Marginal Geographies: the Map and the Time of the Little Viral Globe. (Dialogue Between AB and GdS)

Abstract

Starting from Paul Celan’s Meridian, between geography and rhetoric, a relation between the viral phase of capitalism and the viral pandemic has been established. In the rhetorical area, the meridian echoes the language of medias and official communications that use the term map to help visualise the spreading of Covid-19. This term, for geographers, has a technical meaning of cloth of the world. Namely, it points to something that surrounds and envelops the world with creases and intensity in a temporal register of a crisis irreducible to reticular reason and the contemporary synchronic space (Olsson, 2007). It is the projection of such a «viral mappamundi» that redesigns the content of a current globe. The relation between the two globes – analogous in their nature of hybrid metaphysical whims – is established by a line of margin or crisis that renegotiates the promise of the immunological limits of the current globalisation phase by intersecting two projections and two geographical imaginations (Sloterdijk, 2007). This is the margin, and the marginality, that our geography shows when intersected with plural pandemic temporalities.