Crisis and Communitas

Front matter

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Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies IN ARTS AND POLITICS Dorota Sajewska and Matgorzata Sugiera

CRISIS AND COMMUNITAS

PART I Community as Potentiality

1 An Aesthetics of Solidarity: Collective Becoming After Neoliberalism JEREMY GILBERT

2 Speculative Communities: Designing Contact Zones in Times of Eco-Eco Crisis MALGORZATA SUGIERA

3 The Emotional Citizenship of Exile TADEUSZ KOCZANOWICZ

4 Past in Common: Departing from History KATARZYNA BOJARSKA

PART II Bodies and the Communal Power

5 Affective Communitas: Towards a Performative Theory of Historical Agency DOROTA SAJEWSKA vi

Contents

Towards Ephemeral Communities of Care: AIDS, Political Transition, and Crisis DOROTA SOSNOWSKA

Inventing Skins. Reinventing Community: Writing, Performance, and Theory in Brazil (1960-2020) EDUARDO JORGE DE OLIVEIRA

Maria Janion’s Frenzy: Transgressing the Crisis of 1968 NINA SEILER

PART III Imageries of the Commons

Sharing Image, Sharing Time. Dante, Visibility and the Common PAWEŁ MOŚCICKI

10 Just Numbers: From Extras to Agents of an

Uncountable Community FABIENNE LIPTAY

An Avant-Garde with Its Back to the Future: Affirming the Crisis MIKKEL BOLT RASMUSSEN

Assembling the Audience: The Spread of the Parliamentary Form in Contemporary Arts LOUISE DECAILLET

PART IV Artists Speak!

Manifest 1: On Eating and Being Eaten: Notes on the zürich moves! 2019 Research and Contextualisation

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Manifest 2: What Do We Want? Society! When Do We Want It? Now! “Come Together” and Its Discontents 249 WOJTEK ZIEMILSKI

Manifest 3: Torn Apart 256 EMA HESTEROVÁ AND PETER SIT (APART COLLECTIVE)

Contributors

APART (Ema Hesterova and Peter Sit) is an artistic collective that has been performing research, artistic-creative, curatorial, publishing, and archiving activities since 2012. It is a meta-participatory platform working on a proto-institutional basis and the principle of shared economies. Today, APART is Denis Kozerawski, Peter Sit, Andrej Zabkay, Ema Hesterova, and Chiara Rendeková. APART has exhibited, screened films, and executed projects at numerous venues including Kunsthalle Bratislava; Karlin Studios Prague; Plusminusnula Gallery Zilina; Work Hard! Play Hard, Minsk; CCA Kronika, Bytom; e-flux Bar Laika, New York; MoMA New York; Prague City Gallery; Easttopics, Budapest; among others. Under the APART LABEL, the collective has published more than 20 publications, including Uhuru by Catarina Simao; Mehraneh Atashi’s Safe Landing; Electronic Dadaist Poetry by Babi Badalov; and the.txt edition (co-published with Display and Kapital). APART’s latest — and to date the largest — project is its own gallery space, A Promise of Kneropy in Bratislava, with an affiliated reading and study room, which seeks to programmatically present critical contemporary artistic positions.

Katarzyna Bojarska is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at SWPS University in Warsaw and president of the NGO View. Foundation for Visual Culture where she co-founded and is on the editorial board of View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, an international, open access, online academic journal www.pismowidok.org. She has received numerous grants and awards including Fulbright, Horizon2020 (www.repast.eu/), and individual and group grants from the National Centre for Science. Her research interests include cultural memory, gender and memory, trauma and visual culture studies, as well as contemporary arts. Her postdoctoral book, titled Wydarzenia po Wydarzeniu. Biatoszewski — Richter — Spiegelman (Events after the Event. Bialoszewski — Richter — Spiegelman), was published in 2013. Bojarska is the editor of Ernst van Alphen’s Krytyka jako interwencja: sztuka, pamięć, afekt (2019). She has also translated and published several works of other thinkers, including Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2018), Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional x Contributors

Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2016), Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (2013), as well as works by Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch, Lauren Berlant, Kristin Ross, Mignon Nixon, Susan Schuppli, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, and Ariella Aisha Azoulay. Bojarska has presented her work at numerous international conferences and taught students in both Europe and the US. She is an active art critic and member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is an art historian and theorist working on the politics and history of the avant-garde. He is professor of Political Aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen and the author of seven books in Danish and six in English — Crisis to Insurrection: Notes on the Ongoing Collapse (2014), Playmates and Playboys at a Higher Level: J.V. Martin and the Situationist International (2015), Hegel after Occupy (2018; in French 2020), After the Great Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Art, Its Contradictions and Difficulties (2018; in French 2019; in Italian 2021), Trump’s Counter-Revolution (2018; in French 2019; in Italian 2019 and in Greek 2021), and Late Capitalist Fascism (2021). He has also written numerous articles about the revolutionary tradition and modern art in journals such as Multitudes, New Formations, Oxford Art Journal, Rethinking Marxism, Texte zur Kunst, and Third Text. He is the editor of nine books in Danish and three in English, the latter being: Totalitarian Art and Modernity (co-edited with Jacob Wamberg 2010), Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (co-edited with Jakob Jakobsen 2011), and Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (co-edited with Jakob Jakobsen 2015). Rasmussen is an occasional cultural producer, with activities including the exhibition This World We Must Leave — An Idea of Revolution at Kunsthal Aarhus Aarhus Kunstbygning in 2010-2011 with Jakob Jakobsen, with a second edition at Kunsthall Oslo 2016; and the play Revolution with Christian Lollike at the Nationaltheatret in Oslo 2017 which then travelled to S/H in Copenhagen 2018.

Susan Buck-Morss is philosopher, intellectual historian, interdisciplinary thinker, and writer of international reputation. Her most-known book, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009), offered a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic by linking it to the influence of the Haitian Revolution. Her books The Origin of Negative Dialectics (1977) and The Dialectics of Seeing (1989) have been translated into several languages and have been called “modern classics in the field.” Other publications include Thinking Past Terror (2003), Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2000), Revolution Today (2019), Year 1. A Philosophical Recounting (2021), and numerous articles (www.susanbuck-morss.info). Susan Buck-Morss is currently professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and professor emerita at Cornell University’s Department of Government, where she taught from 1978 to 2012. Buck-Morss was also a member of Cornell’s graduate fields in comparative literature; history of art; German

Contributors xi studies; and the School of Architecture, Art, and Planning. She serves on the editorial boards of several journals and has been invited as a lecturer at dozens of universities worldwide. Her numerous international awards and fellowships include a Getty Scholar grant, Fulbright Award, and Guggenheim Fellowship. She holds a PhD in European intellectual history from Georgetown University.

Louise Décaillet is a PhD candidate in cultural analysis at the University of Zurich. Previously, she studied cultural analysis as well as French and German literature in Geneva and Zurich. Since 2018, she has worked as an assistant at the Modern French and General Comparative Literature departments at the University of Zurich and as an independent translator. Since September 2019, she has been part of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)-funded project Crisis and Communitas. Performative Concepts of Commonality in the Polish Culture since the Beginning of the 20th Century, writing her PhD thesis on notions of audience and public and their transformation in contemporary performative practices (working title: Plurales Publikum. Formate des Gemeinschaftlichen zwischen Theater, Performance und Aktivismus). Her research interests include contemporary theatre, visual and performance art, activism, history, theory of twentieth-century theatre, spectatorship and participation, institutionalisation of art, and performance studies.

