Glossed as “forced to do more with less”, postpandemic health care systems are calibrating mortality by articulating covid-19 imbued reductions in outpatient care as a form of learning: “this ‘natural experiment’ in reduced care may help health systems identify and address unnecessary care, and move towards greater sustainability.” Similarly, schooling systems are celebrating the increased safety measures imposed during the pandemic as a successful educational experiment in condensed curriculum, online delivery and socially sanitized classrooms. M. (name) will not return to his classroom even after the comprehensive lifting of measures as testing for complying with safety protocols is now recalibrated as testing for developmental fitness for learning. A new bill on special education cancels the right to school escort for students with disabilities, brings back mandatory testing for school entry, and sends students with disabilities back to separate-but-safe special education.

Saving lives from the pandemic put people under the rule of exception. For those, however, whose lives were already regulated through social hygiene, those contained in marginality, those “inhuman, and human-as-humus” (Haraway, 2015) surviving in “refuges”, the government tightening of social distancing was experience as a pastoral command for economizing contact but as criminalization of life. This paper explores how educational zones of slowness and morbidity --wherein marginality, stasis, and abjection are recomposted as zones of life-- reckoned with social distancing and shaming for not distancing effectively.

It draws from queer theorizations of temporality (Freeman, 2010; Love, 2009) and shame (Sedgwick 2003) and touches on stories of dissident intimacies during the pandemic to tease out the gentrification of queer theory and to relink the latter with a politics of sustainability: as a rewildening-and-queering of commoning. I suggest queering slowness and commoning in marginal educational zones through two supplementary moves: (a) reclaiming Aristotle’s “socializing of/in zoe” (κοινωνία ζωῆς; social communion) from reifying readings of zoe as biological life, and (b) making connections between queer theory and forms of dissident affective sociality not claimed as such in their living present. This asynchronous and perhaps also theoretically aberrant double touch--the touch on the pandemic as past and the touch of theory on narratives across genres-- follows what Carolyn Dinshaw (1999) calls a queer historical impulse: “an impulse toward making connections across time between, on the one hand, lives, texts, and other cultural phenomena left out of sexual categories back then and, on the other, those left out of current sexual categories now.”

Foucault’s definition of biopolitics as regulation of life draws on the crossing of a threshold between antiquity and modernity “when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies”. In Foucault’s reading of Aristotle, however, animality remains coextensive the possibilities of biopower, not a terrain for the biopolitcs’ practice, not stripped of immance’s self-reflexivity as with the ontological binarism Agamben imposes on Aristotle’s fluid and sometimes interchangeable references to zoe and vios. “For millennia,” Foucault elaborates in the History of Sexuality, “man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (143). For centuries of modernity, homo is excised from humus to extrapolate Homo Politicus as the other of the animal. Zoon logon echon (ζῷον λόγον ἒχον), usually translated as "rational animal" wagers rationality against animality and vios against zoe even when the latter is lamented in critiques of biopolitics. When confronted with the objection that enforcing mask wearing on people walking alone in parks makes no sense, the Head of the National Covid-19 Committee of Medical Experts explained that it is helping in getting them used to wearing the mask. Educating students to follow covid-19 safety rules encompassed taking off the edge of life’s immanence rather than dispossessing people of the right to the body as argued in anti-vaxxers’ high-jacking of the “my body, my choice” discourse. Educating “care of the self” to resonate with the rule of exception, to suspend the critique of arbitrary state gymnastics on life for placing ethics of care in perspective, to honor-and-resent politikon zoon [πολιτικὸν ζῷον] froze the immanence of life: ‘a-subjective current of consciousness, an impersonal pre-reflexive consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without self” (Deleuze, 1997: 3). Inscribed linguistically in the ambiguity of a double performativity, gerund-and-participle (lost in its translation as ‘animal with reason’), ζῷον λόγον ἔχον suspends the separation and hierarchy between life and politics, animality and reason. Categorically different from animal owing to logos but, at the same time, sustaining the capacity for logos with-in the scope of animality. Similarly, the sedimentation of Aristotle’s Politics in search of vios politikos separates politics from life failing to appreciate how zoe is irreducible to biological life and politics inseparable, through redemption or transcendence, from the “commoning of life”( κοινωνία ζωῆς, Aristotle 1280b).

Education for the pandemic became a double learning in transcendence and substitution: you protect yourself to protect the others; you protect the others to prevent transmission to prevent the virus’ mutation to protect vaccination’s effectiveness from new variants to protect your vaccinated self. Cultivating a consciousness of others’ lives at risk became conditionally dependent on cultivating self-critique for not complying with social distancing even when intimacy did not engender transmission. A life threatening virus whose combating was threatened by life. “Pure immanence requires as a principle the equality of being, or the positing of equal Being: not only is being equal in itself, but it is seen to be equally present in all things’ (Deleuze 1990: 173). Univocity or immanence, writes Laura Cull (2012), “means that there is only one kind of thing or being in reality, and as such no fundamental separation or hierarchy between the nature of words and things, body and mind, subject and object, representation and the real, theory and practice and so forth” (p. 7). Cull notes that immanence “originates from the Latin immanere, which might be translated as ‘to dwell within’” (ibid., 6). The sedimentation of κοινωνία ζωῆς is gracefully undone by Malabou and Butler as they gracefully demonstrate how Hegelian dialectics of substitution both negates and demands detachment from life. Considering how Foucault’s corporeal ethics of the care of the self holds up with an ethics of substitution --“Υou be my body for me”/ You distance yourself for me (?)/ I distance myself for your (?)— they address life’s auto-affectivity and its enabling of a spacing more primal that detachment: “The self affects itself even with what it does not know about itself. This nonknowledge is included in self - transformation, and is in a way its condition of possibility” (635-6).

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