This essay was published in Portuguese in the academic journal O que nos faz pensar (29.46, 2020), and an earlier version, also in Portuguese, appeared in the Biblioteca Virtual do Pensamento Social. While the pandemic was undeniably on my mind as I wrote it, this piece is also born of my dialogue with Andréa de Castro Melloni, who has been reflecting for years on the refugee condition in Brazil and beyond. The photos that punctuate the text were taken in Athens in July 2017; in the name of avoiding an overly referential or merely illustrative framing, we decided to reproduce them without captions, noting only that the hotel that appears in one image, in the neighborhood of Exarchia, was then being run by a group of refugees, mostly from the Middle East. As for William Kentridge’s “More Sweetly Play the Dance,” which figures in two of the photographs, we saw it on display at the foot of the Acropolis as part of documenta 14, which in that year stretched from Kassel to the Grecian capital.
Heidegger and the iPad: presence and image in the pandemic, by Pedro Meira Monteiro
By Pedro Meira Monteiro[1]
1. Isolation as Sleeplessness
“This is my seventeenth straight day without sleep.”[2]
These are the first words of a story I read recently, when we were already cooped up at home. In “Sleep,” by Murakami, the main character does not struggle with drowsiness: rather, she recounts her stupefaction at the sheer absence of any need or even desire to sleep. She is haunted by the fear that her nightmares will continue to manifest themselves out of the realm of dreams. Unshakable wakefulness brings a grim conclusion: “this was reality.”
Is isolation a sort of prolonged sleeplessness?
The activity that keeps us bustling – Zoom, WhatsApp, and so on – is more intense than usual. More than ever, we seem to need a window onto the “reality” which, we presume, exists beyond the space where we find ourselves.
These are strange times, with millions sheltering in their homes and social class made even more glaringly visible than before. As one might expect in a system where social welfare isa mirage at best, it became clear at the outset that isolation was not an option available to all. This is to say nothing of the madmen perched in the seats of government across the world, with Bolsonaro’s Brazil cresting the wave of lunacy.
Beyond “essential” service providers, an army of delivery workers forged on from the very first days of social isolation, making their rounds in conditions that are both a testament to economic exploration and a reminder that while we may speak generally of unhealthy working conditions in the gig economy, the pandemic has made the adjective all too literal.
As Giorgio Agamben suggested recently with his characteristic perspicacity, as keen as it is exaggerated, “it is almost as if with terrorism exhausted as a cause for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic offered the ideal pretext for scaling them up beyond any limitation” – yet another step forward for the state of exception, transformed into a “normal paradigm for government.”[3]
If we embrace Agamben’s critique, any and all measure of public health “control” may be cast as suspect, part of a pact to keep bodies in check. His reflections (as a friend put it: the philosopher who is disconcerted to see his theory proven) brought a volley of critiques, which can be turned up easily with a search. For our purposes here, I’ll limit myself to a pitch-perfect comment from Jean-Luc Nancy, who recalled that some thirty years ago he had been recommended a heart transplant, but his dear friend “Giorgio,” ever wary of medical advice, tried to dissuade him.[4] Happily for us, Nancy didn’t follow Agamben’s lead; having surrendered himself to the doctors, he is among us today, able to speak out against the postulations of biopolitics…
It is not easy to understand what notions of presence and community are being forged at this moment in time, amidst the commotion of the pandemic. But the fact is that fate has spiraled into a sort of high-speed Russian roulette. The specter of death hangs over our imaginations, and it seems to be no accident that Brazil’s psychopath-in-chief should take so much joy from forming imaginary weapons with his hands (“finger guns” are one of Bolsonaro’s trademark gestures, underscoring his fervent advocacy for the proliferation of firearms). For as long as the calamity can be shrunken by imagination, reduced to a “little flu” – as Bolsonaro suggested in the wake of Trump’s folly –the Brazilian president’s followers will stand guard.But what if, as José Miguel Wisnik suggests, glossing Arnaldo Antunes, the real finally asserts its full weight? “Reality is that which you cannot not see – even if it happens to be invisible, as viruses are.”[5]
As Shaj Mohan recalls in his dialogue with Kant and Wittgenstein, the end of the world is not an event, “for it is not an event in the world.”[6] In other words, the end takes place out of the world, at least insofar as we can conceive of it. In the best-case (or perhaps worst-case) scenario, the end awaits us in some distant spot, whether in time and space.
