Hidden Fissures and Epidemics in Plain Sight: The Common Paths of Syphilis and HIV in Russia

The paper examines and compares two epidemics in Russia: syphilis in the first quarter of 20th century and HIV in the early 21st century. The author considers both epidemics from the standpoint of the social sciences by applying the concept of vulnerability to underline the social and cultural factors that cause one social group to be more susceptible to a disease than another. The article focuses on gender-based vulnerability and maintains that both epidemics follow a single, structurally similar scenario. The author shows that the vulnerability of women during both the syphilis and HIV epidemics depends upon the clear continuity in the way gender roles and expectations and the relationships between men and women were structured during the early days of the USSR and in present-day Russia. The article analyzes how stigma arises and how in both eras inequality of power and expectations for men and women formed the main channel for transmission of disease. The paths along which modern epidemics spread have been mostly inherited from the epidemics of past centuries, and in particular the HIV epidemic is following a pattern derived from the syphilis epidemic. More precisely, the current epidemics exploit the same vulnerability of certain groups, vulnerability rooted in the past and still manifest in the norms and relations in contemporary culture and society where one group is much more exposed than the other. The article relies on historical sources, in particular Lev Friedland"s book Behind a Closed Door: Observations of a Venereologist published in 1927, for its account of the syphilis epidemic in the early 20th century and on the author"s own research into the experience of women living with HIV in contemporary Russia.

Media Genealogy of the Contagion: Syphilis — AIDS — COVID-19

The article is devoted to a genealogy of the attitude toward viruses in social and political practice in light of the new coronavirus pandemic. The disciplinary society and the society of control have taken on a completely new configuration since the HIV crisis in the 1980s. AIDS and now COVID-19 as phenomena of social crisis have had a great impact on (sexual) relationships and have also caused a significant change in the social and political order. Epidemics and pandemics mobilize political structures and constitute power relations, thus changing the way bodies are controlled, establishing new differentiations and redefining what disease is. The authors trace the development of discourses about syphilis, AIDS and COVID-19 to describe how knowledge about the disease is being generated today; it has origins in myth and would be unthinkable without aesthetic visualization and mass media technologies. Syphilis was an exact fit for the paradigm of the disciplinary society, which stigmatized bodily pleasure and abstracted pathology by activating projection mechanisms as a sign of the Other. However, AIDS already differed significantly from that paradigm because other medical technologies are used to define HIV, and that has affected the epistemology of the disease and epidemic. The article considers HIV/AIDS as a transitional model that forms a bridge between the epidemics of the past (leprosy, plague, smallpox, syphilis) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all there is a change in the biopolitical regime so that bodies are no longer controlled and regulated through sexuality. COVID-19 is a new form of sociality which is not based on the exclusion of “pathological” forms of sexuality or on “deviant” or “perverted” bodies, but involves the object-based, microlevel of relations between viruses, the immune system, and the human genome, which are then mapped with distortions and substitutions onto social relationships and practices. The authors use the term “delegated control” in a new context and introduce the original term “omniopticum” to describe the new regime of biopolitics and the “control society” in the post-COVID era.

A Rathole: Foucault, Freud, and the Problem of Isolation

The article discusses the problem of isolation and draws a parallel between two different approaches to it - Michel Foucault’s archeology of power and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Foucault’s perspective is exemplified by his critique of the strategies of power as they were applied to the epidemics of leprosy and bubonic plague. For leprosy there was an undifferentiated exclusionary space, while the the plague brought about a segmented space for confinement. The passage from the one strategy to the other marks the development of the disciplinary model of power: leper colonies are transformed into prisons and psychiatric wards. Freud’s approach is examined in his treatment of the Rat Man, the patient whose analysis prompted Freud to formulate his theory of obsessional neurosis, or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The article emphasizes the relevance of the problem of OCD to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. The traditional strategy of power applied to leprosy was isolation by means of exile from towns, while for the plague isolation meant shutting towns down with their inhabitants each in their own place as if imprisoned. COVID-19 brought about a new strategy of self-isolation which entails creating physical and psychological barriers together with social distancing. Obsessional neurosis is evolving from an individual pathology into a kind of collective one: epidemiology influences mentality. In conclusion, the article takes up two literary examples - Roman Mikhailov’s text “The Wrong Side of a Rat,” and Varlam Shalamov’s story “Lepers,” from the Kolyma Stories collection - in which breaking out of isolation, disease and infection are presented as alternative affective experiences.

