재난 시대의 인문학을 생각하며

Abstract

This paper suggests that the current outbreak of coronavirus be approached both as a singular event with its own catastrophic characteristics and as one of many disasters that have constantly plagued the modern world. To define the corona pandemic as a disaster is, by definition, to say that it is absolutely unpredictable precisely because the way our modern knowledge, culture, and civilization have been structured to systematically blind us to the impact and consequences of the disaster. A disaster, in other words, demands that we should engage with our past and present from a radically new perspective that defies the conventional thoughts available prior to the disaster. The unpredictability of the disaster, thus, leads us to the invention of new concepts and politics that necessarily problematizes the vulnerability of our community. However, given that the infodemic that accompanies the corona pandemic has been fueled by economic as well as political attempts to directly profit from the large-scale crisis and to exploit the affective fluctuations, what is urgent is a genuinely collective thought that explores the conditions of possibility for the security of the whole community. In other words, the search for the collective right/ responsibility for security cannot be done within the confines of narrowly national, commercial, parochial interest. If everyone is vulnerable to the disaster, then whatever politics emerging from the disaster should be based upon the totality of community. And the invention of the forms and practices of common security is the task of Humanities in the age of disaster.