RADICAL SYMBIOSIS

Symbiosis, Not Antibiosis.

The Cancellation of Michel Bounan

Verso cancelled the publication of an English translation of Michel Bounan’s Le temps du sida in 1990. This is a book that contains a rare homeopathic view of world epidemiology—the idea that a virus needs to flourish and run its course rather than be attacked out of existence. In other words, radical symbiosis. The translation was cancelled because of what now appears to have been a made up scandal about homophobia. When Avital Ronell, herself publicly cancelled by Verso author Andrea Long Chu and others in 2018, gave a lecture on 10 October 2019 on ‘climate’ and AIDS just before the COVID epidemic began to spread in China, she touched on Bounan’s book and its broader, multi-causal description of ‘disease’ as itself a form of climate. ‘It is as though the planet itself had contracted the AIDS virus’, she said, a matter of days before the planet did indeed catch (up with) the immunological crisis the return of which Bounan had predicted. On November 11 2019 Bounan passed away, a short time after the ‘pandemic tabletop exercise’ ‘Event 201’ took place at The Pierre Hotel in New York City. Since the Verso debacle, none of Bounan’s many books have been officially translated into English, and Ronell herself remains symbolically ‘blocked’ from mainstream theoretical debate.

The fate of Bounan and his work, together with Ronell, self-evidently diagnoses the contemporary mal d’archive. Even today, this dialectical genius of immunological crisis remains largely unknown in the English speaking world. Were it not for Ronell, perhaps Bounan would still be absolutely obscure outside of France. The nexus of resonance around his name nonetheless persists, and there is doubtless an irony in the fact that the suppression of his anti-antibiotic view resembles precisely what he was warning against. What was repressed was precisely the view of symbiosis (antibiosis causes ‘variants’) now most needed.

In this way, the double-suppression of Bounan-Ronell tells us everything we need to know about the immunological landscape we now enter. It diagnoses the entirety of the pharmacological seizure and default. As a practising medic and ultra-situationist, Bounan was in close contact with his patient Debord at the time of the latter’s suicide. Debord told the doctor he’d ‘left the framework around an (?) illness—to become the main expert on the total disaster that will be ascertainable in the entire sphere of health’.

The COVID-19 Industrial Complex: The Crime Is Already Beyond Scope

Josh Rogin said on CNN on 11 May 2021 that ‘if it lead to the epidemic we’re in, then Fauci and his team deserve some blame for it’. This is a situation we’re starting to know well. A domino effect in early summer 2021 will have allowed theories that were previously forbidden to suddenly became visible. The lab-leak hypothesis will have been the least of these, as outlined here.

What is the name for a situation in which the person who may have been in the place of greatest responsibility for the creation of a disease that has killed ~3 million people has also been the main authority in charge of the response to it (responsible for it in both senses), including a worldwide vaccination program that is ongoing and now increasingly being imported into Africa and other parts of the world?

Scandal? Swindle? Unfortunate historical disaster? Inevitable coincidence of bad prime movers? Noble toxic lie? Omnicidal medicine? Structural sickness? Finite decision? Vaccine Industrial Complex? Catastrophic antibiosis? Extinction sigil? Ubidemic? COVID-industrial complex? Annihilation vigil? Extinctive medicine? None of these? All of these? Genocide?

Perhaps we should go quickly here and say that everything that is happening right now under the inadequate and orchestrated name of ‘coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)’ is without doubt a sign of the end. It is impossible to imagine this disease as it is without the context of accelerating co-extinctions, namely, without a worldwide situation of extinction as an intra-affective pathogen and immunological stressor.

When Avital Ronell wrote ‘A Note on the Failure of Man’s Custodianship (AIDS Update)’ in 1993, as mentioned in READING NOTES #13, immuno-disease as a symptom of some kind of end was precisely what she iterated and homed in on. Echoing Le Temps du Sida, which she calls a ‘critically important work’, the crisis in immunological defences cannot be spoken of without reference to a crushing sense of finite anthropic time, a felt lack of time for us. Whether we actually have this lack of time or not, and on what scale, is hardly decisive here, since ‘the disease’ surges precisely there where, unchecked, there is a feeling of the end.

All debated origins of ‘COVID’ are, in this specific sense, a distraction. Lab-origin or bat cave-origin: the function of this duality would be to elide the main contextual stressor which Tom Cohen has been labelling a grand mal d’archive since just after 9/11. The feeling of extinction—its pathology and pathogen—cannot not introduce into the consideration of COVID-19’s origin a multifactorial appreciation of co-extinction multipliers and variable eschatological stressors. What could be more stressful, after all, than the impossible-to-take-or-leave thought and feeling of imminent anthropic vanishing?

Since this thought and feeling is asubjective in part (that is, hard for an individual psyche to absorb or even believe in: we are dangerously immune to active belief and disbelief in the thing), it over-stresses the human frame and system. It leaves the body empty, an easy prey. So much is this the case that Ronell, a COVID-dissident before her time, writes:

The manifest inability to question the entire apparatus of theoretical presuppositions under which research has been conducted (cancer remains incomprehensible, AIDS confounds them absolutely) leads one to wonder whether this paralysis is not symptomatic of the paranoid condition typified in all epochs anticipating the end of civilization.

The paralysis before a deepening immunological crisis is self-causing: the disease is brought about by the pre-given inability to reflect on it. The crisis is one of lack of reading and abundance of presumption (an ‘inability to question’) caused by a feeling of the end (‘symptomatic of the paranoid condition typified in all epochs anticipating the end of civilization’). This specific end-related ‘paranoia’ is formulated classically in Le Temps du Sida, and this seems among the main reasons Ronell calls it a ‘critically important work’.