Epidemics as Leisure Killers: The Transformation of Japan’s Entertainment Industry in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Among the various human attitudes toward a pandemic, along with fear, despair and anger, there is also an urge to praise the catastrophe or imbue it with some sort of hope. In 2020 such hopes were voiced in the stream of all the other COVID-19 reactions and interpretations in the form of predictions of imminent social, political or economic changes that may or must be brought on by the pandemic, or as calls to “rise above” the common human sentiment and see the pandemic as some sort of cruel-but-necessary bitter pill to cure human depravity or social disorganization. Is it really possible for a plague of any kind to be considered a relief? Or perhaps a just punishment? In order to assess the validity of such interpretations, this paper considers the artistic reactions to the pandemics of the past, specifically the images of the plague from Alexander Pushkin’s play Feast During the Plague, Antonin Artaud’s essay “The Theatre and the Plague” and Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. These works in different ways explore an attitude in which a plague can be praised in some respect. The plague can be a means of self-overcoming and purification for both an individual and for society. At the same time, Pushkin and Camus, each in his own way and by different means, show the illusory nature of that attitude. A mass catastrophe can reveal the resources already present in humankind, but it does not help either the individual or the society to progress.

AIDS as a Metaphor

In this excerpt from the essay AIDS and Its Metaphors Susan Sontag considers how the AIDS epidemic has affected lifestyles and morality. When epidemics persist for many years, the precautions that had started out as briefly enforced precautions become a part of social morality. Until 1981 the successes of medicine in treating sexually transmitted diseases encouraged emancipation from sexual morals. Sontag uses economic metaphors to designate those decades as a period of sexual spending, speculation and inflation, after which the early stages of a sexual depression set in. AIDS caused fear of sexuality to return. If cancer has taught us to fear environmental pollution, AIDS triggered a fear of pollution through people. The AIDS epidemic led to the disappearance of many secular ideals, which Sontag regards as closely linked to freedom. AIDS provided an incentive for a resurgence of conservatism in many areas. Its effect on the arts in particular was to force a rejection of modernist discoveries and a return to tonality, melody, plot, character, etc. AIDS then becomes a new realism. Sontag also addresses post-colonial issues related to the AIDS epidemic. If AIDS had been a purely African disease, notwithstanding the scale of the epidemic, it would have been considered a “natural” cataclysm similar to famine. But once the epidemic affected the West, it was no longer perceived as a natural disaster. In First World countries, disasters are understood as historical events which bring about important social change, while in Asian and African countries they are viewed as one part of a general cycle of nature and as something closer to natural phenomena. The new disease has changed very little in the operation of that logic.

AIDS Without Metaphor: Sontag and Her Struggle With Disease

The article considers the demetaphorization strategy which Susan Sontag used in her essay AIDS and Its Metaphors. The program that Sontag put forward in Against Interpretation is readily applicable to diseases such as cancer or AIDS, which inevitably become entangled in metaphorical descriptions that encourage sermonizing and moralism. The modernist ideal of avoiding interpretation that Sontag proposed would enable thinking about a disease as a distinct etiological entity brought into sharp focus by the very process of stripping away its cloak of metaphorical layers, myths and imaginings. The article suggests that Sontag’s strategy, which is both practical and semiological, can be understood as a critique of the tradition of holistic medicine usually called “alternative” as well as a countermeasure to it. Medicine of that kind in the West harks back to ancient paradigms and in particular to Stoicism by presupposing that moral errors can be equated with diseases and sins with symptoms. Sontag believes that metaphors are not only useless but also harmful in that they impose a mistaken therapeutic program for both disease and patient, for example, by prescribing exercise or a healthy lifestyle when they are irrelevant. The article analyzes some problems in Sontag’s demetaphorization and argues in particular that the isolation and detection of a disease as such are not somehow antecedent to metaphor, even if the nature of the disease is well understood. Diseases whose nature or treatment are unknown, at least at a given point in history, are an additional problem. Sontag assumes a correlation between a disease as an isolated entity and a drug of choice or a precise therapeutic method, but that correlation cannot always be made.

The First Quarantine: How the Plague Became a Political Disease

The great plague of 1665-1666 is one of the starting points for the birth of biopolitics in its modern form. The quarantine measures introduced by the government have been considered effective from the medical point of view since the middle of the 18th century. However, many of those contemporary with the plague were convinced that the state was only worsening matters for London’s inhabitants. The author examines why the plague elicited such an ambivalent response in England and how the disease stopped being a composite object and turned into a “comfortable, domesticated” concept. The article investigates why the moral assessment of those measures has become so different over the past hundred years and shows how the quarantine in London influenced the “hygienic revolution.” Apart from its historical interest, this case is a suitable topic for the use of STS methodology because it illustrates the impossibility providing a complete description of the quarantine process and subsequent medical treatment in terms of a conflict between different actors. In order to understand why these measures have subsequently been perceived in this fashion, the author applies the concept of Lovecraftian horror, which offers a way to describe the situation of “collisions” with the plague. By describing how biopolitics released the moral tension built up by the co-existence of different interpretations of the causes of the epidemic, the author reconstructs the retrospective creation of the myth about the success of the quarantine. He contrasts the logic of “multiplicity” with the unifying descriptions and shows the kind of problems a “blurred” ontology can bring on during a crisis in everyday life. This leads to a discussion of the difficulty of holding onto unstable objects that have the potential for liberation from the logic of paternalistic care.