The experience of loneliness springs from an uncomfortable equation: we feel the world moving on even as we fail to grasp its being, the reason for its existence. The struggle against solitude – which might be a simple definition of that which we call life – becomes possible whenever one shares something with the “being” of the world, something that rests in language. A mature Wittgenstein would arrive at the conclusion that language simply cannot be private, since experience is public.[7]
But what is public, in this peculiar virtual marathon?
2. Classes and Online Togetherness
Teaching remotely is as strange as it is revelatory. Professors trying to understand their students’ reactions and trying to see who “in the classroom” is following the discussion may tire faster than usual. In a conventional classroom space, body language, looks, gestures are spread out before us like a painting. On a shared screen we see only faces, often obscured by a poor connection. We must cling to them, obstinately, in search of something.
Forms of coexistence exist and resist, in the online world. I’m driven to imagine that, consciously or no, a little Walter Benjamin is piping up in each of us when we teachers complain about the online experience. Are we fretting over a loss of aura? Have we slipped into the age of the technological reproducibility of teaching?[8]
I understand the complaints from colleagues who don’t feel that the impromptu experience of remote teaching provides the quality of a “real” class. I also understand the anxiety that takes hold as we see that, in the end, online classes do work – in their own way. Deep down, the potential substitution of professors with remote instructors haunts us: what if we, too, are dispensable?
Of course we aren’t – but I refer to a fantasy that, in an age of unbridled neoliberalism, has gained steam and given many the sense that online classes are a threat to their jobs, a sort of dry run for the wholesale substitution of one system for another and the end of instructors as we knew them. A fantasy on this scale matched up almost perfectly with reality while Brazil’s Ministry of Education was headed up by a devotee of Olavo de Carvalho, a figure perhaps best defined as a sort of tropical, semi-intellectual Steve Bannon.[9]
Those of us who simply refuse the online experience altogether as worthless, however, do so on equally fanciful premises. I don’t mean those who are concerned about the real, pressing matter of digital access for vulnerable populations, and students for whom digital inclusion goes as far as the telephone, if that.[10] Rather, I mean the ideal relationship we often sustain with what we call a “real” class.
I should say that I am speaking from a place of privilege (Princeton University), where the switch to online learning, while burdensome, never posed a real threat to our work. The possibility of all-online learning through the end of 2020, entirely omitting the “in-person” part of the fall semester in the Northern Hemisphere, intrigued colleagues: what might only online classes allow for, and what, then, might we explore?
In Brazil, the discussion over remote learning has reignited old promises and fears around distance learning, set against a disquieting context: at a time when the public sphere as a whole is held in suspicion and profoundly regressive desires point to the home as the space where “real values” ought to be taught, what does it mean to substitute circulation around university campuses with teaching that takes place within the home? This is a thorny issue for the left, even more so with the public square roped off by the pandemic, the result being protests more often than not restricted to the most conservative sectors – precisely those with little regard for the democratic gains enshrined in the 1988 Constitution, written after the end of Brazil’s last military dictatorship (1964-1985).
Even as I recognize the complexity of the situation, I can’t help but question the validity of reactions to online learning that brandish the “true” pedagogical act, or “real” classes.
This ideal may prove a counterproductive fantasy; and so-called ideal teaching conditions pose a barrier that may leave us stuck where we are. Consciously or unconsciously, we run the risk of concluding that online teaching is less noble, less worthy, in no small part because students deserve better than a “halfway” learning experience. The ideal is indeed a noble one, but I wonder if snubbing anything that falls short of ideal doesn’t ultimately reveal nobility as that which dare not speak its name: an aristocratic stance. While the world collapses out there, we are driven to reflect on what we, as professors, can do from home.
Professors’ working conditions vary greatly, as do students’. In relatively small classes, seeing students in squares spread across the screen is an interesting experience; among other things, social class emerges as a backdrop in the most literal sense. There is a stark difference between the student we can see back in her comfortable childhood bedroom and the student who’s been forced to set up camp in some improbable corner of a house, seeking refuge from noise, from little siblings, and from countless other invisible things that nevertheless make their presence felt.
This unveiling of the invisible is also, in this case, a product of the pandemic.
