We seem to be struggling to take the measure of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its arrival is sudden, its effects uncertain and its long-term consequences still unpredictable. La Vie des Idées brings together a collection of texts on epidemics that explore its multiple facets.
The pandemic that is affecting us is disrupting our habits, our lifestyles, our certainties. It is disrupting our daily activities and suspending, for a time, our plans. It is also making us feel, to varying degrees, our vulnerability. All dimensions of our existence are affected: economic activity is threatened, social relations are configured, cultural life is partly suspended, even leisure activities are affected.
The paradox is that we do not always know what to be afraid of, we do not even know if we should be afraid. The divergences in the political treatment of the epidemic leave doubts hanging, and if the virus has no borders, it is clear that international cooperation is stalling and that governments are struggling to reach an agreement. The prevailing uncertainty fuels fantasies, even triggers wild rumors. Contagion has its imagination, catastrophe its representations – they are often, ultimately, those of our powerlessness or the dilemmas we must face.
On Covid-19, there are many questions, perspectives are fragmented and interpretations are perhaps still hypothetical. The texts that we bring together here echo this complexity, largely unprecedented as it seems today to call into question some of our certainties. We must understand the pandemic, measure what confinement is doing to our lives, evaluate the consequences of an unprecedented global crisis, question the relevance of our intellectual categories to grasp what we were unable to predict.
We are adding to this issue articles published in recent years on epidemics. The questions they raise are varied and complementary: the definition of a health policy to which global threats invite us, the relationships between man and animal that these new viruses lead us to rethink, the moral problems to which the treatment of victims can lead us, or the past failures of vaccination, the difficulties in setting up an international policy due to the lack of adequate solidarity, and the role of contagion in the fall of the most solid Empires. These articles have lost none of their relevance, and they are very topical today.