Schelling on Extinction:

Pandemic Encore

Schelling ascribes extinction to the predominance of ‘irritability’ which he defines as the “armor of the sensible … the chains in which it is bound” (2004,107), where irritability means the “activity of the formative drive,” and “by which the organic appears to be moved inwardly”(2004, 124). But without sensibility to act upon it, irritability as a force of production or a sheer formative drive lacks a condition of possibility of something like individuation, its possibility of manifesting as an object of nature, say, a body organ. But with the organ, this force “must decrease,” albeit, maintained as an inner force of production so that, consequently, sensibility is prevented from “[passing] directly into the outer movements” (2004,143), which roughly translates into organ termination, death or nothingness. As a ‘negative principle of irritability,’ sensibility must be protected from the positivization of irritability, prodded by external influences (Schelling 2004, 44), where all activities are directed outward in pursuit of objects (or biorhythmic spaces) in which to individuate (or with which to humanize under the inner pressure of our nature). Therefore, with the present circumstances outside, this is tantamount to embracing contamination and infection. 

Here the outside is characterized by a de-individuating force, the pure positive principle of irritability in which sensibility becomes incapable of counter-acting the formative drive to occupy a disposition, a character, or subjectivity, under the circumstances when sensibility can no longer sustain itself as a self-reproducing agent, sexually or socially speaking, which incidentally the terms of the quarantine and of physical distancing protocols practically impose. In short, the preponderance of irritability through outside influences that the pandemic in a sense manifests (the natural derivation of the virus incidentally speaks of what Schelling understood an ‘outside influence’ to be an “an original natural predisposition or germ” [2004, 44], the formative drive of the general species) implies the eventual impossibility of the organism.