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To confront the forthcoming ecological crisis, a radical philo-
sophical change is thus needed, much more radical than the usual
platitude of emphasizing how we, humans, are part of nature, one
of the natural species on Earth, i.e., of how our productive processes
(our metabolism with nature, as Marx put it) is part of the metabo-
lism within nature itself. The challenge is to describe this complex
interaction in its detailed texture: coronavirus is not an exception
or a disturbing intrusion, it is a particular version of the virus
which was operative beneath the threshold of our perception for
decades, viruses and bacteria are all the time here, sometimes even
with crucial positive function (our digestion works only through
the bacteria in our stomach). It is not enough to introduce here the
notion of different ontological strata (as bodies, we are organisms
which have to hosts bacteria and viruses; as producers, we collec-
tively change the nature around us; as political beings, we organi-
ze our social life and engage in struggles in it; as spiritual beings,
we wind fulfilment in science, art and religion; etc.) “Assemblage”
means that one has to make a step further here towards a kind of
flat ontology and deploy how these different levels can interact at
the same ontological level: viruses as actants are mediated by our
productive activities, by our cultural tastes, by our social commer-
ce… This is why, for Latour,

“politics should become material, a Dingpolitik revolving around
things and issues of concern, rather than around values and be-
liefs. Stem cells, mobile phones, genetically modified organisms,
pathogens, new infrastructure and new reproductive technologies
bring concerned publics into being that creates diverse forms of
knowledge about these matters and diverse forms of action –
beyond institutions, political interests or ideologies that delimit
the traditional domain of politics.”

Again, is the coronavirus epidemics not such an assemblage of a
(potentially) pathogen viral mechanism, industrialized agriculture,

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