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‘Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease is both a timely and enduring
examination of how to understand the politics of disease where the normal
rules of life no longer apply. From the transformation of our daily interac-
tion with our fellow human beings to societal decisions of whether to close
the economy and suspend electoral politics, the authors of this collection
explore what are the limits of our decisions as social, cultural, and political
beings. A thoughtful and provocative account of what constitute politics
in this age of pandemics, Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease asks
questions that are neglected and provide answers that are not defnitive.’
— Lee Trepanier, Chair and Professor of Political Science,
Samford University, USA
‘We are not living in a post-covid world, but in one in which the mea-
sures against covid have continued to evolve and transform social life.
This book traces the changes in authority, expertise, and regimentation
produced in response to covid, and the ways in which social and personal
life is being recreated in response to the changes. It is a radical and indis-
pensable starting point for thinking about these questions.’
— Stephen Turner, Distinguished University Professor,
University of South Florida, USA
‘Whether the COVID-19 event was a viral pandemic or a pandemic panic,

it is not over. For its supporters among the “experts,” it never will be. We
will be “living with COVID” for the foreseeable future. What can that pros-
pect possibly mean? Pragmatically, it means an expansion of our—by now
pervasive but conventional—technology-mediated existence. And second,
it means an exponential increase in the tyrannical effciency of the surveil-
lance state, which is hardly confned to the PRC. Thinking about this novel
condition and this novel regime requires imagination as well as analytical
rationality. The authors have brought both to bear on a contingent reality
that presents itself as necessary. That is the lie at its heart. We can take
some comfort not so much in the stupidity of our new tyrants—though as a
North American, that seems to me to be their primary domestic attribute—
as that they are worthy only of ridicule. How it all plays out over the next
few decades as the friction increases between the second reality within
which the new tyrants live (and into which they seek to drag the rest of us)
and the commonsensical reality within which most of us still live carries
tremendous consequences. The authors of this important study invite us to
contemplate the options and understand what they mean.’
— Barry Cooper, Professor of Political Science,
University of Calgary, Canada
‘An urgent, provocative and fascinating attempt to re-think the Covid

pandemic and its traces in a kind of fractal way; separate but linked
patterns of analysis undergirded by conceptual concerns for ideas such
as authenticity, grace and beauty, seemingly outmoded by the opportu-
nistic technocratic mediatisation and datafcation of life itself which has
been turbo-charged by the pandemic restrictions and their pliant recep-
tion. The dynamic force of the endeavour is to do the work of thought
to perhaps allow escape from the sterile condition of endless fearful and
confused suspension in a liminoid expectant haze of waiting for the
release engendered, ironically, by the coming of the next crisis and the
next set of constraints.’
— Eugene McNamee, Professor, School of Law,
Ulster University, UK
‘This book is an indispensable guide for understanding the pandemic and

the exceptional politics surrounding it. Whilst richly sourced with empir-
ical material on the actions of health professionals, governments, and
extra-governmental institutions in the response to COVID, it addresses
the potentially irreversible consequences for the relations between citizens
and their states. Concealed by opaque processes in which unaccountable
experts and managers imposed their agendas, this global emergency has
suspended “normality”, subjected citizens to severe restrictions of their
freedoms, and even created front lines between enemies inside societies.
This book asks uncomfortable but entirely legitimate and urgent ques-
tions regarding the quality of governments, the powers of technocratic
managerialism and the conspicuous absence of defence of basic human
rights. Most importantly, it evokes the probability of the impending next
great emergency. This poignant effort to make sense of how exceptional
politics risks losing all measure is extremely lucid and makes for very
rewarding reading.’
— Harald Wydra, Professor of Politics,
University of Cambridge, UK
‘A must-read and timely collection of critical refections on the pandemic

as a state of exception, sharing important analyses of certain “blind
spots”—what the pandemic reveals about “the age of disease,” “trickster
logic”, “liminal politics” and “technocratic mimetism”.’
— Professor Maggie O’Neill, Head of the Department of
Sociology & Criminology, University College Cork, Ireland
Liminal Politics in the New
Age of Disease
Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease explores the phenomenon of

‘liminal politics’: an open-ended ‘state of exception’ in which normal
rules no longer apply, and things which were previously unimaginable
become possible – even appearing remarkably quickly to represent a ‘new
normal’. With attention to the emergency measures introduced to counter
the spread of Covid-19, it shows how the emergency suspension of dem-
ocratic accountability, ordinary life and civil liberties, while accidental,
can lend itself to orchestration and exploitation for the purpose of politi-
cal gain by ‘trickster’ or ‘parasitic’ figures. An examination of the cloning
of political responses from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, with little consid-
eration of their rational justification or local context, this volume inter-
rogates the underlying dynamics of a global technological mimetism, as
novel technocratic interventions are repeated and the way is opened for
new technologies to reorganise social life in a manner that threatens the
disintegration of its existing patterns. As such, it will appeal to scholars
and students of sociology, social theory and anthropological theory with
interests in political expediency and the transformation of social life.
Agnes Horvath is a political theorist and sociologist. Founding editor of

the Journal International Political Anthropology, she was an affiliate visit-
ing scholar at Cambridge University from 2011 to 2014. She is the author
of Modernism and Charisma (Palgrave, 2013) and Political Alchemy: Tech-
nology unbounded (Routledge, 2021); the co-author of The Dissolution of
Communist Power: The Case of Hungary, Walking into the Void: A His-
torical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, and The Political
Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology; and co-editor of
Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality; Walling, Boundaries and
Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations; Divinization and
Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion; and Modern Lead-
ers: In Between Charisma and Trickery.
Paul O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Sociology at United Arab

Emirates University in Abu Dhabi, and is a main editor of the Jour-
nal International Political Anthropology. His research and writing are
centred on the anthropological foundations of home and community,
the dynamics of modernity and globalisation, the intersection between
society and its physical environment, the emergence and disintegration
of structures of meaning, and the mediatisation and virtualisation of
contemporary social life. He has published articles in journals including
Memory Studies, Mobilities, International Political Anthropology and the
Irish Journal of Anthropology, as well as in the Dark Mountain Anthol-
ogy of ecological writing. He is the author of Home: The Foundations
of Belonging (Routledge, 2018), which examines the idea of home from
an anthropological and historical perspective as a centre around which
we organise routines and experiences, endowing the world with meaning
and order. With Marius Benta, he is co-editor of The Technologisation of
the Social: A Political Anthropology of the Digital Machine (Routledge,
2022), exploring how technology has shifted from being a tool of commu-
nication to a primary medium of experience and sociality.
Contemporary Liminality
Series editor: Arpad Szakolczai, University College Cork, Ireland
Series advisory board: Agnes Horvath, University College Cork, Ireland;
Bjørn Thomassen, Roskilde University, Denmark; and Harald Wydra,
University of Cambridge, UK.
This series constitutes a forum for works that make use of concepts such
as ‘imitation’, ‘trickster’ or ‘schismogenesis’, but which chiefy deploy the
notion of ‘liminality’, as the basis of a new, anthropologically-focused
paradigm in social theory. With its versatility and range of possible uses
rivalling mainstream concepts such as ‘system’, ‘structure’ or ‘institu-
tion’, liminality by now is a new master concept that promises to spark a
renewal in social thought.
While charges of Eurocentrism are widely discussed in sociology and
anthropology, most theoretical tools in the social sciences continue to
rely on approaches developed from within the modern Western intellec-
tual tradition, whilst concepts developed on the basis of extensive anthro-
pological evidence and which challenged commonplaces of modernist
thinking, have been either marginalised and ignored, or trivialised. By
challenging the taken-for-granted foundations of social theory through
incorporating ideas from major thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Dilthey,
Weber, Elias, Voegelin, Foucault and Koselleck, as well as perspectives
gained through modern social and cultural anthropology and the central
concerns of classical philosophical anthropology Contemporary Liminal-
ity offers a new direction in social thought.
Titles in this series
17 Inhabiting Liminal Spaces

Informalities in Governance, Housing, and Economic Activity in
Contemporary Italy
Isabella Clough Marinaro
18 Diseases, Disasters and Political Theory

Refections of Political Theory from Antiquity to the Age of COVID
Lee Trepanier
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.

routledge.com/Contemporary-Liminality/book-series/ASHSER1435
Liminal Politics in the New
Age of Disease
Technocratic Mimetism
Edited by
Agnes Horvath and Paul O’Connor
First published 2023
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Agnes Horvath and
Paul O’Connor, individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Agnes Horvath and Paul O’Connor to be identified as
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Horváth, Ágnes, 1957– editor. | O’Connor, Paul, 1978– editor.
Title: Liminal politics in the new age of disease : technocratic
mimetism / edited by Agnes Horvath and Paul O’Connor.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |
Series: Contemporary liminality | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022035828 | ISBN 9781032201900 (hardcover) | ISBN
9781032208183 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003265344 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Political science. | Political sociology. | Liminality—
Political aspects. | COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020—Political aspects.
Classification: LCC JA71 .L556 2023 | DDC 320.01—dc23/eng/20220915
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035828
ISBN: 9781032201900 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032208183 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003265344 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003265344
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents
List of fgures xi
List of contributors xiii
Preface xvii
AGN E S HORVAT H A N D PAU L O ’C ON NOR
1 Introduction: liminal politics in the new age of disease:

Technocratic mimetism 1
2 Liminality and modernity in sickness and in health 23

RO GE R G R I F F I N
3 Rulers of liminality: on imbecility, or contemporary modes

of gaining and operating power 47
A R PA D SZ A KOL C Z A I
4 ‘The most despotic of all regimes’: Covid-19 and the

political anthropology of expertise 69
PAU L O ’C ON NOR
5 Pandemonium: authority and obedience under lockdown 97

