Viral Entanglements:

Pandemic, Planetarity and New Materialist Response

Abstract

This paper seeks to investigate the current pandemic from a New Materialist perspective. New materialist philosophy through its radical understanding of agency and subjectivity provides the tools to grapple with the viral entity without placing it within the anthropocentric frame. At the same time, New Materialism can help understand the thick mesh of intra-action between the human and the non-human. The paper will study how the human body and the viral entity each and how such a relationship calls for an ethics of responsibility. Through a close reading of New Materialist philosophers like Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Rosi Bradoti and through the employment of their ideas such as intra-action, agential realism and operator, the paper attempts to reach at an understanding of the pandemic which is accommodative by nature. The paper also provides a planetary understanding of health and illness and argues for a "more than human" approach to health care and medical knowledge. The paper derives perspectives from Spinoza’s philosophy to understand the cellular interactions between the human cell and the viral entity.