Crafting a better future
What’s needed is a radical restructuring of capitalism, one that builds on the values of craftsmanship, a post-growth economy organised around human wellbeing, rather than one fuelled by the accumulation of capital.
Donald Trump and the ‘soulstealers’
In the eighteenth century, during the most prosperous period of the Qing dynasty’s rule, mass hysteria broke out in the empire’s commercial capital over rumours that a band of sorcerers were roaming the countryside chanting incantations and stealing their souls. There are instructive parallels between China’s sorcery crisis of 1768 and the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Imagined communities can’t conquer invisible enemies
Trump’s insistence that a martial response is required reflects an inability to think about collective action outside the realm of war and the nation state.
Our not so distant past
The dead-carts have been replaced by hearses and the bodies are burnt rather than buried, but this scenes are not altogether dissimilar to those depicted by Daniel Defoe in A Journal of a Plague Year.
Coronavirus and Bare Life
The paradox that seems to elude Agamben is that spatially isolating oneself is a collective response to the crisis.