In the last almost two years there have been major tests in hospitals, in schools, in different homes, etc. An unknown fatal disease has had to be combated in this way. A pandemic, the consequences of the deaths and those who have gone through the disease; the strong mandates of eviction; the stagnation of the economy; the terrible expansion of fear… The nervousness, the nervousness, the dance of data – infected, admitted, the cumulative incidence, vaccinated…– every hour, every day, for eighteen months. How can we not want some normality?

And the hard discussions between people. Insults have not been limited to drunken hours (bars were closed! ), but to the headlines and to the articles of serious newspapers: The Deniers! The fascists! The conspirators! Dogs! An ugly environment that makes you want to keep quiet at the same time: “Whatever happens, better forget it”; “we’ve seen something harder.” And what the future can bring. Let everyone return to their occupations. Peace.

But there's always someone who says no. After every hard moment, which tries to keep the wound open: we have to look for those responsible, that the disease is structural, that is the time to make profound changes. Normality? The origin of what we have gone through in that normality has been a small warning. That the true deniers are the ones who claim normality; that is, the vast majority.

Of course, this reflection is in a bad mood. Putting myself among the latter causes me nausea and headache. Who wants to dig up his wound? Do not be annoyed, please, what we have already had is enough.

Bertsolaris

At a time when most Euskaldun people were a grievous – I wouldn’t say illiterate, because that is a great misunderstanding in today’s supposedly literate society – the Bertsolaris also served to launch disputes and grudges: an incredible injustice and to order someone who could write about it a selection of verses; move on to the papers and sell them in the plaza; to learn from the thorns. Things wouldn’t change at the bottom, but let people hear the version of the steep…

He tried this during the summer, calling a dog the most esteemed and acclaimed Basque doctor, Sasiko-Silveira, who attends well to his last name. And the white Zubia engulfed the hook. “In Lesaka there is a big man, / who makes verses, / with the ups and downs of the pandemic / who has called me a dog. / I know very well what is wrong / and what is right, / why have I been named that way?». All the newspapers – also those who use Euskera with contempt – echoed it, and translated into Spanish, the headline of Naiz was “The head of ICU Felix Zubía responds with bertsos to a negationist insult”. What to say about the tone used by the Basque Journal and Digital Confidential.

“Hello Felix I am the lesakarra / the dog who called you / the nice way was neither in advance wise / but I have also achieved / what I was looking for / opening the debate / here I am my answer”. The area of bertsolarism enthusiasts, which normally does not have more than 500 visits, is estimated to have about 5,000. But that's where it ended.

“In the media you are from Yangola / I again a leper. / It is a big difference if our challenge / bertso is a challenge / you are ready to go down / from the sky to the plaza / we could play a hundred verses». And I came up with the following: very hot things, friends of one and the other could organize a championship – yes the biggest pediment was filled with shoulders! – four versus four, after negotiating the themes that put it, to all the trades, a great party for a whole day… But then I was refreshed the enthusiasm (in what mist you live! ! ). The function that Bertsolarism has today is not what it had before. It is an exemplary institution of the Basque culture; organiser of schools and championships; a wonderful stimulus of the Basque culture, of the culture, of the nation. Look at BEC, Xilaba and the rest!

However, I found what had happened to this small issue to be symptomatic, and I came up with the dense argument of one and the other, because the bertso also serves to compact ideas. Bridge: “The dead have passed through the world four million, about six thousand, in the Basque Country. / I still have one thing / you can't get into your head / Why do you reject it / as if not? // More than seven hundred cases / seen in my view / lessons learned through death. / I would like to avoid some, / advise. / Why do I get those ugly words?” Silveira: “When it is called a negationist, little remains, even if it is not insult / new tactic / bad no one denies it / but its origin / is a virus that has not been isolated? / what guess?”

So, if denial is not an issue, we must insist on something else, and there goes Silveira, a necessary discussion to clarify many obscure things: “Not everything is well done/not a bad reflection. / If journalists have spread it / a version and a single / can not doubt it / is it not a beautiful gem / to which you disagree / to which you disagree? // You on television, on the radios / and in the newspapers / have spread the fear of the four winds anyway / making you feel the same life of truth / and that last year so many / so many years before died // The hospital of San Sebastian / UCI has launched the verses / Has launched the verses. / A debate was held with the Basque scientists / invite you and not explain it / and we ignore it».