E UGE N E M C L AUGH L I N A N D C H R I S ROJ E K
6 ‘No human’s land’: comparing war rhetoric and collective

sacrifce in the Great War with the pandemic 105
JA NO S M A R K SZ A KOL C Z A I
7 Corruption and the frefghter effect: on the

commodifcation of liminal professions 124
M A R I US ION BE N ŢA
x Contents
8 Sovereign power and the politics of the pandemic as
elementary parasitic social relation 137
CA M I L F R A NC I S C ROM A N
9 Trickster parasite: about the snake pit of oozing disease 203

AGN E S HORVAT H
Conclusion 216
Index 219
Figures
8.1 The natural matrix of linear transformation 164

8.2 The artifcial matrix of relative transformation (cycle of
metamorphosis) 164
Contributors
Marius Ion Bența received his PhD in 2014 from University College Cork,
Ireland, with a thesis on Alfred Schutz’s sociology. He lives in Cluj,
Romania and is a Research Fellow in Sociology with George Barițiu
History Institute, an Associate Lecturer with Babeș-Bolyai University
and is a main editor of the Journal International Political Anthropol-
ogy. His recent publications include Walling, Boundaries and Liminal-
ity: A Political Anthropology of Transformations (a collective volume
co-edited with Agnes Horvath and Joan Davison, Routledge 2018),
Experiencing Multiple Realities: Alfred Schutz’s Sociology of the Finite
Provinces of Meaning (a research monograph, Routledge 2018), ‘Fluid
identity, fuid citizenship: The problem of ethnicity in post-communist
Romania’ (an article published in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics,
23/2017) and The Technologisation of the Social: A Political Anthropol-
ogy of the Digital Machine (co-edited with Paul O’Connor, Routledge,
2022).
Roger Griffn is an Emeritus Professor at Oxford Brookes University, with
a now distant BA in Modern Languages (First Class) and DPhil from
Oxford University. He is best known for The Nature of Fascism (1991),
Modernism and Fascism (2007); Terrorist Creed: Fanatical Violence
and the Human Need for Meaning (2012); Fascism: An Introduction to
Comparative Fascist Studies (2018) and for co-founding the journal
Fascism (2011) and COMFAS, the Association for the Comparative
Fascism Studies (2018). His main achievement is to have formulated
a non-Marxist working defnition of fascism which is now widely
used in academia all over the world. Despite retirement, he continues
to pursue his research interests in fascism, populism, terrorism and
more generally the way modern society generates a permanent lim-
inal condition and crisis of identity for many, leading to a constant
fow of minority movements of extremism and fanaticism, as well as
occasional explosions of far more destructive energies unleashed by
modern states, in the attempt to impose a dramatic narrative arc on
the chaos of history.
xiv Contributors
Agnes Horvath is a political theorist and sociologist. Founding editor of
the Journal International Political Anthropology, she was an affliate
visiting scholar at Cambridge University from 2011 to 2014. She is
the author of Modernism and Charisma (Palgrave, 2013) and Politi-
cal Alchemy: Technology unbounded (Routledge, 2021); the co-author
of The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary, Walk-
ing into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology
of Walking, and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil:
Tricksterology; and co-editor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of
Liminality, Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthro-
pology of Transformations, Divinization and Technology: The Political
Anthropology of Subversion and Modern Leaders: In Between Cha-
risma and Trickery.
Eugene McLaughlin is a Professor of Criminology at City, University
of London. His current research focuses on institutional criminality,
institutional scandals, whistleblowing and ‘trial by media’. He also has
a long-standing research focus on the politics of policing and critical
criminology’s history and development. His work has been published
in numerous peer-reviewed journals. Recent books are The Sage Dic-
tionary of Criminology (with John Muncie, 4th Edition, 2019) and
Understanding Deviance (with David Downes and Paul Rock, 7th Edi-
tion, 2016). He was, with Lynn Chancer, co-editor of Theoretical Crim-
inology and has served on the editorial boards of the British Journal
of Criminology, Crime, Media and Culture, Critical Social Policy and
the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice. He is currently on the Inter-
national Editorial Boards of Crime, Media and Culture, the Journal of
Criminology and Theoretical Criminology.
Paul O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Sociology at United Arab
Emirates University in Abu Dhabi and is a main editor of the Jour-
nal International Political Anthropology. His research and writing are
centred on the anthropological foundations of home and commu-
nity, the dynamics of modernity and globalisation, the intersection
between society and its physical environment, the emergence and dis-
integration of structures of meaning, and the mediatisation and vir-
tualisation of contemporary social life. He has published articles in
journals including Memory Studies, Mobilities, International Political
Anthropology and the Irish Journal of Anthropology, as well as in the
Dark Mountain Anthology of ecological writing. He is the author of
Home: The Foundations of Belonging (Routledge, 2018), which exam-
ines the idea of home from an anthropological and historical perspec-
tive as a centre around which we organise routines and experiences,
endowing the world with meaning and order. With Marius Benta, he is
co-editor of The Technologisation of the Social: A Political Anthropology
Contributors xv
of the Digital Machine (Routledge, 2022), exploring how technology
has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium
of experience and sociality.
Chris Rojek is a Professor of Sociology at City, University of London. He
has held Professorships since 1994 at The University of Staffordshire,
Nottingham Trent University and Brunel University, West London.
He is the author of 14 solo authored books, 12 edited and co-edited
books and over 50 refereed articles. He regards himself to be a Gen-
eral Sociologist, but has particular expertise in Cultural Sociology
and the Study of Celebrity.
Camil Francisc Roman (PhD, University of Cambridge, 2016) is a Lec-
turer in Political Science and Sociology at John Cabot University and
LUMSA University, and is an Associate Editor of International Polit-
ical Anthropology. He is interested in refexive, historical-genealogi-
cal and interpretative approaches to the following areas of research:
modern democracy and revolutions, the political anthropology of
modernity, the philosophical anthropology of modern science, poli-
tics and religion. Currently, he is working on a research monograph
for Routledge on the political anthropology of The French Revolu-
tion as a Liminal Process. His latest publications include ‘Charisma:
from divine gift to the democratic leader-shop’, in Agnes Horvath,
Arpad Szakolczai and Manussos Marangudakis (eds.) Modern Lead-
ers: Between Charisma and Trickery, London: Routledge (2020); and
Divinization and Technology. The Political Anthropology of Subversion,
author and co-editor with Agnes Horvath and Gilbert Germain, Lon-
don: Routledge (2019).
Arpad Szakolczai is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University Col-
lege Cork, Ireland; he previously taught social theory at the European
University Institute, Florence, Italy. His recent books include Sociol-
ogy, Religion and Grace: A Quest for the Renaissance (2007), Comedy
and the Public Sphere (2013), Novels and the Sociology of the Contempo-
rary (2016), Permanent Liminality and Modernity (2017), Walking into
the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking
(2018, co-authored), and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of
Evil: Tricksterology (2020, co-authored), all by Routledge, and From
Anthropology to Social Theory: Rethinking the Social Sciences (Cam-
bridge University Press, co-authored, 2019). He has published articles,
among others, in Theory, Culture and Society, the American Journal of
Sociology, the British Journal of Sociology, the British Journal of Polit-
ical Science, the European Journal of Social Theory, Cultural Sociol-
ogy, International Sociology, International Political Anthropology and
the European Sociological Review. His current book project is entitled
Political Anthropology as Method.
xvi Contributors
Janos Mark Szakolczai (PhD) is a Lecturer in Criminology at the Uni-
versity of Glasgow and a researcher at the Scottish Centre for Crime
and Justice Research. His interest focuses on the elements of harm
and zemiology, especially in the perspective of hegemony and docil-
ity (technological and institutional). He has written on covert surveil-
lance, secretive conduct and social harm. He is currently working on a
book entitled Onlife Criminology: Ecology for a New Frontier of Crime
and Harm, to be published in the New Horizons in Criminology series
of Bristol University Press.
Preface
Well be empty you light

