Systemic violence in post-pandemic times

Abstract

The purpose of this text is to analyze how the recent Covid-19 pandemic revealed our fragility as humanity to face a health catastrophe of such magnitudes because we are subordinated to a global system that cannot ensure the necessary conditions for the reproduction of the life, social and natural. In addition, for this system the death has become a business and the nature has been brutally violated and reduced to merchandise, that is, to a mere object. Thus, in this paper I intend to argue in a general way how the system generates a temporality of violence, destruction and death, and why the pandemic has been a phenomenon with biological and social characteristics that should be understood as a manifestation of that temporality. Likewise, I would like to point out that the measures of a biopolitical and technological nature that the system employs as a response, far from attacking the root causes of the crisis, tend to reinforce the commodity form of social relations and the catastrophic temporality inherent in that form. So, we could conclude that are we really facing a “new normality” or is it simply an exacerbated and more evident continuation of the existing political and social order?