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Since the beginning of my activity on X and Substack early in 2025, a larger and larger proportion of my writing has come to consist in “guidance notes” to orally delivered lectures, some thirty or so of which are now posted on this site. An idea of the general outlines of my philosophical thinking can be gleaned, I think, by anyone who expends the combined effort of listening to these couple of dozen audio recordings and reading through the couple of dozen sets of “guidance notes” that accompany them. It’s beginning, however, to nag at my intellectual conscience that my philosophical writing has taken, these last two years or so, more or less exclusively the form of notes written in a “shorthand” style and serving only an ancillary function. My philosophical (self-)formation having been more “continental” than “analytical”, I incline very much toward the view that a philosophical essay is a work of literature and that what is hastily and inexactly said is likely also to have been hastily and inexactly thought.
Speculating, then, on the possibility that some of my subscribers may indeed wish to form for themselves some idea of my philosophical beliefs as a whole, I’ve decided to “dump” onto this Substack, pending my future composition of further “stand-alone” written contributions to philosophical debate, whatever I have left on my computer hard-drive of the philosophical writing that I did during the period immediately before I acquired a small online audience - that is to say, philosophical writing produced in a rather more “art for art’s sake” mindset, without pedagogic intent and indeed without consciousness or expectation of a readership/audience at all.
Partly for just this reason, the essays, drafts and fragments that I will be publishing here in the next few weeks also display stylistic slovenlinesses and imperfections. But they are, generally speaking, more reflected on and more lengthily stylistically revised and worked on than are the “guidance notes” which make up most of what I’ve published here during the past eighteen months.
I have given them the general title “essays, drafts and fragments from the bio-securitarian tyranny period” not just because the worldwide “lockdowns” and everything associated with them were inarguably the defining historical and political characteristic of the years (2019-2022) in which they were written but also because nearly all of these essays, drafts and fragments were written as responses to this massive bio-securitarian power-grab as it unfolded: as attempts to understand the nature of what was being imposed upon us, its historical antecedents, and possible strategies of resistance to it.
The historical avenues I was led down by my attempts to understand and to resist here were, in part, those that I have continued down in the work I’ve published here since 2025. In part, though, they are avenues I have since abandoned. The reader of these essays, drafts and fragments will note, for example, my constant preoccupation with the ideas of Leibniz during this period.
Some of the earlier of the writings from the period 2019-22 that I am about to publish here are in French, since up until the end of the former year I was domiciled in Paris and I am generally in the habit of writing, insofar as it lies within my ability, in the language of the country I am living in.
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Notes on Nietzsche and the “Pandemic”
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Robert Koch Institute has taken on the ideology of Koch’s antagonist Virchow.
Politicized medicine / medical politics
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Immunitas
He who was immunis was exempt from public service – the res publica was something he could hold, partially at least, hence from himself.
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But we shall turn to try to settle this anomaly in a moment.
For the present, let us add another layer and aspect to the problem.
I have suggested here that the “logicist” thinking of Leibniz reappears in Nietzsche, two hundred years later, under the form of “fairy-tale”, of magical thinking.
This is to take 17th-century thinking in a direction oddly contrary to the direction in which it is often taken today.
It has struck me that there is a whole swathe of contemporary writing the main thrust of which is to take the most “wildly” metaphysical – the most “magical” – theses of the great 17th century philosophers and translate them (back?) into highly materialist terms – i.e. terms opposite to the “magical”.
This is a procedure most typical, of course, of today’s Spinozan scholars. Correlates of Spinoza’s procedures of “real definition”, easily taken by the layman for pure metaphysics, are today found in the “hardest” of “hard sciences”.
The work, say, of a Terrence Deacon – more readily accepted into the culture of “French Spinozism” after Deleuze than is, say, Dommasio’s work on Spinoza – moves in the direction of restating Spinozism in the language of biology and neuroscience.
I am not enough of a Leibniz scholar to know whether this sort of thing has even been attempted with regard to Leibniz.