Easy forever playing,
Seeing but far-sighted,
Fluttering a hundred words
Silk like the fag, or soap bubbles up,
Between winds in the sky,
and live as long as the soul,
beauty or shims,
Because – god me – I too,
I only live until then.
Dezső Kosztolányi, Esti Kornél’s song 1
In the motto above, the immortality of the soul is concerned with beauty,
but if the soul is being moved or is ‘playing’, ‘futtering a hundred words’,
as again above in the poem, then the most probable view is that what
moves it are sensible things, which are mortal, and so commensurable in
nature. Or, saying it differently, there is an immortal, invisible particle in
our body, which is our soul that comprises the qualities appealing to the
mind, to the beauty-perceiving mind, which it while moves itself is moved
by commensurable, mortal sensibility to such an extent that the move-
ment of the soul is a departure from its essential delighting nature: the
mind develops appreciation, the soul progresses through sensuals during
its lifetime. But could it be that its development begins by ceasing mov-
ing? The movement begins to cease when the moving force of the mind
for beauty no longer causes the soul to be a mover, as it appears in the last
lines of the above fragment: ‘Because – god me – I too, I only live until
then’; or, when the deadly disease occurs.
This book was born out of personal experiences of being subjected to
an epidemic disease, especially concerning the way in which responses
to it were replicated into the responses of others in order to construct a
new reality in which to live, and where social relations will be and already
are structured in a new way. Things like mask-wearing and a series of
xviii Agnes Horvath and Paul O’Connor
new social conventions and expectations, and a new moralism develop-
ing around them, have become our new reality, and it is strange to see a
new social order come into being in this way, with the soul being immo-
bilised, and beauty paralysed. The problematic itself is very fundamen-
tal in a theoretical sense, whether – as Aristotle noticed – because all
those things whose substance is to perish become not-beings, alternated
beings that are not beings anymore, or following Heidegger, Kierkeg-
aard, Nietzsche or Dilthey about the real question being what it means to
exist, the external truth of being. These authors emphasise that our world
has a meaning only if we give ourselves to its beautiful, moral and truly
immortal (but not infnite) nature. Finitude in contrast to divinisation
is the sense of reality, the concreteness or ‘disclosedness’ (as coined by
Heidegger) of existence, where we have neither a share in creating nor
even a hope to control life, but simply to live it in full, ‘as long as the soul’,
as again in Kosztolányi.
But this book also works with other ideas, such as liminality, para-
sitism and the trickster, which offer a considerable potential for under-
standing the current condition, especially together with the notion of
mimesis. They capture the Plato-Aristotelian not-being, a non-entity
void, or one whose substance has perished, who is without the ‘quali-
fcations of the mind’, but who is forever miming and tricking the real.
Now such ‘unqualifed’ means the voided, dissociated not-being, who
denies logos, negating the ‘being’ of the mind (the Aristotelian nous),
defned in the motto above as immortality in beautiful charis. Otherwise,
not-beings like the parasite and the trickster do exist, but in separation
from substances, thus in a voided existence, what is not real existence
in any meaningful sense at all: in a universal negation of all forms of
being, constantly invading them and causing disease in them. The poem
by Kosztolányi, written when he himself encountered his own imminent
mortality, makes it evident that we still and always must maintain our
faith in the beauty of existence, that our soul only moves properly if this
is adhered to, and that therefore the measures imposed on us by our own
governments were way worse than the disease itself – an unprecedented
and most preoccupying development.
This is the reason why this book on disease attempts to document
the alteration of all the positive signs of life into something opposite to
that which was accepted and lived thus far, before the development of a
media technology that receives and transmits mimetically the same mes-
sage everywhere without respect to borders. Now, when every one of us
can be kept under control simultaneously, the result is the uniformity of
opinions on all subjects, and the soul is silent. In the book, we give some
reasons why this is now happening, though not without the hope that
out of this false and voided alteration there is a way out, offering again a
meaning for all of us.
Preface xix
Note
1 The Hungarian poet Dezső Kosztolányi (1885-1936) wrote in this manner on
the immortality of the soul, when he was diagnosed with a deadly disease:
‘Hát légy üres te s könnyű,
könnyű, örökre-játszó,
látó, de messze-látszó,
tarkán lobogva száz szó
selymével, mint a zászló,
vagy szappanbuborék fenn,
szelek között, az égben
s élj addig, míg a lélek,
szépség, vagy a szeszélyek,
mert - isten engem - én is,
én is csak addig élek’.
Esti Kornél éneke, 1933
1 Introduction
Liminal politics in the new
age of disease: Technocratic
mimetism
We must learn how to handle words effectively: but at the same time we
must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world
directly and not through that half-opaque medium of concepts, which
distorts every given fact into the too familiar likeness of some generic
label or explanatory abstraction.
(Aldous Huxley, 2004: 47)
Liminal politics or the new world order

