first book I’ve read that focuses on the covid-19 pandemic of 2020 and onwards. butler uses merleau-ponty and critical phenomenology to discuss what happened during those days. the book creates space to think about ‘infection’ in a broader sense, considering all the interactions we humans have with each other and with the world in general. there are also accounts of how the pandemic affected the disadvantaged people and communities all around the world. some people say that the pandemic broke something fundamental in human societies, i’m curious about it.
Butler, J. (2022). What world is this? A pandemic phenomenology. Columbia University press, p. 56-9.
“As I noted earlier, Merleau-Ponty’s posthumously published reflections on tactility rely upon the figure of the “entrelac”—the interlacing. He tells us that when we touch an object, we become aware of ourselves touching as well, and that the tangible world, everything in the world we touch, is always defined in part by the fact that it is touchable by us. At the same time, the tangible world exceeds our touch and establishes the general conditions of tactility. And that excess makes itself known in the touch itself. In this way we cannot conceive of ourselves as beings capable of touch without the tangible objects of the world. And when we near and touch one another, do we always know at that moment who precisely is touching whom? When we say “we touched each other,” and we seem to be reporting on an emotional or physical encounter. If my hand touches another, it is at the very same time touched by that other bodily surface, animate and animating. That means that the other also touches me, whether or not I think of myself as receptive. Of course, receptivity is not the same as passivity, and yet the two are all too often conflated. Further, if activity and passivity are intertwined, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, then both action and receptivity have to be thought outside the logic of mutual exclusion. Following Spinoza, the greater the potentials of receptivity, the greater the powers of action.
This notion of intertwining compels a reformulation of basic questions: Am I subject or object or always both, and what difference does it make to understand one’s body as bound to a tangible world? If, as Merleau-Ponty points out, touching another is also the experience of touching oneself or becoming aware of one’s own skin at the point of contact, is there a way to distinguish between this scene of touching / being touched and a sense of the tactility of the self? Is there, in other words, an equivocation between acting and receiving that marks an embodied and tactile sense of self? There are moments of touch in which one poses questions about oneself: Who am I at this moment of touch, or who am I becoming? Or to follow the question posed by María Lugones, who have I become by virtue of this new tactile encounter with another? Any teenager in the course of coming out finds this existential/social quandary emerging precisely then and there, in a proximity and intimacy whose form one could not have fully anticipated. This is how tactility works, Merleau-Ponty tells us, insofar as the porous boundaries of the body mark out paths of relationality; affected by that which we seek to affect, there is no clear way to distinguish activity and passivity as mutually exclusive. Aristotle bites the dust again.
Why bring Scheler and Merleau-Ponty together in the way that I have? Is the destruction of value that defines the tragic for Scheler really something that speaks to us now? Is the notion of the world indicted or laid bare by the tragic event something that we can now bring forward as we seek to understand the coordinates of the world in which we are now asked to live? Is this world inhabitable? If so, for whom? And in what measure? What happens when the destruction of value— such as the value of lives, the values of the earth— drenches the world in sorrow? What happens when we lose touch or can barely remember the proximate breath of another? Who are we then or, rather, what world is it that we then inhabit, if inhabitation is in fact still possible? Perhaps the disorientations of a subject- centered view of the world carries with it signs of hope or promise of another kind of world- making, another way of living in the world of air and earth, architectural enclosures, narrow passageways, as a breathing and tactile creature who requires so many human and nonhuman dimensions of life to live.
Merleau- Ponty thought that the human body was dispersed in time and space in the way that other objects and things were not. What he did not consider, however, was that objects and things carry with them natural histories, to use Theodor Adorno’s phrase, the history of work and consumption, and a mediation by market values. This is especially true when we think about extractivism as the plundering of natural resources for the purposes of profit. If the intersubjective relation is formulated without reference to the object world— that is, to the environment, to the complex values of natural goods, and to the broader organization of economic and social reality— then it is no longer possible to understand both the values it produces and those it destroys. If a notion of the inhabitable world fails to include the effects of environmental toxins on breathable air, then what is lost is the very idea of the climate as part of the horizon of the world. Further, without those references, we cannot know how to live well and how best to inhabit the earth or to make an inhabitable world. Living in a livable way requires inhabiting a world— a world that remains inhabitable. Objects can be vectors for all these questions, perhaps more clearly than an exclusive focus on subjectivity or its variant, intersubjectivity. For Merleau- Ponty, the dyadic relation between you and me is both conditioned and exceeded by tangibility itself, by language, but also, we might add, by breathability— the social character of air.”
