Ruptures in the American Psyche: Containing Destructive Populism in Perilous Times

fungi living symbiotically with their roots and the rhizomes of other herbaceous plants, they are able to secretly exchange essential nutrients. Mother trees can send their carbon to understory plants, increasing their chances of survival. The metaphor is illuminating. For survival, an invisible and vast network of communication relies on the foreign elements that are the filaments of mycelia for trees, true intermediaries as words are for humans. We almost see the chains of signifiers—even for us, largely foreign, that is, unconscious—that constitute the meaning that we are, and through which, through moments of at-one-ment or (Virginia Woolf’s) moments of being, we are born to ourselves from our prereflexive selves as subjects. This profound ethical sentiment of humanity as deeply immersed in nature and sharing the fate of all living beings is the gift Moss gives us with his book. Of course, the plague is not just the pandemic, but the plague in Igmar Bergman’s movie The Seventh Seal, a figure of death.