Sick of It All

Abstract

In a brief statement concerning our current global crisis, made one month into the Covid-19 pandemic, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler invited us to regard confinement as a gift. Drawing on his own experience of confinement following his incarceration for a series of bank robberies in the late 1970s, Stiegler argued that confinement can provide us with a much needed opportunity for reflection, and to reconnect with practices of traditional care and education—practices everywhere threatened by the destruction of intergenerational connectedness. “Confinement,” he wrote, “can revive the memory and meaning of past ways of life” (2020, 2). His hope appears to have been that in confinement and quarantine we might find the ability to think again, and to rethink what it means to be able to be and to do things together.