Jeremy Gilbert is professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University /AU: Please of East London. His most recent publications include Twenty-First- Century the Orcid Socialism (2020), the translation of Maurizio Lazzarato’s Experimental Politics been moved (2018), and Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Indi- seen vidualism (2013). His next book, Hegemony Now: Power in the Twenty-First Century, co-authored with Alex Williams, will be published in August 2022. Gilbert is the editor of the journal New Formations and regularly writes for the British press (including the Guardian, the New Statesman, open Democracy, and Red Pepper), and for think tanks such as IPPR and Compass. He is routinely engaged in debates and discussions on Labour Party policy and strategy, and has appeared on national television as a spokesperson for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira is assistant professor in Brazilian Studies (Literature, Culture, Media) at the University of Zurich. He has worked as a researcher at the German Center for Art History (DFK) in Paris and at the Max Planck Institute’s Bibliotheca Herziana in Rome. He develops research in literature, ethnography, and art criticism and theory in Latin America with a focus on Brazil. In addition, he has a special interest in critical theory and French literature, philosophy, and visual culture. De Oliveira undertook postdoctoral research at the Centre d’Histoire et de Théorie des Arts (CEHTA) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; and at the Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL) at xii Contributors

Universidade de Campinas, São Paulo. His published books include Beschweigen, Bezeichnen: Mira Schendel und die Schrift unmittelbaren Erlebens (2020) and A invengáo de uma pele: Nuno Ramos em obras (2018). He is one of the editors of the journal Lingua-Lugar — the University of Zurich’s Portuguese Studies partnership with the University of Geneva; a regular French to Portuguese translator from authors such as Édouard Glissant, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Ranciére, Georges Didi-Huberman, Michel Carrouges, and Muriel Pic; and is currently compiling a collection of essays from Brazil entitled Peles Inventadas (Invented Skins). Together with Jean-Luc Nancy and Maria Filomena Molder, he made the film La joie qui vient (2018); followed by Une joie animale (2020) with Jean-Christophe Bailly and Muriel Pic; and is currently finishing his third film, Joie publique, joie politique (2022), with Suely Rolnik and Georges Didi-Huberman.

Tadeusz Koczanowicz is a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SW PS) in Warsaw. He holds a PhD from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Zurich which he obtained as part of the SNFS (Swiss National Science Foundation)-funded project “Performative Concepts of Commonality in Polish Culture since the Beginning of the 20th Century.” The title of his thesis was “Community of Refugees: The Experience of Exile in Edward Abramowski's Thought and Its Modern Reconfigurations." It examined the impact ofthe experience of exile on the concept of non-state socialism created by Abramowski, a nineteenth-century Polish sociologist and psychologist. This perspective placed Abramowski's ideas within the context of modern discussions about the end of the nation-state and the status of a refugee in social, political and cultural thought. Before coming to Zurich, he studied Sociology, Social Anthropology and Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw and German Culture at the Free University of Berlin. In October 2023 he is starting a two-year mobility postdoc granted by the SNFS at the New School's Transregional Center for Democratic Studies in New York City.

Fabienne Liptay is a professor of Film Studies at the University of Zurich. She studied film and theatre studies, as well as English language and literature, at the University of Mainz, where she earned her doctorate in 2002. Between 1999 and 2001, she worked as an assistant editor on the TV programme 3sat Kulturzeit. Liptay is a former lecturer in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Mainz (2002-2007) and was assistant professor of film history in the Department of Art History at the University of Munich (2007-2013). She is head of the research project “Exhibiting Film: Challenges of Format” (www.exhibitingfilm.ch), for which she was rewarded an excellence grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She has published widely on the aesthetics and theory of film, the interrelations between the visual arts and media, as well as concepts and practices of aesthetic production. Her publications include the monograph Telling Images: Studien zur Bildlichkeit des Films (diaphanes,

Contributors xiii

2016), and the co-edited books Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Brill, 2015) and Taking Measures: Usages of Formats in Film and Video Art (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2023). She is also the co-editor of the quarterly journal Film-Konzepte.