The mode of production of classes, as well as the varying circumstances in which professors find themselves, also bleed through. There is a huge and obvious difference between teaching online with and without children at home. Of course our eyes are caught by the human side of things: colleagues’ children, normally invisible, make cameos or appear unbidden in the backdrop of a video call. There’s a touch of humanity there, with the professor suddenly made more vulnerable, a lecture broken into by a domestic scene. Gender dynamics, evidently, also make themselves felt; I’ve seen more women worriedly monitoring the children in the background than men. Leïla Slimani, writing on the subject of social distancing, recalled women’s confinement in contrast to Ulysses, the eternal voyager.[11] I have yet to see a toddler clambering up a male colleague’s chair in the middle of a Zoom meeting.
When Benjamin critiqued Mickey Mouse, he spoke of film as a promise: the seventh art would allow us to move in an entirely new fashion along the streets, into cafés, offices, and rooms that had seemed to imprison us until then. Through cinema’s ingenious lenses, these hitherto closed spaces would be opened up to the “journeys of adventure” of the cinematographic image. As it glides, oscillates, zooms (no pun intended), the camera allows us to make out that which we do not perceive in everyday experience, revealing what Benjamin, in dialogue with psychoanalysis, would call “the optical unconscious.” Disney’s most famous mouse would help “trigger a therapeutic release of unconscious energies,” keeping the tensions created by everyday technologization from developing into full-blown collective psychoses.[12]
Lest I be misunderstood: I am not suggesting that the power of cinema is felt in the shambolic experience of online teaching. Rather, I might simply suggest that this new experience may itself be a way of recording aspects of reality that lie “outside the normal spectrum of sense impressions,” to quote Benjamin rather freely.[13] In other words: something has come in through the screen that we hadn’t perceived before; and perhaps we should be glad that we can now perceive this other reality, hidden until now.
During the first few days of the lockdown, a friend of mine, worried about how her kids were faring, decided to check in on her ten-year-old daughter. Peeking through the half-open bedroom door, she realized that her daughter was doing her homework with an iPad by her side, on a FaceTime call. On the screen was a friend of hers. Every now and then, one of them would say something – just a few words – and then both went back to what they were doing, in silence. The screen glowing, the two of them together, all afternoon long.
3. Fear and Anguish
If it is true that language cannot be exclusively private, then presence is, in a way, a form of coexistence. The etymology of the word is clear: we live with someone, in light of something. On the grammatical plane, the conjunction addresses the problem, almost seeming to resolve it: where there is language, there will always be at least two of us, I and the other.
But things are more complicated than they seem, as exemplified in the famous conundrum that is the translation of Heidegger’s Dasein: “being there,” “presence,” “existence,” etc. In his monumental translation of Being and Time into Portuguese, Fausto Castilho, a fellow philosopher, decided to leave the word in the original German. The problem remains in many other languages, however. In any case, beyond the colossal stylistic challenge of retaining the concepts woven into each word wielded by Heidegger, there are moments in the text where striking images come through. One case is the discussion of the “Temporality of State-of-mind,” in which we learn that “Understanding is never free-floating, but always goes with some state-of-mind” (the translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson may skirt the localizable sense of something truly “present,” as conveyed by the original befindliches).[14]
In other words, understanding – Verstehen, in the original – depends on a state of mind that opens a being to a world or closes it off from it. I am simplifying, whacking through the dense thicket of the discussion around Dasein, which, for that matter, we see resurface in contemporary reflections on the “production of presence,” in Gumbrecht’s turn of phrase.[15] It is significant, however, that Heidegger lingers on the element of the future that underlies understanding, given that the task of locating ourselves takes place in the realm of the present. At this point in the argument, we reencounter the temporality of fear, with its complex ties to the time to come.
And this is a fundamental step: for Heidegger, fear does not simply connect us to something that lies in the future (death by an invisible, lurking virus, say), but rather evokes the strange existential and temporal position that is an “awaiting”: a sort of retreat, coming to a halt in the being that we are. Oppressed by fear, we embrace no “definite possibility”; we lose all perspective, ultimately wandering through a hazy present in which we cannot even begin to know what we should save should a disaster befall us.