In its initial stages, it was possible to imagine that the Covid-19 pandemic
would be over soon, so that a book such as this would arrive too late to
elicit any interest. However, not only is there no end in sight to either
the pandemic or its ramifcations – with renewed lockdowns in Shanghai
disrupting supply chains around the world as we put the fnishing touches
to this volume – but the event has established itself as a major topic, just
like a world war, and evidently will not fade from public discussion for a
generation. The expansion of authority seen during the pandemic raises
fundamental issues concerning power and politics, and even more, how
their meaning ‘faded away in the half-opaque medium of concepts’, as the
epigraph above indicates. Though neither Aldous Huxley nor we know
without the shadow of a doubt what sort of thing life is and what death
is – they certainly are not ‘concepts’ –; we have no doubts about the sig-
nifcance of this disease event and that it is a question of life and death.1
Measures against the disease are still visibly in place and affect peo-
ple’s lives in all sorts of ways. But as this drags on, the focus of discus-
sion should be shifted to the permanent consequences, identifying the
pandemic as a world transforming event. For most of the world’s popu-
lation, Covid inaugurated a ‘state of exception’ in which the emergency
measures introduced to counter the spread of disease led to the suspen-
sion of both individual rights and civil liberties which were previously
taken for granted, and ordinary forms of political decision-making
and democratic accountability. The global scale and simultaneity with
which almost any limits on technocratic interventions were pushed aside
in the name of ‘public health’ is unprecedented. Yet, the impact of the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003265344-1
2 Agnes Horvath and Paul O’Connor
pandemic went beyond this suspension of legal and political norms; it
involved also the suspension of everyday life and social relationships,
as schools closed, people switched to working from home, restaurants,
bars, and entertainment venues were shuttered, public and even private
gatherings prohibited, and masks and social distancing became a way of
life. Even after lockdown restrictions were eased or ceased in many coun-
tries, other measures such as home-working, mask-wearing, and social
distancing continued or were periodically re-imposed in many jurisdic-
tions around the world. Together with vaccine mandates and periodic
Covid-testing, these are elements of the ‘new normal’ which is succeeding
the initial period of the pandemic. Rather than a defnitive end to the
pandemic, and a return to pre-pandemic life, this is characterised as a
condition of ‘living with Covid’, where many elements of normal life can
resume, but always only conditionally, subject to renewed restrictions if
the case numbers go too high or health systems come under too much
pressure, and framed by a whole new infrastructure of PCR testing,
vaccine mandates or ‘green passes’, and periodic booster jabs.
Over and beyond a political and legal ‘state of exception’ therefore, the
pandemic has brought about a liminal condition of social life in which
normal rules no longer apply, and things which were previously unimag-
inable become possible – even, remarkably quickly, being taken for
granted. Indeed, it is worth noting that while in the early days a frequent
question was when the pandemic would end, today it is increasingly clear
that it will not; we have simply moved (at different speeds in different
countries) from the initial phase of lockdowns to the new phase of ‘living
with Covid’ where the regime of restrictions and surveillance constructed
since February 2020 is different in modality, but still in place. In this
context, it is possible to point out two changes which seem of particular
import and may come to be permanent.
In the frst place, the pandemic (and the political response to it) dramat-
ically accentuated existing trends towards the ‘digitalisation’ or ‘medi-
atisation’ of social life – in simpler terms, the migration of ever-larger
areas of social life online. For example, while online learning had been
promoted as the future of education for quite some time, without ever
really being embraced by traditional educational institutions, during the
pandemic it suddenly replaced face-to-face classrooms as the primary
mode of teaching almost everywhere. Likewise, the pandemic-induced
lockdowns offered Amazon and its equivalents the perfect opportu-
nity to expand at the expense of bricks-and-mortar retailers, including
small local businesses, whose premises were closed. Zoom and Micro-
soft Teams were transformed from offce tools to an indispensable means
for friends and family members to keep in touch. Hundreds of millions
of white-collar and professional workers shifted to working from home,
seeing their colleagues only on screens, while a smartphone became
a necessary requirement for participation in society for even the most
Introduction: liminal politics in the new age of disease 3
determined Luddite, as everything from reading menus to accessing
government services to displaying vaccine passes became dependent on
various ‘apps’. These trends will not reverse themselves with the advent
of the ‘new normal’, despite the conditional and uneven return to face-to-
face workplaces and classrooms. New habits have been formed, millions
of people have become comfortable using digital applications for trans-
actions previously carried out face-to-face, and huge economic interests
are invested in maintaining and extending this ‘technologisation of the
social’ (O’Connor and Benta, 2022). This, in turn, has major implica-
tions not only for the character of everyday social life and relationships
but also the nature and extent of political (or technocratic-managerial)
authority, since the migration of social life online renders it subject to a
regime of total surveillance and datafcation, and subjects individuals to
ever-deepening dependence on platforms and applications controlled by
a handful of global corporations.
In the second place, the impacts of the unprecedented intervention in
civil society and private life by the administrative state which has taken
place – in peacetime, and with startlingly little opposition – cannot be
undone. A disease posing limited risk of death or serious illness to nor-
mally healthy adults provided the pretext for shutting down society and
literally confning citizens to their homes, and the public accepted this.
A precedent has now been established whereby every aspect of ordinary
life – work, schooling, meeting friends, going to a restaurant, going for a
walk, travelling abroad – can be suspended by administrative fat, with
little debate or parliamentary scrutiny, as a precaution against possible
harm. As our ordinary lives resume after Covid, they do so in the con-
ditional tense. After the ‘war on cancer’, the ‘war on drugs’, the ‘war on
terror’, the fnancial crisis of 2008, and the Covid-19 pandemic, it is only
to be expected that our rulers, or rather colonisers, will rapidly discover
another emergency to justify the further regulation and control of society.
Just before the outbreak of the pandemic, the youth climate protestors
inspired by a young Swedish activist called on governments to declare
a ‘climate emergency’, and various parliaments responded positively, in
what seemed at the time a largely symbolic gesture. From our current
vantage point, however, the increasing talk of ‘climate emergency’ sig-
nals the potential for the undoubtedly serious issue of climate change to
provide the next pretext for a wholesale suspension of individual liberties
and intervention in civil society by the techno-managerial state and its
corporate partners.
Both of these likely long-term impacts of the pandemic are in fact
manifestations of the same thing – the expansion of technocratic-
managerial forms of power from which the pandemic has drawn the
veil. The rise of the ‘new class’ or ‘technical-managerial’ elite has been
a subject of comment since the 1970s (see Gouldner, 1979; Konrád
and Szelényi, 1979), but techno-managerialism goes beyond this; it is a
technique of power, a form of knowledge, and an ideology all at once. In
this context, it is not accidental that a crucial role in advocating for and
legitimising these extraordinary measures has been played by assorted
technocrats within state bureaucracies, government advisory bodies and
academia. The pandemic has provided the occasion for a technocratic
backlash against the populist revolts of the past decade, characterised
by demands to ‘listen to the experts’, instead of the delegitimated ‘listen-
ing to the people’, to base decision-making ‘on the data’, and to follow
‘the science’, resulting in the subjection of the population to both techno-
cratic elites and technological solutions.
The suspension of meaningful order due to an emergency can be acci-
dental, but it can also be purposefully orchestrated, just as liminal situ-
ations can be forced. If the emergency is purposefully orchestrated, the
agents of such artifcial moves could be called either parasites (Serres) or
tricksters (Radin, Hyde, Horvath), individuals who exploit extraordinary
circumstances to achieve political infuence, including through manipu-
lating various media and other means of political communication. This is
not to say techno-managerial elites orchestrated the pandemic, only that
the crisis situation it engendered gave them the opportunity to engage
in a massive expansion of administrative power – with the best of inten-
tions, of course.
The pandemic, therefore, reveals the connections between a particu-
lar kind of knowledge and a particular technique of power, which are
currently re-making our world. In the void left by the suspension of ordi-
nary political order, mimetic processes, already escalated by the social
media – the term ‘going viral’ emerged way before Covid – become super-
charged. In this new ‘Age of Disease’, novel technocratic interventions
metastasise worldwide, fears and conspiracy theories spread faster than
the virus itself, and the way is opened for new technologies to reorganise
social life, from the digitalisation of learning to novel types of vaccine.
How is it that under liminal conditions, political life becomes subject to a
technologised mimetism that can seemingly act without a mover and can
move without an action, but nonetheless be consistent, upfront, and pub-
licly coordinated? The fusion of technology, the public sphere, and media
communications produces a kind of blind mimetism in which political
responses can be effectively cloned from jurisdiction to jurisdiction
with little consideration of their rational justifcation or local context.
Mimetism thus becomes incommensurable, the infnite negation of reg-
ularities, gaining a pure dynamism of its own, which can quickly lead to
the multiplication and amplifcation of any phenomenon, undermining
commensurability or the ratio of charis, promoting generalising, univer-
salistic, even eschatological solutions. This is why this book is interested
in the underlying dynamics of a technological mimetism that has grown
into a new age, an Age of Disease, where the existing patterns of life are
disintegrating, even beyond the question of a concrete epidemic.
Liminal politics in planetary metastasis
In an overview of liminal politics in planetary metastasis (a term coined
by Voegelin2), we should note that while presumably all political pro-
cesses take place inside the space-time framework, once the concept of
matter has been stripped of all meaningful content they have evolved
into a purely logical abstraction of possible relations. A new paradigm
was opened up for a novel relativity, a brave new methodology of logic.
Every element falling under a given concept only has meaning as an ele-
ment within the mimetic series that is generated by the universal concept
where an entity has no independent existence, individuum, or character,
having been made ‘matter’-less, or less material. This has happened by a
single transformation of meaning to other frames of reference, where a
particular position in space only gains meaning with reference to other
positions. Indeed, relation-concepts are general and transcendental in
the sense that the individual is conceived as a step under the rule of a
more general concept, and these concepts are serial in the sense that they
generate a series of objects by successive applications of the same con-
ceptual rule, which represent a universal law, where lies the newly found
transcendentality.
Consequently, individuals become mere subjects to mechanical pro-
cesses described purely by relations, a subject that equally expresses
the connections between different physical processes, and is ultimately
reduced to judgements about such connections. Politics has likewise
been displaced from its earlier space-time framework into relativity, into
mechanical abstractions, where every moment of time is determined with
a mimed reference to an earlier or later one refected in it, recalling the
lagged variables of econometric modelling, which usually explain most
of the variance in the models, though they do not really explain anything.
Space and time thus appear as serial concepts, where individual space-
time points only have meaning as mirror elements within the universalis-
tic space-time manifold.
Both technology and technocracy are fundamentally imitative, based
on the endless repetition of an original, in itself artifcial, procedure or
template, about how to extract energy from bodies and replace them for
their own purpose, forgotting what Huxley (2004) emphasised: ‘it left me
with something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me
of the beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us’.3
It is not that Huxley undermined himself with mescalin experiences, as
the cover blurb indicates mistakenly on the Vintage edition of The Doors
of Perception. He rather looked for truth in a reality that has become
mimed and covered by hundreds of years of misguidance. So, in so far as
mimed entities are lacking self-suffciency, identity, and cohesion, they
are contrary to the nature of mind, which contains grace or in Greek
charis, all that the Greeks were and loved and exemplifed in their art,
literature, and thought, which lies embedded in this word charis, in the
felicitous beauty principle of forms. Consequently, when charis is missing,
the corrupted elements which remain are absurd, invisible non-entities
whose purpose is constituted by permanent, rapidly succeeding hybri-
disation: mutations and amplifcation of an alternative, erratic artifcial
mind. Through hybridisation, the sphere of given existence is tran-
scended in a new direction, conceiving the laws of this new existence as a
perfect, closed continuity in infnitum. After this process, only one task
remains, that of placing the different series within a unifed system. This
technique requires a principle which enables it to connect different series
according to an exact numerical scale and a constant numerical relation
which governs the transition from one series to the others.
This scale is provided by the disease measure, the human, physiologi-
cal version of the error principle, or the double negation of ‘eliminating
all errors and suffering’, the general principle of the modern revaluation
of values, replacing the promotion of the good, which, starting from the
infamous equivalence of prevention and disease, has included progres-
sively more domains of illness. Illness represents a common series for
all physical processes, making possible an objective correlation accord-
ing to a law in which all social contents (health, politics, social services,
education, childbearing, family, etc.) stand. It signifes an erratic intel-
lectual point of view, from which all recent phenomena can be measured
and thus brought into one system, in spite of all their sensuous diver-
sity. It was re-discovered as a new self-existent thing, a curious existence
comparable only to the communist party apparatus, that has a self-
developing energy, an identity that relates to mechanical processes. It has
a personality, soul and feelings, self-movement, and the ability to make
things move, initiating/directing/magnifying movements and sensuals –
mortality and infnity, an incomprehensible void content, and the belief
in it that makes it’s rule possible.
This is best evoked by the absurd play King Ubu by the French writer
Alfred Jarry, conveying the wild, bizarre world of the void that overturns
mind, ratio, normality. The play is childish, nonsensical, even cruel,
but also extremely powerful in its capacity for catching and infuencing
attention. The vulgar, gluttonous Ubu recalls the stupid, greedy trickster,
whose exploits are widely discussed in the anthropological literature.4
Ubu is irreal, but this does not mean that he is without consequences;
rather his existence produces a real effect upon people, who suffer from
it. Jarry was quite young (only 23 years old) when he became successful
with the play and still young when he died, but even this short life enabled
him to formulate the new laws of the disease-ridden age: ‘the laws which
govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this
one’ (Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician).
This is quite a lucid description of a second reality that has grown over
us, simply by supplementary means: not because disease-ridden politics
and the traditional one share any objective property, but because they
can occur of the same causal equation of health and felicity and thus
can be substituted for each other from the standpoint of political and
economic expansion. Still, such deprivation from individual forms leads
to the stimulation of annihilating appetites that are rooted in a mali-
cious and sterile mimicry of sensual life, an overly excitable pulsation of
pure adaptability and pulsating connectivity. Technological mimeses are
neither here nor there, while at the same time being everywhere, living
