In the Name of the Virus. Intellectuals and the Pandemic (original) (raw)
Related papers
David G. Borges (2021) Coronavirus Quarrel: The Debate between Intellectuals in the Media and the Academy about Post-Pandemic Society, World Futures, 77:6, 418-451, 2021
During the SARS-CoV-2 (or Covid-19) pandemic that has plagued the world in recent months, several renowned intellectuals have spoken in academic publications and the media about the risks and expectations brought by the post-pandemic scenario, sometimes with an ethical or phenomenologicalexistential approach, and sometimes with a more political focus. The aim of this article is to synthesize and analyze the different positions expressed by the authors mentioned and to present some similar reflections made by Portuguese-speaking authors (from Portugal and Brazil), as well as to propose an alternative evaluation based on the critique of value and the works of Marx.
12 THESES AGAINST THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL PANDEMIC
Utopia rossa, 2020
The following points are an initial assessment of the situation caused by the pandemic. These considerations are as narrow as possible and will be followed by more detailed and documented action. 1) The pandemic of the new coronavirus is causing a very serious world social crisis with completely new features. Very quickly and in all continents the daily life of many hundreds of millions of people is being disrupted, and the process continues. This is a total social fact, involving all dimensions of social life. One way to describe the situation is that social relationships seem to be suspended, frozen. In other historical situations, a total crisis of social relations is the product of war or revolution or economic collapse. In this case, causality is reversed, because the detonator appears to be something external to social relations. But this is not so: the virus is a natural agent, but the pandemic is a social product. 2) The spectacularization of the pandemic is decisive in shaping its mass perception, of which the compression of individual and social space-time is an essential aspect. Beyond any doubt, this has the effect of focusing attention on the current emergency and individual survival while neglecting the pre-existing causes of the pandemic and feeding the idea that "we all are in the same boat", creating an atmosphere of patriotic union. However, the self-defence reaction to the spectacularization, which, among leftists, tends to be to minimize the health risk, was completely wrong and in a few days became intolerably irresponsible and politically suicidal. The pandemic is a real fact and its risks are very real. It is not the so-called "Spanish flu" but, equally certainly, it is not "a flu like others". 3) The pandemic was not an unlikely or unpredictable event, which could fall into the category of the "black swan". It had been announced by other important epidemics ("avian", "swine", Mers, only to indicate epidemics known to the general public) and it is at least since the early nineties of the last century that specialists have acknowledged the emergence of new diseases and the re-emergence of others that were considered confined. The lethality rate of the new coronavirus is undoubtedly much lower than can be inferred from the ratio between clinically proven cases and declared deaths, because the infected are much more numerous: I do not know how much, but I would not be surprised if they were about ten times more than the official cases. However, there is also no doubt that the lethality of the coronavirus is much higher than that of a normal seasonal flu (whose direct and indirect lethality is 0.1%) and that the deaths as a result of the pandemic are much more numerous than those declared: those who live in Bergamo realize it easily, just by talking to friends and acquaintances. For an easily transmissible virus, a lethality of 2% is extremely dangerous (out of a million infected implies 20 thousand deaths); but on large numbers even a lethality of 0.5% can produce many thousands of fatalities and an excess of mortality, as it's happening (the value indicated is only an example; but it is possible that it is close to the real lethality of the coronavirus). It is clear that the actual lethality of an epidemic-all the more so when a vaccine is missing-also depends on the timeliness, extent and consistency of the containment measures taken. It must also be clear that this pandemic is not merely a natural phenomenon but that it is the product of the interaction between human activity and the environment; and that the tragedy could have been avoided by timely and well-targeted measures and by preparing the material means to deal with an emergency. The crux of the matter is that all major changes in society bring about ecological changes which, in turn, lead to the emergence and re-emergence of diseases. Viruses evolve with society and changes
The Dignity of Human Nature, the Tensions of the Pandemic and the Post-Pandemic Challenges
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022
The Pandemic threat made the social body sick, even before the COVID-19 virus attacked the individual' s health. When Romania started the lockdown in March 2020, interpersonal relationships began to strain, and extreme behaviours appeared, never seen before. It could see the gradual escalation of social tensions due to the limitation of a large part of fundamental rights. The State' s decisions to prevent Pandemic is seen as an abusive interference on the Churches' internal activity. The rites and rituals of the Orthodox Church, the religious denomination with the most significant number of believers in Romania, were either forbidden or distorted by the uninspired intervention of public authorities. Gradually, tensions between the State and the Church intensified to the point where public accusations against the State began to appear, in the public speech of the bishops and especially of Patriarch Daniel, the Romanian' s spiritual leader Orthodox Church. Do the State and its intervention in the activity of the Church affect the dignity of the human being? Does Religion' s resistance to the social tension caused by the Pandemic express a high degree of resilience? Are the pressures between State and Church profound, or did the Pandemic superficially generate them? How will religious life in Romania be affected after the Pandemic? What will be the post-pandemic challenges that spiritual life has to face? We will study official institutional documents, press comments, and specialists' opinions expressed in the literature to answer these complicated questions. We will also try to assess, based on statistical information, whether the phenomenon of secularisation has been accelerated or diminished during the Pandemic restrictions. Our approach' s limitations are that the Pandemic is an evolving process, and the conclusions still cannot be clear and convincing. However, we will try to predict the evolution of religious life in the post-pandemic period. … The Tensions of the Pandemic and the Post-Pandemic Challenges 569 Our analysis will fall within the interdisciplinary field of sociology of religion, social sciences, legal sciences and contemporary history.
