There Is No Society?: Individuals and Community in Pandemic Times

Leading theorists from Silvia Federici to Eva Illouz address the pandemic’s intensification of neoliberal alienation

The success of social distancing as a strategy against the COVID-19 pandemic resonates acutely with neoliberalism’s destruction of the very notion of society itself. This was most famously expressed by Margaret Thatcher’s dictum there is no society, which supplies the title of this anthology–with a question mark added. How can we deal with the paradoxical mix of solitude and common experience that the pandemic entails? How can culture and critical discourse even continue when public space has been shut down upon the advice of epidemiologists? Such are the questions tackled by the authors of this anthology–some of today’s leading theorists of capitalist affect and experience. Contributors include: Fahim Amir, Franco Bifo Berardi, Nika Dubrovsky, Silvia Federici, Srecko Horvat, Eva Illouz, Achille Mbembe & Milo Rau, Robert Pfaller, Renata Salecl, Natascha Strobl and Ece Temelkuran.