The Virus Is Our Idea of Ourselves, by Claire Fontaine
Preface:
Not only viruses but also power relationships go through the body. With this in mind, the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the precariousness of our daily living and working conditions: of informal slavery, badly paid jobs, gendered multitasking, the return of fascism, and other separating effects of the social Darwinist ideology of neoliberalism. In the twentieth contribution to our column “Notes from Quarantine” the collective artist Claire Fontaine paints a differentiated picture of these very violent explosions of conflicts amongst those who cannot participate in the dream of a life made of material comfort and institutional recognition. Becoming complicit in our dispossession rather than our submission thus seems to be all the more necessary.