In March of this year, in the solitariness of a Rio apartment during lockdown, philosopher Marcia Cavalcante Schuback gave a lecture entitled “On the isolation of the world”, in collaboration with the YouTube channel Bazar do Tempo. What does it mean, Schuback asked, to do philosophical reflection in times of pandemic? And more specifically, what does it mean not only in a certain time, but also in a specific place; a country that knows all too well epidemics of different kinds, be they biotic, social, or political. A country, where ever since the very beginning of the modern era, indigenous people have been killed and exterminated through epidemics. One could pose a related question: How to deal with the historical fact that epidemic contagion is constitutive in the making of Brazil, and that it was so before Brazil was even thought of as “Brazil”? On April 28, president Jair Messias Bolsonaro held an outdoor press hearing … Continue reading at discoversociety.org.
Brazil, Corona and the History of Epidemics
Acampamento Terra Livre, Brasília 2019. Photo by Patricia Lorenzoni.