Pawel Mo$cicki is a philosopher, essayist, translator, and professor at the Institute of Literary Research in Warsaw (Polish Academy of Science). He is on the editorial board of the online academic journal View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture (www.pismowidok.org). Paweł Mościcki is the author of several books (in Polish), including Politics of Theater. Essays on Engaging Art (2008); Godard. Arcades Project (2010); The Idea of Potentiality. The Possibility of Philosophy According to Giorgio Agamben (2013); We Also Have Our Past. Guy Debord and History as a Battlefield (2015); Photo-constellations. On Marek Piasecki (2016); Snapshots from the Tradition of the Oppressed (2017); Chaplin. The Prevision of the Present (2017); and Lessons of Football (2019), Higher Actuality. Studies on the Contemporaneity of Dante (2022). In 2016, he created an online Refugee Atlas (www.refugeeatlas.com) inspired by Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. In 2022, he published his debut prose book Asylum. His personal website combined with a blog can be found at www.pawelmoscicki.net.

Dorota Sajewska is a cultural theorist, theatre and performance scholar, as well as a dramaturge for theatre and dance. She is a professor of Theatre Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, a former assistant professor of Interart (Eastern Europe) at the University of Zurich, and for Theatre and Performance at the University of Warsaw. From 2008 until 2012, she was deputy artistic director of the Dramatic Theatre in Warsaw. Her interests oscillate between cultural and performance studies, body anthropology, material aesthetics, and the decolonisation of knowledge. She is the author of various publications on performance, theatre, and visual art, as well as cultural theory and history (in Polish, German, English, and French). To date, Sajewska has written three monographs:

“Sick plays”: Disease/Identity/ Drama (2005 in Polish), Occupied by Media

2012 in Polish), and Necroperformance. Cultural Reconstruction of the War Body

2016 in Polish; 2019 in English). She has edited issues of peer-reviewed

journals, most recently Theatre and Communitas (in English, 2021) and

co-edited numerous anthologies: RE//MIX. Performance and Documentation in Polish, 2014); 4 Worker. Performances of Memory (in Polish, 2017); and

Performances of Memory in Contemporary Arts and Literatures (in Polish, 2021).

Currently, she is running an SNSF-funded project Crisis and Communitas

2018-2023, www.crisisandcommunitas.com).

Nina Seiler is a research associate in the Department of Performing Arts and Film of Zurich University of the Arts, and is currently writing a book on transgressive humanism in Polish culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She is the chief editor of the journal Femlnfo published by the Swiss Feminist Research Association FemWiss, where she is also a board member.

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Nina Seiler obtained her PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Zurich in 2017, and part of her research involved a period in Warsaw as an associate researcher in Literature and Gender at the Institute for Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (2015-2016). Her dissertation Privatisierte Weiblichkeit. Genealogien und Einbettungsstrategien feministischer Kritik im postsozialistischen Polen (Privatised Femininity: Genealogies and Strategies of Implementation of Feminist Criticism in Post-Socialist Poland) was published by transcript Verlag (series Gender Studies) in 2018 and is currently being translated into Polish. Nina Seiler is the recipient of several research and travelling grants and was the chief editor of HAZ Magazin between 2018 and 2019.

Dorota Sosnowska is assistant professor at the Institute of Polish Culture (Department of Theatre and Anthropology of Performance) at the University of Warsaw. She is a member of the editorial board for View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture journal and a member of the International Federation for Theatre Research Historiography Working Group. Her research focusses on the theoretical and methodological issues in theatre and performance historiography. She is mostly concerned with questions of archiving, documentation, and the tension between the acting body and forms of its recording in art and science. She has published papers in international scientific journals including Performance Research, Maska, and Theatralia and in the edited volume The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson (2019). She is currently the principal investigator of the project Odmieńcy. Performances of Otherness in Polish Transition Culture, which is concerned with post-communist culture and emancipation, as well as co-investigator of the project Epidemics and Communities in Critical Theories, Artistic Practices and Speculative Fabulations of the Last Decades.

