Each of us faces his/her own real. Nowadays, however, we could say that CO-VID19 is the real of the entire planet. Every day, we witness new measures “feeding” the speech of science and the protection of society. We are all invited to confront it, but each one with the invention of his/her own solution; luckily, there can be a singular solution through desire, against this real.
In Greece, for the time being, when someone needs to move from one place to another, it is necessary to send a significant code to a significant number, according to the new law. Otherwise, there are sanctions. There is a new interaction here, between society and technology.
To begin with, ever since modern science had a purpose to fulfill, it addressed each human subject as a number. For each transaction with public or private organizations, a single code corresponds to each subject’s name. Everyone is represented by their code every time: this is how technology addresses each one’s specific body.
In Latin, the word “codex”[1] includes a variety of meanings, such as the encryption and decryption of a message, e.g. the computer language or the genetic code. Even the S1 “CO-VID-19” is an encrypted word, which is decoded as “COrona-VIrus Disease” with the discovery date of the virus, 2019.
In the time of coronavirus, people are being separated into those who are positive or negative to the virus. The quantifiable of science is thus found, both in the plus (+) and the minus (-). However, no one knows when and if the (-) becomes (+). How is this construed by some people?
Jacques-Alain Miller points out: “The zero effect of the elementary phenomenon is obtained here through an aleph effect, which opens to the infinity of the semantic, or, better, to the flight of sense”[2], so an opening up to the infinity of signifiers without interpretation, makes the subject evade meaning, without any emergence of lack. Georg Cantor applied the cardinality to compare the sizes of infinite sets, showing that the set of real numbers, is uncountable infinite. The smallest infinite cardinal number is ℵ0 or aleph-null. Infinity, for him, is defined as an extreme limit of the real number line, diverging to infinity. This infinity is opened up to speaking beings with psychotic phenomena.
In Écrits, Lacan mentions that “There is no such thing as a science of man because science’s man does not exist, only its subject does.”[3]
We see here how some so-called experts, certain of the effects of the virus, transmit the fear of the pandemic to subjects, who are already overwhelmed by the real or have the contingency to be overwhelmed by the real. They are “bombarded” by the pandemic and, thus, many symptoms are provoked. Some of the speaking beings end up imprisoned in their own self, without escape. In this case, the fear of the big Other of prohibitions has already led them being stranded in their own home, subjected to the constraint of confinement.
To quote Walt Whitman:
To think of time—of all that retrospection!
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward!
Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue?
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?
Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing?
If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing.
To think that we are now here, and bear our part![4]
[1] See: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/code & https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/codex
[2] See: https://londonsociety-nls.org.uk/Publications/002/Miller-JacquesAlain_Interpretation-in-Reverse.pdf
[3] Jacques Lacan, Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. N. York/London: Norton, 2005, p. 730.
[4] “To think of time”- Walt Whitman(1819-1892): https://poets.org/poem/think-time