Overview

A refreshing approach to the dominance of technology in our contemporary lives, The Digital Pandemic, translated from Portuguese, poses fundamental questions about love, fear, connectedness, proximity, imagination and consciousness. Arguing that the pandemic has ushered in a civilizational digital shock, João Pedro Cachopo charts new channels of relatedness and communication between people through digital technologies for the foreseeable future. The transformation of human experience that began in 2020 creates a break in our sociality that Cachopo pinpoints through key themes of love, travel, study, community and art. In contrast to the growing philosophical literature on the pandemic, this bold theoretical work does not prophesy the fall of capitalism or the end of personal freedom and relationships. Instead, this book carefully investigates the advanced technology that is increasingly inextricable from our lives, using an alternative approach that avoids pessimism, while remaining alert to the risks and threats of the digital age. It opens up the possibility of fostering global solidarity and consciousness beyond physical borders in the 21st century.

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9781350284289

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A most learned survey of the most up to date theorists of the Pandemic and of the prevalent themes: globalization, inequality, bio-politics, digital technology and disaster capitalism. But more, a marvelous mediation of spatial and temporal reorientation, of isolation in the home, of the shock of a daily existence for which threads of aesthetic experience sustain the courage to keep going. --Lydia Goehr, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, USA From Agamben to Zizek, anyone interested in a sober, witty, and productive critique of the ways in which the pandemic has influenced our ways of loving, studying, traveling, coexisting, and creating should read this book. --Ana Ilievska, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer, Stanford University, USA Among countless books and articles on the COVID-19 crisis, The Digital Pandemic stands out. It is a compelling meditation on the isolation that we have experienced. Philosophically sophisticated and yet thoroughly readable, the book offers fresh insight into the physical separation and digital proximity of life during this unpredictable pandemic. --Jay David Bolter, Wesley Chair of New Media. Georgia Institute of Technology, USA Though carried by the urgency of our times, this is a short book that manages to slow down. What emerges from its careful reading of the discourses to which the coronavirus crisis gave rise is a medial pharmacology: the pandemic is also digital and it reshapes the conditions of imagination. Cachopo's analysis is philosophy in deferred real-time. --Peter Szendy, Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature, Brown University, USA

A most learned survey of the most up to date theorists of the Pandemic and of the prevalent themes: globalization, inequality, bio-politics, digital technology and disaster capitalism. But more, a marvelous mediation of spatial and temporal reorientation, of isolation in the home, of the shock of a daily existence for which threads of aesthetic experience sustain the courage to keep going. --Lydia Goehr, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, USA From Agamben to Zizek, anyone interested in a sober, witty, and productive critique of the ways in which the pandemic has influenced our ways of loving, studying, traveling, coexisting, and creating should read this book. --Ana Ilievska, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer, Stanford University, USA Among countless books and articles on the COVID-19 crisis, The Digital Pandemic stands out. It is a compelling meditation on the isolation that we have experienced. Philosophically sophisticated and yet thoroughly readable, the book offers fresh insight into the physical separation and digital proximity of life during this unpredictable pandemic. --Jay David Bolter, Wesley Chair of New Media. Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Author Information

João Pedro Cachopo teaches Philosophy of Music at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal. His essays have appeared in journals such as New German Critique and The Opera Quarterly.

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