Review of Sovereignty & Life edited by Matthew Calarco and Seven DeCaroli

Review of Sovereignty & Life edited by Matthew Calarco and Seven DeCaroli

Language is a virus, a half-life that requires human bodies to complete it. It thrives, spreads, consumes and dies. That’s the bare requirement for language. It needs bio-power provided by the human organism. This is the core thesis of William Burrough’s research into language. He finds that this virus requires a disguise, an armour to protect it from degeneration. And yet only in degeneration, the kind of abjection witnessed in Burroughs’ writings Naked Lunch and Soft Machine, does the language virus cast off its armour, ideology, to reveal its viral life form. Language degenerates lose their individuality, language degenerating becomes increasingly viral seeking other individuals to infect in order to survive. Language degenerates recognize each other through their state of need, their loss of protective armour. This armour is the ideology of language and of language communities. These are not imagined communities. These are bare knuckle enforcers, gangster thugs of ideology and their language is tough guy cryptic, understood only by those they are oppressing, ignored by all the others of the language community who are shielded from the police, the military, the corporations that make them think they are protected from the virus of degenerate language.