J : There’s been a rumor of a biological trade war between the United States and China. It has gained momentum after disputed social media talks on U.S. patents, articles published in Granma and mutual accusations of the Chinese Foreign Minister and CIA agents against each other. How do you see this circus ?

RW : Such utterly unfounded accusations are part and parcel of what I call pandemic theater. The efforts we just talked of to control populations within-country are rivaled only by attempts to pin blame for the present pandemic and its socioeconomic ramifications upon other countries. These are all modern updates on calling diseases after an international enemy, now spun into vast, unsubstantiated conspiratorial theories aimed at fast-talking debunkers into exhaustion. What were previously simplified into piquant aliases, such as the Spanish flu or the French disease, are now wound into stories about Wuhan labs or biowarfare gone amok.

Much as for UFOlogy—space saucers, aliens, and the like—perpetrators of such frauds and their dupes are seeking a means by which to avoid grasping the material roots by which capital-led modes of production are increasing our vulnerabilities to the emergence of multiple pathogens of pandemic or near-pandemic capacity. We’ve seen in rapid succession, upon deforestation and development, H5N1, SARS-1, H1N1 (2009), MERS, H7N9, Ebola Makona, Zika, African swine fever, and now SARS-2 exit out of marginalized wild reservoirs across poultry and livestock and into human populations. Blaming an enemy allows rulers to avoid having to blame themselves for the sudden surge in multiple deadly diseases.

To avoid the worst outcomes here on out, disalienation offers the next great human transition : abandoning settler ideologies, reintroducing humanity back into Earth’s cycles of regeneration, and rediscovering our sense of individuation in multitudes beyond capital and the state. However, economism, the belief that all causes are economic alone, will not be liberation enough. Global capitalism is a many-headed hydra, appropriating, internalizing, and ordering multiple layers of social relation. Capitalism operates across complex and interlinked terrains of race, class, and gender in the course of actualizing regional value regimes place to place.

At the risk of accepting the precepts of what historian Donna Haraway dismissed as salvation history—« Can we defuse the bomb in time ? »—disalienation must dismantle these multifold hierarchies of oppression and the locale-specific ways they interact with accumulation. Along the way, we must navigate out of capital’s expansive reappropriations across productive, social, and symbolic materialisms. That is, out of what sums up to a totalitarianism. Capitalism commodifies everything—Mars exploration here, sleep there, lithium lagoons, ventilator repair, even sustainability itself, and on and on—these many permutations are found well beyond the factory and farm. All the ways nearly everyone everywhere is subjected to the market, which during a time like this is increasingly anthropomorphized by politicians, could not be clearer.

In short, a successful intervention keeping any one of the many pathogens queuing up across the agroeconomic circuit from killing a billion people must walk through the door of a global clash with capital and its local representatives, however much any individual foot soldier of the bourgeoisie, Glen among them, attempts to mitigate the damage. As our research group describes in some of our latest work, agribusiness is at war with public health. And public health is losing.

Should, however, greater humanity win such a generational conflict, we can replug ourselves back into a planetary metabolism that, however differently expressed place to place, reconnects our ecologies and our economies. Such ideals are more than matters of the utopian. In doing so, we converge on immediate solutions. We protect the forest complexity that keeps deadly pathogens from lining up hosts for a straight shot onto the world’s travel network. We reintroduce the livestock and crop diversities, and reintegrate animal and crop farming at scales that keep pathogens from ramping up in virulence and geographic extent. We allow our food animals to reproduce onsite, restarting the natural selection that allows immune evolution to track pathogens in real time. Big picture, we stop treating nature and community, so full of all we need to survive, as just another competitor to be run off by the market.

The way out is nothing short of birthing a world—or perhaps more along the lines of returning back to Earth. It will also help solve—sleeves rolled up—many of our most pressing problems. None of us stuck in our living rooms from New York to Beijing, or, worse, mourning our dead, want to go through such an outbreak again. Yes, infectious diseases, for most of human history our greatest source of premature mortality, will remain a threat. But given the bestiary of pathogens now in circulation, the worst spilling over now almost annually, we are likely facing another deadly pandemic in far shorter time than the hundred-year lull since 8. Can we fundamentally adjust the modes by which we appropriate nature and arrive at more of a truce with these infections ?

Dogs, however, cannot, under normal circumstances, understand the full range of human speech. As I indicated above, if people want dogs to understand them, they must give dogs hallucinogenic drugs. That is, the Runa must make their dogs into shamans so that they can traverse the ontological boundaries that separate them from humans

That afternoon, back at the house, Ameriga, Hilario’s wife, wondered aloud why the dogs were unable to augur their own deaths and, by extension, why she, their master, was caught unaware of the fate that would befall them : « While I was by the fire, they didn’t dream, » she said. « They just slept, those dogs, and they’re usually real dreamers. Normally while sleeping by the fire they’ll bark ‘hua hua hua.’ » Dogs, I learned, dream, and, by observing them as they dream, people can know what their dreams mean. If, as Ameriga imitated, the dogs had barked « hua hua » in their sleep, it would ´ have indicated that they were dreaming of chasing animals, and they would, therefore, have done the same in the forest the following day, for this is how a dog barks when pursuing game. If, by contrast, they had barked « cuai » that night, it would have been a sure signal that a jaguar would kill them the following day, for this is how dogs cry out when attacked by felines.