This would be enough to confirm the clash between two positions and misunderstanding. Moreover, to demonstrate once again that the argument of the one serves only to strengthen the position of the other (negationist! ; txakurra, that is); and to confirm the motto “with you it is useless”. If that were not enough, the conspiracy affair: “But there are people who resign from what happened / Under a conspiracy / Who smash us. / A horrible idea occurs to me / Nothing else to hear them, / Although they refuse five thousand times / That will not disappear. // I don't know who invented / Everything is a lie, / Vaccines lose half poison / Everything. / If there is any doubt, to the hospital / Come later / He who does not want to see / He is the most blind» (Bridge). Silveira replied: “The PCR in diagnosis / use choice / you know it is as good as me / malicious / so you do it to your liking / cumulative incidence / until you draw a situation / totally manipulated. // Just mention without redness / asymptomatic / After the first laughter come / anger and grief / if a doctor does not know / what a child knows / has never been sick / no symptoms. // What you call vaccine / what contains? What does it contain? / no cure, no protection / and it is causing many bad consequences / I have not put in / but I invite you / – of course, in writing – all responsibility / and tomorrow // You know that pharmacology has little ‘holy’… / Last year in Spain 600 million doctors received from these (it is public) / I therefore know / how many have come to Euskal Herria / which have come from them”».

Obviously that is not a debate; if it is a provocation prior to the debate, but, as I say, the present Bertsolaris is not to disturb anyone, and what Silveira is asking for cannot be answered (‘What has the floor, it is in him/her or it is not an offense / of course it is not me who starts now to tell me. / If you are able to understand it! / and also, forgive the excellent / erroneous words and / pending your answer”).

Then the extra ended, each with his own head confirmed and the close adhesion of his peers. But, although in a simple and casual way, many of the points that have been at the heart of the debate every day were cited: the nature and origin of the pandemic, the responses provided or disproportionate, the lack of discussion, dubious diagnoses, suspicions about the pharmaceutical industries and vaccines… The demands of the official version make it clear that all this has already been seen and shown that the absolute majority of people have been willing to buy the standard. We want peace, and the last verse of the Bridge expresses the general feeling well: “It is evident that everything / has not been done well; / the authorities, the journalists, the doctors. / Accept what happened and / or not repeat it, / set your head on and / speak with respect”. But what is wrong or who is wrong, what must be accepted so that it is not repeated? Nervousness? Insults and bad manners? The attitude of the irresponsible who have continued to neglect the experts? Those who refuse to get vaccinated? Because in the last verse there is a kind of superiority and a hidden threat: "We're a lot of crappy nonsense! You will have to learn once again how the strength of the State and of Reason is!”1.

Conspirators

I have the impression that the time has come for those who, with anger and despair, continue to hold our stand in front of all this – few round truths and many uncertainties – to insult us from the enemy and say that we are negators, as happened with the black offenses or queerness. Yes, we're also conspiratorial, of course. Put aside the accusations like “you are the real deniers” or the effort to confront the sages who say “not to accept the official version come all the paranoia and conspiracies” or the last manure that adds to the sweet denominations of irresponsible and sociopath: “You are playing the far-right.” Yes, the fact that the situation we suffer is not recognised opens up gaps or risky paths, and we know that those who are committed to this have a great chance of getting rid of it – as Spartaco and Rosa Luxembourg have just done; or those who were psychiatrized in gulages or Sinkiang or those who are these days. “Everything I do doesn’t make sense if the house burns. However, when the house is burned, we have to continue as usual, we have to do everything carefully and precisely, perhaps even more precisely — even if no one realizes it. It is possible that life will disappear from the earth, that there will be no memory of what has been done for good or for evil. But you are still like before, it is too late to change, there is no longer time’, recently written by the cursed philosopher Agamben. We will not get angry with blindness, cowardice or bitterness. Or if we get angry, we'll look for breaths to relax, and also voices that will come to us from sensitivities that aren't ours, to fine-tune, sharpen, widen, change our work.

