Paper long abstract:

Since COVID-19 first became the subject of international attention, in January 2020, ideas that behind COVID-19 lurks some sort of secret or mystery have become extremely popular across the globe. In particular, whether this involves Trump’s accusations of the laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of the virus, or ideas that the virus had been circulating unreported in China for months, the idea that China is misleading the rest of the world, manipulating the WHO and hiding the truth about COVID-19 has reached epidemic proportions in the mass and social media, and is now officially endorsed by the American government. This paper examines the idea of “COVID-19 mystery”, and argues that in order to understand its symbolic efficacy and appeal to large sections of the general public we need to understand not only the ways in which it relies upon pre-existing imaginaries of China as a veiled empire (or the manner in which these imaginaries are turned into political weapons in the relations between US and China), but more importantly the ways in which, in the first place, since its emergence at the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of the pandemic has been invested with “mysterious” and “secretive” agencies. These forms of imagined agency, the paper will argue, rely, first, on a particular ontology of pathogens, developed since the bacteriological revolution, and, second, on the idea of pandemics as world-historical events that reveal hidden truths about the workings of “society”, “humanity”, and their deeper essence.