An inquiry into the Thick and Affiliative Relationships as a means of anti-violence during pandemics

Note: This piece was written for a masters course that investigates the Rhetoric of Violence. In my writing, I draw from critical race theory, queer theory, as well as absurdist literature to explore the possibilities and limits for building thick affiliative relationships in service of anti-racism and decolonization. In this inquiry, I use Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract as well as Avishai Margalit’s distinctions between morality and ethics; for the analysis of pandemic absurdism as a comparison to then current situations, I use La Peste by Albert Camus; with references from José Esteban Muñoz and Macs Smith. It was written in the spring of 2021 at the height of the third wave of COVID-19 in Ontario when cases reached 4,500+ daily cases, at the time, the most devastating wave of the pandemic.

Over the course of this semester, the hopes of the pandemic coming to an end feel fleeting. We write from a desk, in the middle of a third wave in a year. Hope, for many of us, is fleeting as we see the ICU’s fill. Doom-scrolling on social media timelines has become a national pastime for us, the ones who can work from home with relatively low risk, typing epithets of shame that like plate tectonics are shifting shearing each other until a violent energy is released. While we all experience the pandemic, the experience shifts depending on the perspective, and our hopes shift as they diffract through our lenses of privilege and position. Academics, like ourselves for example, have remained working from home for the past year, as we should be due to this pandemic. We have the ability to rapidly convert our lives and recluse to safety in our houses and apartments while essential workers maintain physical presence in dangerous work environments. For example, in Canada, Black and Filipino women are over-represented as nursing aids and PSW in Canada placing these workers at higher risk of contracting COVID-19 (Turcotte & Savage 2020). Not only are these realities of inequality exacerbated because of the virus, injustices such as the trial of Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd continue to persist in our collective realities that remind us of the hopelessness in pandemic. These discrepancies in our society, in time of the pandemic, as well as the continued violence that persists, should not be described as mirroring our reality to allow a retrospective look. This is our society and rather than framing the situation as something in the past, the introspective pandemic is only a start in building affiliative relationships that is needed in the time of pandemic.

As an academic masochist, I began reading Camus’ “La Peste,” or in Englsih, “The Plague” as a means of better understanding disease, pandemic, and to find hope in what can only be described as existential pandemic dread. Maybe it is the Kafkaesque nature of Camus’ writing that roots itself on realism and the fantastically mundane that picks the structures of reality like a scab, revealing the deeper mechanisms of society’s injustices. The book fittingly uses epidemic as a means of exploring perceived notions of freedom, ego, suffering, and ultimately humanity’s existence. This absurdist dread of the main character, Dr. Bernard Rieux, the central character that drives the plot of this pandemic narrative in the Northern Algerian town of Oran in the 1940s when a sudden bacterium begins to ravish the townspeople. Throughout the book, Rieux’s interactions with the townspeople, colleagues, and institutions that are meant to protect people. Throughout the novel, the grim and meaningless nature of life is identified throughout all the character’s actions, ideologies and more. Doctors, such as Dr. Richard, Dr. Castel, and Dr. Rieux all conflict with their protocols to contain the plague. Others such as Father Paneloux, preaches the pandemic as a punishment for sin, something that hits close to home as a gay man who has heard these arguments time and time again. Hope, and the meaning of finding connection in a time full of chaos is grim, when describing the citizens of Oran, the narrator states, “Some of them plague had imbued with a skepticism so thorough that it was now a second nature; they had become allergic to hope in any form,” (Camus 224). It is not until the end of the novel that (SPOLIER ALERT) the narrator is Rieux himself, where he explains his objective retelling of the plague:

His profession put him in touch with a great many of our townspeople while plague was raging, and he had opportunities of hearing their various opinions… Summoned to give evidence regarding what was a sort of crime, he has exercised the restraint that behooves a conscientious witness. All the same, following the dictates of his heart, he has deliberately taken the victims’ side and tried to share with his fellow citizens the only certitudes they had in common — love, exile, and suffering. Thus he can truly say there was not one of their anxieties in which he did not share, no predicament of theirs that was not his. (248–249)

The act of revealing the narrator’s identity is an act of rebellion. Rieux, being as objective and reasonable as possible reveals the absurdity of violence vis-à-vis the plague. The interconnected nature of the plague is nonsensical no matter the position of the person. If the plague were a boat, say the Titanic even, we would all have different experiences of the boat. However, when catastrophe hits, in a matter of time, we are all in the water trying to stay afloat. Rieux, attempts to tell the story from a perspective that excludes himself, yet, in the jest of the experience finds that the plague just as much impacts him as the people of Oran. While there is a means to the objective nature of the plague, the subjective experiences of these large events shift the perspectives that coalesce into a mosaic of understandings, complicating the matters of violence.

Stepping out of Camus’ reality and back into ours, the absurd stinks like Chanel №5 on a boomer woman in the perfume section of the department store. But, like the plague, the allegory of the novel to some is a larger dissenting of Nazi ideologies and 20th century fascism; such critics like Roland Barthes and Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre who felt like the novel normalized fascism (Smith 1). Camus at the time lived under Vichy and Nazi rule; but, he was also born in French Algeria and experienced French colonization differently from native Algerians to the region; violence from French occupation of Algeria may also be just as an equal allegory for La Peste as well. Violence itself, and the underlying institutions that support ideologies of violence are one of the major critiques of the book such as colonization, white supremacy, and more that are deterministic of the allegories rather than a narrow view of Nazism. Camus famously fell out of touch under the arguments of necessary violence in revolution and revolt; where Sartre accepts violence as the cost of social change and Camus rejecting violence as it is unjustifiable (Aronson et al 115). Just as there is violence with Nazi rule under the French, there are forms of violence perpetuated by the French onto Algeria, Indigenous peoples of Canada, and across the globe in the form of colonization and imperialism. It is not the intention to diminish the atrocities by comparing Nazi violence to French violence during colonization. Like the plague itself, symptoms of violence that appear may be related to different diseases of violence. Both viral and bacterial infection may cause fever, but the cause of fever is through different modes of illness. To Camus, violence is the symptom of the underlying ideological disease such as colonization and white supremacy.