In this endeavour, we will not forget the facts that are in the hands of all and that may be distorted by the peace requirement. Those who, despite being insulted and punished, try to explain things so that everyone can understand them have a great deal of merit. They question the official and unique version, so they are condemned to the hell of the deniers before they are heard. Don't spin it anymore. Because for anyone who wants it, enough information is available to make matters very bad on the subject of the pandemic. But not in the moral sense (“It is evident that all things / have not been done well, / authorities, journalists / doctors alike…”). In other words, we can also say that things have been done very well or the best thing you can - wet over the jaw - the question is where we put the spotlight and what importance we attach to each argument. Loayssa and Petruccelli make it clear in that article on vaccines:

“Although the pandemic has been perceived as a natural phenomenon, and the measures taken have shown themselves as if they were not political and ideological connotations, the measures taken as a “scientific” operation, on the contrary. The pandemic is a social phenomenon at least as biological or natural, and the way to deal with it is closely linked to social representations, political options or ideological premises in force. Experimental vaccination against COVID-19 is part of the ideology of technological resolionism, in a paradigm or belief that social relationships and the natural cycles of metabolism that breaks human species can be corrected by technology. One of the implicit premises is: “Forests and forests can be destroyed and animal species can be abandoned, because when zoonotic leaps are produced, in laboratories we will find solutions that experiment with dangerous viruses, and if a virus escapes, we will solve it.”

Deep down, and for the first time in the history of epidemiology, military strategies of aggression against a virus have been implemented. It does not matter if it was soon found that the forecasts made by mathematical modelling were erroneous. The campaign was underway and continues with its simple and unique logic. It is pointless to consider that the avatars of the epidemic, called waves, understood as attacks by an enemy, have been almost equal to those of all epidemics. If the virus and nature should be put under our control, everything that is thought and done will be seen in that logic; and all the “experts” who work in the media are slaves and raised from that logic. From the very beginning it was decided that universal incorporation would solve everything, and we continue in that logic. It is pointless to consider the weak, controversial or dangerous points of this campaign. Even when the pandemic is over and it is accepted that we will also have to live with this virus, it will be celebrated as a great victory. If the first cause of death in the world in 2020 has not been COVID-19 anywhere – as usual, many more people have died from hunger, air pollution, heart disease or cancers – they have claimed that this has been thanks to the measures that have been taken against all evidence.

First, terror seized him and repression was brutal against those who did not accept him. And I don't mean what was used against the poor devil who had been caught in the woods during the lockdown, nor the violent samples of strength of all the police, over the past few weeks, because of the parties. Under or above all this, structural repression is taking place. From the information options. It is enough to know what the close network exists between pharmaceutical companies, the world’s monopolized computer media, those who govern finances and governments, to understand that the demands of many “for an honest and plural debate” serve only to provoke a perverse smile (what is before the Silveira Bridge? ). As Dr. Ángeles Maestro has recently explained, “in this phase of capitalism, in which history has known the greatest concentration of capital, greater social control is carried out, which does not support the idea of freedom of expression that once coincided with the bourgeois revolutions” 4. That we live in the age of “communication”. Even the smallest and largest media that are at the lowest level of this gigantic pyramid of martillean communications day by day the demands of obedience, taking advantage of the meekness of the workers who seek to maintain the base of the health system. Besides being a conspiracy, one needs to be stupid to face the tsunami of so many honored and majestic people.

Everything I have said so far – and the subject has many points that could have been extended much further – is not intended to “reinvent an honest public debate once again”. My intention is to think about the gap that is taking place.

Gap

Cracks are the typical elements of what we call coexistence. We constantly talk about them: of the gender gap, of those with lighter or darker skin, of those of social classes, of the intergenerational… And along with these gaps are the structures or myths that are built to reduce or soften the distances they create: from states and following with religions, with all the structures “interclasists”, “intergender” and ecumenical. But on these condiments there are also fortifications and trenches to sustain the cracks, often with weapons and death, always with great violence, with the strong taboos that one or the other gives for certain and natural ones. In today's cities there are frequent groups or groups that have little contact with each other: caring for our thousands of old people, and in parks we see the immigrants celebrating their children's birthdays, and those who are born there. Today’s society is a building of watertight spaces, although most of us – the most privileged – tend to think that we live in the center of the city.

