The Phenomenology of the Coronavirus and the Uncanny World of the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic is not just a physical, biological or medical event, it is also an event that has radically changed our experience of and embodied existence in the world. Phenomenologists already have contributed to the understanding of the radical change of our lived world brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic that has come with a disruption and breakdown of our life as we previously knew it. However, little attention has been paid to how the experience of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) itself, that is, the meaning it has for us and its appearance to us in our daily life, have contributed to the radical change. Without denying the variability of the pandemic experience and the importance of a broader context that shapes our experience of the pandemic, I want to argue that the invisibility of the virus, and what I will call the threefold displacement of its appearance, lets it become indirectly visible everywhere and every time we carry out our daily habitual actions and interactions. The virus does not just infect our bodies, its meaning infects the meaning of our embodied existence in the world, radically changing our everyday practical life.