(C)Ovid, Metamorphosen

Die Rückkehr ins Goldene Zeitalter

English version

The present text is an attempt to deconstruct the prevailing ideological assumptions of the current corona discourse. It is an attempt to illustrate these ideological lines of thought in their deficiency and to name their ideological character, hence an attempt to understand the prevailing reasoning about Corona. This dominant reflection on Corona and its ascend from one ideological assumption to the other can be called metamorphoses of the pandemic consciousness. The pandemic consciousness takes its starting point in the diagnosis of the crisis-like character of present society, against which it imagines an “old normality”. Here, it tries to justify society’s past condition, which is, however, not recognized in its own proneness. In longing for the idyll of pre-pandemic society, it designs a “solidary” community against the threat of an external enemy and thus negatively constitutes itself as a homogeneous entity. Its longing becomes a need for harmony in the present, which it satisfies with its belief in good domination, when it gets het up about the disproportion of the state-imposed corona-measures. In doing so, in its daily dealings with Corona, it feels confirmed by the state’s plea to common sense and, in an enlightened ethos, listens to its own eternal capacity to reason. Through dialectical acrobatics the pandemic consciousness accomplishes to discover a new form of solidarity in isolation, a blessing in disguise, without realizing that it has thus completed its return to the “normal state” of the bourgeois society as a commodity producing society. With a clear conscience, it abstains from a critical judgment of the Corona crisis and resigns itself, loyal to the state, to the insight of reality. This way it is perfectly governable.