[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 4 on -em; yre- Interfacing COVID 19: the technologies of contagion, risk, and contamination

[Junting Huang]

Thank you, Luca. A quick note on your last point, Eric Hayot’s The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain traced that whole tradition to the Enlightenment period, when European philosophers often used the Chinese in their thought experiments on ethics. At its core, it asks us again and again what we should do about the suffering from afar. 

I also tried to follow the debates originated from Agamben, and I do feel the remarks he has made are a bit out of touch with reality, even though he may have some valid points in China’s context—considering civil liberties in the state of exception (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/09/the-new-normal-chinas-excessive-coronavirus-public-monitoring-could-be-here-to-stay), etc. However, his deliveries read more like an ideological commitment than a theoretical guidance. 

Junting

Junting Huang
Department of Comparative Literature
240 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853