent article to my Colaricocovirus (op.cit.), easily accessible on the web), I will simply oppose that in times of total war against the peoples, it is not simply an invaluable luxury to have such intellectual comrades in the trenches: it is, quite simply, now a matter of survival. That is why, in light of the events of the last two and a half years, Spinoza’s sentence appears to me to have been, in the future tense, the most important in the entire history of philosophy: « Only free men are very grateful to each other. » I dedicate it to all the resistant artists, who constitute today, as Deleuze would have said, not a constraining « school », but a movement; and certainly the most important, by far, of this beginning of the twenty-first century. Just as the artistic avant-gardes dominated the beginning of the twentieth century, and for much the same reasons: they were an enraged protest against the civilization that had given birth to the butchery of the First World War. There is a whole « conspiracy culture » that is being built up, with its cult films, its music, its art, its games (yes, for example, a hilarious and brilliant game has just been released, ÉEmergency statuscreated by Mickaël Dion and Jérémy Ferrari, about which I will soon write in Kairos) and, of course, his great books. Enjoy your meal.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

December 14, 2021

Translation of the article: http: //dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2021–068094

Tables of numbers about the pandemic dominated the screens and helped track the progress of COVID-19, but
David Robertson
and
Peter Doshi
explain why they may not be enough to determine when it will end.

As the year 2021 began, the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to be in retreat. Discussions and predictions about a « reopening », a return to « normal », and the acquisition of herd immunity were in the air[note] [note] [note] [note]. But for many, the optimism faded as cases and deaths emerged in India, Brazil and elsewhere. Attention turned to variants of the SARS-CoV‑2 virus — and more recently, with the emergence of the Omicron variant. Just when it looked like the end was on the horizon, this feeling was replaced by the idea that the pandemic was far from over [note] [note].

Unlike any previous pandemic, COVID-19 has been closely monitored using charts to report the progress and effects of the coronavirus in real time; these charts include indicators of laboratory tests, hospital and intensive care unit admissions, transmission rates, and, most recently, vaccine doses that have been administered. These charts — with their grids of numbers, statistics, epidemic curves and attendance maps — have invaded our TV, computer and smartphone screens. At their core is the appeal of objectification and data to hold on to, while we are plagued by uncertainty and fear. These elements helped people to visualize the need for rapid containment and control, to guide general sentiment, to fuel pressure for action, and to maintain a climate of urgency [note]. They provide a sense of control when cases decrease as a result of certain measures, but can also lead to a sense of helplessness and impending disaster when cases increase.

The problem of defining the end of a pandemic

There is no universal definition of epidemiological parameters that mark the end of a pandemic. So what indicators will tell us that it is really over? The World Health Organization has declared the existence of the COVID-19 pandemic. But who will tell us when it will end?

The ubiquity of these graphs has contributed to a sense that the pandemic would be over when all indicators reach zero (zero infections, zero cases, zero deaths) or 100 (in percentage of vaccination). However, the respiratory pandemics of the 20th century show that the end of an epidemic is never clearly established, and that it is better understood with the resumption of social life, and not in the achievement of epidemiological targets[note] [note].

The respiratory pandemics of the past 130 years have been followed by annual seasonal waves fueled by viral endemicity that generally continues until the next pandemic [note]. What grows decreases again, and the difficulty of dating the end of a pandemic is reflected in the historical and epidemiological literature.

Although many researchers describe said « Spanish Flu » as occurring in three waves, from « 1918 to 1919, » references to a pandemic from « 1918 to 1920 » are also abundant, usually encompassing what some call a « fourth wave. »[note]. Similarly, the mid-century « Asian flu » pandemic is generally described as a two-wave event, from 1957 to 1958, while others include a third wave, placing the end of the pandemic in late 1959 [note].

This variability in the dating of historical pandemics underscores the imprecise nature of using mortality rates to determine, even retrospectively, the « end » of a pandemic and the beginning of the inter-pandemic period. For example, the CDC(Center for Desease Control) now states that approximately 100,000 Americans died during each of the influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1968[note] [note]. But these estimates include deaths occurring at times that many would consider to be intermediate periods between two pandemics (in 1957–1960 and 1968–1972, respectively) [note] [note].

