Fetishism and Pandemic: A Critical Reading of the Theories on the Post-COVID Era

The FPCOVID project aspires to offer an applied approach of the key concept of fetishism by providing an analysis of the theories on the post-pandemic era from a negative, dialectical and thus critical perspective. Namely, it aims to examine in a critical epistemological fashion how public discourse is constructed in the predictive theorisations about the after-coronavirus world. Fetishism, as a process that is produced and reproduced by us through our daily doing, is related to contradictions and to the fact that concepts and forms do not exhaust their meaning in their current content. In critical theory’s terms, negative dialectics attempts to make us aware of the human content that lies hidden inside fetish-forms such as the state, the bourgeois form of democracy, value as money or the trinity formula (capital, rent, wage), or even more particular fetishised forms regarding human/social relations such as reified conceptions of gender and sexuality (gender oppositionality, forms of sexism). Within this framework, a sample of books which was written by influential people and have already attracted public and media attention are examined in order to investigate if the theories presented in them are trapped in a fetishized understanding of the current social forms. FPCOVID contends that a fetishised theorisation of the post-pandemic society may very well set a rather insuperable set of limits regarding the potential of shaping a fairer and more equal world. On this account, the project argues that a negative and open critical thinking has a specific meaning and purpose, which is to understand the non-apparent, hidden character of social fetishised forms; hence, to denaturalize and thus defetishize them.

DETAILED INFORMATION

  • LOGO: FPCOVID
  • PROJECT LEADER: National Centre for Social Research
  • BUDGET: 68.000,00 €
  • FUNDING CATEGORY: Funded
  • FUNDING AGENCY: Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI)
  • SCIENTIFIC COORDINATOR: Vangelis Liotzis
  • ΙΝΣΤΙΤΟΥΤΟ: IKE
  • YEAR START: 10/2022
  • DURATION IN MONTHS: 14
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