'the lists of manuscripts formerly owned by dr. john dee' (death turns out to be under insufficient surveillance)

say it ain't so.

horsemouth has been following up the antiquarian researches of m.r. james (rather than his ghost stories).

in his the lists of manuscripts formerly owned by dr. john dee he finds the name of j.o. halliwell (no relation/ spelled differently).  halliwell is famous as a collector of nursery rhymes and folk-tales (in particular the three little pigs) but also as a bookthief and errant son-in-law of even more legendary book collector sir thomas phillipps. 

it was from phillipps that halliwell is supposed to have stolen a book, fleeing the family home with the book (and phillipps' daughter).

here we have a jamesian plot of shady goings on  - dee 'not merely an alchemist and a spiritualist but a really learned man', the sack of his library at mortlake by a witch-hunting mob, the dispersion of his books among many collectors (including his diary to j. o. halliwell and subsequent publication), and then the theft of a book from a father in law, the son-in-law and daughter flee.  

'of the general character of the collection a few words must be said. it is in the main a special one got together to assist dee in his peculiar studies...'

later horsemouth finds m.r. james issuing advice to curious pupils at eton on pursuing antiquarian goals in the wanderings and homes of manuscripts. 

meanwhile the philosophers have been feeling left out of the pandemic (they have been sat at home missing thought). 

the problem for the followers of agamben and foucault is that when if you theorise a medicalisation of politics (and a politicisation of medicine) and then when it happens for real (and on a global scale), you  must have something useful to say about it.  

agamben bemoans the state of exception we find ourselves in (the state that begins the moment when governments suspend existing laws), he bemoans the lack of philosophical resistance to it (have we learnt nothing from his books?). he argues covid is an insufficient cause (horsemouth re-read marco d'eramo's article on it and some other commentaries on agamben's original pieces). for agamben in march 2020 it simply doesn't kill enough people to warrant the state taking the powers it has. 

in the picture of the sovereign from the cover of hobbes' leviathan plague doctors appear. 

but as the pandemic progresses the state behaves more like benjamin's baroque sovereign. the sovereign is indecisive. the panopticon of epidemiological surveillance necessary turns out not to exist and has to be bolted together on the fly (and then the technology turns out not to work or have unintended consequences that require it to be turned off). the state is torn between its need for business as usual  and its alleged desire to enact a fully medical regime (and it ends up doing neither to anyone's satisfaction).

in the US 800,000 people have died so far. in the UK we are nearly at 150,000 deaths. in brazil 618,000. in the world to date 5.3 million. this seems fairly compelling to horsemouth. these are likely to be  underestimates of the numbers  (death (globally) turns out to be under insufficient surveillance). 

in europe the medicalisation of politics may reach a fuller flowering with more compulsion (and more struggle against that compulsion). for the rest of the world horsemouth cannot say. 

there is of course a movement on the streets that criticises the measures necessary to fight the pandemic - the anti-maskers, the anti- lockdown activists, the anti-vaxxers, the conspiracy theorists, but the philosophers are prevented from throwing their weight behind them (as a wild analysis, a folk-political science) by a fastidious caution. 

where science has done great work the state is revealed as unprepared, a mere confidence trick, and its medical arm to have been underfunded, under-resourced, under staffed. the populations of the richest countries in the world  are revealed as unhealthy, the medical needs of their citizens unmet. 

foucault provides three disease models (leprosy, plague,  smallpox - there is possibly a fourth, madness) and the strategies of social control and subjectivity for dealing with them. camus takes the plague and urges us to get our hands dirty with the necessary work of exclusion (there was artaud too, whose mayor of cagliari knew it was coming). saramago and wyndham take blindness (in all its necessary metaphor) to push society over the edge and into collapse. later in his same fictional world saramago takes silence, where the people will not vote, as a strange delayed symptom.

horsemouth is not seeing the new world being built in the ruins of the old (and he is not seeing any build back better either). he is seeing the rage with and disaffection from politics continue to fester (the situationists would be delighted). 

when this pandemic is over (oh how happy we shall be) horsemouth forsees a backlash against science for having brought us the bad news. ok gongs for some on the vaccine side (and possible assassination by anti-vaxxers later), but practically universal execration for those with the courage to call for masks and lockdowns as the state (following the model of 2008) makes the poor pay for the crisis with yet another round of austerity.