“The Great Internment”, “the State of Emergency”, “the Historical Ontology of the Present”

The critique of the dichotomy of the great internment as "event" to "structure" has been going on for half a century if it has not been completed. From the perspective of history, i.e., the perspective that is outside of the event, no one can ignore the indelibility of the great internment as a discontinuity. In other words, whether or not a historical critique is adopted, all meaningful intellectual activities after it in time are offsprings of it.

It is puzzling why such a variant of the great internment is arrogantly regarded as an irrelevant event, a vexing trifle, but being safely unimportant, when modernity develops smoothly according to its own logic. Ironically, while the intellectuals relentlessly exclude the event from the structure, the structure—physical or intellectual—is in a gratifying state of immortality, while outside the subject, “the state of emergency” is transformed from an instant to permanent. If in the critique of post-structuralism the inclusive exclusion refers to the direction in which dike descends to bio, the ignorant reaction of today's people seems like to refer to the existence of a non-existent bio prior to dike — Using the Hegelian language as an example is to refer to a non-life without death. This intellectual pleasure, laziness, and security are undoing half a century of intellectual activities. 

Enlightenment in Foucault is “the present meets freedom”; a critique of enlightenment is a historical ontology of the present. People of today don't know what present means, and at the same time, lie comfortably in an eternally static “now”—the louder those debates over the “technique” are, the more stable such a static belief becomes. So, let's call this segment starting from covid-19 a new history, a post-enlightenment or de-enlightenment era, century, millennium, whichever that no longer matters.

In plain words, what I am trying to say is that if people choose such an understanding that is dominated by fear, even though they refuse to assume the responsibility of thinking rationally, the repercussions of such choice will still not fall on any “the Other” by any wishful thinking. Still, up to the moment, people’s fear of the great internment is no greater than that of their own independent thinking.