#nonlife

Merleau-Ponty is concerned with the particular figuration of human life. To what extent is this articulation of life a specifically human one? From the perspective of a phenomenology that situates itself beyond the Husserlian level and is instead concerned with the prehuman sphere, prior to emergence of the ego, the distinction of life loses its clarity. Merleau-Ponty poses a critical question: ‘Life and nonlife are different only as chemistry of mass and individual chemistry: Are viruses living or nonliving beings?’. The question is in direct contradistinction to a phenomenology purportedly concerned with the human experience, and that alone. From the perspective of a human subject, a virus or a disease enters the body and is experienced as a form of anti-life. It is experienced as something that reduces life to a paralysed state, draining the body at all times of the resources [it] depends [on] in order to advance itself in the world. But how does the virus perceive us, to paraphrase David Cronenberg? The very reversibility of these perspectives confuses the boundaries between life and nonlife, masking the phenomena with both dimensions at once

Capitalism has a unique relation to the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus insofar as Capitalism sees all things as having the potential to create profit; that is, nothing is inherently inert, everything is vital from the point of view of capitalization, and anything can become something more with the right innovative angle. Indeed, capitalists can be said to be the purest of the Animists. This said, industrial capital depends on and, along with states, vigorously polices the separations between forms of existence so that certain kinds of existents can be subjected to different kinds of extractions. Thus even as activists and academics level the relation between animal life and among objects (including human subjects), states pass legislation both protecting the rights of businesses and corporations to use animals and lands and criminalizing tactics of ecological and environmental activism. In other words, like the Virus that takes advantage but is not ultimately wedded to the difference between Life and Nonlife, Capital views all modes of existence as if they were vital and demands that not all modes of existence are the same from the point of view of extraction of value.

But something is causing these statements to be irrevocably read and experienced through a new drama, not the drama of life and death, but a form of death that begins and ends in Nonlife—namely the extinction of humans, biological life, and, as it is often put, the planet itself—which takes us to a time before the life and death of individuals and species, a time of the geos, of soulessness. The modifying phrase “insofar as” now foregrounds the anthropos as just one element in the larger set of not merely animal life but all Life as opposed to the state of original and radical Nonlife, the vital in relation to the inert, the extinct in relation to the barren. In other words, it is increasingly clear that the anthropos remains an element in the set of life only insofar as Life can maintain its distinction from Death/Extinction and Nonlife. It is also clear that late liberal strategies for governing difference and markets also only work insofar as these distinctions are maintained.

AXA to Sell Non-Life Operations in Azerbaijan