The notion, reinforced by epidemic dashboards, that a pandemic ends when the number of cases or deaths falls to zero, contradicts the historical evidence that substantial influenza-related morbidity and mortality continue, season after season, between pandemics. During the 1928–1929 inter-pandemic season, for example, an additional 100,000 deaths related to influenza A/H1N1 (1918 pandemic virus) are estimated to have occurred in the United States in a population one-third smaller than today [note]. In addition, it may be difficult to determine which deaths can be attributed to the pandemic and which are in the inter-pandemic phase. These distinctions are not unimportant, as excess mortality is the classic measure of severity[note]. Inter-pandemic years have sometimes seen a higher number of deaths than in subsequent pandemic seasons: this was the case in the 1946–1947 season that preceded the 1957–1958 pandemic (Fig. 1)[note]. Therefore, the end of a pandemic cannot be defined by the absence of excess mortality associated with the pandemic pathogen.

(fig. 1) Monthly rate of all-cause deaths in the United States, with bold arrows and dates indicating the onset of pandemics, from January 1900 to September 2021. The red line indicates the average every 12 months. Note that from 1905 to 1909, the U.S.Bureau of the Census provided only annual (not monthly) data. 

Interruption and resumption of social life

Another way to declare the end of a pandemic is to consider the imposition and lifting of public health measures or restrictions. The measures used in previous pandemics were more transient and less intrusive than those implemented in COVID-19. Even for the terrible Spanish flu, which killed three times as many people in the United States as COVID-19, with an average age of death of 28 years [note] — life returned to normal in a short time, perhaps only because there was no other option. Before the Internet and its food delivery apps and video conferencing, widespread and prolonged social distancing was simply not possible, and indeed it is a situation that remains for many workers in what is considered the « essential » sector. Indeed, a brief look at past pandemics in the United States shows that there is no fixed or determining relationship between the pathogenicity of a virus and the intensity and longevity of public health interventions.

Compared to previous pandemics, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruptions in social life. Populations have always been plagued by tragic illnesses or unexpected deaths throughout pandemic and non-pandemic periods. But the COVID-19 pandemic is historically unprecedented in that the interruption and resumption of social life was so closely linked to epidemiological indicators.

Box 1: Contrasting historical approaches to pandemic respiratory viruses- 1918: The Spanish fluIn 1918, the first wave of the pandemic was mild and « attracted relatively little attention » [see note 11]. In response to the second wave, which « snuck up on the world, » some U.S. cities implemented non-pharmaceutical interventions such as school closures and restrictions on public gatherings. Most countermeasures were relaxed within two to eight weeks, and the disruption to social life was relatively short-lived [note]. John Barry, a leading historian studying the 1918 pandemic, explains, « It all happened very quickly. Unlike covid-19, he said, « the stress was not continuous, » noting that many places experienced « several months of relative normality » between waves [note]. New York City and Chicago, the nation’s two largest cities, never officially closed their schools, although Chicago’s schools reached an absentee rate of nearly 50 percent. When schools closed, they remained closed for a median of four weeks (range: 1–10 weeks) [note].- 1957: The Asian fluThe 1957 « Asian flu » pandemic reached American shores by mid-year.During the next nine months, which included two waves in late 1957 and early 1958, an estimated « 80 million Americans were bedridden due to respiratory illnesses » [note]. In the first wave, about 60% of students were sick, and absenteeism rates were as high as 20–30% [note]. Yet even when it was estimated that 40 percent of students in some New York City schools were absent because of the flu, the city’s superintendent of schools said there was « no reason for alarm and, on the advice of the health department, we did not curtail any activities. » [note] In late October, college soccer games were cancelled across the country because many players were ill. Team managers scrambled to find last minute replacements and in the end no major competitions were cancelled. [note] As with the Spanish flu, the health effects of the new H2N2 virus did not end when the 1957 pandemic was « over. In 1960, Newsweek reported that « without the fanfare of two years ago, [le] Asian flu virus was quietly affecting almost everyone it didn’t the first time around » [note]. At the beginning of that year, it was estimated that 20 percent of Los Angeles schoolchildren, or about 120,000 children, and more than 15 percent of industrial workers were absent from school because of the flu. Despite their magnitude, these epidemiological impacts did not give the impression that society had fallen back into a pandemic.- 1968: The Hong Kong FluTen years later, another pandemic virus arrived, which officials later estimated killed a million people worldwide. But its impact on public health and social life has been minimal. Historian John Barry writes that for the United States, « the episode was not significantly more deadly than a typical seasonal flu episode, » noting that « some people who had experienced it did not even know it had happened » [note]. Historian Mark Honigsbaum points out that « during the height of the epidemic in December 1968, the The New York Times described the pandemic as « one of the worst in the nation’s history, » while there were few school closures and businesses, for the most part, continued to operate as normal.  » [note]

