Our New Fragility: Pandemic, Ethics, and the “Biomedical Others”

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to the concept of fragility as a constitutive structure of the contemporary subject of the pandemic period. COVID-19 has once again actualized the problems of modern philosophy: the boundaries between human and animal, nature and culture, “self” and “alien”. Based on Levinasian phenomenological ethics, I propose the concept of bioethics as the embodied science of “biomedical Others” — people whose experience cannot be normalized and inscribed in the intersubjective structure of the life world of healthy individuals. The negative consequences of coronavirus for psychophysical health show that during a pandemic every person can become different — by contracting an infection or interrupting habitual social ties due to self-isolation. This proves the work of destructive plasticity — a transformation of the subject in which she becomes radically different, examples of which can be considered not only with the brain injuries or neurodegenerative diseases but also with the consequences of coronavirus. The transformed subject is such a “biomedical Other”, she needs an empathic and hospitable bio-ethics based on an expanded understanding of the boundaries of “self” and “other”. This subject represents the “grounding” of contingency, which has become an important concept of recent philosophy. A brief outline of bio-ethics illustrates an attempt to “phenomenologize” contingency, linking it with the anthropological possibility of plastic transformation, which can have both creative and destructive dimensions. Bioethics works with contingency, without turning it into a metaphysical concept and without trying to fit it into the framework of biomedically drawn normativity. Immune hospitality provides a framework for the acceptance of “biomedical Others” as the realization of the diversity of the forms of human embodiment.