2020, year zero. Intimate narratives or vulnerability as a power during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This essay recovers chronicles and essays of philosophers, critics and activists during the first months of 2020, when these texts emerged from the experiences during the quarantines in various cities, as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. We focus on the voices of Nelly Richard, Paul Preciado, Ana Longoni, val flores, Franco Bifo Berardi and Osvaldo Baigorria from what we´ve come to call intimate narratives. These writings avoided futuristic allegories which tried to give answers or imagine preconceived futures (whether catastrophic or revolutionary). On the contrary, in the tense calm of suspended time, these authors approached their questions from a crucial bodily dimension, thus plotting micropolitical strategies. In these texts, the resistances take form as a writing-thought elaborated from the circumstance of the obligatory isolation, although projected towards the life in common, the capabilities of affective care and the memory of collective revolts.