Coronavirus and social symptoms from the lens of literature and philosophy

Abstract

The article reads the coronavirus pandemic as a real biological event that, once it breaks into everyday life, exposes and intensifies a set of social symptoms: fear, suspicion, narcissistic reactions, and ideological ways of making sense of catastrophe. By bringing literature and philosophy into dialogue, the author mobilizes narrative motifs – from Chekhov’s sneeze to Bolaño’s allegory and García Márquez’s immovable “cow” – to show how an apparently minor occurrence can disrupt the logical order of life and reveal the fragility of modern securities. In a Hegelian key, the coronavirus appears as a universal fact that links actions across the planet and resists being reduced to the particular narratives through which we attempt to domesticate it. At the same time, the text highlights the biopolitical dimension of the event: the state management of bodies, the reconfiguration of freedoms, and the rise of biological security as a public matter. Against the temptation to turn the pandemic into propaganda or ideological comfort, the essay calls for critical attention to social reactions and frames as “heroes” those who suffer, resist, and generate immunity, presenting pain and survival as processes that acquire universal significance in the species’ historical experience.