Authors
Svetlana Hristova
Publication date
2023
Journal
Divinatio
Issue
51
Pages
105-130
Publisher
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société (Sofia)
Description
Globalization, spelled out as the triumph of neoliberalism and global market economy in the 1980s, with its advent in 1990s entered the phase of the great uncertainty (Robertson), gradually turning our life into confluence of crises (Chomsky). Today’s post-pandemic new normal is analyzed as a structural effect of the world risk society (Beck). It involves an emerging safety-and-security-lead culture, dominated by the ethos of avoiding risks and seeking for sustainability in all spheres of human life; growing medicalization, enabled by further digitalization, techno-medical quantification and totalizing observation of all aspects of human existence, leading to new unions between political power, medical expertise, and technology – safetycracy (Agamben). Analyzing COVID-19 as a dress rehearsal of risk society, the paper discusses three major effects of the pandemics as systematic consequences of the process of globali …