Il y a une trentaine d’années, un Noir du plus beau teint, en plein coït avec une blonde « incendiaire », au moment de l’orgasme s’écria : « Vive Schœlcher ! » Quand on saura que Schœlcher est celui qui a fait adopter par la III^e République le décret d’abolition de l’esclavage, on comprendra qu’il faille s’appesantir quelque peu sur les relations possibles entre le Noir et la Blanche.

On nous objectera que cette anecdote n’est pas authentique ; mais le fait qu’elle ait pu prendre corps et se maintenir à travers les âges est un indice : il ne trompe pas. C’est que cette anecdote agite un conflit explicite ou latent, mais réel. Sa permanence souligne l’adhésion du monde noir. Autrement dit, quand une histoire se maintient au sein du folklore, c’est qu’elle exprime en quelque façon une région de « l’âme locale ».

Le sourire du Noir, le grin, semble avoir retenu l’attention de beaucoup d’écrivains. Voici ce qu’en dit Bernard Wolfe : « Nous nous plaisons à représenter le Noir souriant de toutes ses dents à notre adresse. Et son sourire, tel que nous le voyons, — tel que nous le créons, — toujours signifie un don… »

Dons sans fin, tout au long des affiches, des écrans de cinéma, des étiquettes de produits alimentaires… Le Noir donne à Madame les nouvelles « teintes créole sombre » pour ses purs nylons, grâce à la maison de Vigny, ses flacons « grotesques », « tortillés », d’eau de Cologne de Golliwogg et de parfums. Cirage des chaussures, linge blanc comme neige, couchettes basses, confortables, transport rapide des bagages ; jazz jitterbug, jive, comédies, et les contes merveilleux de Brer Rabbitt (Frère Lapin) pour la joie des tout-petits. Le service avec le sourire toujours… « Les Noirs, écrit un anthropologiste (a), sont maintenus dans leur attitude obséquieuse par les sanctions extrêmes de la crainte et de la force, et ceci est bien connu des Blancs et des Noirs tout à la fois. Néanmoins les Blancs exigent que les Noirs se montrent souriants, empressés et amicaux dans tous leurs rapports avec eux… » (« L’oncle Rémus et son lapin », Bernard Wolfe, Les Temps Modernes, n°43, p. 888)

Dans un ordre plus particulier, quand à Paris des étudiants antillais se rencontrent, deux possibilités s’offrent à eux :

• ou soutenir le monde blanc, c’est-à-dire le véritable monde, et, le français alors employé, il leur demeure possible d’envisager quelques problèmes et de tendre dans leurs conclusions à un certain degré d’universalisme ;
• ou rejeter l’Europe, « Yo », et se rejoindre par le patois, en s’installant bien confortablement dans ce que nous appellerons l’umwelt martiniquais ; nous voulons dire par là — et cela s’adresse surtout à nos frères antillais — que lorsqu’un de nos camarades, à Paris ou dans quelque autre ville de Facultés, s’essaie à considérer sérieusement un problème, on l’accuse de faire l’important, et le meilleur moyen de le désarmer est de s’infléchir vers le monde antillais en brandissant le créole. Il faut trouver là une des raisons pour lesquelles tant d’amitiés s’écroulent après quelque temps de vie européenne.
  Notre propos étant la désaliénation des Noirs, nous voudrions qu’ils sentent que chaque fois qu’il y a incompréhension entre eux en face du Blanc, il y a absence de discernement.

Un Sénégalais apprend le créole afin de se faire passer pour antillais : je dis qu’il y a aliénation.
Les Antillais qui le savent multiplient leurs railleries je dis qu’il y a absence de discernement.

Lorsqu’un Antillais licencié en philosophie déclare ne pas présenter l’agrégation, alléguant sa couleur, je dis que la philosophie n’a jamais sauvé personne. Quand un autre s’acharne à me prouver que les Noirs sont aussi intelligents que les Blancs, je dis : l’intelligence non plus n’a jamais sauvé personne, et cela est vrai, car si c’est au nom de l’intelligence et de la philosophie que l’on proclame l’égalité des hommes, c’est en leur nom aussi qu’on décide leur extermination.