A conversation with Vincenzo leaves me with the impression that it hasn’t; that, in Vincenzo’s view, Leibniz is not a philosopher who lends himself to contemporary application. This is, of course, a view that the present notes run counter to by their very nature but I shall leave my contradiction of it to the very end.
For the present, I shall restrict myself to the very tentative and hypothetical claim that if the analogy between Leibniz’s discourse on the notio completa and Nietzsche’s on the Gutgeratener developed above holds true, then the search, in the natural sciences, for “objective correlatives” for Leibniz’s highly abstract, logicist ideas of notio completa and total analyticity, may not be in vain.
The Twilight passage, indeed, gives us a hint as to the “objective correlate” in the natural sciences that might be found for Nietzsche’s notio completa discourse.
Again: the “young man falling sick”.
We have spoken of this above as “the young man succumbing or not succumbing, by virtue of his internal ‘concept’, to an external quantum of force” in the form of a virus.
The science of virology is immediately suggested.
But the farther thought might occur to one: are not even the scenarios outlined in this passage that do not explicitly evoke a virus also virological scenarios in an expanded sense of “virological”?
Is not the whole notio completa scheme here, as Nietzsche outlines it, a sort of logos of the relation of vis to vis, virtus to virtus, and thus a “vir-ological” scheme in a new sense: a general theory of all that is vis- and vir-related?
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But the question, somewhat disappointingly, really does appear to have to be qualified, and thereby effectively to be dismissed, as indeed the question of a layman, one who will promptly be informed by the philologist that there is in fact no such realm of human experience as “all that is vis- and vir-related” as his question presupposes.
Vir, virtus and virtue, to be sure, are provenly intimately etymologically interconnected with one another, so that no reasonable objection can be made to calling Nietzsche’s philosophy a “political philology” of these particular semantemes and of the cultural consequences of their different “weights of presence” one within the other. But the link that would need to be made, if any such thing as a “moment in human experience consisting in all that is vis- and vir-related” were really to come into being, between this semantic kinship-group vir/virtus/virtue and, say, the semanteme virus is not one that can legitimately be made. Virus, the philologist will inform the intelligent but over-eager layman, is a term etymologically unrelated to vir or to virtus: a term meaning not “strong” nor “male” but rather “poison” in classical Latin and passing, in sharp contradistinction to its apparent close relation virtus, only very late, in the 18th century, into vernacular European usage.
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On the one hand, the philological judgment here appears a soberingly unappealable one. But on the other hand, few contexts conduce more strongly to an appeal against it than the present one: that of a study of Nietzsche. Does not, after all, the argument of that text of Nietzsche’s which has exerted, perhaps, the greatest influence of all the texts that he authored – that first Abhandlung of Zur Genealogie der Moral which develops the schema of the alternate moral oppositions gut und böse and gut und schlecht – rest very largely on certain etymological hypotheses radically at odds with the received philological wisdom of his day?[1] Have the respective etymologies of virtus and virus really been probed with the energy and daring with which Nietzsche himself probed the respective etymologies of gut and böse? Might there be unsuspected affinities here after all – and might the reasons for their remaining unsuspected themselves be affined with the reasons for the affinities between esthlos, deilos etc.?