THE ORIGIN OF COVID . . . IS EXTINCTION

Bounanian homeopathy basically says nothing but this: since the explanation for extreme immunological crises is to be, at the very least, multifactorial, it also has to be viscerally eschatological. ‘COVID-19’, insofar as we continue to call it that, was created not in a lab in Wuhan or in the caves of Yunnan; rather, it was created in and by the inability of the protective psychic shell to deal with and process the thought and feeling of extinction. No conspiracy here, and no coincidence either: contemporary extinction cannot not be taken as a kind of ultimate stressor and ‘origin story’.

Stress, in this case, is being used in a technical (extological) sense. Here is Alfred Hässig for example—the Swiss physician and ‘AIDS dissident’ known for his insistence that symbiosis and not antibiosis should be the key factor in the approach to immunological crises—speaking in an interview in the summer of 1997. (Applying his logic not only to COVID but to COVID as symptom of a broader extinction-triggered mal d’archive, I place in bold some of the relevant phrases.)

There are five identified categories of stress: infectious, toxic, traumatic, nutritional and psychological stress. If there is a chronic accumulation of several of these stress factors it causes a whole body inflammation. That means antibody production increases in order to keep pathogens under control or eliminate them while production of T-cells is suppressed. This leads to an over-demand on the organism—fight or flight—without the necessary restoration time–anabolism. Body reserves are used up in an extensive way, more than they are built up–catabolism. This achievement-oriented switch in the vegetative nervous system is called stress by the Hungarian scientist Hans Seyle. The stress hormones adrenalin and cortisol are produced extensively. This hypercortisolism causes the Thymus gland to shrink and fewer T-cells are produced while T-cells in circulation migrate to the bone marrow where they activate B-cells. In the short term these mechanisms are life-saving; when persistent they damage the immune system and create illness. We know all so-called risk groups are exposed to a multiplicity of stresses, including death-sentencing because of an ‘HIV’-diagnosis, and toxic treatments with so-called antivirals. Treatment with blood products is also hard on our immune system.

Note here, for example, how the ‘death-sentencing’ of a positive diagnosis is taken to be a key stressor, itself potentially productive of the disease in question. Hidden in sight is also a relatively straightforward claim about where diseases come from: insofar as an over-demand on the organism that it is exceptional (and when isn’t it now?) takes place, then the disease produced will also be increasingly exceptional, variable (variant-eidetic), even enigmatic. Isn’t it simply the case that no real expertise is needed to recognise this direct aetiology of COVID-19 in extinction? What is the thought and feeling of extinction except an over-demand on the organism that is bound to make us more-than-ill?

SYMBIOSIS, NOT ANTIBIOSIS

Here is what Hässig goes on to say:

We all should learn again to live with our microbes in symbiosis instead of trying to kill them off—in short, to shift from antibiosis to symbiosis . . . However all this is useless if the stress factors like drugs, psychological hopelessness and helplessness etc. persist. We cannot energise destruction yet expect health.

With a background of expertise or none at all, there is enough here to necessitate the following speculations:

• Immunological crises cannot not occur and increase under conditions of spiralling co-extinction on a non-superhabitable planet. That is, extinction is the main cause of COVID-19.

• It follows from this that antibiotic treatments of any variety—which try to kill the disease—can only, under extinction conditions, accelerate the crisis, produce variants, and so on.

• In this sense, and in a way that remains necessarily under-theorised, to favour antibiosis over symbiosis is to favour the foreshortening of life conditions—any future lives—on this planet.

• Taken to an extreme that is merited and worth our time, this would also mean that the pro-vaccination tendency is more deadly, perhaps infinitely more so, than an ongoing belief in symbiosis and survivance.

• Under present conditions, it is as if anything but radical symbiosis will bring on a suddenly possible and actual end of the world.

Pure Symbiosis

At the far end of such a thought of radical symbiosis, we can listen a second time to Le Temps du Sida, which proposes that every wasted or misjudged antibiotic effort equals the setting up of later ‘variants’, whether these be so-called ‘COVID’ as the second wave of ‘HIV’ or the ‘variants’ themselves of ‘COVID’ (Kent, India, Yorkshire, and so on).

When Ronell made a point of calling Bounan’s text ‘critically important’, it was no doubt precisely because Bounan argued that worldwide antibiosis, under extinction conditions, is itself an immense danger. In pitting ourselves squarely against a ‘disease’ that we refuse to read, analyse and consider as multi-factorial, we set up local and general future ‘variants’ of what may indeed be (as both Bounan and Ronell say) an inherently terminal condition.

In other words, what the idea of radical symbiosis entails, whether we vaxx or not, is knowing that every such attempt now has the potential to deepen ‘the total disaster that will be ascertainable in the entire sphere of health’. The point of view of a radical Bounian homeopathy, where individual disease runs always in parallel to biospheric malaise, would be that ‘pro-vaxx’ is just another name for delegated and ramped up existential risk. Total suppression of AIDS was impossible to disconnect for Bounan from later potential surges of immunological crises under different names.

Every time antibiosis is simply assumed as appropriate, world immunology is itself juddered. Current pro-vaxx ideology is yet another such judder, setting us up for much worse later on. As Bounan wrote in Le Temps du Sida thirty years ago, predicting every aspect of the present, ‘Another misfortune is coming, something that even the pessimism of Orwell didn’t dare imagine and against which market civilization will not find a solution.’