Locked In The Coronavirus Event

(The following was posted to the Empyre mailing list, in response to Simon Taylor's sharing on the list of 'A World Is Ending' by Levi R. Bryant from the journal Identities - #12 in their Lockdown Theory series)  

Reading this, and other texts written in the last few weeks by Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, Judith Butler and Bruno Latour, I can’t help also thinking about the ‘trap of the event’. In letter to Jean-Paul Sartre of 18 July, 1953, Maurice Merleau-Ponty has this to say about the relation between philosophy, politics, writing and events:

 

I have in no way renounced writing on politics… What I have decided to do since the Korean War is a very different thing. I have decided to refrain from writing on events as they are unfolding. This has to do with reasons that belonged to that period, and also with reasons that are permanent. … I have suggested a number of times that what the journal [Les Temps Modernes] should be doing is not take hasty positions, but rather propose lengthy studies. ... What I had in mind was to act as writers, a type of action that consists in a back and forth between the event and the general line, and which does not simply consist in confronting every event (in imaginary fashion) as though it was decisive, unique and irreparable. This method is much closer to politics than your method of ‘engagement continue’ [continuous engagement] (in the Cartesian sense). Indeed, precisely in that sense, it is more philosophical, because the distance it creates between the event and the judgement one passes on it defuses the trap of the event...

 

Interestingly, Wendy Brown quotes this passage from Merleau-Ponty in her chapter on ‘Moralism as Anti-Politics’ in Politics Out of History. To the ‘trap of the event’ and the ‘terms of “the event”’ she adds the ‘trap of existing discourses’.