The question is: Has the Covid-19 pandemic created or surfaced a new gap? And in the event of an affirmative answer to this question, what kind? What are the consequences? An article written by anthropologists Stefania Consigliere and Cristina Zavaroni has put me ^{5 on that} track. This article begins to comment on the novel The City & the City, published by China Miéville in 2009. In the novel, a crime occurs – the narrator is the commissioner who has entered the investigation for clarification – but it occurs in a singular place: In an urban state called Bes?el, which shares the same geographic space with another urban state called al Qoma, totally different. So a street, a building or even a tree can be located at the same time in one country and another. Both cities are separated by a strict border, and each one has its own language, its culture, its completely different economy. But how do you keep that limit in the same place? For a mechanism called a gap.

In these States, an offence or crime is called a breach, but also the clandestine army that has been set up to destroy it. The gap is at the center of the education of the inhabitants of one city and another, and to avoid it, people need to be trained. Thus, boys and girls should learn to dissee, to desautilize. “In some places there are also isolated trees, in front of which the children of Ul Qoma and Bes?el rise them next to each other, following the whispered orders of their parents, so that the others disappear continuously. However, children are common sources of contamination that spread disease. Epidemiology is a complex science, both there and in our own”, says the narrator at the heart of the novel. This disappearance, in which the authorities and the population of one state and another converge, is the basis for survival. It would be a crime for those who strive to see rather than see the gap. When the infringement is serious, not an unexpected issue, immediately corrected, a kind of army with the same name, Arrakala, is activated to crush this crime. This army, even on the basis of the two States, lives outside its legislation, without any uniform or distinctive. The novel describes it as follows: “The gap is nothing. It's a commonplace, it's a simple matter. The gap has no embassies, no official currencies, no armies; it has no related characteristics. If you make a [crime] breach, Arrakala will devour you. The crack is an empty place, full of police fury”. In other words, ‘the one who makes the gap is in the hands of Arrakala. We can easily remove the offender. However, there are only rumours about these criminals. No one has heard of someone who has arrested Arrakala and “complied with his punishment.” They become absolutely discreet, or Arrakala does not liberate anyone…”.

This strange fiction (weird fiction), built from the intricate characteristics of the fantastic novel and the black novel, has many levels of reading. The author says that she is against allegorical readings (in which it can be clear “what the novel is really about”); that she likes open or diverse meanings. Therefore, this novel is not “fixed”, and I think that gives it added value. But I'm not going to go into the mazes of the novel or its interpretations. I'm going to stick to the idea of the gap.

To do this, one has to take into account another element that corresponds to the myth of origin of the two urban states that have been built in the same place. Where does the current division come from? Was there a time when the two urban statues lived together? There is no knowledge about it, nor is it sought. It would be dangerous to get into those investigations. In both cases there are small fractions called unionists, but they have no operational force and are fully controlled and trampled by the police on each side. In the mythology of these marginalized people there is talk of a no-place called Orciny:

“It would be a city prior to division; a kind of protomyth that has to be interpreted as a mystery and as a shed. […] He said that Orciny had existed somewhere, in the gaps between Al Qoma and Bes?el, that they were prior to the division or that it remained as a secret colony, an extraordinary colony among the neighbors, visible to the citizens of both cities, although they all despair, while they all see them, from the claws of Arrakala they are freed… At the intervals of the inner cities, they do not live in exile justice.

And to make things even more messy:

“He once said that the whole story of Bes?el and Ul Qoma was the story of the war between Orciny and Arrakala… But it is not clear to me that Arrakala and Orciny are enemies. Maybe they work together. Or maybe we've given Orciny a power that's been accumulating for centuries, saying it's a story as we all sit there. I believe that Orciny is the name given to himself.”

Like the Italian anthropologists, I get suggestive images and ideas to describe the situation we are experiencing at the moment: confusion, ever-tighter limits: the gap. And pulling away from another thread mentioned in the novel, I thought of a regret that many deniers repeat. It is regrettable that, on the right and the left, everyone shares the only speech approved; and even more so among the Abertzales, those who are going to take tougher measures in confrontation. The novel states that ignorance between the two cities that have to be seen ignoring each other and the tension it maintains are fundamental to the survival of each state. “Those of the National Bloc – and the Real Citizens organised for street fighting – hate Arrakala, but that’s like hating the air, because without Arrakala there is no homeland… The Bes’ abertzals are divided between the supporters of the balance of power and the triumphalists. The latter think that Arrakala is protecting Ul Qoma and that this is the main obstacle of a sovereign B?el».

