You have just published an article entitled “COVID-19: On the Epistemic Condition”. What prompted you to write this article?
Basically, academic anti-Asian racism. In the late 19th century, there was a large amount of travel writing that, shamefully, portrayed people living on other continents who followed different rules and customs, as primitive and barbaric. A few weeks ago, two Hong Kong virologists published an article very much in this vein. Writing about coronavirus, they argue that the backward customs of Chinese mainlanders lie at the root of what they call the “Wuhan Virus”. This narrative was soon reiterated by a well-known French intellectual, Alain Badiou. In his blog article “On the Epidemic Condition”, Badiou writes about the “dangerously dirty” Chinese wet markets and the Chinese peoples’ “irrepressible taste for the open-air sale of all kinds of living animals”. I grew up with these wet markets and I think it is extremely careless of a major intellectual of the left in the West to write such a sweepingly racist and inaccurate analysis. Badiou did not even care to check what exactly Wuhan is in administrative terms – it is not a province, as he calls it, but a city, the capital of the Hubei province. It is also very telling that Badiou refers to “Cartesian reason” as the ultimate answer to the “epidemic” – now “pandemic” – condition we are living in. So by changing some letters of Badiou’s title, I wrote a response called “On the Epistemic Condition” to suggest that the current pandemic and its repercussions reveal an epistemic crisis, too. To start with, I strongly believe that no singular understanding of the world, or in Badiou’s words, any “simple idea”, will suffice to face the multifaceted challenge that the pandemic has brought to the global community.
When will you be returning to Tübingen?
On 27 May 2020, I will be returning to Tübingen virtually, to give a digital lecture at the China Centre Tübingen (CCT) on the concept of “Shanzhai” (“Counterfeit”). Anyone interested is cordially invited to join the event. Find more information here.
What are the next steps that you will be taking?
In July 2020, I will be taking up the position of Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Associate Director of Art at Duke Kunshan University. I am very excited about this position as it will allow me to reconnect with China and Asia after having left almost 13 years ago to pursue my postgraduate studies and do research in Europe and Latin America.