Il virus dello straniamento : Le cornici discorsive del Covid-19

In this chapter the author argues that in order to make sense sociologically of the global response to the pandemic of Covid-19 it is less important to find a meaning to what is happening than to adopt the main meta-frame of estrangement: by doing so, it might be possible to consider the present situation not in its ability to provide us with meanings, but in its ability to keep these meanings alive. If this is to be a first meta-theoretical reflection on the pandemic in progress, then it must focus on the frames of coronavirus in themselves, and not on the interpretations they can refer to. The article tries to explore some of these frames: that of “risk and blame”, that of “invisibility and exclusion”, and that of “(im)mobility and acceleration”. These frames are to be considered as preliminary fragments of a “viral discourse”, and they are all framed within the “frame of frames”, that of estrangement and cognitive displacement.