“Life with the Virus.” A Phenomenology of Infectious Sociality

Abstract

The article conceptualizes the specifics of experiencing time and reality under the COVID-19 pandemic. Its stakes are double: first, critique of objectivist evidences and the inertia of analogizing interpretations of events, in order to find a gaze toward the intercorporeal constitution of an unprecedented infectious sociality; second, revealing the possibilities of becoming Other not under the pressure of life circumstances, but in the borderline situation of anticipating the possibility of pandemic mass death. This is a characteristic social form of death. In the light of the “rendezvous at death,” the ethical radicalization of life is a distinctive phenomenon of everyday life. It reveals life as risk and duty, it makes everyone be committed to choices, it makes societies discover the stakes of generative time (the time of simultaneous experiencing the non-simultaneity of lives) where the possibilities of caring for one another, but also of resistances against one another, are funded.

Keywords

• covid-19
• infectious sociality
• intercorporeality
• time interval
• social order
• becoming other