Cultural violence

In the aforementioned article by Consigliere and Zavaroni, after commenting on the gap, they talk about the function of what we call culture:

“Culture is not a universal, a curtain with which we cover nature, a suit that we can put or remove to our liking, but our way of adapting as human beings. Culture enters the bodies, the cells, the genome; culture shapes the perception of the world, structures our impulses and emotional responses, and makes us function according to a physiological and pathological regime… [What is decided at that level] has nothing to do with truth or lies, because it creates our own world, and its truths and lies we create or adapt them constantly… The idea of disvision is chaos. And a truth that comes into force invalidates the above: as monotheism did with polytheism, or monogamy with polygamy, or linear time with cyclical time… One of the most relevant issues to value the quality of the world we create is the relationship between unknowns and marginalized; between the real and the imaginary, perhaps the most decisive factor of global quality. With possible differences of contempt for repression”.

Children are forced to live in these worlds, because they are not adapted to the world of their parents. As in the novel, they have to be educated to disregard the worlds of others, to distinguish the pre-individual and the imaginary from the real, the functional world that belongs to them. However, all societies adapt their times and special spaces to the relaxation of the dismissal: in the interpretation of dreams, in the trance, in meditation, in the use of drugs… The function of some therapies would be to broaden the field of the visible, which must be disregarded generates an imbalance or too great suffering. The flexibility of a society can be measured in the use of these spaces and, as far as we are concerned, the hardening and tightening that is taking place in many bordering areas is evident: we have turned everything into tourism, depoliticized art and, in short, applying increasingly restrictive measures of objectivity, we have defeated everything that is considered pathological or sinister, which will feed the morb as a spectacle.

All of this requires large doses of violence to be maintained. Someone said that if all the citizens of the first world suddenly realized the violence that makes our world possible, if we felt its exploitation and its cruelty, we would not be able to cope with the impact. We'd either go crazy or die of shock.

It is clear that a collective emergency – a war, an epidemic… – shakes the previous balance; what we call normality. And this should be the right time to notice the column on which our own is raised. “Science” is the basis on which we seek to establish all criteria and decisions, and on which “health criteria” are adhered. We deal with these criteria with objectivity, and anyone who doubts their minimum reason is forced to the hell of the irrational. A final mention of the article cited:

“All this is not surprising, but it scares him. There are historic times of greater or lesser ideological rupture, but those coinciding with dictatorships and totalitarianism have been the ones that have lasted the most and have shown no flexibility whatsoever. When you can see more clearly, looking away means that the border police have been completely internalized, that we decided to disappear. Above all, however, this manoeuvre responds to a violent logic, perhaps more serious than the perversity of those seeking their economic benefit in turbulent waters. Rage Against can be summed up with the verse of a song by The Machine: “Since there is no other pill to take, it devours you.” For many of our contemporaries, the only psychically acceptable solutions to emerge from the crisis are the same logic that has caused the disaster. Were we depressed by bad relationships of importance? Well, we have to be completely alone if we want to save ourselves. Did our children have problems with screen dependence? Well, you have to force him to spend all the time in front of a screen and there is no problem anymore. That we had increasingly gigantic hospitals and weaker basic services? Well, strengthening hospitals is the only way to deal with COVID-19. Etc.’

I suspect that the gap that is being created is not only going to demonize and leave a new group of people, as usual, but it offers a perfect excuse for channeling the ghosts of most. This group of people – deniers, conspirators, criminal sociopaths against vaccines – would further weaken social, political and cultural classifications so far, and would demand a high price for the increasingly unsustainable balance.

