Questions about ‘the world of tomorrow’, the world after the Covid-19 crisis, are being asked almost obsessively. Analysts are vying to outdo each other so that in a few months’ time they will be able to announce smugly: ‘I told you so.’ Perhaps we should rather face up to a wiser assessment, one that is more profound and more serious: there will be no world tomorrow. The world is dead.

Of course, something will endure. There will be no sudden disappearance of the stars or planets, mountains or insects, forests or humans. This is an entirely different issue: as described particularly in the theories of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, the concept of mundus in Latin or cosmos in Greek demands the existence of a transcendental commonality – a shared order and meaning. It is this, so it seems, that has now been lost.

The hypothesis would therefore go as follows: the world is dead. Not in the sense that Nietzsche, with a sort of gleeful and nihilist mischief, announced the death of God. What we have here is not a deicide but a cosmocide. Something no doubt simpler, perhaps more performative, certainly more immanent, this paradoxical meta-murder opens up as many possibilities as it closes down.

Why would the world disappear now? Firstly, of course, because it is understood here as a human conceptual entity and not something essentialised with a value of its own. Words are never in a non-equivocal relationship with things. Things, for that matter, probably do not exist independently of their relationship with each other. What meaning could the absoluteness of ontology have independently of any symbolic or even organic referential chain? In this sense, the world is indeed threatened as never before.

Wars, genocides, pandemics and even natural catastrophes have been legion throughout history. In a simplistic sense, nothing fundamentally new seems to be taking place today. It might be tempting to believe that in fact ‘globalisation’ allows humankind to ‘create a world’ more than at any other time. We all appear to live, after all, in a shared universe.

However, it is this illusory universality that is contributing to the cosmic collapse – in the philosophically literal sense of these words – which is now under way. By subsuming the dissemination of possible meanings and orientations within a few master-concepts with globalising missions, contemporary society has invented a framework that is as grandiose as it is fragile. It is fragile because any glitch can bring down the whole edifice, whose merit only consisted in an artificial or at the very least superficial unity. The effective implementation of a sweeping economic-symbolic unity, in thrall to the interests of a minority, has made the world extremely brittle. It has lost its plasticity.

It is in this sense that the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic is acting as a trigger for the end of the world. This is certainly not because of its intrinsic scale, which, though terrible, is obviously no match for the ravages of malaria, famine or pollution, to give just a few examples. It is because it represents, in the abrupt appearance of an immense flaw at the very heart of the apparently impregnable citadel of the all-powerful and infinitely ramified West, the gust of wind that causes the collapse of an unstable edifice. Unlike all preceding pandemics – some of which were much more destructive – and unlike the wars and instances of brutal oppression that have left their mark on history, Covid-19 turned up in a world that had reached a level of imagined unity that made it extraordinarily precarious. Paradoxically, globalisation, that is to say the creation of an alienating and reifying uniformity, had made the world mortal. It was not hard to kill it off.

There is no doubt that society will still exist after the epidemic. But as for the world, it will have died. The level of incoherence and internal tension, the suicidal power of the total war waged by a civilisation against the life that supports it, the incommensurability of resources and means, the widespread subjugation of the less ‘adapted’ – these factors no longer permit the necessary cosmogonic cohesion. What will survive will no longer be a world, but rather a global archipelisation of values, expectations, arrangements, desires and accommodations: the radical diffraction of ontology, of ethics and of logic. The direct opposite, therefore, of a world.

Perhaps a transformation will take place, leading to a recognition of the crimes against life and against the future that are currently being committed. Perhaps there will be a major shift – even a revolution – in attitudes, causing us to renounce the behaviours and deadly designs that negate the very essence of life. More probably, there will be a rapid return to the earlier situation and therefore to the ecological meta-crisis, heavily supported by those who think they can still benefit for a while longer. And we must not forget that something worse is equally conceivable: that under pressure of demands made by employers, environmental norms – derisory as they are – could be revised downwards, while the state takes advantage of habits developed during the crisis to establish mass surveillance and restrict individual freedoms. Many other trajectories are possible – first and foremost a tacit and insidious seizing of power by ‘government’, leading to a sad and subdued extinction that would enshrine the management culture already widely in operation.

But whatever the future may be, whatever its political and economic modalities, its social and relational arrangements, it will be apart from the world. It will establish itself on the ruins of a dead world. It can only be built on the ashes of a cosmos destroyed by excess.

If, in essence, this chaos is the negation of a grand order which never actually existed but could be viewed as a potential, let us not forget that in Ancient Greece the concept also represented an abyss or void. In other words: chaos is also a retreat that makes creation possible. There is nothing to suggest that the world could be resuscitated. In any case, is a world necessary?

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*Translated by Emma Mandley / Kennistranslations