Think of the way one person can make you feel, also the way that one person is only one. Why want that one person who is only, after all, one person, and why wake up longing for a person and fall asleep longing for the same person and who knows if anyone else in this is longing ? You don’t know if that one person is longing, too.

the over-determination of each thing unheld

That person who is only one person is just as over-determined as anything else unheld, over-determined like an angelic realm or the commune or whatever else you never get but really want. You hold their face in your face. You see how their face goes from one expression to the other. You imagine how you could make their face move between expressions. You imagine how if you held their face in your eyes how that face would look when held. You think about their face a lot and ask some questions of it : What would it look like if I touched it ? What would it look like if I did that thing to that person ? What would it look like if the person were doing that thing or another ?

the elasticity of surprise on the longed-for’s face

Remember what it looked like when that person was surprised by you ? You said something they didn’t expect. That it was unexpected delighted them from surprise, then you saw their face in immediacy and elasticity of surprise. They said, « You just did that surprising thing ! » and their face was spread open by surprise. You were surprised by their surprise, and your face spread up open. Every one was immediate and elastic then. And remember the grimaces, the person’s face in anger ? Remember the dereliction and affection ? Remember the look on the face in pure vulnerable recipient of pleasure ? Remember the face with its crevices of intellectual effort ? Remember how you wanted to trace any crevice ? Remember the look of doggish desire ? Remember when you were in your pleasure, and you opened your eyes and looked at the person’s, too, and added it to your own ? Remember the look of that face in minor pain ? You remember that person’s frustration, to, and when you caused it, how the frustration slowly took the face and ossified it, how that person’s frustration when you caused it could be the opposite of that face’s surprise. This is one person, but these were so many different faces, then.

the thousand fictions

These one persons are so many different ones, and even if the one person has never been your lover you can still remember all of your love in its precise iteration and all of it in different measures combined, and if that person hasn’t been your lover yet or for whatever reason never will be, you can make a thousand fictions of when they were. You can think of the time you haven’t but did deny the person pleasure. You can think of that time you haven’t given but did give pleasure freely as if you were just a radiator or the sun. You can think of that person’s face when you made that person weep from your own cruelty or sadness. You can think of the time with that one person a thousand times or ten thousand even if none of it has been yet or will, for whatever reason, be.

the precise method

How do you long ? Like you do. There’s the person’s face in the morning, and then again at night. The person is there in dreams sometimes : you can think in your dreams « we will walk through this city » and the city is endless and like every other city until you wake up. You can imagine saying « let’s be as innocent as animals or children » and in this meaning « let’s hold each other’s faces in our faces and eyes and pretend to suffer none of the destruction inherent in this ». The day is made of alternating terror of having that person with you in some way or not having that person with you in some way, the terror of their interest or non-interest, the terror of asymmetrical or symmetrical desire. Pulling out of the terror, you make some plans to pull out of the terror, to fracture idealization or make the person more precise but increased exposure never actually results in decreased idealization like you plan.

longing as cosmopolitanism

So you can swear you think the one-ness of this one person feels really special right now, and in most hours you would swear to their specialness, but in fact it isn’t even that person and never limited like that. Sometimes it is one, sometimes it is another, sometimes it is a future-oriented longing, sometimes a nostalgic one, sometimes it is a generalized they-ness, sometimes a him-ness or her-ness, the way all the people of past longing combine with those of the present longing. This is like sometimes how you are in a city you used to live in or one you have visited a lot. Then sometimes you feel like you are in all cities at once, or that all cities are basically just one, or that you are driving or walking in a city that makes each city the same like the dream city you have the one-person in. So, too, your longing has both an enlarging and flattening effect : now that you have been alive for some time, it’s clear all this longing is a kind of cosmopolitanism. This is the longing that is not in actual relationship but outside of it. That is when it is longing in the state of the general but not in the specifics of one-on-one bodily negotiation. You hold a face in your eyes a lot and say « I am a citizen of longing for that one person », but what you really mean is that you are a citizen of longing for the world.

Cette expression : s’il le voulait, il le ferait est une proposition composée que l’on appelle hypothétique. Or la propriété logique d’une proposition hypothétique n’est pas que l’une et l’autre propositions qui la composent soient vraies. De fait, une hypothétique vraie peut aussi être composée de deux propositions fausses ou bien seulement d’une proposition fausse et d’une – le conséquent – vraie. Une hypothétique est donc vraie, même s’il s’agit d’une énoncé comme « si l’homme volait, il se déplacerait dans les airs ». De fait, cette proposition est vraie, et pourtant ses deux parties sont manifestement fausses. De même une proposition comme « si l’homme volait, il serait un animal » est vraie elle aussi, pourtant son antécédent est faux, seul le conséquent est vrai. Donc si quelqu’un dit que cette expression « s’il le voulait, il le ferait » semble impliquer que si la volonté de faire quelque chose d’autre que ce qu’il fait concernant une chose advient à Dieu dans le futur, il y aura nécessairement en lui un changement, il faut répondre que cette interprétation est vraie au sens précis où, en disant de Dieu qu’il est puissant, on entend que tout ce que Dieu veut se réalise et que rien de qu’il refuse ne se réalise, mais que ce qu’il veut, si l’on pose par hypothèse qu’il ne le veut pas, alors cela ne se réalisera pas, et que ce qu’il ne veut pas, si l’on suppose qu’il le veut, alors cela se réalisera. Telle est la signification des notions de puissance et de volonté appliquées à Dieu. Les deux se réduisent à sa science, c’est-à-dire à son essence.