Seeking Intelligent Life in the Time of COVID-19, or, Thinking “Epicritically” (For Stan Robinson)

Rethinking critique seems all the more urgent at a moment when COVID-19 seems to be doing our work for us, free of any regard for the structures and limits of intelligibility we might have come up with. The virus' imperative is a simple one: to live. It doesn't care what happens to us, and it's pushing us to our limits in several dimensions at once. Against the background of COVID19 we see, as if in relief, our selves. Especially, how “stupid” we are: the virus makes us (feel) stupid because we keep coming up against how much we don't know. No wonder it is the morning after this chapter is absolutely, positively due, and it's not done. But “a friend” visited in the form of an essay published yesterday (May 1, 2020) in The New Yorker online by well-known science-fiction writer Kim Stanley (“Stan”) Robinson. Stan is a friend, and I had almost emailed him several weeks ago as I was rereading his “Three Californias” trilogy. In the last volume, Pacific Edge (1995), a main character, an aspiring novelist in fact, tests positive, allegedly, for HIV upon reentering the United States from Switzerland. He knows it is probably his membership in the American Socialist Legal Action Group and California Lawyers for the Environment that has flagged his reentry; nonetheless, his papers are stamped “Quarantine possible,” and he is sent to a “camp” with an order for a second test. Reflecting on his writer's block he thinks—in a way that strikes home—that.