Another remarkable image, in the same part in Being and Time, is of the residents of a burning house, who, in their fear, ultimately save a haphazard array of objects, regardless of importance – in other words, those “that are most closely ready-to-hand.”[16] Extending this line of reflection to anxiety, which he classifies as altogether different from and more interesting than fear, Heidegger takes aim at “concernful waiting,” which, to his eye, “finds nothing in terms of which it might be able to understand itself; it clutches at the ‘nothing’ of the world.”[17] In other words: fear is tied to the act of simply waiting. To transfer the question to the image: might we find ourselves before the terrible “nothing of the world” in the moments when we contemplate our daily screens?
Maybe, maybe not.
If we take Heidegger’s suggestions at face value, anxiety practically swoops in to save us. The endless, infernal business of busying oneself with things is replaced by an opening, by the remembrance of the presence of finiteness, which, rather than paralyzing one’s being, allows it to open up to the world of possibilities. In his words: the presence of Angst “holds the moment of vision at the ready [auf dem Sprung]; as such a moment it itself, and only itself, is possible.[18] Fausto Castilho’s translation uses a clearer metaphor: we are left always ready to jump.[19]
Beyond these hurdles of translation, it is challenging to read this “leap.” More than theoretical, it is poetic – and, strictly speaking, it is also political. Heidegger is taking up arms against the force of forgetfulness that comes to bear on our frames of mind in daily life, shaped by our immediate occupations. To set conceptual precision aside for a moment (as well as the complex history of Heidegger himself), I might say that herein lies our sole salvation: the possibility of replacing the immobile wait for the end of the world with the chance to be affected, touched by the present. The end of the world lies in the future that we dream up. Being affected, meanwhile, if I have grasped what Heidegger is proposing, heralds the possibility of being present, being touched at a specific time, without being overwhelmed by the in(action) of the wait for the end of times. As Yuk Hui has observed, Heidegger establishes a sense of time that is inextricably linked to daily experience, such that transcendence cannot be understood outside of its rootedness in the subjective present, the terrain where apprehension – in the Kantian sense – takes place.[20]
In any case, this is a radical ontology of the present. We are left to ask what to do with it, as we stare at our little screens. Whatever the answer, presence is an unavoidable issue, as in the case of the screen bridging the space between the two girls doing their homework together. Despite the silence of the tablets, they are still there with one another, and both know, with a precision that we may perhaps lack, when it is time to break the silence and when to keep it.
4. Prisoners of the Image
In a remarkable book published in 1940, La invención de Morel, Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares imagines an exiled prisoner who marks the passage of time on an island where strange visitors repeatedly appear and reappear. After a few rash incursions, the narrator realizes that this is an ingenious optical machine which, driven by the motion of the tides, projects the images of people who move and act over the course of a single week in a never-ending loop. The “rotating eternity” of that weeklong scene leads the narrator to wonder about the people whose images he sees, day in and day out. Are they alive? But where? And why have they given themselves over to this interminable ballet?
Sunk in the world witnessed by the narrator, the realm of imagination, these people are “free from bad news and disease, [living] forever as if each thing were happening for the first time; they have no memory of anything that happened before.”[21] For images screened in constant movement, there will never be a first time, for they have no awareness of the circle that the perpetual-motion machine is leading them to trace. Prisoners of the images of themselves, they bear witness to something that took place, even if they are oblivious to time slipping past around them.
As if exiled from experience itself, the narrator winds up wondering about the “heaven of […] consciousness,” where one of the projected images might finally react and recognize him.[22] As he wanders endlessly through this world of images, he grows old without knowing if he will ever truly meet his beloved, who traces her own path through that interminable week.
This skepticism of the glowing projections imposed on the subject might allow for a discussion of the ontology of the image: as to how it sustains itself, but its very nature as well. This is not the path I will take here, although I do insist on leaving it open.
Rather, as an exercise for these pandemic days, I am simply sketching a reflection on the prejudices that rear up whenever we sniff out a disconnect between experience and its presence in the image. When we come to fear giving life over to images, we are sensing a lack of faith that our bodies will remain sheltered and active, even when our togetherness takes place on a plane of digital copresence. Ironically, the abundant imagination unleashed by viral forces has dislodged a few such prejudices, forcing us to coexist (albeit provisionally, in an emergency) long-distance, and to work there as well; we distract ourselves, we concentrate, we love and we hate at a distance. All this was already happening, you might argue. But now the movement of the images has taken on a new scope altogether.
