Voices from Chernobyl meeting. Threat and life. Radiation vs Biosecurity

Last week we held a seminary with a diferent kind of reading: Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich. And we say is a diferent reading because this Nobel Prize wrote a periodistic-novel book; and it is distinct from our main readings. 

Nevertheless, we extracted several interesting ideas, comparing our kind of threats (epidemics, virus, etc.) with a catastrophe of this magnitude as Chernobyl was. Here our report:

Why the author says Chernobyl went beyond the Holocaust or Kolyma? Because these horrors are linked to the war (which we already know what happens there), and history (wars give us History). Chernobyl breaks this because it is not linked to war or History: it is something unexpected (although the USSR linked him to war and managed it military). Chernobyl catastrophe and war were linked.

-The Enigma of Chernobyl is that a new regime of life was brought, and all the stories in the book talk about the new limits for life and the danger to life. Chernobyl is a cosmic catastrophe, the first major global catastrophe. It is the origin of the History of threats. Chernobyl expect us to new regimes of the living: every child born has a unique and different deformity: life takes on a varied and multiple topology - the threat to life is also re-defined, therefore Chernobyl opens a new stage (perhaps the 4/5 diagram not said by Deleuze) where not only sees life in new ways, but also its control and their (bio) surveillance.

• How is the threat that Chernobyl brings?
• Is the same catastrophe that threat? The first would aim to past and second to the future.
• Preparedness / Syndromic Observation (active surveillance by lay-people, and circulation of this knowledge) is introduced.
• The radiation is more "invisible" than viruses. There is an ongoing effort to visualize the virus, in contrast to radiation, that is much more difficult to see (we only have Geiger counters and maps of clouds with wind colors).
• Scales are articulated: The structure of life is altered.

-The blast reactor event works as scenario (in our current conception):  future and past are undifferentated, the living and the dead are entangled and they cannot be separated; equally to the far and the near (distant-close ...) are merged, etc.

Photo Credit: Ben Adlard.