It is impossible to contemplate the shape of late modern history — in Africa or elsewhere — without the polymorphous presence of HIV/ AIDS, the signal pandemic of the global here and now. In retrospect, the timing of its onset was uncanny: the disease appeared like a memento mori in a world high on the hype of Reaganomics, deregulation, and the end of the Cold War. In its wake, even careful observers made medieval associations: “AIDS,� wrote Susan Sontag (1989: 122), “reinstates something like a premodern experience of illness,� a throwback to an era when sickness was, by its nature, immutable, mysterious, and fatal. Such reactions make plain how the genesis of the pandemic affected our very sense of history, imposing a chronotope of its own, a distinctly unmodern sense of fate unfolding, of implacable destiny. By unsettling scientific certainties, AIDS also prefigured an ironic, postmodern future. As Sontag intuited, it marked an epochal shift, not merely in the almost omnipotent status of medical knowledge and its sanitized language of suffering, nor even in the relationship with death, so long banished from the concerns of those preoccupied with life and their seemingly limitless capacity to control it. AIDS also casts a premodern pall over the emancipated pleasures, the amoral, free-wheeling desires that animated advanced consumer societies. And, as is often the case when Western self-images of reasoned control face homegrown disruption, the disease was deflected onto Africa as primal other, Africa as an icon of dangerous desire, Africa as the projection of a self never fully tamable.

In more ways than one, then, AIDS represented the return of the repressed, the suppressed, the oppressed. Soon overwhelming the received limits of virology and immunology — indeed, of the restricted lexicon of bioscience sui generis — it set off an avalanche of mythmaking. There have been those in the tradition of Nietzsche (1910: 77) who insist that modernity has banished such mythmaking, that it has condemned us to pain without meaning. In our day, says Jean-Luc Nancy (1997: 149), suffering is “no longer sacrificial.� Our bodies are broken and repaired, but “there is nothing to say.� There certainly has not been a shortage of things to say about AIDS. On the contrary, AIDS has sparked a veritable plague of images: what Paula A. Treichler (1988) memorably termed an “epidemic of signification.� Striking the unstable landscape of the late twentieth century like a “lightening bolt� (Nancy 1997: 146), it cut a swath at once awesome and absolute, marking out the path of economic and environmental changes that sped the evolution and transmission of new viruses across and within species (Davis 2005: 55). In the process, it signaled emerging biopolitical insecurities: unrecognizable aliens capable of disrupting existing immunities, penetrating once-secure boundaries at a time of deregulated exchange. In the West, the disease prefigured a novel order of post – Cold War terrors: of protean, deterritorialized invaders who hijack our defenses and threaten to coexist with us in a deadly symbiosis that sets off rapidly mutating, mimetic forms of violence and counterviolence. In short, it is a process that W. J. T. Mitchell (forthcoming) has called the “cloning of terror.�

As all this suggests, AIDS has been rewriting the global geopolitical coordinates within which we think and act. We may lack the nerve or imagination to theorize it adequately, but it has certainly been theorizing us for quite a while. “It doesn’t matter if you are HIV-positive or negative,� insists South Africa activist Adam Levin (2004: 226), “the world has AIDS. And if you give a shit about the world, you have it too.� The threatening mutability of the disease challenges efforts to impose stable categories of recognition and exclusion in an already disrupted late-modern geography. The pandemic is savagely cosmopolitan, making blatant the existence of dynamic, translocal intimacies across received lines of segregation, difference, and propriety. But it has also revived old specters, marking out pathologized publics and crystallizing latent contradictions and anxieties. And, in so doing, it has exacerbated existing economic and moral divides on an ever more planetary scale. Coming as it did at the time of a radical restructuring of the axes of a bipolar world, of the liberal-democratic nation-state and the workings of capitalism itself, the disease served as both a sign and a vector of a global order-in-formation — and with it, a new sense of the nature and possibilities of the political.