A pandemic, then, links all the people through the potentials of infection and recovery, suffering and hope, immunity and fatality. The “demos” is all the people despite the legal barriers that seek to separate them. Pandemic is etymologically pandemos, all the people, or perhaps more precisely, the people everywhere, or something that spreads over or through the people. Whether or not one is living a livable life is not only a private existential question, but an urgent economic one, incited by the life-and-death consequences of social inequality: Are there health services and shelters and clean enough water for all those who should have an equal share of this world? The question is made more urgent by conditions of heightened economic precarity during the pandemic, exposing as well the ongoing climate catastrophe for the threat to livable life that it is. But all these were already imperiled by climate change.

Within these pandemic times, air, water, shelter, clothing and access to health care are sites of individual and collective anxiety. Who now could deny that to be a body at all is to be bound up with other living creatures, with surfaces, and the elements, including the air that belongs to no one and everyone? This sense of the interdependency of the world, strengthened by a common immunological predicament, challenges the notion of ourselves as isolated individuals encased in discrete bodies, bound by established borders.

Rigid notion definition