Marc Streit is a cultural worker, facilitator, artistic advisor, and organiser for several institutions and organisations in researching and realising artistic projects. He is the founder and artistic director of zürich moves! festival for contemporary artistic practice in performing arts (www.zurichmoves.com) and Imbricated Real (together with Simone Aughterlony). His projects are situated at the intersection of art and life. He likes to challenge himself by dealing with discourse in ways that destabilise normative modes of thinking. With his initiatives he wants to move people closer together and promote real encounters. Marc Streit realises projects locally, nationally, and internationally and creates collective experiences that free things from their invisibility in order to facilitate agency and recognition. Since 2011, he has been part of the team at Tanzhaus Ziirich, where he served as deputy artistic director from 2014 until September 2019. From October 2019 until June 2022, he coordinated the dramaturgy pool at Tanzhaus Zürich. From September 2020 until June 2022, he was a guest curator at

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Gessnerallee Zürich. Marc Streit completed his studies in Management before earning his MA in Curatorial Studies at Zurich University of the Arts. He is a guest lecturer at several universities in Theatre, Choreography and Curatorial Studies.

Malgorzata Sugiera is a professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and head of the Department for Performativity Studies. She was a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; DAAD; Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna; the American Andrew Mellon Foundation; and the IRC, Interweaving Performance Cultures, at the Freie Universitit Berlin. Her research concentrates on performativity theories, and environmental and decolonial studies. She has published 12 single-authored books, most recently Nieludzie. Donosy ze sztucznych natur (Non-humans. Reports from Artificial Natures, 2015) and, together with Mateusz Borowski, Sztuczne natury. Performanse technonauki i sztuki (Artificial Natures: Performances of Technoscience and Arts, 2016). She has co-edited several books in English and German, most recently Emerging Affinities: Possible Futures of Performative Arts (2019). In addition, she translates scholarly books and theatre plays from English, German and French. Currently, she is carrying out a three-year international research project titled Epidemics and Communities in Critical Theories, Artistic Practices and Speculative Fabulations of the Last Decades funded by the National Science Centre (NCN).

Wojtek Ziemilski is a theatre director and visual artist based in Warsaw, Poland. He works across art forms, exploring the diversity of performing arts. Since 2009, when he premiered the autobiographical lecture performance Small Narration, Ziemilski has been creating art which investigates different facets of theatrical situations, negotiating the ways in which a performance can present, provoke, or resist difference. Prolog (Warsaw, 2012) created social choreography using the audience, while Come Together (Warsaw, 2017) asked the audience to treat an explicitly participatory show as a traditional, non-interactive piece. One Gesture (Warsaw, 2016) explored Deaf culture through the richness and diversity of sign languages. It was shown in over 20 venues around the world and won, among others, the Main Award at Theaterspektakel Festival in Zürich. Ziemilski went back to work with Deaf performers: In Translation (Wrocław, 2021), Language Games (Trondheim, 2017), Signes Comuns (Montreal, 2022). He is a lecturer at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw, and a guest lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, and DAMU, Prague. He is currently studying for a PhD at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Dorota Sajewska and Matgorzata Sugiera

