The body in the pandemic. Individual and collective

Abstract

The studies of the body acquire an unusual actuality in academic life. Before it was minimized faced the mind and the spirit. In modernity, the body is discovered, explored, investigated, experienced. It is a territory of joy and pleasure, a field for joiussance and enjoyment. The body is mortal and finite, it is a zone of diseases and demise. In multi-disciplines such as bioethics and biopolitics, the body is the object of power and dominant social relations and the distinguishing point between life and death. The body is also the confluence field of the individual and the collective. The classical contrast of individualism and collectivism tends to be resolved with citizenship, a corporal and concrete subject, which concentrates social achievements and expectations. The pandemic weakens the citizenry, and returns us to the most unusual of prepolitics, of human bestiality devoid of freedom and justice, reduced to mere survival. Faced with the harsh and difficult ordeal of the health crisis, we must seek the complete reconstruction of the citizenry, the nodal point of the social, political and individual body.