The Will Not to Know

Abstract

COVID-19 has been gradually fading from the headlines since summer’s end, and other news has moved into the lead. However, the pandemic has not gone away, nor have expectations of a second wave. Famous philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek refers to this tendency as “the will not to know” in opposition to the title of Michel Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know. Behind this phenomenon Žižek sees a tripartite structure at work along the lines of Freudian dream-work: there is “triangulation” between latent dream-thought, manifest dream-content, and the unconscious wish. The coronavirus itself corresponds to the “manifest dream text,” the focal point of our media, and is what we all talk (and dream) about. It is not merely an actual phenomenon, but also the object of fantasized connections, of dreams and fears. For that reason Žižek regards the switch to other news as fake, while the pandemic remains the true Master-Signifier. This Master-Signifier is overdetermined by a whole series of interconnected real-life facts and processes that form its dream-content, consisting not only of the reality of the health crisis, but also of ecological troubles and more. The hypothesis Žižek defends is that this interplay between the COVID-19 pandemic and the social causes that overdetermine it is not the whole story. There is a third level at work here (which corresponds to the true trauma, the unconscious wish of a dream), and this is the ontological catastrophe triggered by the pandemic, the undermining of the coordinates of our basic access to reality, which reaches far beyond a usual “mental crisis.”