Slavoj Žižek - Pandemic! 2

1 Cover

2 Title Page PANDEMIC! 2 Chronicles of a Time Lost SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK polity

3 Copyright This edition published by Polity Press, 2021 First published in the United States by OR Books LLC, New York, 2020 © Slavoj Žižek, 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes. 9781509549085

4 Dedication Dedication To all those whose daily lives are so miserable that they ignore Covid-19, regarding it as a comparatively minor threat.

5 Introduction: Why a Philosopher Should Write about Bringing In the Harvest

6 1. What We Don’t Know, What We Don’t Want to Know, and What We Can Do

7 2. The First of May in the Viral World

8 3. Covid-19, Global Warming, Exploitation— The Same Struggle

9 4. Why Destroying Monuments Is Not Radical Enough

10 5. Father or Worse

11 6. Sex in the Age of Social Distancing

12 7. The (Not So) Brave New World of Pigs and Men

13 8. A No-Touch Future? No, Thanks!

14 9. Where Are Greta and Bernie?

15 10. What Movie Is Now Playing Out in Real Life?

16 11. Deaths in Paradise

17 12. Now We Live in a Store of the Worlds

18 13. Yes, Red Pill but Which One?

19 14. Simple Things That Are Hard to Do

20 (No Time) to Conclude: The Will Not to Know

21 Appendix: Four Reflections on Power, Appearance, and Obscenity The New Obscene Master Oppression, Repression, Depression The New Populism Is Not Fascism The Crisis of New Populism

22 About the Aouthor

23 End User License Agreement

1 Cover

2 Table of Contents

3 Title Page

4 Copyright

5 Dedication

6 Introduction

7 Begin Reading

8 (No Time) to Conclude: The Will Not to Know

9 Appendix: Four Reflections on Power, Appearance, and Obscenity

10 About the Aouthor

11 End User License Agreement

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SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

polity

This edition published by Polity Press, 2021

First published in the United States by OR Books LLC, New York, 2020

© Slavoj Žižek, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

9781509549085

To all those whose daily lives are so miserable that they ignore Covid-19, regarding it as a comparatively minor threat.

Something is rotten in north-by-northwest—and I don’t mean Hitchcock’s classic film but Gütersloh, a town in the north-by-northwest of Germany where in the middle of June 2020 more than 650 workers at the meat processing plant tested positive for Covid-19 and thousands are now quarantined. As usual, we are dealing with class division: imported foreign workers doing a dirty job in unsafe conditions.

The same bad smell is spreading all around the world. In late spring of 2020, something is rotting in the Southern state of Tennessee—tons and tons of unpicked fruits and vegetables. Why? Because 100 percent of the workforce at one farm in Tennessee, nearly 200 employees in total, tested positive for Covid-19 after one of the workers came down with the virus. 1

This is just one of many examples of the threat posed by the pandemic to food supplies: products that must be hand-picked rely on hundreds of thousands of seasonal, mostly immigrant, workers who are moved around in crowded buses and sleep in cramped dormitories—an ideal breeding ground for Covid-19 infections. Cases are sure to climb since harvesting has to be completed quickly in the short window of time when the produce is ripe. These seasonal workers are in a very vulnerable position: their work is hard and insecure, their earnings are modest, their healthcare is as a rule inadequate, the immigration status of many is illegal. This is another example of the pandemic revealing class differences, the reality that we are not all in the same boat.

Cases like this abound all around world. There are not enough people to harvest fruits and vegetables in the south of Italy and Spain, tons of oranges are rotting in Florida, and similar problems are to be found in the UK, France, Germany, and Russia. Because of the pandemic, we are faced with a typically absurd capitalist crisis: thousands of eager workers cannot get work and sit idly by while tons of produce rots in the fields.

It is not just harvesting and distributing that are beset by difficulties—the growing of plants is also affected. Locusts are now ruining harvests from East Africa to the western parts of India, which are also threatened by droughts. Summing all this up: we are facing the prospect of considerable food shortages, if not outright hunger, and not only in Third World countries. The problem goes beyond we in the West having to pay a little bit more for our usual box of strawberries. The situation is not hopeless, but a fast and internationally coordinated response is needed—much more than calls for volunteers to help in the fields. Government organizations need to be involved in mobilizing people to avert the crisis.