Editor's Introduction - Pandemic Politics and Phenomenology
Puncta Special Issue, 2022
I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.-bell hooks, "Theory as Liberatory Practice" 1 I. MOTIVATIONS AND CONCERNS As the lived realities of the COVID-19 pandemic set in, academics in the humanities and social sciences quickly began interpreting and making sense of this period of transition, uncertainty, and cascading crises (Baraitser and Salisbury 2020; Bambra, Lynch, and Smith 2021; Bratton 2021). However, since the very early days of the pandemic, some commentators sought, and indeed continue to seek, pathways to our so-called "normal" pre-pandemic lives. Much of this commentary has failed to acknowledge the burden of the pre-pandemic status quo for many marginalized people, as well as foreclosing space
Life in a Pandemic: Some Reflections from The Plague (1947) and the COVID-19 Pandemic
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, 2022
Human existence is a continual struggle against various kinds of calamities including infectious diseases like the COVID-19 virus that threatens the vulnerability of human life. It has affected humanity throughout the globe who are either hungry due to financial crisis or hospitalized or even killed because of the virus infections. This enduring threat continues to persist as long as the holding sway of the coronavirus remains unresolved. It is no accident that the pandemic of the century mirrors The Plague (1947) of Albert Camus in which both catastrophic events challenged the social order and the vulnerability of human life. Although the health crisis exists in a different period in the history of mankind, nevertheless, the existential crisis it has created has no different. This paper aims to (1) highlight some of the similar events in both pandemics and (2) argue that the pandemic can be an avenue for religious introspection.
V. 13, n. 02, 2021
The circulation of the SARS-COV-2 virus has generated a whole range of economic, social, health and securitarian effects on the planetary population, the consequences of which are not only reduced to the containment of mass contagion, but have had an impact on the daily lives of humans. As a result of the biopolitical strategies implemented by different States, the biological life of human beings is currently governed by other means justified in order to maintain health or prevent death from COVID-19 disease. The essay main goal is to analyze this event through concepts proposed and developed by Michel Foucault concerning biopower and biopolitics. These concepts can criticize the power over life exercised by both States and international organizations seeking to regulate the effects of the virus and disease. Also, through the framework of biopolitics, we can show the characteristic event of the 21st century: the transition from epidemics and endemics to pandemics. What this essay is trying to show is the extreme biologization of the lives of humans who cannot delinquete from that identity, on which it operates a whole series of biopolitical strategies to control it.
Philosophical Practice, Vol 15.2-15.3, 2020
This article aims to describe phenomenologically a most recent practical philosophical experience, which is still going on, as – at the moment (April 2020) – is continuing the pandemic of a new strain of the coronavirus disease named Covid-19. A health and social crisis of vast complexity, able to upset our lives and our beliefs, therefore so deeply significant to make us share a few reflections on our conditions as human beings, and the conditions of the world we live in. Moreover, despite its being a work in progress, this philosophical conversation may allow us to trace a sort of orienteering pathway which can be helpful during this extra-ordinary experience, as well as a powerful remedy against our malaise. An experience which is, spatially and temporally, both local and global, and brings out questions and matters that for us as human beings are equally actual and eternal.
Thinking and writing in the time of pandemic COVID-19
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2020
Thinking and writing in the time of pandemic COVID-19 When we presented the early 2020 issue of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, no one comprehended what the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, in Wuhan province, China, would mean to the world, to Europe, to any country or any single person in the weeks to come. A couple of months later, life as we knew it fundamentally changed. The mantras of today are 'stay at home, stay safe' and 'social distancing'. Not even the most critical mind working on surveillanceand on what George Orwell grasped in his '1984' novelwould have imagined that almost all over the world, nation states ban individual free movement and the gathering of people, while borders are closed and aeroplanes are grounded. Normal social life and work has come to a halt. It seems the policing of populations might be the 'only' way to stop the deadly virus spreading further-or at least slow it down to a pace our medical systems can handle. Ulrich Beck's 'risk society' appears to be taking on new forms in current times, while Simmel's 'psychology of the city dweller' also seems to take on novel meaning. The effects of the pandemic on social inequality, urban life, citizenship, migration, and core-periphery relations are already becoming visible, but will be only fully comprehensible in due course. What we have to face up to is unprecedented as far as contemporary generations are concerned, and will leave heavy marks, stigma, and perhaps trauma for those who survive the virus (but also for the lucky ones who are not being physically infected). There is a lot to say on the neo-nationalisation of security regimes we see right now, as well as on systematic failures of national and international politics in securing public health systems, which now renders visible the horrific scale of death counting. Neoliberal capitalism has ignored what society means, and now leaves it to the kinder people in society to fill the care gaps that are man-and system-made. The disaster is televised, and in the daily news, we increasingly see worn out faces of nurses, doctors, and of all involved with keeping alive the livelihood in our neighbourhoods, cities and across the globe. Foremost, the rising
Experiencing the Covid-19 Outbreak Socially: On Some Recent Philosophical Contributions
Phronimon, 2020
The coronavirus outbreak is currently scrutinised by professional philosophers from different traditions and geographical areas. By focusing on several contributions from European academic philosophers, this article assesses whether such philosophical works manifest and reproduce, consciously or unconsciously, neocolonial and Eurocentric understandings of the Covid-19 pandemic. Particular attention will be given to Agamben's and Žižek's interpretations to show the role played in their analysis by reductionist and regressive constructions of the social world. I will then draw on several contributions from African and Africana philosophers (Gqola, Asante, More, West and Outlaw), to set up a theoretical space in which the social experiencing of the coronavirus outbreak, as well as the self-understanding of academic philosophers, could be positively reconceptualised. This act of resignification has its aim in promoting adequate forms of institutional analysis and professional engagement, and it points to the emancipatory task philosophy embodies in the global South.