We may have arrived at that point in history in which the body is no longer a vessel of experience. The problem, however, is that social frontiers are redefined and reinforced in light of the pandemic. In discussing and broadening the paradigm of biopolitics, Paul Preciado proposes a radiant image: “Lesbos starts now at your doorstep.” [23] The new “necropolitical frontier” hems us in at every turn, reaffirming a global order marked by the necessity to remove oneself from others, maintaining them at a distance. Recalling the etymological discussion proposed by Roberto Esposito in his examination of the common root of community and immunity, Preciado invites us to revisit Foucault’s approach to control of the plague in Discipline and Punish. In fact, the warlike speeches made by Macron (we have an enemy before us) and so many other democratic leaders are a skimpy fig leaf over the pleasure taken in controlling the circulation of bodies, a centuries-old practice in the struggle to contain contagion. In Brazil, as I write, governmental perversion takes on another form, somehow even baser: simply allowing bodies to perish.
The question is not whether the paradigm of biopolitics is an adequate response to what we are living through. Evidently, a form of thought that locates the control of bodies as the source of all power will come to the fore in a pandemic. But perhaps we should look to the fate of togethernessin the age of the virus.
I don’t see much use in asking whether we’ll come out “better” on the other side of all this. It seems clear that the answer is no – at least not in the short term. After all, selfishness can’t be swept under the rug, and money will continue to rule the world. In the wake of recent events, nationalisms are more alive and triumphant than ever. The island of Lesbos will always lie before us, ineluctable, even in the face of expanded digital access. Even if a wave of a wand could allow all children in the world to take their classes online, the wretched of the earth would still be knocking at the door somewhere.
Even so, something will come of this crisis.
Back to the girls doing their homework next to the iPad. Something in the scene touches me. Not that a better world can spring from online togetherness. But that coexistence before the screen evokes the countless possible encounters in the world that, not so very long ago, we referred to as “virtual.”[24]
While the newfound volatility of concrete life may seem terrifying, the image of the screen hasn’t quite robbed us of the perception of the presence of the other – at least not entirely. At least not while we can still ask after the body of the other, in its finitude. I believe this is the importance of Achille Mbembe’s words: there is no community if we cannot bid farewell to our departed.[25]
Mbembe was referring to the restrictions on funerals in the context of a pandemic. But we might also recall that presence is an insistent statement in the face of death – and in this sense, the image is not, or is not necessarily, a lethal vanishing point. On the contrary. In the realm of consciousness – the “heaven” of consciousness envisioned by Bioy Casares’ disillusioned narrator – we find an impossible, yearned-for encounter, there where one person’s time is knitted into another’s, and where even the silence that separates them may be brimming with meaning.
Translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux.
Notas
[1] Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton Unviersity.
[2] Murakami, H., “Sleep,” in The Elephant Vanishes. Transl. Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin. Vintage Books, 1994.
[3] Agamben, G. “The Invention of an Epidemic,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis. <https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/>. Accessed 9 jun. 2020.
[4] Nancy, J.-L., “Viral Exception,” 2020. < https://www.lacan.com/symptom/philosophy-the-coronavirus/.> Accessed 17 nov. 2020.
[5] Wisnik, J. M., “Coronavírus é antagonista à altura do estado de alucinação de Bolsonaro,” Folha de S.Paulo, 20 mar. 2020. <https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrissima/2020/03/coronavirus-e-antagonista-a-altura-do-estado-de-alucinacao-de-bolsonaro.shtml>. Accessed 9 jun. 2020.
[6] Mohan, S., “What Carries Us On,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis. <https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/>. Accessed 9 jun. 2020.
[7] “If we bring Kant and Wittgenstein together the end of the world is not an event, for it is not an event in the world. This absolute certitude is the most obscure experience, while also being the most distinct. Like a membrane it envelops everything while penetrating everything as we look into everything. Early Wittgenstein’s experience of this mystery was that of the individual who in his solitude experienced the sense of the world lying outside it while the being of the world itself was for that very reason obscure. But what we can say, for now, is that this experience of the obscure — the assurance of an absolute persistence — is possible on the condition that we are able to speak with one another in sharing our reasons and responsibilities. Later Wittgenstein would argue that the possibility of each experience is public, for there is no private language. Then, each one of us, without knowing the whence and whither of it, share the obscure because we can share words, cultures, love, cautions and tragedies.” Idem.
