The Phenomenology of Contagion
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SYMPOSIUM: COVID-19
The Phenomenology of Contagion Annu Dahiya
Received: 15 May 2020 / Accepted: 17 July 2020 # Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Pty Ltd. 2020
Abstract The lived experience of COVID-19 forcibly returns us to our bodies. This essay uses this (for most, sudden) return to embodiment to consider how our senses, as well as our “sense” of space, have been reoriented by this pandemic. It turns to certain strands within feminist philosophy that have questioned the privileged place vision has been accorded in the history of Western thought, as well as to mid-twentieth century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s aim to rediscover the world of perception by philosophically centring the body, as touchstones to put forth a phenomenology of contagion. Contagion makes us confront our phenomenological and embodied experience of tactility. This focus on tactility undermines the philosophical hierarchy of the senses that accords sight as the most “noble” of the senses in Western canonical thought. While COVID-19 results in us rediscovering our bodies through touch in a moment of fear and panic, this essay considers how this rediscovery may be harnessed for different, possibly more just, futures.
A. Dahiya (*) Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords COVID-19 . Contagion . Feminist philosophy . Lived experience . Phenomenology . Touch
Contagion, n. Contāgiōn-em: A touching, contact, contagion. Con- together + tangĕre to touch. —Oxford English Dictionary (2020)
Contagion: A Topology of Touch During the month of March 2020, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011)—a nine-year-old film—began to top charts on various on-demand streaming services, including WarnerBros, Amazon Prime Video, and iTunes (Sperling 2020). This spike in viewing, in turn, generated articles assessing the scientific accuracy of MEV-1, a fictional recombinant paramyxovirus of pig and bat RNA genomes that causes twenty-six million
Bioethical Inquiry
deaths across the globe (Jaber 2020; Kitz 2020).1 In their analysis of Contagion, Dixon and Jones argue that the film offers us the philosophical tools to theorize space through touch, or “a tactile topology” (Dixon and Jones 2015, 223). Soderbergh centres tactility to convey the threat of contagion. In the film’s first four minutes, the tactile topologies of infected bodies take centre stage. The first scene is a black screen that is permeated with a wet cough in a public place as we hear people speaking in the distance. We shortly learn who is coughing: Gwyneth Paltrow, sitting at a bar in a Chicago airport, enjoying a beer and grazing from a bowl of communal nuts. She already looks unwell, her skin pale and clammy, and her nose slightly red. After ending a phone call with an old flame she had a sexual liaison with just a few hours ago, she hands the bartender her card to pay for her drink. This cues the film’s soundtrack, ushering in a high-pitched suspense-inducing siren. As soon as the bartender swipes Paltrow’s card and uses the touchscreen to finaliz
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