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going on is something we till now considered impossible, the basic
coordinates of our life–world are disappearing. Our first reaction
to the virus was that it is just a nightmare from which we will soon
awaken – now we know this will not happen, we will have to learn
to live in a viral world, a new life-world will have to be painfully
reconstructed.
But there is another combination of speech and reality at work
in the ongoing pandemics: there are material processes which
can happen only if they are mediated through our knowledge –
we are told a catastrophic X will happen to us, we try to avoid it,
and through our very attempts to avoid it it happens… Recall the
old Arab story about the “appointment in Samara” retold by W.
Somerset Maugham: a servant on an errand in the busy market
of Baghdad meets Death there; terrified by its gaze, he runs home
to his master and asks him to give him a horse, so that he can ride
all the day and reach Samara, where Death will not find him, in
the evening. The good master not only provides the servant with a
horse, but goes himself to the market, looks for Death and reproa-
ches it for scaring his faithful servant. Death replies: “But I didn’t
want to scare your servant. I was just surprised about what was
he doing here when I have an appointment in Samara tonight…”
What if the message of this story is not that a man’s demise is im-
possible to avoid, that trying to twist free of it will only tighten
its grip, but rather its exact opposite, namely that if one accepts
fate as inevitable and one can break its grasp? It was foretold to
Oedipus’s parents that their son would kill his father and marry
his mother, and the very steps they took to avoid this fate (expo-
sing him to death in a deep forest) made sure that the prophecy
would be fulfilled - without this attempt to avoid fate, fate could
not have realized itself. Is this not a clear parable of the fate of the
US intervention in Iraq? The US saw the signs of the fundamen-
talist threat, intervened to prevent it, and thereby strengthened it.
Would it not have been much more effective to accept the threat,

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