For much of the past year, Covid has been absent from the news. But lately, the rapid spread of the “Eris” variant, which takes its name from the Greek goddess of discord, has occasioned a new round of anxious coverage as well as a return to pandemic protocols in a few places and calls for more of the same. These responses have generated, in turn, a backlash from those who warn that renewed concern about the virus will once again serve as a Trojan horse for a new global authoritarianism. While such worries about the dystopian potential of pandemic response persist, what is far less visible now than three years ago is their flipside: a paradoxical utopianism that saw in lockdowns a positive vision of the future.

For many on the left, the disruptions of 2020 signaled that another, better world was possible: one in which the cheering on of essential workers heralded the recognition of the centrality of caring labor, and where the shared effort of “stopping the spread” instilled us with a new spirit of collectivism and solidarity. Academic luminaries including Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, and Bruno Latour all hailed the supposed transformative possibilities of Covid lockdowns. From their perspective, the pandemic offered the opportunity for a reckoning with everything from the sins of late capitalism to colonialism, racism, and, inevitably, the climate emergency.

The German-Jewish Marxist mystic Walter Benjamin argued a century ago that “the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe.” It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the shock of Covid and the ensuing lockdowns unleashed a new round of utopian thinking. What’s more, the pandemic landed amid an increasingly apocalyptic turn within critical theory. Precisely because we were “living in the end times,” Žižek proclaimed before the pandemic, “the future will be utopian, or there will be none.”