Margalit’s description of morality and ethics strike a balance and resemblance to the arguments being made in La Peste, and I think the overall view of violence as not only not justifiable, but a violence that is not just a physical entity, but a sociopolitical, economic, and cultural one. Where moralities and ethics converge within La Peste is with Rieux himself, as a doctor, his duty is to eliminate human suffering, aid the sick, and ultimately cure the plague. But in times of hopelessness, one might turn only to their ethics, and say fuck the rest, let me focus on my wife who has died in a sanatorium outside of the town of Oran. But, Rieux never strays from his morality, “there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of righting a plague is — common decency,” (142). Common decency is the quantum amount of hope needed to change a system of oppression and is the starting point to foster these thick affiliative relationships in antiracism and antiviolence. Like Mill’s idea of community acting as a commune, keeping in the privileged group and keeping out the Other. It is the two worlds that are not connected with a thick relationship, but are rather separated by a thick ideological wall. Like the recent events in the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, outrage grew from medical workers like nurses and doctors detailing the shifting demographic of ICU patients from the elderly to the essential worker: racialized, living in multigenerational homes, who cannot survive without the pay-check from an employer who creates unsafe working conditions and does not have sick pay policy to protect them; it is an externality of a white supremacist system that Mills argues violence is baked into both the Society and the State.

Camus, and I think Mill and Margalit use this irony of freedom when they analyze injustices and violence that forms the backbone their antiracism and antiviolence actions. To Mills, the racial contract offers the freedom to internalize the beliefs of white supremacy, it can become “consensual and voluntaristic even for nonwhites” (89). To Margalit, one can choose their ethics over their morality. Camus’ freedom, and use of quarantine in the novel finds similarities in the unconscious habits that persisted in the lives of Oran only for their freedom and “sufferings” to be decentered by the plague. The ideas of common decency for Camus is this ignition point in everyone in the darkness of hopelessness that ignites action against the plague and against violence that continually perpetuates in society. Like Rieux, the choice for common decency is the point of energy to create antiracism and antiviolence in a society run amok by failed plague protocols, miscommunication, and poor implementation from authorities. Like essential workers, there is a sense of irony within the freedom they own. On one end, there is the façade of “stay-at-home” orders that exclaim to the public that “if you’re not staying at home, you’re part of the problem” and the idea that “essential worker” is the hero to ensure the rest of society, the predominantly white society, can work under the “restrictions” of working from home.

We can choose to aid in the fight against the plague while it may ultimately feel like a hopeless endeavour. This is also true in the sense of fighting antiracism and antiviolence; we can begin to feel an existential dread, a hopelessness that clouds our perception of the scale of antiracism and antiviolence. The plague is a force that if one faces will place themselves in the path of a hegemonic biology; the plague will consume those who pose a threat against it, and those who will be complacent in its consumption. Camus doesn’t offer the reader a hopeful ending, and, why shouldn’t he? It wouldn’t be absurd!

The plague never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city. (254)

I want to return to José Esteban Muñoz concept of the future as a horizon I referenced in my counterstory assignment. In conjunction with Camus’ final appeal to the audience in La Peste, Camus argues the persistent nature of the plague, and the need for people to congregate ideologically to rebel for it is common decency to fight for the future and for justice. If the plague did not infect you now, it will infect you later, and the only way to fight is for you, yourself, to choose to fight it. Muñoz offers a similar proclamation, that while he focuses on queer futurity offers a “radical negativity” where the normalization of rejection offers simply not an antirelationist as a system of binary logic, but rather a mode for new choice against the “freedoms” that exist in the current states of Society, “From shared critical dissatisfaction we arrive at collective potentiality,” (189). The horizon, therefore, is a convergence on the past and present, with the future potential for change; however, common decency, as a quantum, is the first step in building these thick relationships; and it is the horizon that offers a potential to continue to build these connections in times of hardship. La Peste, in its final words offers the idea of common decency for people who you may find morality with, or even no morality at all.

Like myself, and the others who find themselves inside during the pandemic, the idea of violence perpetuated through plague are not just the exposing of injustices in society, they are our society’s downfalls. The issues of violence, like the plague, never simply go away. They remain dormant, waiting to strike again. Like a vaccine, common decency is a starting point to creating a thick affiliative relationship, that like the vaccine, is a tool to be used in conjunction with others such as decentering, nuancing, future imagining, and of course love. It is a choice that in times of hopelessness, is the only choice we can make to ensure that when the times comes, we will be ready to face the plague.

Works Cited

Aronson, Ronald, et al. Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Camus, Albert. The Plague. Translated by Stuart Gilbert, Random House, Inc., 1991.

Mills, Charles W., and Mills, Charles Wade. The Racial Contract. United Kingdom, Cornell University Press, 1997.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009.

Smith, Macs. “What Dies in the Street: Camus’s La Peste and Infected Networks.” French Forum, vol. 41, no. 3, 2016, pp. 193–208. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/90001133. Accessed 20 Apr. 2021.