The main idea of Crisis and Communitas: Performative Concepts of Commonality in Arts and Politics gained its shape at the end of 2019. We intended for a multi-authored volume that offers a critical, transdisciplinary examination of a broad range of philosophical ideas, theoretical concepts and artistic projects of community in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries within the context of global and local, social and political, as well as environmental, changes. Although the issue of the eponymous crisis and communitas has increasingly gained attention over the last turn of the century, we wanted the volume to open new approaches, mainly by focussing on well-chosen moments of recent multipronged crises in which existing concepts of commons and commonality have been questioned, subverted and reformulated—or even speculatively designed with a (better) future in view. Since the time of conceiving the main idea of the volume and sending out invitations to its prospective authors, at least two major crises happened—the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine—and still their end is unforeseen. Both crises—although diametrically different in their political reality—evidently have things in common. On the one hand, the war metaphor has been widely used to describe coping with the virus as an invisible enemy against which state authorities have to and have waged a war. On the other, when describing armed Ukrainians attempting to prevent Russia’s aggression from spreading to the whole of Europe, Western politicians and journalists have repeatedly used traditional epidemiological metaphors, especially the one of containment. However, what is worthy of attention in the context of this volume is that there are noticeably distinct responses to these crises, especially when we look at how they were commonly perceived at the time of their respective outsets.

After the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly became global, with news spreading much quicker than other viruses in the last 100 years, it was widely perceived as a kind of singularity that struck almost out of nowhere. It has not only deeply affected the global world, but also marked, albeit differently, everybody’s experience at multiple levels. On the contrary, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which came during a period of relative peace in the very heart of the European continent, has rather called forth nightmares and traumas of the Second World War and its aftermath. Now, more than before, war is viewed as an immediate and overwhelming threat to the ways of life of the vast majority of the world's human population. However, this has been not the first armed conflict since Hitler's defeat in Europe, although the continent had prided itself in putting the danger of military clash firmly behind it. Suffice it to recall the civil war in former Yugoslavia—no less brutal and genocidal than the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. In addition, Russia's invasion started with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and has not stopped since. Therefore, it seems the particular role of the events in February 2022 relates to the fact that shortly after, the EU and NATO alliance decided to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia. They did so in such a way that the almost-forgotten ghosts of the Cold War reappeared. Once again, we are in a situation of increasing direct confrontation between two great military powers, each fully equipped to destroy the human world by choice. The war in Ukraine appears to be, as Ivan Krastev (2022) rightly pointed out, “the last iteration of Europe's political geography based on an East-West divide." That 1s why, in his official speeches, President Zelensky so often repeats that what we witness in his home country is not a war of two armies, but rather a war of two worldviews—Ukraine representing the West here. At the same time, Western countries, which have increasingly engaged in helping Ukraine, must find themselves unwillingly meeting their Other. After all, in seeking to extend its territory with military means, and declaring that there is not, and has never been, a Ukrainian nation, language, and culture, Russia performs a well-known kind of, not only colonial, but also racial, imperial politics. In so doing, it undertakes, in reality, what several Western countries—Great Britain, for instance—have already done symbolically: wanting to make themselves great again.

Both crises—the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine—are incredibly overwhelming that they must be thought through conditions of great global peril with unknown proportions; this increasingly endangers any secure and collectively acceptable future, and puts an end to Western modernity’s linear time, if not to one kind of human and natural history. That is why, at the very moment of writing this short introduction to the Crisis and Communitas volume, the critical situation has already deeply affected how the eponymous key notions are thought of and defined. However, it does not mean that the articles gathered here have lost their validity, nor that their insights only retain historical importance. Quite the contrary, the contemporary crises existed long before the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, thus they should rather be perceived as manifestations of the crises than veritable and verifiable causes. Therefore, before turning to the issue of the modern awareness of crisis, or the modern consciousness as crisis consciousness, which today is evidently in crisis itself, let us have a closer look at some of the decisive changes the last crises brought along. As a matter of fact, these changes have only seemingly brought along emerging economic, social and political problems which our societies are coping with just now. In reality, they are proof of an ongoing, much older and deeply rooted multipronged catastrophe which most probably reached its peak during recent years. To signal the multicausal nature of the unfolding crisis, time and again, it is called an economic-and-ecological crisis, eco-eco crisis for short. For instance, in his 2015 book on crisis, Jason W. Moore did not write about the conventionally understood notions of social and ecological crisis purely because he viewed the 2008 economic crisis as more than a signal of the unfolding neoliberal capitalist crisis. In his Capitalism in the Web of Life, Moore explains that it was “something more epochal: the breakdown of the strategies and relations that have sustained capital accumulation over past five centuries” (2015, 1). To see it clearly, one thing is needed: we have to go beyond the well-established nature/culture binary to reckon that capitalism is “a way of organizing nature" (Moore 2015, 2). Indeed, nothing better has corroborated Moore’s definition of humanity as "a species-environmental relation" (2015, 11) than the COVID-19 pandemic, caused most probably by a zoonotic virus.

