Not to Be Unworthy of the Event: Thinking Through Pandemics with Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

Abstract

This chapter examines the phenomenon of pandemics, particularly COVID-19, and attempts to conceptualize the excesses, surprises, and ruptures which epidemics introduce into the human lifeworld. The notion of a pandemic as an event on the personal and social levels requires a twofold investigation, and this chapter uses Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to look at the event structure of the body, and Deleuze’s philosophy to think about the event structure of the socio-political world. The event as it unfolds in the body attunes us to the anonymity and generality of the body, its contingency, and the excess of its biological processes beyond human control—an awareness that induces vertigo, nausea, and a pervasive anxiety. The chapter ends with a reflection on what kind of ethics is implied in the COVID-19 pandemic and how we can be changed when we take the moral step and decide “not to be unworthy of what happens to us” (Deleuze G, Logic of sense. Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2004, 174).