The Coronavirus’ Two Bodies

From the beginning – or at least the time of the so-called “Norman Anonymous” writing in the 12th century – there was a contradiction at work, in whether to see such figures as genuinely possessing two natures or really unified in one. For Santner argues that the very modernist trope of the representation-of-the-lack-of-representation itself constitutes “an almost defiling contact with the flesh that one has torn free from the king’s sublime physiology and claimed for the People”. Camus refers to “the prisoners of the plague”, and there is a certain misleading, but convincing, universality that is also, in some ineffable way, the collective universality heralded by Badiou and Zizek. It may indeed be that collectivity which is called into being by the pandemic.