54 RüdigerKunow
brief and often imperceptible. Even the mere fact that an encounter of
the biological kind has indeed occurred can often be verified only
afterwards, by what happens in their wake. Merleau-Ponty's description
ofthehumanbodyas"lacachettedelavie,"thatis"theplacewherelife
hidesaway"(qtd.inShusterman60,69),wasnevermoretruethaninthe
case of a body encountering pathogenic biotic material coming from
someone or somewhere else. I will return to this ideological concept
later on in this chapter in the context of my discussion of the "military
response"modelofdisease.
The turn to Althusser now makes it possible to directly address the
"Trojan horse" effect of biological encounters: the origin, causes and
pointsofcontactare,asthehistoricalrecordshows,forthemostpartnot
available for immediate inspection but become visible only later, and
primarily through their effects, on the individual body or the body
politic. Such a characteristic delay, "deferral" in post-structuralist
parlance,accountsfortheposteriorauthorityofmostbiological(safety)
measures and arguments. The term "quarantine," deriving from the
Italian word for 40—the 40 days of isolation of people suspected of
carrying a dangerous infectious disease—registers the peculiar delay
which characterizes many moments of biological encounters. From the
perspective of cultural critique, this characteristic of medical
emergencies, namely that they manifest themselves only later on, is
crucially important for a cultural-critical perspective on them, as the
casespresentedlateronwillshow.
TheAlthusserianmaterialismoftheencounter,thusunderstood,thus
providesausefultheoreticalscaffoldingfortheargumentunfoldedhere.
Such a scaffolding acknowledges that encounters mediated by the
biologyofhumanbeingscannotbetracedbacktothewilledactivitiesof
individual or collective agents ("without subject," as Althussser would
say)nordotheymanifesttheworkingsofanoverarchingstructure("no
cause"). For materialist cultural critique this also means that encounters
of the biological kind cannot be read as part and parcel of an
overarching, meaningful super-structure but must be understood as
where necessary, even though from a cultural critical point of view, both are
processesinvolvingthetransferofactive,pathogenicbioticmaterial.