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In a recent article titled "After Life: De Anima and Unhuman Politics," Eugene Thacker writes, "If our global context of climate change, disasters, pandemics, or complex networks tells us anything, it is that political thought today demands a concept of life adequate to its anonymous, unhuman dimensions, an unhuman politics, for unhuman life" (2009, 40). Thacker's use of the unhuman, rather than the inhuman or nonhuman, alludes to the strange worlds and weird lives that reveal themselves by turning toward the emergent, unexpected, and challenging interactions, engagements, and limits between the human and nonhuman.
Thacker 's call for an unhuman politics arises in a swarm of viral hype. Everything has seemingly gone viral: Alongside repeated panics of virus outbreaks, there are also fears of vaccine shortages - but there are plenty of Anti-Viral Kleenex; the rise of PC computer viruses are fought with antivirus security software; and just as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have described the new world order's institutional structure as being "like a software program that carries a virus along with it, so that it is continually modulating and corrupting the institutional forms around it," there is now viral marketing, viral advertising, and viral media to aid, support, and propagate this structure (Hardt and Negri 2000, 197-98). Concurrently, the emergence of theories like viral ecology, viral philosophy, viral capitalism, viral politics, viral affect, and viral aesthetics to diagnose our culture today suggests that the virus perhaps is the major trope of the postmodern condition (Bardini 2006). The virus |viral looms as an exemplar for considering Thacker's unhuman politics, as the nonhuman virus comes to bear multifariously upon the human, in part, through the human naming or classification of what is permitted to be considered viral. What a virus is and does cannot only be extracted into the qualifier viral just as the qualities of the viral cannot be reduced to the virus. To think the virus and the viral is to engage in their continuous states of flux, transformation, and movements toward and between as well as diversions away from one another, attending to the fact that there is some kind of recognition or identification process that binds or links the virus and viral together for the human. The virus is difficult...