METAPHYSICAL VIRALITY

Abstract

Self-replication, as a deep functioning of any viral mechanism, constitutes an omnipresent scenario that outlines the literary representations of most of José Saramago's texts. In a ludic attitude preferred by the postmodern deconstruction and its technologized visions specific to post humanism, immortality becomes possible in the novel Death with Interruption only on the level of somatic indetermination. To alternate this experience with death and death again with the horizon of the immortality, in a continuous process of epidemic irruption, would be a good pretext for reflection on our finitude and the possible eternalization of the body threatened by metaphysical suspension. The writer proposes new transcendental scenarios from these chiasms between death and immortality to question the regularizing potential of being through death in both ontological, metaphysical, social, and economic terms. Our aim is to read this novel as a metaphysical dialogue between the virality of being and the virality of not being, two epidemic streams sticking one to the other through the current technological possibilities alluded in this process of reaching a possible eternity of the body, but not free from suffering and degradation