ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the COVID-19 pandemic in light of earlier experience of HIV and AIDS, arguing that the bareback subculture that emerged among gay men during the late 1990s offers an example of what it might mean to live with a virus that has become endemic. Combining a psychoanalytic emphasis on social fantasy with a biopolitical perspective, the chapter zeroes in on the respiratory dimension that distinguishes transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from that of HIV. Since an aerosolised virus makes ordinary respiration a site of intensified vulnerability by disclosing our ‘shared insides’ (Sloterdijk), it has become ever more necessary to learn not only how to live with other people but also how to inhabit the virosphere. Drawing on four decades of thinking about HIV, this chapter engages with the newly universalised problem of how to navigate viral intimacy.
