What does it mean to cogitate in gated communities,” asks the BCLA, “to think and to write in enforced isolation?” It is a good question though by no means new. With the phrase “gated communities” the BCLA must mean to remind us of the social inequalities that have marked the progress of this disease, particularly in countries without a comprehensive system of health care. Gated communities are designed to keep out “undesirables”—the poor, the foreign, the dangerous. Their creation symbolizes the privatization of public space that English-speaking countries have accelerated since Thatcher and Reagan. Obviously that is one of the causes for our inability, in the United States, to counter or even to take stock of the covid-19 pandemic.
But the allusion or metaphor trips over its own tail. What is the body but a gated community? When we wash our hands, put on masks, keep the prescribed distance while waiting in line, and when our skins, mucous membranes, and antibodies interrogate the substances constantly streaming into us from outside, what are we doing but maintaining a desired degree of isolation? Maintaining a self, a necessary precondition to any possible cogitation, requires robust boundaries. So is there good isolation and bad? How would we make that distinction without falling into hypocrisy (one rule for me, another rule for thee)?
The remedy to the threatened self-undermining of the conceit is to refuse the temptations of metaphor. Let’s not seize on the opportunity, as many distinguished thinkers and writers have done in the past weeks, of making the coronavirus a symbol of our present condition, a symptom of the strife of good and evil, of Man and Nature, of Capitalism and Socialism. Boundaries in general are without moral implications. We can in good conscience be interested in maintaining certain boundaries—those of the human envelope containing ourselves, our neighbours, or the nurses, doctors and cleaners without whose efforts our own chances of maintaining selfhood are diminished—and try to dissolve others, boundaries of nationality or entitlement for example. They are not the same.
The wish to draw a moral from disaster is powerful. When the Roman Empire was overrun and sacked, some blamed it on abandoning the old tutelary gods for Christianity, and Saint Augustine countered (in The City of God) that it would have gone much worse were it not for Christianity. I rate that match as a draw. When eminent philosophers see in confinement and quarantine the shadow of the concentration camps, the looming threat of totalitarian “biopolitics,” or the long arm of eugenics reaching out from the past to decide who will live and who will die, I think we must answer these gestures of moral panic with questions that differentiate scales and outcomes.[1] If confinement is a “state of emergency,” does it serve or not to forestall worse “states of emergency” in hospital wards and the bodies of sick people? Rationing of the goods that make the difference between life and death shocks the conscience, but if there are to be shortages (and let’s do what we can to ensure there are not), shouldn’t we deal with them as fairly and justly as we are able? Our philosophers are dealing with the new by subjecting it to moral reflexes coming from old stockpiles, assimilating Bergamo to Buchenwald and Wuhan to the Gulag, when a proper response would start from the most pressing danger.
The pressing danger in this country, at least for those of us who are not currently intubated, is on show in the evening news: strutting ignorance, lurching vindictively from one life-endangering decision to another, and “public servants” announcing that the stock market is more important to them than the lives of an arbitrary number of their countrymen. Against this background, I experience my house and my books as a place of peace and order. It’s a scene familiar from many of the great books of the tradition: Boethius, in his prison cell in Pavia, while waiting to be executed for his defense of the Senate against Theodoric the Ostrogoth, fantasizing dialogues in prose and verse with Dame Philosophy, his consolation; Boccaccio’s country retreat where a number of Italians, lacking television, while away the time with stories; Victor Klemperer obstinately recording the violence done to the German language in his notebooks while worse violence was being done outside them. Surely this is what humanistic education is for: it equips you to make hermitages of the mind when the rest of the world is going to the dogs. On the other hand, there’s no moral authority in a wall per se: Sade’s Hundred Days of Sodom and Pasolini’s Salò are “gated community” stories enclosing such horror that they make the outside world look like the domain of peace and mutual respect.
Not everyone has a house; not everyone has books or the desire to read them. I am lucky. But the point of teaching, I think, is to share the luck. Just now I am teaching the great Chinese novel Shitou ji (Story of the Stone, ca. 1750) in its nineteenth-century commented editions. The novel is itself a story of enclosure. Hoping to keep their adolescent children safe and unspotted from the world, a family of Qing-dynasty aristocrats has built for them an immense walled garden. Of course the garden, while distinct from the outer world, depends on it in countless ways, not least for the steady tramp of servants going in and out to till, clean, and cook. And inevitably the walled garden subsides into a condition of undifferentiation from the world outside. Boundary-violating goings-on mount up until finally the police break in and the dream is over. The import of the garden metaphor can be situated at various scales: does it stand for innocence, for culture, for the superstructure in its relation to the base, for the empire of China (the “Flowering Middle” in its self-designation)? My students and I are unable to meet in person, but we share, through electronic means, our notes and translations of passages. In just this way the nineteenth-century commenters on this enigmatic work, who never met, shared their analyses and fantasies through the medium of print. Each of us—twenty or so all told—builds a garden from the words of the novel and shares its produce across the fences of our usernames and file systems.
[1] See Giorgio Agamben, “L’invenzione di un’epidemia,” Quodlibet, February 26, 2020, available at https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia; Slavoj Žižek, “Is Barbarism With a Human Face Our Fate?,” Critical Inquiry, March 18, 2020, available at https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/18/is-barbarism-with-a-human-face-our-fate.
