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Daily Archives: 14 May 2020

Ricco COVID poster

Join the Centre for Ethics for The Ethics of COVID, an interdisciplinary series of online events featuring short video takes on the ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis.

Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude:

The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Brought Us Too Close Together

In this brief talk I discuss how distance is the spacing of the ethical, isolation is the evacuation of that space, loneliness is the deprivation of the self, and solitude is what we need to reclaim as the only means by which an ethical sense of the common might take place. Drawing upon the work of Arendt, Agamben, Blanchot, and Foucault, I proceed to explicate how it is that the COVID-19 pandemic has actually brought us too close together.

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel at 3pm, Friday, May 29. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.

For registration: https://ethics.utoronto.ca/events/667/john-ricco-the-ethics-of-covid/

 

 

 

Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s identification of impotentiality as the most proper power of the human, in this short presentation I argue that in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, resistance to the political-economic logic of neoliberalism and to the bio-political effects of bare life, lies in our potential to not-do and not-be. That is, to live in ways that affirm the in-appropriable singularity of our existence, and a commonality shared by each of us, to be some-one other than simply a productive subject.

I want to express my thanks to Jérôme Lèbre for providing me with the opportunity to participate in his project.

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