Enormous questions that we cannot hope to answer here. But even if philology and etymology do indeed prove powerless, in this case, to provide the sort of Nietzschean insights into the true structure of our moral ideas that the Nietzsche of Zur Genealogie der Moral offers actual pecuniary encouragement to these sciences to provide, Nietzsche’s philosophy itself surely makes substantial contributions toward confirming the oddly unexplored hypothesis that “virtue is a kind of virus”. It would surely be child’s play, of course, to find in Western intellectual and cultural history a dozen or even a hundred instances of this notion “virtue is contagious”’s being worked out in a non-Nietzschean sense. I mean in the banal sense of “a good example’s always finding imitators” and so on. Where the idea is taken up by Nietzsche, however, it assumes forms that are far from banal in their implications. “Virtue”, as we have already noted in passing, mostly designates for Nietzsche (or at least for the last, best Nietzsche) effective un-virtue, that is to say, a “virtue” from which the healthy core of virtù, masculine virtus, has been removed. The proposition of the “contagiousness of virtue” in this Nietzschean sense, the reader of this latter’s works cannot fail to note, prefigures natural-scientific “virology” far more concretely than had any pre-Nietzschean iteration of a formally similar idea. Almost innumerable are the passages in which Nietzsche points out how “virtue” tends to spread in mass society, among the already “constitutionally” weak etc. Indeed, the linkage to the natural science of virology, just then in the process of consolidation, is more concrete and specific still. Nietzsche pointedly coins for the “virtue” he saw circulating and expanding in modern society – the virtue that is not virtue, since it lacks the virile Renaissance quality of virtù – new denominations modelled on the denominations of toxins and viruses. “Moralin”, for example – a coinage, significantly, of the magnificent final months before his mental breakdown that also produced Twilight of the Idols – along with Moralin’s ethno-historical counterpart and synonym Judain, likewise a coinage of late 1888.[2]
Even, then, if the notion of a “general or universal virology” must remain – at least until someone undertakes an investigative sally in this field as bold as that undertaken by Nietzsche in 1886 in the field of the etymology of gut and böse – a Mißbildung on the merely formal level of stylistically permissible designation, there can be little doubt but that it is something like such a “general or universal virology” that Nietzsche practices throughout his work and most particularly in his late work.
The focus is, throughout, on virulent forces seeking to penetrate and commandeer the integrity of subjects.
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We do best, in fact, to slightly shift our perspective here. The intelligent layman, as we have said, finds himself initially most attracted to the notion that the natural science which might act as an “objective correlative” to Nietzsche’s “magic thinking” is “virology”.
A little more attention and energy of inquiry is required to recognize that the same very much holds for “immunology”.
Virus, we have seen, is – or so at least we must assume for the present – only speciously the social, historical, political concept that we would suit it to be a building block in a “general and universal virology” putatively practiced by Nietzsche.
But immunitas, a concept multiply and intimately affined with it within the complex of modern medical science, is this social, historical, political concept really.
He who was immunis was exempt from public service – the res publica was something he could hold, partially at least, hence from himself.
Such a concept lodges itself immediately and naturally into the heart of the Nietzschean problematic:
Conceived of against the background of Nietzsche’s larger understanding of modern society, immunitas would be the right to hold hence from oneself the demands of slave morality
If Nietzsche cannot entirely be said, then, to practice a “general virology”, he is much closer to practicing a “general immunology”.
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But I think that we have said enough to work, nonetheless, with the idea that Nietzsche’s philosophy might indeed be characterized as a sort of “general or universal immuno-virology” taking both immunity and virus in the broadest possible sense.
This becomes clear, admittedly, by a perfectly roundabout way:
At this present historical juncture, an “immuno-virology” dominates and moulds the entire globe.
It is an “immuno-virology” that displays at every point the contrary traits to Nietzsche’s philosophy.
We may call it, perhaps, “Virchowian”.
Just as the motor of the “health dictatorship” in the UK and indeed largely in the English-speaking world has been two specific institutions, Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene, in Germany the constant driving motor has been the Robert Koch Institute. But I suspect that close institutional-sociological examination would reveal the migration into the institute named after Koch of ideas actually associated with a contemporary antagonist of his: Rudolf Virchow. The “philosophy of the health dictatorship” certainly has its base in the writings of the highly political Virchow.
Virchow, a founder of the main left-wing political party in Germany during the Bismarck era, the German Progress Party, expounded a social and a socialist medicine.[3]
But does this not disprove rather than prove my contention? If the “immune-virology” which presently bestraddles our planet is in every respect the contrary of Nietzscheanism, does this mean that Nietzscheanism is precisely not any kind of “immune-virology”?
No, it does not. For the simple reason that this “immune-virology” bestraddling our planet is plainly the contrary of its own self.