Epidemic boards: to fight or to feed the pandemic?

Although visual representations of epidemics have existed for centuries [note], with COVID-19 it is the first time that tables of numbers broadcast in real time have saturated and structured the public’s experience in this way.

Some historians have observed that pandemics do not cease when the transmission of the disease ends « but rather when, in the attention of the general public and in the opinion of some of the media and political elites who direct that attention, the disease ceases to be seen as a media issue [see note 8]. » These tables of epidemic numbers provide endless fuel, ensuring the constant currency of the COVID-19 pandemic, even when the threat is low. And in doing so, they can prolong the pandemic state by inhibiting the sense of a way out or a return to the way things were.

Turning off or disconnecting ourselves from these dashboards may be the most effective action to end the pandemic. It’s not about burying your head in the sand. Rather, we must recognize that no single or combined indicator in these dashboards can tell us whether the epidemic has stopped.

The end of the pandemic will not come by itself

History tells us that the end of the pandemic will not simply result from the achievement of herd immunity or an official declaration, but will occur gradually and unevenly as societies cease to be mobilized by the shock indicators of the pandemic. The end of a pandemic is mainly a matter of lived experience, and is therefore more of a sociological than a biological phenomenon. And so the epidemiological tables — which do not measure mental health or the impact on education, and deny the importance of social connections — do not provide the tool that will tell us when the pandemic is over. Indeed, if we consider how societies have come to use epidemiological tables, they may prove to be a tool that prevents a return to normalcy. Pandemics — at least those of respiratory viruses — simply do not end in a way that can be translated into a table. Far from a theatrical « end », pandemics gradually fade away as society adapts to a new infectious agent and social life returns to normal.

The COVID-19 pandemic is part of an extraordinary period in which social life has been turned upside down. It will end when we turn off our screens and decide that other issues deserve our attention. Unlike its beginning, the end of the pandemic will not be televised.

Authors and sources: DR is a doctoral student in the history of science at Princeton University. He has published in the field of medical history and infectious disease epidemiology. PD has been studying the science and politics of infectious disease outbreaks for nearly two decades, focusing primarily on influenza. Both authors contributed to both the research and analytical aspects of the article, and both were responsible for gathering secondary sources related to COVID-19 and the history of influenza pandemics. Primary sources as well as mainstream media sources from the press and elsewhere were largely processed by DR, while PD processed all-cause mortality data. The data and calculation method are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5764277. Both DR and PD are responsible for this.

Conflicts of interest: we have read and understand the BMJ (British Medical Journal) charter on declaration of interest and declare that: PD has received travel funding from the European Respiratory Society (2012) and Uppsala Monitoring Center (2018); grants from the FDA (through the University of Maryland M‑CERSI; 2020), Laura and John Arnold Foundation (2017–2022), American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (2015), Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (2014–2016), Cochrane Methods Innovations Fund (2016–18), and UK National Institute for Health Research (2011–14); and is an editor at BMJ. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of their employers.

by David Robertson (Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA) and Peter Doshi (University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, Baltimore, MD, USA) 

Translation by Vera