Virology and Biopolitics

As neither alive nor dead —though deadly, as we had to learn again—the virus is the figure of the border. The border divides, of course, but thereby relates what it separates. The virus belongs to the living, but on its border, disrupting life from the outside. If Derrida once described deconstruction as a 'virology', it was to note its special interest in the constitutive failure of coding and de-coding, in the interruption of goal-directed reading processes: the virus as parasite that derails communication, whether biological, linguistic, or information-technological (Derrida 1994, 12). Deconstruction seeks to grasp this derailment as necessary for reproduction in general, including understanding as a form of recapitulation. As Derrida also points out in the same context, viruses can become a privileged figure here for another reason: as neither alive nor dead, they effect this disruption from a site that is not itself capable of self-reproduction, a capacity often seen as the very definition of life. A virus is said to be non-living because it can multiply or reproduce only inside living host cells that it hijacks. It has no cellular structure and lacks its own metabolism. But it is not exactly dead either, as it contains genetic information that, alas, can be reproduced.