Philosophical and Aesthetic Reflection on the Pandemic Phenomenon

The article’s problematics is examined in the socio-cultural context. The pandemic phenomenon is considered as a metaphor derived from a pandemic of infectious diseases. The latter is nothing more than a model projected on various social evils. It is in this capacity (not in the viral-infectious one) the pandemic is used in the article. The article broadly interprets the concept of a pandemic as a universal type of general massification of a threatening nature. It is accompanied by fear, aggression, ideological delusions, economic and demographic catastrophes.

Like the biomedical pandemic, its associative counterparts have been repeated with unpredictable regularity in human history. Even today, we can assume that the unforeseen consequences of information and communication technologies in the digital age bear the signs of impending pandemics. In the article, the infectious disease pandemic serves as a matrix model for characterizing an invariant version of other heterogeneous pandemics. The author builds his theoretical judgments on the material of well-known philosophical and cultural sources (L. Wittgenstein, M. Heidegger, M. Bakhtin, L. Vygotsky, S. Averintsev, R. Girard et al.), as well as on the history of art, its species and genre varieties.

Particular attention is paid to the works of art whose authors intentionally give them an ambivalent meaning. A significant role is given to the subtext of the material presented, the importance of which is determined by the goal to realize the main semantic intent of the article. There is an attempt to substantiate the relevance of postmodernism culture to the modern picture of the world, to the highly ambivalent civilizational changes. The article uses the material of extensive artistic practice to trace the manifestations of postmodernism as both a symptom and a mocker of the absurdism of human existence. The final part of the article prognosticates a number of possible post-pandemic changes in various areas of public life.

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