The first slide had just COVID-19 in bold red on a black background, with an arrow and the word DESIRE in all caps in a kind of purplish-violet, much harder to see.
The voice of the Schizoanalytic Studies lecturer was grave and awkward sounding, though rich and resolute, as if it had endured much, but knew well how compose itself as it went along.
“The reason this virus is so unprecedented, why it’s made such a presence in your lives, and why it’s so hard to tame, is because it is you.”
A period of silence followed. This was a one-way audio connection.
“The virus is a machine.”
“Just as you are a machine.”
The screen changes to a picture of a bee landed on a flower, something with pink petals and a yellow core. The bee was laid across it, as if being held by an unseen grip.
“An assemblage of life processes.”
A slide of a young child of undetermined sex reaching up into the sky after a bird.
“It wants to flourish, as you do, it wants to help what it loves flourish and grow. It loves itself and what it produces, its offspring. Though unlike you, it is its offspring.”
A slide of an Amazon valley forest hewn of its vegetation.
“It wants to flourish and expand, and just as you do, it confuses quality for quantity. This is one of the chief criticisms of Henri Bergson — the solution to the problem oftens tends to be more or less of something, rather than an understanding of differences.”
A slide showing a Chinese wildlife market.
“There are points of vulnerabillities, but it is your expansion — our expansion — and our misunderstanding and mistreatment of desire that brings us face to face with ourselves. The shadow of ourselves, which lives in this virus. It is us, in a sense — not the cellular entity itself, but the problem we have caused by entering into its world as if it was a world of objects, and not a self we are a part of, which we contribute to, a thing we assemble into. Just as the cells of our bodies assemble this unit of flesh you recognize as yourself, and the molecules that make up the cells, and so forth. It is all a life. A complexity, far reaching and incomprehensible, no matter what my colleagues will try to tell you.”
“Don’t blame the purveyor of bats, or any other animal that may make us squeamish to think of eating. She is only following the directives of capital. She desires nice things just as you do, and would love it if she could send her children to a school like this one.”
A slide showing an emergency room, people in scrubs, masks and lab coats, and one person on a stretcher receiving oxygen.
“The immediate problem may seem like a medical one, and it’s rather obvious that the solution will be as well. But the overall and continuous problem is one of desire and understanding.”
A slide showing a medieval portrayal of a devil or demon.
“The evil incarnations we have represented in our cultural activities throughout our history, our so-called religions and superstitions, are not entities as we are, but the relationships among things, among ourselves for instance, and those things we have mistakenly objectified as out in the world, animals, plants and nonliving things. Things we think of as nonliving, at least, though they are as much a part of the life we assemble as the dead skin on your fingertips, touching your keyboards, your hair for instance.”
A blank black slide.
“Between you and I, in our desire to dominate the other, there is a demon which we give power to the more we surrender to that desire of domination.”
“Instead of love. Love is a much friendlier demon.”