Why Loss?
Enjoyment and Sacrifice.
Constantly engage in self-destructive behaviour, humans fight wars, unleash loss on ourselves and others. Loss becomes enjoyable and produces something enjoyable, objects only have their worth through sacrifice and loss.
If we sacrifice something, we give the object transcendent value, in the process of losing it. Loss gives us something to desire. There are no values that just are, values come into existence through sacrifice.
Loss and sacrifice create an object to desire.
Loss gives us something to desire, it creates a value, value comes into existence through the act of sacrifice or loss.
Interview with Todd McGowan, Crisis and Critique Volume 7.2 Issue 2.
We can see now that there is no such thing as bare life. All life is politicized.
Even the attempt to protect or promote life is part of a political form of life, to use Agamben’s terms. The reluctance of conservative leaders to impose strict regulations reveals that regulating life is not inherently a conservative or ideological operation. The logic of capital demands the flow of commodities so that nothing gets in the way of accumulation. The outbreak interrupts this flow, thereby exposing how protecting life puts one at odds with the logic of capital. This means that we can see how the state—in its role of protecting life—is not just the servant of capital. If it were, we would not see the arrest of the flow of commodities. The catastrophe shows us that the state can be our friend, not just our enemy. The great revelation of the coronavirus catastrophe is the emancipatory power of the state, the ability of the state to serve as the site for collectivity rather than acting as just the handmaiden of capital. This is something that the theory of biopower can never accept. The anarchic tendencies behind this theory need to be shown as fundamentally libertarian, not leftist. This is what the virus has demonstrated to us.