Rethinking the Category of Class: Tempora Multa of the Plural Subject

This article attempts to rethink the Marxist category of class in response to criticism of the progressivist conception of history. The Marxism of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries has typically run into a problem arising from the fact that accepting the proletariat as the subject of history makes any political action aimed at social transformation superfluous. From a political viewpoint, the concept of the subject of history either implies that the working class will spontaneously carry out its historical task without any intervention, or requires the dictate of the party to act as a revolutionary vanguard for the working class. Many theorists (Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Daniel Bensaïd, Massimiliano Tomba, et al.) have pointed out that emancipatory politics should abandon the idea that history is linear and that it has a particular subject. Does this then mean that the concept of class itself should be discarded? Althusser’s concept of the social whole as a weave of multiple temporalities allows us to take a new look at the problem of class in Marxist theory and political practice by understanding class as neither essence nor structure, but rather as a conflictual social relation and a political concept. Based on the works of Edward Thompson, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Étienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd, Cinzia Aruzza, etc., the author demonstrates that the multi-temporal structure of capital means that class contradiction cannot be confined to the matters of production because class struggle unfolds at all levels of surplus value creation — production, exchange, reproduction and circulation of capital taken as a whole. Moreover, other social movements — feminist, anti-racist, migrant, etc. — lead to a redefinition of key aspects of class subjectivity related to the concepts of productive labor and exploitation. With left-wing politics now in crisis, class struggle also entails a struggle for recognition that the problem of class is a political one.

The Pastness of the Past: Some Reflections on the Politics of Historization and the Crisis of Historicist Pastness

Berber Bevernage’s thinking is centered on the concept of the pastness of the past, which is the basis of historicism. The need to rethink this concept has become evident because of the crisis in historical consciousness proclaimed by a number of theorists of history and because the boundaries between the past and the present became blurred when the presentist “broad present” (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s term) became dominant. The author does not demand a complete break with historicism, which can be both repressive and emancipatory in nature. He does insist distinguishing the past from simple chronological precedence and on considering it strictly as a “relational concept,” i.e. as dependent on the perception of the present, which should not be reduced to simple empirical observation. The pastness of the past always depends on understanding the present as a coherent historical context; in other words, it presupposes the idea of the present’s contemporaneity to itself. However, Bevernage relies on the works of the British philosopher Peter Osborne to argue that it is possible to speak about the “fiction of the contemporary” which is not confirmed by any empirical experience. At the same time, that fiction is not a mere illusion because it fulfills a pragmatically motivated and politically significant performative function. Bevernage would apply the concept of the pastness of the past in exactly the same way. He sees the attribution of the sign of pastness to one phenomenon or another as something that can be disputed because it always attempts to justify the existing relations of power. Historians are not the only ones responsible for creating the status of pastness. The author allows that other professional communities, particularly artists and lawyers can also take part in attributing pastness. The sense of the past that prevails in a culture arises from a multitude of locally produced senses of the past.

The Decameron: On the Possibility of Love During Self-Isolation

This article in the genre of the consolation of philosophy deals with the COVID-19 pandemic as a new superphenomenal experience marked by an extremely intense experience of one’s vulnerability and finiteness as well as by problematization of our previous ideas of a human being. The author offers a way to understand our situation and find solace by starting with the performative paradox of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, which contains one of the most famous descriptions of the plague and remains one of the most cheerful and life-enhancing texts in European literature. The article shows that, contrary to the common belief, the consolation offered in the The Decameron is not reduced merely to telling stories that entertain and distract us from tales of grief. Nor is it reduced to the invention of social practices for building a new and more perfect society, although all this, as the author shows, is undoubtedly there in the text and has a beneficial effect. The Decameron’s consolation ultimately consists of the assumption that man himself has metaphysical depths in his incomprehensible (although it is fully embodied in the Decameron) and impossible potential for lovingly accepting the reality of the world as a blessed Gift, to think of eventfulness itself as a gift. The article argues that the anthropology on which Boccaccio’s utopia is based is that of the feast or symposium understood in the spirit of the Platonic-Christian tradition. The author hopes that Boccaccio’s anthropological optics, designed to overcome the pessimism of reason and affirm the optimism of will and faith, can help the reader find meaning and joy in the midst of the suffering and death which are the irrevocable framework of life. This consolation can be heard in the cheerful voice of Boccaccio, which comes to us from faraway plague-ridden Florence and offers us his prescription for healing the “wounds of being.”