Sanitary Crisis, Civilizational Crisis

Sanitary Crisis, Civilizational Crisis is the translation of Michel Maffesoli’s Crise sanitaire, crise civilisationnelle. This paper can be taken as his pronouncement on the civilizational crisis that the COVID-19 pandemic acutely reveals. Maffesoli’s text urges one to see beyond secondary causes or dramatic representations of the pandemic as a sanitary crisis, and to consider the primary, and tragic, causes of this event, understood as a crisis that marks the exhaustion of the logic of modernity. Following from a longstanding critique of the decadence of modernity and, by extension, of an “official society” ordered and controlled by an out-of-touch and morbid elite, Maffesoli makes unequivocally clear that this global pandemic is a direct consequence of a globalized progressivist, economicist, and utilitarian civilizational paradigm. The paper takes up the task of reflecting on how relationality, being-together, and being-with, can be thought in our current moment of civilizational crisis.