Pandemic and Desacralization: the New Political Order Founded on the Bare Life

Abstract

This article aims to approach the COVID-19 health crisis through the category of precarity in two senses. On the one hand, in the face of power, a state of exception has been configured as the new form of political handling of the new normality. On the other hand, the loss of public space has meant that community ties have been broken, fostering greater atomisation and loneliness. Both processes were already present in modernity and post-modernity and foster an increasing uprooting of the individual through the loss of the symbolic axes of socialisation, as well as more intense social control. In short, the defining characteristic of the pandemic is the precarity of life.