Прощай, COVID? - стр. 3

In case of COVID-19 pandemic we can say that philosophy probably wins this one, albeit not with a crushing score. Shakira, sitting on self-isolation, studied Plato and graduated from a four-week course of classical Greek philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Slavoj Zizek on self-isolation wrote so many op-eds on the pandemic that it was enough to manage the book.

For humanitarian knowledge, this pandemic means the same as the 1991 Gulf War meant for the media. That was the first live war that had been televising and happening at once. This is the first pandemic, reflected by philosophers and social theorists live, here and now, in an innumerable accessible form. Columns, articles, op-eds, blog posts – if there is feast during the plague, during this we managed to look at the feast of the spirit.

However, the founders of Moscow Philosophical Circle weren’t able to calmly enjoy the accessibility of the fruits of enlightenment and the steady flow of first-class humanitarian texts. Pillars of the English-, French-, German-, Italian-, Hispanic-language humanitarian scenes, did not tear themselves away from desks to produce texts on coronavirus. The Russian language as a tool of thought, having fallen into quarantine, flourished anywhere: in the heated debates of faculties at Zoom, in dialogs on YouTube and fleeting skirmishes on Facebook. But didn’t want to lie down on paper. Iconic figures of modern philosophy seemed to us as if asking: what did you write during the quarantine, besides fifty Facebook comments and three posts? Perhaps it was a conscience. Rather, it was the very itch that Socrates describes in Plato’s “Philebus”.

The book you are holding is the product of this itch. It is unique for several reasons.

First, it gives a panoramic picture of the phenomenon that mankind encountered in the first half of 2020. In terms of the coverage of the plots given to us by the pandemic for observation and evaluation. In terms of the scatter of points of view. And in terms of the focus and sharpness of the advanced estimates and proposed arguments.

Second, it is a multi-party book. If we can call SARS-CoV-2 a thing, then this is its full-fledged democratic parliament. The Russian intellectual space has long been marked by demarcation lines protecting the integrity and hermeticity of intellectual camps. “Goodbye COVID?” behaves as if these lines do not exist. Left, right, liberal, communist, statist, and anarchist points of view and argumentation systems are presented here on an equal footing. And no, neither the world nor this book collapsed from an unexpected or even provocative neighborhood. On the contrary, they became more voluminous and enlightened.