on networks, communications, junctions, and relations, subduing them
and inverting their meaning or rightful dispositions, ever in division and
schism. They are in other words invasive, acquisitive, and also parasitic
agents, with transformative powers over themselves and their host-bodies,
agents of connection and adaption who take advantage of division in
order to bring in multiplication and amplifcation.
The liminal by defnition is the suspension of forms, the elimination
of borders, but also the non-place (Augé) for approaching the immortal
mind, so an ideal breeding ground for voided entities. A famous example
is the First World War (the disappearance of nous resulted in the growth
of transcendentality; see Griffn, 2007) – how the mass displacement,
nonlocality, and death voided any consideration of divine immanence in
individuals and stimulated a desire to seek the sacred in politics, under-
mining belief in the virtue that lay in sincerity, or the loving kindness
in which personal lives were lived. In addition to voided politics that
became adapted to liminality, the liminal politics of massifcation, gen-
eralisation, and universalisation has annihilated our individual thinking.
This is why in liminality the mind-building potentates gained such an
enormous power in our times, when media images are replacing real-
ity, as the process of thinking goes through our sensibility. Our desiring
mind looks for impulses, and it desires effects to touch, to see, to build
up experiences, to feel, and to taste, thus directing the senses to receive
into themselves the sensible forms of things, even when there is nothing.
When King Ubu appeared on this voided stage, the reconsideration of
the classical conceptions of space and time based on Aristotle and Plato
was already happening through the reconceptualisation of matter and
the introduction of the ether concept in electrodynamics. The liberation
from time and space and from substantial matter-form identity into a
unifed structure of space-time determination was seemingly irreversible.
Until this moment, under normal circumstances the continuous displace-
ment of every previous sensual movement had a serial unity (hence the
state of being one; oneness), but not a spatial magnitude, nor a circu-
lar movement. Instead of that, the mind was forming or was arranged
in a continuous unity of thinking, in a kind of linear transformation in
which through every displacement, or even in substitution, it preserves its
identity (represents an identity element: its identity remains unchanged,
even if it is combined with another element), but not in insinuation or
queasiness. So, King Ubu simply refected his time, an age of insinuation,
where the serial unity of the mind becomes copied and altered into a
feeling machine, a fake body identity, itself in a circulating movement of
digesting sensuals into a mortal machine fed by high and low sensuals,
without inhibitions.
As we can see, for the Greeks, the working of the soul is a process
whereby emotions are passed on from one object to another and moved by
different modes of sensual movements, in a kind of identity-related mode
that gets very large very quickly, as identity elements are always their
own factorial. By a ‘sense’ is meant whatever has the power of receiving
into itself the sensible forms of things (the phantom image), without the
matter. Thinking is equal with perception, which moves the soul: every
pain or pleasure, anger or joy stimulates our perception, and so thinking.
These modes of movement are originating in the incommensurable mind.
For the mimetic mind-potentates, all this becomes subtly altered.
Through mimesis, the sensuals are no longer affections of mind (as
was recognised by the Greeks) but become the affections of an artif-
cial ‘mind’. The difference between them is that the artifcial ‘mind’ is
far away from anything rational (in the sense of ratio and utilitas being
combined in charis); instead, it is simply a built-up structure to receive
and perceive sensuals, sensory impressions of appetite, pain or joy, etc.
They build up a vanishing vehicle that continuously dies if it is not fed by
sensuals. Death is foreseen for the commensurable, the feeling, touching,
affective soul part, (a simple vehicle), but not for the incommensurable
mind, that survives in charis, which is originating its movements. Indeed,
the theory of relativity proposes the insight that neither pure space nor
pure time have an existence in themselves, but only in their unifed appli-
cation under the laws of relativity to physical phenomena do space and
time retain empirical meaning in artifcial, built-up structures.
The mimetic mind-building potentates rely on this knowledge in order
to increase the mobility and so the capacity of the ‘mind’: it is neces-
sary to increase the quantum of sensuals, painful or joyful, in every body
which contains it, in order to raise energy and life force. While the soul
is not a body, it can be artifcially constructed by phantasms, imagina-
tions, which notoriously happens in the absence of the senses – when
faculty and activity is nullifed, or when there is some failure of accu-
racy in the exercise of the senses, in any liminal moment like delirium or
dreams, or in other similarly unreal moments of life – in order to animate
an artifcial structure, moved by appetite, sensuals, and desire, which is
termed artifcial intelligence, but in reality is far away from the perfor-
mance of intelligence characteristic of a living organism, but rather acts
out the most savage rages and desires, in which it seeks to gratify itself
at all cost. From this perspective, it is signifcant how the wearing of
masks, as mandated during the pandemic, makes the wearer resemble a
puppet – with their faces obscured, so is their humanity, and they appear
like man-sized marionettes, animated by an artifcial ‘mind’ or ‘soul’.
Just remember how we were ‘tamponed’ and how our temperature was
measured, as if these were scenes in that absurd, vulgar play, Roi Ubu,
which was associating the vagina tampon that absorbs menstrual fow
with shooting the animals by gun-shot; or are wearing a mask that makes
the wearers as if to embody a puppet – they are no longer seen as humans,
so it can mirror the ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ of man-sized marionettes.
At this point, the absurd evokes the philosophy of Kant, that it is only
the rules of understanding that give existing objects their real involve-
ment. This Kantian view is in opposition to the Euclidean one, which is
concerned with things or relations of things in reality. The Kantian view,
instead of starting from things in reality, starts with their mediation or
extension, like the mask, the tamponing, or the mode of measuring tem-
peratures. They only have a relation to reality: the mask that substitutes
the face, the vaccine that substitutes illness by prevention, the measuring
of temperature by mimicking shooting are practical uses made of Kant’s
ideas, further distancing the individual from its own self, pushing it into
the absurd. This is exactly what Kant’s theory has realised, after Newton:
identities have lost all their meaning, and the only question that remains
is which explanatory system should be used for the interpretation of
nature and their dependencies, according to an overarching law.
Diseases and their even more absurd preventive measures are explan-
atory systems for interpretations of nature: one is a threatening, danger-
ous peril, and indeed, the prevention provides a mathematical framework
for space-time determinations, making possible the exact formulation of
certain physical relations such as the laws of infections, without attach-
ing any reality to the space-time manifold itself. But distancing from
nature is distancing from the immortal mind, and without it Ubu rules,
who acts out our most brutal rages and desires, in which Ubu seeks to
gratify himself at all costs.
When we pose the question whether a sudden emergency situation
can lead to or bring about permanent changes in politics, the seemingly
evident answer would be ‘yes’. However, it also implies a quite different
question: can any emergency or liminal situation become permanent,
and here we hesitate. In the classical idea of causality, there is no perma-
nency in liminality. Classically, the political state of a people in any given
moment is completely determined in every way and with respect to all
possible predicates. This is a conception of how we understand reality:
the judgement of existence is its stability in space and time, the resistance
to change is a test of reality. Firmness in particular is the spatiotemporal
determination of a political state, which classical notion is drastically
transformed in the age of disease by the superposition principle and the
uncertainty of relations, where personal and public relations became
fuid, together with the loss of meaning of the individuum. Causality is
characterised as the regulative principle of a general conformity to law
in classical political theory. Now, it becomes a metaphysical fction, but
the real departure from classical notions of causality is situated on the
level of the concept of a physical object. In this respect, the formalism
of modern physics is a new step in the progressive functionalisation of
physical concepts: this new formalism was not created for the description
of things and states, but refers to the representation of their behaviour as
a physical system. Suddenly, data, algorithms, the conducting of oneself,
or the aggregation of all the responses made by a physical system in any
situation became important, together with the special attention to spe-
cifc responses of certain entities to a specifc stimulus and their action,
reaction, or functioning as a system. No sooner did algorithms, the set of
rules for solving a problem in a fnite number of steps, appear than mod-
ern science wisely resolved itself to be perfectly easy and unembarrassed
by the void it created; a resolution all the more necessary to be made, but
perhaps not the more easily kept, because everybody saw with suspicion
that once people were awakened against them for fnding the greatest
common divisor against their life there was scarcely a mind which did not
watch this change without embarrassment. Jarry is just an example of the
frst reactions to the absurdity awakened by being without referential, the
foundations of time and space being replaced by the void.
Such a turn might be accidental, but it can also be purposefully orches-
trated, just as liminal situations can also be forced, by tricksters, as we
have already argued, but with such an idea, we are still only at a surface
level. The development of the modern exact sciences from Newton to
Einstein, through the Kantian philosophy that supported an intersubjec-
tive rationality and epistemological holism, rather showed the absence of
rational rules governing scientifc paradigms – conceptual frameworks
that do not show reality. They defne, conceptualise, represent – and we
speak about mechanics, relativity theories – using these imagined struc-
tures in formulating precise physical laws for empirical phenomena.
They also acquire empirical meaning to set up a correspondence between
theory and the empirical part, but the part they emphasise is relativised,
which fxes the empirical content of the theory. This is how we were freed
from our slavish, superstitious meaning of existence: now things are not,
the discontinuity is proven, and all added dimensions bring us into the
incommensurable transcendental, and the passage connecting the two
themes by Newton’s law of gravitation and Einstein’s equitation became
completed within a common space of not-being (which in the Euclidean
framework could not even be formulated), concerned with the a pri-
ori or intuitive basis of knowledge as independent of experience where
space is not fnite but variable, relative in transcendental aspirations. We
already mentioned the incommensurable, together with the infnity, all
aspects which have no obvious application to life. They belong to the
transcendental realm, being terms of fundamental irrationality, elusive
and without words, without experiences, and can be approached only
by divinisation. Divinisation means asserting irrationality or a super-
natural element in experience, dressed in the robe of ruminating reason-
ing, based on inconclusive evidence; speculative cobwebs of eternal truth
embroidered with fowers of rhetoric. Sickly sentiments about the idea of
unity in nature, the progress of knowledge and experience, the evolution
of science truly arrive at a relativised a priori, a transcendentality that
surpasses all we have learned and lived: to the absurd abstract.5
What was usually stabilised in material forms – energy or transcen-
dental existence without form – became the focus of scientifc attention.
Energy modelled for human interaction in organisational settings was
similarly liberated from solidity. Solidity became a subjective sensation,
and the reality of matter became voided in the ocean of energy. In contrast
to this not-being, being is no longer frmly settled in forms but merely an
unsettled, roaming vagabond in a kind of stellar nucleosynthesis. We are
bringing humans to a higher level of synergy, which disposed time as a
constant and can be interrupted in its infnity only in terms of God. Only
God’s transcendentality can interact with these – a feld of not-being,
the unmanifest pure consciousness of the unmoved mover, that forms
the source of everything in the universe; all the forms and phenomena
of creation are but waves on the ocean of Being. But in reality, we have
just become helpless and ridiculous, confned in our bodies, masked and
tested, green carded, sickened, and infected; only our delirious effuences
make our wishes known. Clearly, relativity can be interpreted only in
terms of an immanent God; when the mind is dissolved, mental activity
settles inward and expands into non-being.
In particular, this shows that transcendental thinking, whether scien-
tifc or philosophical, exhibits its own transformations in people’s lives.
But what is it exactly that fxes the mainstream of science across import-
ant changes? How we can trace motives behind the development of
principles in theoretical physics? What are the invariants that progressed
into the Age of Disease? The ultimate goal of relativity was to approach
the unity of all being into non-being, but still, it does not look for the con-
stitutive function of physical concepts and principles or does it? Could it
be that a scientifc, determinate, and fxed experience of physical reality
is in infnity? Namely, that being has properties over and above those of
its parts and their organisation, and the question to which these prop-
erties are the answer lies in the energy waves of the infnite. Relativity
simply questioned the solid fundament of Being, but what was added on
this basis was the special treatment of being as a corrupted, ill-driven
substance that could be perfected by science through transmuting being
into the infnite transcendent.
This position means that existing beings are only fragments and
fractures – ill, uncomplete, and unperfect – that can only be understood
in terms of their contribution to the whole, to the unity of the whole.
The peculiarity of the idea lies in its necromantic touch, the interest
in establishing via the plastic properties of artifcial additions, or the
placement of artifcial organs, the condition of perfection through bio-
technology. This implies a peculiar perichoretic relation, through unity,
distinctiveness and equality, which is present in this position, and which
covers its infnity, an intricate trap that ensnares Being; the idea that
beings can exist in all different states simultaneously; and fnally, that
equality with God is the truest state of human existence. Consequently,
there is a shift to transcendentality that would hopelessly cement a global
social world.
Not surprisingly, this way of interpreting the concepts of physics always
arrives at a progressive elimination of being-like6 ideas and promoting
technological progress. Technology, especially biotechnology that sub-
stituted for the basic space and time structure of traditional logic, like
integrity and the individuum, started to run into absurdity. In the clas-
sical logic, different individuals are collected in classes in virtue of some
common features. Individuals share continuity by memory and do not
make a break in the uniformity of their condition: human dissection was
forbidden in Antique Greece, and abortion was an offence for most of
the Greek authors.7 Not to mention that the entire Greek and Roman
legal corpus was based on post factum: legal action took place after the
damage was done (on the integrity of being), and not before; from this
perspective, prevention is identical to a blank, universalised, and easily
irreparable damage itself. As Aristotle instructs us, legal decisions are
concerned with matters that have already taken place8; it is thus again
post factum and not preventive. But now, instead of integrity, a gener-
alised concept of prevention has come into vogue and monopolises atten-
tion, an idea which by defnition implies an a priori break in the previous
condition, giving rise to a generic concept of prevention which compre-
hends all the determinations in which things in the same class agree.9
It is through the process of abstraction that these concepts can rise up,
out of the multiplicity of individual things. At this point, however, no
doubt this procedure of forming concepts through abstraction can lead
to any solution. Now that we have a preventive disease control, the result
is that never before have we found ourselves so sick; we are statistically,
so factually, more ill than before the measures for disease control were
established.
Chapter outlines
The writer Paul Kingsnorth describes the Covid-19 pandemic as apoc-
alyptic in the original sense of the Greek word apokalypsis, meaning a
revelation:
Beneath the arguments about whether or not to take a vaccine that