[8] I am riffing, of course, on the classic Benjamin essay. Cf. Benjamin, W. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Transl. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
[9] On the “true believer” flank of the Bolsonaro administration, the digitization of politics and the work of “Ministrolls” Abraham Weintraub, Damares Alves, and Ernesto Araújo, hand in hand with “quasi-ministers” such as Filipe Martins and Olavo de Carvalho, as well as Bolsonaro’s sons, cf. Lago, M. “Procura-se um presidente,” piauí, n.152, maio 2019. <https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/materia/procura-se-um-presidente/>. Accessed 10 jun. 2020.
[10] Soprana, P. “70 milhões de brasileiros têm acesso precário à internet na pandemia do coronavírus,” Folha de S.Paulo, 16 maio 2020. <https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2020/05/cerca-de-70-milhoes-no-brasil-tem-acesso-precario-a-internet-na-pandemia.shtml>. Accessed 10 jun. 2020.
[11] Slimani, L. “As mulheres e o confinamento,” Blog Bazar do Tempo, 10 abr. 2020. <https://bazardotempo.com.br/1475-2/?mc_cid=767fbcea25&mc_eid=1d2d68054a>. Accessed 10 jun. 2020.
[12] Benjamin, W., op.cit., p.37-8.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Heidegger, M. Ser e Tempo: Edição bilíngue. Transl. Fausto Castilho. São Paulo/ Petrópolis: Editora Unicamp/ Vozes, 2012, p.923. (Being and Time, Transl. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. Crane Books, 2013. E-book.)
[15] Gumbrecht, H. U. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
[16] Heidegger, M. Being and Time, op.cit., 2013.
[17] Ibidem.
[18] Ibidem.
[19] Heidegger, M. Ser e Tempo, op.cit., p.935.
[20] “By quoting Kant’s view that time ‘apart from the subject is nothing,’ Heidegger suggests that ‘this indeed implies that in the subject, it is everything.’ Time constitutes the finitude of Dasein as well as the transcendence of its being. By the same token, Heidegger is able to assert that the ‘rootedness in time alone enables the transcendental power of imagination in general to be the root of transcendence’. […] In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant gave three different orders of synthesis. The first is apprehension, meaning the process by which data that come into the mind are passively stored as manifolds. […] The second synthesis is recollection/reproduction in imagination; it differs from the first synthesis in that now the image is formed through the Einbildungskraft (power of imagination). The third synthesis is the synthesis of recognition in relation to a concept, which must at the same time be the recognition of sameness and the recognition of the concept’s unity. Heidegger uses three German words, Abbildung (likeness), Nachbildung (reproduction), and Vorbildung (pre-figuration), to characterize these three syntheses. At first glance, it is very clear that these syntheses have the role of putting what is perceived in relation to time.” Hui, Y. On the Existence of Digital Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. E-book. In his study, Hui contrasts the Heideggerian critique of logical rationalism with the birth of computational thinking in the 20th century – which, while it escapes the scope of this essay, offers an interesting avenue of research into the understanding of technology as the creation of alternative spaces in which we may exist, or, in the words of Laymert Garcia dos Santos, where one can “find pleasure, suffer, love, and dream, as well as think.” Santos, L. G. “Considerações sobre a realidade virtual” in Politizar as novas tecnologias: o impacto sócio-técnico da informação digital e genética. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2003, p.110.
[21] Bioy Casares, A. The Invention of Morel. Transl. Ruth L.C. Simms. New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2003.
[22] Ibidem, p.111.
[23] Preciado, P. “Aprendiendo del vírus,” El País, 28 mar 2020. <https://elpais.com/elpais/2020/03/27/opinion/1585316952_026489.html>. Accessed 10 jun. 2020.
[24] Santos, L. G., op.cit., p.109-122.
[25] Mbembe, A; Bercito, D. “The Pandemic Democratizes the Power to Kill. An Interview,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis. <http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/the-pandemic-democratizes-the-power-to-kill-an-intyerview/>. Accessed 10 jun. 2020.
