HIV Traduction

Towards an Ethics of Tact
Seropositivity: who wants their head?

"For our generation, AIDS is of absolutely no concern," a 20-year-old student, who was reading Hervé Guibert and Guillaume Dustan, told me one day in my office. How should I respond to her? "You should be concerned about it, shouldn't you?" Since the appearance of effective treatments in 1996, AIDS seems to have gradually disappeared in our country, or rather, we have managed to absorb it. That is the way we go about making it disappear in a liberal democracy. We study the science of the disease and the sociology of the epidemic, we get tested from time to time, we make civic commitments as we would do in the case of hunger or sex trafficking, we sometimes even honour as veterans those whose courage and sacrifice enabled us to contain the deadly pandemic. AIDS, which has long been a mystery, has now entered for good into the realms of history and reassuring knowledge. 

Even in gay communities, where both incidence and prevalence rates remain high, HIV is no longer seen as a crisis, but as a chronic disease among others. Thus, talking about one's seropositivity is not much of a discussion. AIDS has become both commonplace and unprecedented. Talking about it falls on deaf ears and creates dissonance, which, in any case, is equivalent to a lack of taste and tact. And AIDS, it must be said, is a real bore. Moreover, politically, we are in the post-AIDS era. The fight for equal rights to marriage and family has taken precedence over the issue of HIV, which was the source of the problem, but which no longer justifies the general mobilization of several years gone by. 

And in any case, why would my student be worried? In our small and slightly well-to-do university town with its word class hospital, anyone having contracted HIV can, in principle, have access to quality care and treatment that not only increase and normalize the chances of survival, but prevent the possibility of transmission. Indeed, access to care is increasingly becoming the norm in the Western world and is spreading astoundingly slowly to the rest of the world as the global strategy of treatment as prevention is established. 

Thus, at the very source of this fight against the epidemic and the trivialization of HIV lies a very simple truth: a person with an undetectable viral load is not contagious. We also know that the risk of transmission is on the other hand at its highest in the period immediately following infection, and this includes the time when the screening test does not yet detect the virus. A partner boasting a negative result dated last week, evidence in hand, can be totally honest but nonetheless misinformed. We must also take into account the large number of people that are unaware of their positive status. We can thus conclude that, if you are sexually active, the most effective way to protect yourself from HIV is to sleep with someone that has it, knows it and is treating it. 

In order to dispute this conclusion, you would have to truly be acting in bad faith. Yet, we agree that this conclusion is not obvious - far from it, in fact. Even after more than thirty years of appeals to reason and of exhortations to stick to the facts and nothing but the facts, here is one which we stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. And because there is always a little shame in denying an obvious fact in a culture grounded in reason, we hide behind weak excuses or else we beg for mercy, citing residual magical thought - “I know it’s silly, but you never know” - as if it were just a little quirk, a little superstition, but fundamentally not harmful. 

Not harmful? My experience is only worth what it is worth, of course, but I have never met an HIV-negative person who wholeheartedly agrees with me when I point out this contradiction to them. I am only entitled to, at most, a slight, embarrassed smile. How should they answer me?: “That’s just a sophism,”?; “You’re exaggerating,”? Or “Try to understand,”? No. There is nothing safer than somebody with HIV. It is a known fact, but one that we cannot accept without forcing ourselves, and from which flows an overwhelming truth: I can touch this body which wishes me no harm.

So how can we rid ourselves of this discomfort, when it is so profound and so fundamental that it is experienced when faced with the body of the other? It might seem an incongruous question, but I think it is one that must be approached with tact. Not that kind of bourgeois tact – with spiritual elegance, ethereal, immaterial, and claimed to be innate so as to refuse its usage by the lower classes, who are too occupied by menial tasks, too stuck in their incorrigible corporality; not that tool of social oppression, cousin of taste, judgement, and distinction. No, I’m talking about another kind of tact, of a tact reincarnated, reincorporated, returned to its original sense of tactility. A tact which permits us to not only consider, in every sense of the word, the body of the other, but to beckon it, to call to it and, if not to love it, then to at least draw pleasure from it, insofar as that is also what it seeks. An ethics of tact could finally bring about a political response to what remains the fundamental, therefore persistent, problem of our modernity: the fear of contact.  

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