There Is No Society? Individuals and Community in Pandemic Times

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. Questions of solitude, common experience, culture and critical discourse are discussed by leading theorists of capitalist affect and experience. How can we deal with the paradoxical mix of solitude and imposed togetherness that the pandemic entails? How can culture and critical discourse even continue when public space has been shut down upon the advice of epidemiologists? How do we grasp the new political constellations arising today? Such are the questions tackled by the authors of this anthology, based on the discussion program of the Paranoia TV edition of the steirischer herbst '20 festival.