John Ricco, Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude: The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Brought Us Too Close Together

The Ethics of COVID
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, May 29, 2020

Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude: The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Brought Us Too Close Together

In this brief talk I discuss how distance is the spacing of the ethical, isolation is the evacuation of that space, loneliness is the deprivation of the self, and solitude is what we need to reclaim as the only means by which an ethical sense of the common might take place. Drawing upon the work of Arendt, Agamben, Blanchot, and Foucault, I proceed to explicate how it is that the COVID-19 pandemic has actually brought us too close together.

John Paul Ricco
University of Toronto
Art History &
Centre for Comparative Literature

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