Mindful of the COVID-19 pandemic as a common and global experience, many authors of recently published books, regardless of their topic, start with a preface to depict the lingering shock and resulting lack of any comprehensive picture of the ongoing disaster, which, at its beginning, froze the whole world in place. Most authors are also perfectly aware of the fact that it will be long before we are able to clearly see how the ongoing pandemic recast our understanding of the first decades of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, they have no doubt that it has already been—and may forever remain—the defining experience of our time. The shock seems to affect especially those authors who spent many years studying similar epidemiological events and their reverberations across various fields and scales. A case in point is “Politics and Scholarship in a Time of Pandemic,” the preface to Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817-2020 (2021), written when the author was in quarantine. In her book, Kolb engages a rich and diverse archive of literary, medical, administrative, and military documents to decipher imperial disease poetics, which then became a productive method in fighting terror and terrorism, particularly after the World Trade Center attack. However, in the preface, Kolb points to these recent proofs of the pervasive force of epidemic imaginary in the hope that “something in this book helps them [young researchers and students] to make sense of the 2020 pandemic not as an isolated disaster, but as a turning point in the history we want to write and the world in which we can live” (xv). She urges them, therefore, to watch out for how the well-known “normal,” which we desperately want to return to after the pandemic—the normal instantiated also in the cropped (re)presentations of COVID-19—will influence our possible future. In other words, although it goes against our common experience, the last pandemic was not a unique event—as has been stressed by experts on historical contagions. Moreover, when removed from its isolation, it does not even possess the power of a turning point in global/local history. In the context of global warming and increasing deforestation, it might well open up a series of various zoonotic infectious epidemics. Thus, perhaps we will never have the chance of coming back to what we used to know as “normal.”

The fact that the COVID-19 pandemic should not be seen “as an isolated disaster” (Kolb 2021, xv), and not only so from an epidemiological point of view, is testament to the best new readings of much broader colonial and decolonial processes, often completed during the difficult time of social distancing. For instance, Amitav Ghosh’s decolonial undertaking, which begins on the Banda Islands in 1621, unfolds alongside his account of how COVID-19 progresses in New York, and each narrative strand sheds light on the other in his book The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). Ghosh’s argument corroborates the increasingly popular conviction that global and local responses to the COVID-19 pandemic did not bring about entirely new, emerging phenomena, behaviours and practices; however, they initiated unknown multipronged processes, which still need deciphering. The pandemic rather made salient these specific aspects of global life under medicalised regimes and their political consequences that many researchers and writers have noticed but still do not fully comprehend. In other words, global society did not enter today’s increasingly dramatic situation because of the coronavirus pandemic alone. What is worth noticing at this juncture—the same could be said about the war in Ukraine. It not only appears to be the last iteration of Europe’s political post-Second World War geography, with its eminent divide between the West and East, as already mentioned by Krastev, it has also aroused unprecedented fears surrounding inflation and recession and exposed an increasingly vast impact on the global world in the combined devastation of Ukraine’s food exports and climate change. Regarding the latter, Russia’s invasion, targeted sanctions, and their aftermath have also visibly decreased efforts to diminish fossil fuels as the main source of CO» emission. As a result, Poland—as well as other Central European countries—faces, for instance, an upcoming winter with more toxic air because of the forced need to burn more substandard coal than the last few years.