may or may not work safely, glides something older, deeper, slower:
something with all the time in the world. Some great spirit whose
work is to use these fractured times to reveal to us all what we need
to see: things hidden since the foundation of the modern world.
Covid is a revelation. It has lain bare splits in the social fabric that
were always there but could be ignored in better times. It has revealed
the compliance of the legacy media and the power of Silicon Valley
to curate and control the public conversation. It has confrmed the
sly dishonesty of political leaders, and their ultimate obeisance to
corporate power. It has shown up ‘The Science’ for the compromised
ideology it is.
Most of all, it has revealed the authoritarian streak that lies
beneath so many people, and which always emerges in fearful times.
(Kingsnorth, 2022)
This volume can be seen as a series of refections on what the pandemic

has revealed about our society – a society which increasingly seems to
exist in a permanent state of crisis, and where, as Arpad Szakolczai sug-
gests in his chapter, powerful forces have an interest in exacerbating such
crisis situations and manipulating them for their own ends. Indeed, the
nature of contemporary elites, the character of the power they wield, the
purposes for which they use it, and the narratives they use to legitimise
themselves will be a recurrent theme in the chapters which follow.
All these different facets of our contemporary condition can be ft-
ted within the wider discourse of liminality. From this perspective, the
Covid-19 pandemic – and even more so, the lockdowns, curfews, and other
emergency measures introduced in an effort to contain it – is one more in
a long series of liminal crises through which modernity has advanced. In
each instance, many aspects of what had previously constituted ‘normal’
life are suspended and never fully resumed, so that social existence is
more and more assimilated to a condition of ‘permanent liminality’. This
condition is powerfully evoked in the opening chapter by Roger Griffn,
which characterises modernity as plagued by a sense of unreality, of mal-
aise, of not belonging, of the insubstantiality of existence, of waiting for
life to begin properly – all of which are associated with liminality. This
leads him to distinguish between the ‘liminal’ in the context of a pre-
modern, dynamically changing but cohesive culture, where it indicates
the traditionally recognised and ritualised moment of transition between
two states of being, and the connotations liminality acquires in a modern
context. Here, the suspension of reality with the loss of ‘Stage A’ rarely
leads smoothly to a ‘Stage B’, producing for many a sustained experi-
ence of limbo which becomes a hollow ‘normality’. The chapter proposes
that the qualitatively different experiential nature of modern liminality
should be marked with a less familiar term, ‘liminoid’, which is charac-
terised by a sense of incompleteness and a longing for renewal and tran-
scendent meaning. This condition has been exacerbated by the pandemic:
two years of physical and psychological isolation enforced by the global
ebbs and fows of Covid-19 have confronted millions with a profoundly
personal experience of the liminoid worthy of a Franz Kafka, a Samuel
Beckett, or a Harold Pinter, linking up with the absurd, discussed exten-
sively in this Introduction above. The chapter ends on an optimistic note,
suggesting that the limbo of the pandemic could, paradoxically, bring
to the surface the capacity to learn anew, create, experience, reach out,
form communities, acquire a skill, change jobs, or otherwise trade in a
moribund life for a new beginning.
The liminal character of the pandemic, with its suspension of ‘normal’
life, also provides the background to the chapter by Arpad Szakolczai,
which emphasises the way in which such periods of crisis can be manip-
ulated or exploited to bring about radical change – changes which would
have been impossible, indeed unimaginable, outside of such liminal situ-
ations and which are not in any sense a response to pre-existing demands
on the part of the population at large. Szakolczai notes the existence of
non-elected bodies which have exerted a signifcant and growing impact
on public policy around the globe from behind the scenes, including the
Mont Pèlerin Society and the World Economic Forum (WEF). To gain
an insight into the thinking of such globalist elites, the chapter analy-
ses the ideas of the German-Swiss economist and WEF founder Klaus
Schwab, especially those expressed in his book COVID-19: The Great
Reset (2020, with Thierry Malleret). Schwab argues that the destruction
of normal life brought about by the pandemic presents unprecedented
opportunities. For him, any problem or disaster is an opportunity to
press further the same agenda – more industry, more technology, more
markets, more communication, more media rule. Through a close exam-
ination of Schwab’s career and written works, the chapter tries to address
the elusive question of who our rulers are, and what they have to do with
the current pandemic and its effects. It suggests that while the measures
set in motion due to the Covid-19 pandemic, from the sudden lockdown
in March–April 2020 onward, caught everyone unprepared, for some
people among our ‘rulers’ these events presented an opportunity. More
fundamentally, the chapter suggests that our current reality is not the
outcome of long-term, gradual evolutionary progress, sprinkled by
much-needed and healthy revolutions, but rather was produced by lim-
inal crises: moments when imitative processes spread by contagion, and
which were used by trickster fgures to replace the normal gift-logic of
social life with a trickster logic, characterised by a combination of conta-
gious imitativity and non-participatory rationality.
What the pandemic suggests about the character of contemporary
elites and the manner in which they wield power is also the theme of
Paul O’Connor’s chapter. He argues that what has been revealed are the
contours of a new form of hegemony in late modern societies, a tech-
nocratic managerialism in which the interlocking elites who populate
government and corporate bureaucracies, big tech, large media organi-
sations, and academia defne the ‘social good’ and construct a consensus
for the implementation of the policies they view as necessary to achieve
it. Increasingly, policy measures are justifed and legitimised by ‘expert
opinion’ rather than as expressions of the ‘popular will’. Moreover, there
is an elective affnity of expertise with three other fundamental aspects
of contemporary society: the digitalisation and datafcation of social
life; the relentless expansion of managerialism and bureaucracy; and the
expanding infuence and numbers of the professional-managerial class.
In combination, these infuences give rise to a managed society in which
an ever-expanding area of human life is subjected to surveillance, regula-
tion, and administrative control, and even private behaviour comes to be
governed by abstract constructs and stereotyped formulae.
The chapter attempts to understand the phenomenon of ‘expertise’
using the concept of trickster logic already cited by Szakolczai. Central
to trickster logic, it argues, are processes of substitution, mediation,
and translation. ‘Experts’ are typically individuals who have mastered
abstract idioms – such as statistics, epidemiological modelling, economic
formulae, management theory, or legal jargon – into which they are able
to translate either concrete experience or the conceptual languages of
other specialist or expert groups. In the process, they generate concep-
tual and normative constructs which react back to the social world,
enabling experts – or more accurately, the policymakers and managerial
bureaucracies which employ them – to infuence conduct and behaviour.
The result is an ‘inversion of reality’, in which abstract constructs inac-
cessible to the majority of the population are treated as offering the
defnitive truth about social life, take precedence over people’s concrete life-
circumstances and individual judgement, and legitimise a fne-grained
regulation of conduct, exercised in the name of ‘society’ and enforced
by state bureaucracies and the police. This process was exemplifed by
the lockdowns and other emergency measures introduced during the
pandemic, which were justifed by abstract and hypothetical statistical
‘models’ of potential hospitalisations and deaths. The chapter concludes
that experts conform to the ideal-type of the ‘magi’ (Szakolczai, 2022),
since they are defned by their initiation into the knowledge of various
esoteric languages and procedures, and use their monopoly of this spe-
cialised knowledge to secure access to resources and infuence. In other
words, rather than refecting the superior ‘rationality’ and ‘complexity’ of
modern societies, the power of experts refects the essentially parasitical
character of contemporary elites.
The parasitical character of global elites is also the theme of the chapter
by Camil F. Roman. Drawing on Michel Serres’ (1982) discussion of the
parasite, he argues that the fabric of our modern social life is made up of
a series of mutually encapsulating, parasitic relations. This implies that
we need to move away from an angle entirely dominated by the idea of
an external parasitic aggression, to the standpoint whereby we recognise
that our rulers’ strictly epidemiological and ‘medical’ type of response to
the pandemic, devoid of any other human consideration, both imitates
and amplifes the parasitic appetite of possession and transformation in
every nook and cranny of our lives. For Roman, the rulers’ pandemic
politics may be seen as the work of human Ur-parasites – or parasites
‘modelled’ on the primordial ontology of the virus. Ur-parasites can be
defned as protean actors with the power to render themselves invisible
and penetrate their hosts or their hosts’ lives. In this way, the appetites of
Ur-parasites destroy natural integrity, harmony, reason, and substance in
order to achieve pure connectivity, adaptability, and most importantly,
‘sterile growth’, a most paradoxical phenomenon due to the fact that no
parasite can ever create anything but can only multiply. Therefore, every
single relation in society has been intercepted, making the parasitic rela-
tion the elementary social force weaving together the tissue of all social
life. In this way, everyone has been hauled inside the artifcial matrix of
relative transformation, a space for the replication, mutation, and trans-
mutation of both parasites and hosts. Roman uses the presence of plague
doctors on the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan to argue not only for
the historically constitutive links between epidemics and the rise of the
modern state but also that modern sovereign power involved from the
start an esoteric knowledge of control and transformation of alienated,
atomised individuals or ‘living dead’. He then focuses primarily on how
this knowledge has been put to effect in Italy and beyond during the con-
temporary pandemic, by looking into the various meanings of collective
lockdowns and decoding all the other anti-pandemic measures of social
distancing as individually tailored lockdowns, or the mobile extensions
of ‘living dead’ tombs.
The exercise of public authority during the pandemic – and especially,
divergent attitudes to the authority of ‘the science’ – is also central to
the chapter by Eugene McLaughlin and Chris Rojek, which maps the
variety of individual responses to the lockdowns and social distancing.
They note that in the early days of the pandemic, there was no consensus
among scientists upon crucial issues such as wearing face masks in pub-
lic spaces, including public transport, or the risk of transmission from
children. The absence of scientifc consensus meant that the authority of
enforcement measures was compromised because scientifc advice was
perceived as not being fool-proof. This undermined the advice from the
alliance of government and science that the infection risks were universal
and, by extension, eroded the authority of lockdown enforcement mea-
sures, since the public perceived their advice as open to interpretation.
McLaughlin and Rojek explore how this played out in practice by
considering some of the virus management strategies adopted by dif-
ferent people. They hold that four types of strategy emerged which are
associated with distinct group identity formations and patterns of social
practice in the general population: Grunts, Compliers Deniers, and Iro-
nists. The public behaviour of Compliers was dominated by conformity
and obedience and the belief that no one is above the lockdown rules.
The behaviour of Gamers was characterised by calculated risk-taking
actions to manipulate or defy the combined guidance of science and gov-
ernment on behaviour in public places. Deniers not only departed from
government and scientifc advice on public behaviour during the lock-
down but they also refused to believe the dangers or in some cases, even
the existence, of the pandemic. Finally, Ironists do not literally refuse to
believe in the virus, but were resistant to dominant pandemic narratives
and regarded lockdown enforcement policies as exaggerating the threat.
The subsequent chapter by Marius Benta focuses on a particular type
of corruption which can be seen as exemplifed in the pandemic and