This extreme socio-political orientation actually led Virchow to oppose the “germ theory” advanced by Koch and Louis Pasteur.
Virchow did not believe in viruses.
A totally sociologized immunology necessarily becomes an anti-immunology the very work of which consists in hollowing out its own core idea: immunitas
“(Herd) immunity” has been transformed from the fait brut that it was for Koch into a factum only in the Vicoan sense.
“Herd immunity” is not, the new immunology tells us, and can only be made to be by vaccines.
What we are seeing, in these “pandemic years” is the emergence, under “Virchowian” rather than “Kochian” sign, of an immuno-virology that tendentially denies the existence of its own object : a human immune system.
And the political corollary of this “truth” of no one really being naturally “immune” is that no one any longer can be politically or socially immunis. “We are all in this together”. We all owe everything we are to society.
Both virological/immunological and political immunitas collapse together.
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Nietzsche’s thought is the direct counterpiece to this – but with a “revaluation of all its values”
But this makes Nietzsche’s thought the true immuno-virology which moves in to take the place of the immuno-virology which has hollowed out its own central notion: immunitas.
Nietzsche’s thought, we might say, is a thought inspired precisely by the notion of immunity, of non-porosity.
One of his most remarkably prescient passages is this one where he describes a world in which both virological “immunity” and the political / ethical culture of a certain status of the individual as immunis (“relieved of public obligation”) will have broken down:
Nichts wäre kostspieliger als Tugend: denn am Ende hätte man mit ihr die Erde als Hospital: und „Jeder Jedermanns Krankenpfleger“ wäre der Weisheit letzter Schluß. Freilich: man hätte dann auch jenen vielbegehrten „Frieden auf Erden“! Aber auch so wenig „Wohlgefallen an einander“! So wenig Schönheit, Übermuth, Wagniß, Gefahr! So wenig „Werke“, um derentwillen es sich noch lohnte, auf Erden zu leben!
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A very great deal more certainly could – and certainly should – be said about Nietzscheanism conceived as a “general virology and immunology” directly alternative and antagonistic to the Virchowian “general virology and immunology” that governs and structures, just at the present crucial historical juncture, pretty much the entirety of the globe. But the last few pages’ remarks are, of course, remarks situated at several removes from the core topic of these notes. Specifically, they are situated at two removes from this core topic.
Our initial question – one confessed, indeed, to be a prima facie baffling one – was, it will be remembered
Are Nietzsche’s cause and Leibniz’s one and the same?
We began to offer what seemed to be a defence of the view that they are by pointing up the close analogies between the notio completa arguments of the 1680s and the discourse of Twilight of the Idols in 1888.
But we then removed ourselves, first, from our initial topic of Nietzsche’s reiteration, two hundred years on, of Leibniz’s doctrine of the notio completa by pointing up the fact that the notions that had been expounded in the 17th century as metaphysics came, somewhat bafflingly, to be re-expounded in the 19th century as a kind of magic.
Then, however, in an attempt to lessen perhaps the reader’s bafflement at the apparent anachronism, we removed ourselves one step farther from the initial question by devoting several pages to the exposition of the co-implication, in the Nietzschean discourse in question, of the “magical” and the “natural-scientific”.
At this point, however, we need to begin to work our way back toward the initial question of how Leibniz and Nietzsche might be solidary with one another.
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How can we take the first step backwards here, from the topic of virology to that of “magicality”? Perhaps with the following observations:
Remarkably, we see here how science has discredited itself, become something “magical”, precisely by purging itself of its “magical” moment.
I have said that Nietzsche’s “virological” thinking, being a thinking that sees the “nature” of an individual as capable not only of determining what this individual does but what is done to it, is a “magical” thinking.
This is why it is not wrong to say that the virological fact of the human immune system that is, I have suggested, Nietzsche’s thought’s “objective correlative” – in a way its inspiration – does indeed have something “magical” about it
The “immunity denialism” of this year’s “political medicine” and “medical politics” tips science back into myth and magic precisely by denying the moment of the “magical” even in science, even in a logic like “complete concept” logic.[4]
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But we are not yet at the core of the issue concerning us here.
