Desde las ruinas del futuro

The COVID-19 pandemic has rocked humanity with unexpected force: an animal-based virus has forced citizens of much of the globe to stay at home, and the accelerating world of globalization has come to a standstill before their eyes. perplexed by contemporaries. Millions of people have fallen ill and hundreds of thousands have died, while the massive use of masks reminded us daily that the habitability of the planet cannot be taken for granted. So, a century after the Spanish Flu, another infectious virus has acted as a historical agent of the first order. And this unexpected, but not unforeseen, catastrophe now awaits its interpreters. Manuel Arias Maldonado approaches the pandemic as the polysemic phenomenon that it is: collateral effect of socio-natural relations and global risk that hardly fits into the dominant categories; the action of the virus forces democracies to operate in exceptional conditions dominated by uncertainty. But the virus also activates new collective imaginations and reopens the debate about a future that is presented less as a promise than as a threat. Shunning any prophetic temptation, the author defends the ability of old Enlightenment thought to successfully process this sublime event, the cause of which should not be sought in the failure of modernity but in its asymmetric and unfinished character.