TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 63
but instead as social as well cultural states of exception precipitated by
biological encounters. Such readings will keep their distance from the
currentlypopularAgambenianparadigmofexceptionassimultaneously
inside and outside a law.^16 Instead, they will understand exception as a
critical moment for social/cultural hermeneutics, as an intervention, an
irruption of the somatic into the semantic, an irruption, moreover, that
"refuses to dissolve completely into the milieu of human knowledge"
(Bennett3).
In addition to the enigma of first cause often emerging in biological
encounters,^17 these encounters possess a characteristic, equally
enigmatictemporality: "[t]he incipience of what is to come" (Massumi,
Power15) produces individual and collective anxieties, often bordering
on an outright panic. At the same time, and in a sober analytic
perspective, these highly affective moments can be shown to follow
certain scripts: encounters of the biological kind are in many instances
notsomuch"there"butemergent,nascent,budding,heraldinganasyet
unknown reality. Unlike many other pathological processes involving
the biology of the human body that are gradual and incremental—
coronarydiseasesandcancerarecomingtomindhere—thoseinvolving
the passing-on of biotic material are precipitous, evental, an irruption
into the cultural status quo. Such moments which brutally differentiate
themselvesfromordinaryeverydaylifecannotbutproducemultipleand
intense reverberations, individually and collectively; they are perfect
instances of what Goethe called "eine... unerhörte Begebenheit"
(Goethes Werke726), an inconceivable, even traumatic event. What
addstothistraumaticirruptionisthefactthatoftentimespeoplebecome
aware that a biological encounter has already taken place only at some
later point. This characteristic time lag is also a lack, a lack of
(^16) For a longer exposition of this argument cf. Norris, Andrew. "Giorgio
Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead."Diacritics30.4 (2000): 38-58.
Print.
(^17) The experience of biological contact as encounter is historically and
contextually variable, as the case of HIV-AIDS demonstrates. While the first
incidences of the disease remained largely unnoticed, even among most of the
medical community, HIV-AIDS became an event—and then a medicalanda
socio-cultural one—with the first prominent deaths and public debate about
"innocent"victims(Kunow,"Epidemie").