What we have called Nietzsche’s “magical thinking” in Twilight of the Idols was, we have argued, a kind of 19th-century reiteration – anomalously “pre-modern” in its Märchen-like quality – of Leibniz’s 17th-century notio completa thinking.
Now, if the “Virchowian” thinking which we have examined in the preceding sections is an “anti-Nietzschean” and thereby “anti-magical” thinking – even if it slips, by a dialectical motion, precisely thereby back into myth and magic – then the really interesting question arises:
Can the “Virchowian” thinking which currently dominates and moulds our globe also be characterized as an “anti-Leibnizian” thinking, as a thinking against the notio completa?
Certainly, the porosity of the individual which is here envisaged is opposed to the compactness of the notio completa individual.
The “Virchowian” subject has little or no immunity – which means that he is almost infinitely befallable.
Almost no predicate that can be ascribed to him can be ascribed analytically, since his befallability leaves him radically open to contingency.
The “magical” thought of Nietzsche, with its “un-befallable” young men who cannot become sick, functions as a force preserving Leibniz’s 17th-century idea.
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Here, we are certainly back at the original question – and indeed generally in the sphere of the sort of political/philosophical issues that alone legitimate the continued practice of philosophy today, namely:
What logics of valid truth and valid self-understanding can a culture offer itself to promote its own flourishing and continued ascendancy (or, alternatively, what logics of valid truth and valid self-understanding are thrown up by some sort of “death-drive” to hinder precisely these things?
[1] In our twenty-first century, standards of “Nietzsche scholarship” have fallen so low that just this important aspect of the first Abhandlung of Zur Genealogie der Moral – that its etymological arguments are daring intellectual gambits – has become largely “invisible”. A twenty-first-century Nietzsche scholar might at best happen to stumble on a remark in the literature that indicates that these arguments were questionable, such as Nietzsche’s expression of satisfaction, in a letter to Brandes, that “the Danish philologists” confirmed his views. No scholar is likely to even be aware of the existence of the literature of the time that violently questioned these arguments, such as
[2] Even the reader unconversant with the present parlous state of “Nietzsche scholarship” will be able to guess what has become of these elements of the thought of the last, most dangerous Nietzsche in our present era of an Academe entirely dominated by an egalitarian-universalist pensée unique. From the undeniably anti-Semitic vocable Judain “scholarship” has simply averted its eyes, impossible to reconcile as this vocable is with the first and most fundamental dogma of “the new Nietzsche exegesis” that “Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite”. The fate of the Nietzschean neologism Moralin is a rather more subtly sinister one. The term, indeed, is to be found among the entries under “M” in the current Duden dictionary. The definition given for it reads enge, spießbürgerliche Auffassung von Sittlichkeit, Moral – a dismaying discovery for the Nietzsche researcher, since it appears to disabuse him of his belief that the term was indeed a coinage of Nietzsche’s. What Nietzsche meant by Moralin was certainly not just a narrow, bourgeois conception of morality – a conception of morality which could be foresworn, for example, by a polyamorous bi-sexual The passages in which the term occurs tend rather to be rejections of all that “morality” usually designates. But Duden does ascribe the coinage to Nietzsche. What has occurred, then, is the usual slippage and dilution of Nietzsche’s discourse…
[3] “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine, as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution: the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution... Science for its own sake usually means nothing more than science for the sake of the people who happen to be pursuing it. Knowledge which is unable to support action is not genuine – and how unsure is activity without understanding... If medicine is to fulfill her great task, then she must enter the political and social life.”
[4] Here we see the reason why I have hesitated to draw in the Spinozan conatus essendi as another iteration of the Leibnizian super-essentialism. If the Spinozan scholarly community are right and Spinoza’s “political” tenor is a socialist one, then conatus essendi must not be interpretable in these terms of individual “immunity”.
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