which he calls ‘the frefghter effect’ – a term inspired by a famous dysto-
pian novel by Ray Bradbury. His starting point is the character of what
he terms ‘liminal professions’ which manifest an ambivalence between
protection and aggression in various spheres of life. These include, for
example, frefghters, police, military, psychiatrists, and medics. Fire,
catastrophes, wars, diseases, mental breakdowns, and spiritual break-
downs are eminently liminal situations either at the personal or collec-
tive level, and professions associated with managing such situations are
generally seen or felt to be special, unique, sensitive, risky or delicate,
especially in traditional societies. They also have a potentially ambiv-
alent relation to the problems they are dedicated to protecting society
against – frefghters are skilled in preventing fres from spreading, but
in other circumstances, they could apply this knowledge to be effec-
tive arsonists; journalists should be dedicated to revealing the truth,
but often make the most effective propagandists. When such liminal
occupations are transferred into the realm of what economists call ‘the
free market’, the consequence is that evil, disease, crime, corruption,
and untruth become not only inevitable but even ‘valuable assets’ and
sources of proft. In the case of the pandemic, the frefghter effect meant
there was a considerable constituency, composed of pharmaceutical
and biotechnology frms, public health professionals, and the ‘medical-
industrial complex’, with an interest in emphasising or even exaggerating
the dangers of the disease and the scale of the crisis.
The chapter by Janos Szakolczai takes as its starting point the deploy-
ment of wartime rhetoric in relation to the pandemic from early 2020
by leaders from Pedro Sanchez to Emanuel Macron, Boris Johnson, and
Mario Draghi. Governments across the world effectively declared ‘war’
on the virus, deploying military tactics against the ‘enemy invasion’ it
represented, including enforced restrictions, curfews, isolation mea-
sures, and an insistence on the collective effort that all law-abiding citi-
zens needed to endure. Szakolczai is concerned to dissect the signifcance
and consequences of such rhetoric. The experience of lockdown and the
mobilisation of the populace against Covid fnd striking parallels in the
anti-war novel ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ by Eric Maria Remarque
(1929; see the Chapter by Janos Mark Szakolczai, in this book), who
witnessed and reported the horrors of warfare as an adolescent fght-
ing in Verdun. Remarque is used as a guide to draw parallels between
the trench war and lockdown life, the new normality the post-pandemic/
post-war situation has imposed, and the legacy of shell-shock/Long
Covid, along with the wiping away of any sense of place and what was
‘before’. Szakolczai notes the continuation of this wartime rhetoric into
the latest phase of the pandemic: with the vaccination campaign heading
towards the possibility of a constantly recurring demand for regular and
repeated inoculation, we are witnessing the birth of a new enemy evoked
using the rhetoric of war – the dissidents, characterised as far-right and
undemocratic, who have not complied with the sacrifcial requirements
demanded of good citizens. Finally – recurring to the themes of power
and authority evoked throughout the volume – he asks whose interest is
served by this feverish mobilisation of the population through wartime
rhetoric?
The fnal chapter contextualises the contemporary pandemic within
a longue durée stretching back to the Neolithic. Agnes Horvath suggests
that the contemporary scientifc manipulation of electromagnetism sug-
gests an analogy with the past, more precisely the Neolithic, perhaps the
epidemiologically most lethal period in human history. Analogous events
in respect to electromagnetic waves produce analogous results in the two
ages, our modern and the prehistoric one, being distant by many thou-
sands of years, yet resembling each other. At the heart of the chapter
is a concern with the disastrous consequences of replacing reality with
the incommensurable, in the form of our contemporary digital and elec-
tronic media. The incommensurable is another term for the liminal void,
indicating something that is out of measure with normal human life; a
phenomenon that turns our normal and accepted practices and world
upside down. Two good approximations of the incommensurable, also
used as examples by Goethe in his Poetry and Truth, are the microscope
and the telescope, each bringing into our sight things which otherwise we
could not see, thus thoroughly confusing our senses, and also our good
sense. Another example could be natural phenomena like earthquakes,
volcanic eruptions or eclipses. The contemporary Google media network
is just a variant of the incommensurable, a quasi-object with its astonish-
ing Web-based collaborative software communication technology that
lets users work on the same content, dubbed, multiplied in its substance,
and which can house any medium of information, i.e. subliminal sensual
information to be transmitted to others and so infuence and change the
receivers. But almost anything exposed to the incommensurable of arti-
fcial radioactive waves will start to show effects of deterioration during
its use. Hence, the parallels between our contemporary world and the
Neolithic go deeper than the coexistence of stunning artistic and tech-
nological achievements with magic, rituals, widespread suffering and
deprivation.
Conclusion
This book will offer a political anthropological discussion of the unprec-
edented policy measures put in place in order to confront the Covid-19
pandemic, understood as embodying a ‘liminal politics’ that is inaugu-
rating a new ‘age of disease’. It explores the technocratic mimetic prac-
tices put into motion through this liminal politics and uncovers some
of their particular effects on individuals, on their social, political, and
collective life. Technocratic mimesis consists of various esoteric proce-
dures for the transformation of social processes into abstract models and
statistical data and for their manipulation in order to legitimate interven-
tions directed back onto politics and onto society at large. It is founded
on a position of exteriority, like its twin-sisters of alchemy and magic
with their evident mercenary logic, regarding society not from the point
of view of a participant but from a putatively neutral standpoint on the
outside.10 It is universalising and generalising, treating the social as a
uniform feld, subject to standardised rules and interventions, disregard-
ing local contexts and particular circumstances. It is transformative, the
purpose of technocratic mimesis being not understanding but the design
of interventions to advance pre-determined, repetitive, automatic goals.
It is a monologic, rationalising activity, endlessly replicating stereotyped
patterns of behaviour according to the requirements of a singular pre-
determined end. Finally, despite its façade of neutrality, its recommen-
dations reliably serve the interests of a technocratic elite (expansion of
administrative competencies, increased claims on resources, enhanced
infuence and prestige, an endless, repetitive prioritising of health). To
this end, technocratic mimetism consistently tends to emphasise ele-
ments of risk, danger, and suffering in order to justify the need to exert
control over people, amplifying surveillance, and transforming society
into a unifed body of distorted and subverted entities.
Rather than a superior, expert, ‘neutral’ type of knowledge, techno-
cratic mimetism produces a mere simulacrum, in which abstract mod-
els substitute for concrete social reality. One might say that it represents
the deployment of a trickster logic by the administrative apparatus of the
state, in order to exert control over conduct and simultaneously legitimise
that control as being in the best interests of the population. This is also
clearly related to Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ and Bentham’s
panopticon, just as Agamben’s biopolitics.11 This book would like to show
that once social and political reality is dominated by liminal politics,
individuals are reduced to a mere populace, docile bodies before political
and other powers. What is more, the meaning of life itself is increasingly
instrumentalised in the service of constant, unlimited growth,12 to be
gained in an individually borderless way from sensuals. Such growth
will be borderless, incommensurable, because subversion and its conse-
quence, self-aggrandizement, generate a peculiar, formless, open exis-
tence that strives towards endless transformation, until the differences
between the equalising characters diminish and everything becomes all –
indistinguishable, characterless, subverted sensuality.
The functioning of liminal politics requires the paradoxical obligation
on the part of the subverted individual to become a trickster, to per-
form the leap into the void, to leave behind everything that is stable and
concrete, and thus to join the paradoxical community of the homeless,
borderless individuals, inhabiting a ‘second reality’ which has been evac-
uated of existential determinants. This book is therefore both timely – in
dealing with a crucial aspect of contemporary reality, pandemic disease;
and signifcant – it addresses a serious and puzzling blind spot in aca-
demic scholarship: the meaning and relevance of a liminal politics in the
service of technocratic mimetism.
Notes
1 Gregory Bateson (1972) said about Aldous Huxley that he considered grace
as the most important guest of humanity, which was corrupted by self-de-
ceit, self-consciousness, and other kinds of failures, frustrations, and depar-
tures from grace. This is how grace was lost for humanity, but still owned by
other species who are unable to deceive and incapable of internal confusions,
like God.
2 In the frst volume of the Order of History, Eric Voegelin elaborated his
understanding of metastasis. The metastatic ‘royal act of faith’ that thinks it
can transfgure the pragmatic conditions of warfare into the fnal victory of
reality remained a political-social constant in Voegelin’s view.
3 About Aldous Huxley’s quest to understand the problematic spread of tech-
nology in terms of the social and political, see also Birnbaum (1971: 407) and
Huxley (1963: 109).
4 See Radin (1972), Hyde (1999), Horvath (2013), Horvath and Szakolczai
(2020), and other sources.
5 The abstract is foolish, in the sense of being considered apart from concrete
existence, impersonal and denoting something that is immaterial, concep-
tual, or nonspecifc, against the senses. Like Jarry’s Ubu, it is apart from
concrete realities, specifc objects, or actual instances, but still powerful,
because it concentrates in itself the essential qualities of the transcendental,
more extensive or more general than reality itself. This is also how Huxley
described the world under mescalin, the world of sensual intensity, far away
from consciousness (Huxley, 2004).
6 As Aristotle’s Politics starts with the striking note that every being is formed
with a view to good partnership with itself and others, being is not for ran-
domness, but for beauty:
Every state is as we see a sort of partnership, and every partnership is
formed with a view to some good, since all the actions of all mankind
are done with a view to what they think to be good. It is therefore evident
that, while all partnerships aim at some good, the partnership that is the
most supreme of all and includes all the others does so most of all, and
aims at the most supreme of all goods; and this is the partnership entitled
the state, the political association.
(Aristotle, Politics 1.1252a)
7 The entity, living or dead, should not be disturbed. See Edelstein (1987: 9–20).
8 See Konczol (2017).
9 Focusing on diagnosis, medicine cured symptoms, and propagated passive
treatments. Its focus was on patient care and prognosis. Hippocrates focused
on a crisis in the progression of disease, the opposite of modern preventive
treatment, curing after the crisis ended, with medical aid helping the patient
to better recover. After a crisis, a relapse might follow, and then another
deciding crisis. According to this method, crises tend to occur on critical
days, which were supposed to be a fxed time after the contraction of a dis-
ease. If a crisis occurred on a day far from a critical day, a relapse might be
expected. Fasting, rest, and the immobilisation of the body were practiced
(see Temkin, 1991).
10 Outsiderness is the point Camus emphasised and understood as the core of
the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus. In The Rebel, he also posited a solution
wholly consistent with it in the belief in immortality. Charis, right think-
ing, and the immortal mind as the only solution to the absurd appear in The
Plague in the fgure of Dr. Bernard Rieux and his mother, Jean Tarrou, and
Raymond Rambert.
11 See the works of Mitchell Dean and Stefan Schwarzkopf. The connections
between political anthropology and economic theology are to be explored.
12 Beyond evident allusions to various theories and ideologies of economic
growth, the idea can be traced back to reason of state (Meinecke 1965), con-
nected by Foucault (1981) to the emergence of police regulations.
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2 Liminality and modernity in
sickness and in health1
Roger Griffn
The paradox of liminality research