House in Sutan

I have before me the newspaper that reads the most in Gipuzkoa. As usual, the last match of the Real Sociedad is taken as a priority, followed by the beginning of the festival and the declarations of the lehendakari: «Urkullu announces the resurrection of the Basque Country after Covid-19». In one corner, however, there is another new one: “The planet is striving not to deal with climate change” (“The planet is striving to throw the towel against climate change”). Who is that “planet” that pauses like an atolondrate? The article refers to the words of the United Nations Secretary-General: ‘The report by our experts leaves no room for doubt. Time is running out. For the UN Conference on Climate Change 2021, to be held in Glasgow (COP 26), to be a turning point, all countries must commit to achieving zero net emissions by 2050.” After detecting the stagnation of the pandemic, pollution and emissions have again reached their peak and are about to exceed the 2019 marks.

Swedish researcher and activist Andreas Malm is one of those who calmly and deeply analyzes the relationships and differences between Covid-19 and climate disaster. The pandemic must be understood in the context of the catastrophe, but the perception of one and the other is completely different – and, of course, the measures that the authorities take against one and the other (no). It explains the situation critically:

“The horsemen of the Revelation do not ride alone, the plagues do not appear in singular. It seems that in our water wells we are awaiting ulcers, storms, epidemics, smelly rivers, fish and dead frogs. When I write these lines, in the spring of 2020, the number of cases recorded in the coronavirus pandemic is about to exceed the million, there are almost 50,000 deaths and no one knows how this story will end... If we collect some of the checks signed to the imagination, we can see a burning planet inhabited by people with fever: global warming will be invaded by pandemics; on Bonbay, for example, suburbs will stay under the sea while people die of pneumonia. From the Dharavi slum they have just reported the first case of coronavirus. There, nearly a million people live there, almost without sanitary facilities, and the cycle passenger cars that flood the neighborhood are getting taller and taller. In some refugee areas, pathogens enter the bodies stacked like a knife in butter. The heat will be too intense and there will be too many infections in the street; the fields will crack under the sun and no one will be able to worry about them” 7.

What about us? Bombay is far away! (But should we not immunize everyone to rid ourselves of evil as well? ). Malm, after a serious reading of the situation, talks about a war economy to combat the climate disaster (“War Communism”, in particular). The measures to be taken are clear. The power organized to produce them does not exist.

As usual, last summer, professors from the universities of our environment launched an umpteenth proposal under the title “Shock Plan for the reconstruction of the eco-social resilience of the Spanish State as soon as possible”, which has already achieved the signing of a hundred experts and experts, among which are essential measures in the economy, energy, taxation, finance, habitat, industry, agriculture, culture, education, education, education, culture, and international relations. All of them are acceptable by common sense expressed in a technical-aseptic way. But if we list the twenty-eight measures proposed here – what I have done – six of them are direct attacks on the sacred right of private property; fourteen, attacks on liberal economic principles; many others on the fundamental political dogmas of our civilisation... In other words, they are aimed at an economy of war communism to which Andreas Malm refers. If a party were to be formed that would textually approve this program would obtain less votes than the PACMA (“Animalist Party Against Animal Abuse”)… We want normality; The Basque Journal, El Correo, Diario de Navarra, Berria, Sud Ouest, El País, Le Monde, Tele5 and EITB are our sources of information. And, from time to time, we protest because one or the other has gone hand in the ballot box or at the invitation of the secretary, in some intervention by Zanzibar or the Ertzaintza, in the last temporary employment regulation TEU or in the “problem” of youth precariousness.

This last crisis has been the one that has suffered direct damage. Many people have been beaten to many levels: by death and risk, but also by the need to live situations that were never imagined: confinement, working conditions, relationships... Those wounds and scars will remain there, but we do not think that the dimension that has had all this has led us to a situation that we had not imagined and in which we are consolidating. Contrary to what they are doing these days for the loudspeakers (“it’s happened, or it’s almost happened, it’s going on forever”), what they’ve lived through during the pandemic is unfortunately not the umpteenth crisis that touched us. On the contrary, the impression I have and that of others is that the house is on fire. And without losing that, we're pushed into inner exile, and that hurts us a lot. Even if I'm a negationist, we're not going to deny that pain.

The situation has upset us for many reasons, but, above all particularities, I would insist that “health” and “disease” have become fundamental political issues. And I am not referring to the management, the management of the pandemic, the management of health, but to the fact that the most intimate issue – life, death… – has become a political problem of first and urgent need, which has caught us off the hook. That's why the foundations shudder until the buildings of our political and social constructions crack. That is why we also feel the desire to return to normal: “This is a national emergency, it is time to abandon partisan,” say the Spanish and French right and the spokesmen of the Abertzale left.

