Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1 Connecting Modernities: A Global Update
- Part I Modernity as We Know It: Narratives of Modernity across the Disciplines
- Part II Modernity under Fire: Critiques, Challenges, and Revisions
- Part III In the Shadow of the Pandemic
- Part IV Imagining New Global Frameworks: Democracy and Modernity-to-Come
- Index
12 - Human Identity and COVID-19: Space and Time in the Post-modern Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1 Connecting Modernities: A Global Update
- Part I Modernity as We Know It: Narratives of Modernity across the Disciplines
- Part II Modernity under Fire: Critiques, Challenges, and Revisions
- Part III In the Shadow of the Pandemic
- Part IV Imagining New Global Frameworks: Democracy and Modernity-to-Come
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter bases itself on the premise that the society that will emerge from this COVID-19 health crisis will inevitably differ from the current one. People have become more vulnerable, and this sense of vulnerability, fragility, and uncertainty has spread throughout society, and is no longer limited to certain social groups. The contemporary idea of security has also collapsed in societies that no longer seem secure, predictable, or under control. This situation of a weakened society is the first paradigm shift, brought forth alongside the notion of identity linked to time, space, and humanity. To that end, we carry out a review of the events which triggered the crisis in Europe and Africa.
Keywords: humanity; identity; modernity; pandemic; COVID-19
Revisiting Time and Space after COVID-19
If space can give individual or collective identity a certain immobility, time obliges it to take into account not only the movement and the change which it supposes, but also and above all the finitude which in particular characterizes life, human or otherwise. Regardless of what I am, here (space), I will not be, forever (time). Identity is therefore projected in time and comes from space, and vice versa. Identity thus expresses itself in two different orders which, like its individual and collective dimensions, are neither separate nor assimilated. On the contrary, transcendence and contingency complement each other and are interdependent.
The transcendent identity emerges from the questioning of the individual's very nature, and his belonging to the natural environment which human consciousness seems to isolate it from. Human beings think of nature as an element that can be controlled through advances and developments in knowledge. The modern individual represents a rupture in historical consciousness, characterized by a desire to complete the reign of all spirituality. However, present times seem yet to acknowledge the return to it in most identity debates.
Having said that, contingent identity is constructed from this awareness and this power to transform nature, and develop culture as its original product. The world therefore appears under the domination of human beings who, being self-permitted to appropriate it, will also seek to dominate fellow humans through the exchange of material possessions, among other things. Social relations are equally present in these economic relationships through collectively shaped and expanded (to some degree) systems of exchanges and transactions.
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- Information
- Global Modernity from Coloniality to PandemicA Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, pp. 277 - 294Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022