There is a fundamental paradox in the study of liminality and its inti-
mately related phenomena in the conditions of modernity – such as ano-
mie (Durkheim, 1897), the ‘disembedding of reality’ (Giddens, 1990), the
erosion of ‘culture’s sacred canopy’ (Berger, 1967), the spiritual ‘home-
lessness’ of modern human beings (Berger, Berger and Kellner, 1974),
their ‘disinherited’ status (Heller, 1959), the ‘terror of history’ (Eliade,
1954), the ‘disenchantment’ of the world (Weber, 1948), the loss of ‘heroic
myth’ and the ‘death of meaning’ (Becker, 1962), the ‘decentring’ of soci-
ety (Harper, 1994), the liquefaction’ of reality under modernity (Bau-
man, 2000), or the disorientation that accompanies modern temporality.2
As a specialist feld of research, such topics generate scores of theories
and many thousands of words, often couched in a hermetic discourse
barely comprehensible to the non-academic (and sometimes to fellow-
academics as well). Yet, according to the most infuential of these theo-
ries, liminality is experientially and phenomenologically part-and-parcel
of modernity as a whole. This means the liminal must be experienced in
one way or another by practically every citizen of the world who lives
in a society affected by modernisation, if only as a suppressed ‘bad’
mood, a lingering emotional headache, a restless ennui, a lurking, dark,
subliminal – yes subliminal – undertone to what is perceived at a con-
scious level as a stable, meaningful, ‘happy’, ‘normal’ life rooted in a
solid, predictable, and plannable everyday reality.
Occasional or regular, momentary or sustained, painful or strangely
exhilarating and creative, liminal feelings – malaise, ennui, acedia, dislo-
cation, dissociation, unreality, that time is out of joint, of not belonging,
of being unreal, of being ‘another’, or multiple, or ‘no-one’ at all –
these are thus, according to most paradigms – universal and familiar
to all, whatever our education, family or material circumstances, social
background, life situation, ethnicity, gender orientation, health, or age.
Or rather such transient dark moods and random, nagging intimations
of the bottomlessness of our lives, the maelstroms of nihilism that lurk
in our tides of emotion, of walking or living on a thin layer of ground
DOI: 10.4324/9781003265344-2
24 Roger Griffn
atop an existential sinkhole, of our eternal superfuity (Sartre, 1938) are,
according to the ‘modernist’ theory of liminality, familiar and universal
wherever the boots of modern consciousness – i.e. the clusters of phe-
nomena that are its vectors such as globalisation, social mobility, inter-
national travel, tourism, internet surfng, social media, multiculturalism,
migrations, and diasporas – have trudged repeatedly across the pristine
meadows of a ‘pre-modern’ society to turn green to brown. In doing so,
they trample and destroy for ever its delicate, critically endangered fora
and fauna, namely its unique cultural microclimate, cosmological ecol-
ogy, and fragile constructs of meaning which originally, at the ‘dawn
of time’, proved a stable source of the sacrality of life. It was these that
had enabled the group’s naïve but magnifcently empowering collective
culture – and meaning-generating creativity and survival in the face of an
infnite, energy-full but spirit-empty cosmos utterly indifferent to the fate
of human beings whether collectively or individually.
The result was a lived, intimate, communal sense of the world’s intrin-
sic signifcance unblemished by refexivity and self-consciousness, a state
that according to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies is a property of all
animals, but in the human sphere is now to be experienced in the modern
world only by lovers in the frst blush of passion, heroes who have put
death behind them, and those who die before attaining self-awareness.
In a world untainted by pluralism and relativism, it seems that all once
lived with the intimation of a higher order that their culture’s beliefs,
rituals, and practices expressed and perpetuated, of an ontological
truth rooted in illo tempore,3 a truth self-evidently and immanently true.
Indeed, the ultimate, the sacred truth, since in such a society there can
be no other rival myth, ritual, way of being that corresponds to the time-
less metaphysical reality made temporal and fesh through that original
cosmogonic act of creation – doubtless stretching over generations: the
elaboration of a sacred canopy (Berger, 1967). The resulting ontological
security meant that even the occasional encounter with human beings
from another tribe, culture, or part of the world did not produce any
ripples of existential threat or devastating awareness of relativism and
culture-cidal doubt or intellectual curiosity. Outsiders who arrived unan-
nounced might, like Captain Cook and his men in Hawaii’s Kealakekua
Bay, be simply exterminated as contaminants of the sacrality of their cul-
ture (unbeknown to Cook, the bay he chose for anchorage was sacred to
the local tribe). To misappropriate the famous binary opposition of Lévi-
Strauss, pre-modern is organic and cru (crude) while modern is highly
processed and cuit (cooked).
Even in modern times, the inhabitants of stable societies can acquire
a high degree of apparent immunity to those Hamletian feelings and
moods where existence becomes sinisterly transparent and emptied of
meaning, as long as they remain ensconced within a room of familiarity
and habit whose walls are covered with one-way mirrors preventing them
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‘Whether the COVID-19 event was a viral pandemic or a pandemic panic,

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Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease explores the phenomenon of

Agnes Horvath is a political theorist and sociologist. Founding editor of

Paul O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Sociology at United Arab

Titles in this series

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For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.

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1 Introduction: liminal politics in the new age of disease:

2 Liminality and modernity in sickness and in health 23

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Well be empty you light

Liminal politics or the new world order

Beneath the arguments about whether or not to take a vaccine that

This volume can be seen as a series of refections on what the pandemic

The paradox of liminality research

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