The name of an article by the philosopher Agamben, to which I referred earlier, is "The house is burning." He was a philosopher discussed but respected until the pandemic, and since in February 2020 he published the epidemic L’invencione di un’epidemic – and there are dozens of articles he has written later – he has had to suffer absolute lynching in all the media. In my opinion, nobody has pointed out the gravity of the situation and, therefore, when the House burns, I will finish this reflection with several quotes from the article:

“How long has the homes been burning? How long have you been smoking? A century ago, between 1914 and 1918, something happened in Europe that threw everything that seemed complete and alive into flames and madness. Thirty years later, the fire took over everything again, everywhere, and since then it has continued to smoke, more humbly, extinct, almost under the ashes, but alive. Perhaps the fire began long before, when the blind impulse of humanity for salvation and progress was linked to the power of fire and machines. All of this is known and you don't have to repeat it. On the contrary, we have to ask ourselves how we can continue to live and think while everything was burned, what was left at the center of the fig tree or at the corners. How we breathed the flames, what we lost, what waste or impostas assaulted us. […]

Now, the flame has changed shape and nature; it's become digital, invisible and cold, but that's why it's even closer, at all times around us, above us. […]

Blindness is even more desperate, because shipwrecks want to rule their own shipwreck and say that everything can be kept technically under control, that there is no need for a new god or a sky – just bans, experts and doctors. Fear and infamy.

What would be a god that is not prayed or sacrificed to? And what would be a law that ignores order and imposition? And what is a word that does not ordains or does not express anything, but sustains itself in the beginning or, perhaps, in something that precedes the very beginning?

In the end, a culture that feels inanimate attempts to govern destruction through a permanent state of emergency. Jünger saw in the general mobilization the fundamental nature of our time, and from that point of view we also have to look at today’s. People must mobilize, feel at all times in an emergency situation, and that situation must be regulated as precisely as possible by those who have the capacity to decide it. But if in the past the purpose of mobilisation was to bring people together and bring people together, today, the general mobilization is to isolate and alienate us from each other. […]

Despite trying to maintain at all costs the simple life that power has created (“knots life”) and trying to control it with all possible devices – not only with the police, but also with medicine and technology – life, as by definition is unsustainable, will always escape us. Governing simple life is the madness of our time. Because people reduced to their pure biological nature are no longer people; people’s governance and the governance of things coincide at that time.”

Dark, heartless thoughts, no doubt, but that shouldn't allow us despair. All of us are born in the flames of Europe, and although the last decades of the last century have given us the impression that we were asleep in a narcotic bubble, that bubble has burst and, as in other red times, each one will have to decide where and how to locate it.

Agamben himself proposed this in the post of 17 September:

‘Italy, as a Western political laboratory in which the strategies of the major powers are drawn up in an extreme manner, is today a country in a poor state, both politically and humanly, and a proud and determined tyranny without scruples has joined a mass. People have been caught by a pseudo-religious terror that is willing to sacrifice not only the water that was once understood as individual freedom, but all the warmth of human relations. Believing that we are returning to normal with the greenpass is completely silly. As the third vaccine is being implemented, other vaccines will be implemented and, if they are useful to the authorities, new emergency situations and red areas will be declared. And those who, recklessly, submit to obedience, will pay their price.

Under these conditions, and without ruling out all possible instruments of immediate resistance, dissidents must think that it is necessary to create a new society within society, a community of friends and neighbours within the society of the enemy and of distance. The forms of this new secrecy, which will be the most autonomous possible of the organisations, must be valued and modified according to experience, but only they will be able to guarantee human survival, whether consciously or not, in a world oriented towards self-destruction”.

Although the loudspeakers have already shouted as alert as normal, since they have reached the intimacy of all, they no longer need to be installed in the plaza, the time has come for something else. Pandemic crises, ecological crises, economic and social crises will only intensify, and even accelerate, as has happened in recent months. And that will create new gaps and intensify them.

It is not time to fall asleep or to despair.

Notes to the article: