ABSTRACT

Scientists around the world are reportedly working exceptionally hard to establish the precise origin of the virus in order to be better equipped to prevent the next pandemic. The intrinsic instability and ineluctable politicization of scientific knowledge is but one of the great many tensions and truths the question of the virus which should also be understood, as a subjective genitive, and thus as the question posed by the virus has magnified and laid bare. Strange as it may seem, the staggering human and economic cost of the virus in the West is directly proportional to its spurious ideological belief in the productive power of self-governance and individual enterprise. Maybe in 500 years, historians will look back upon the year 2020 as the beginning of the second Renaissance; maybe in 500 years, 2020 will merely be recorded as an extremely significant yet ultimately controlled disruption in the course of human existence.