For a year now, the obsession with the coronavirus and the restrictions on life seem to have made us one-dimensional beings, lost in a monochrome, odorless world, emptied of the sensitive at the same time as loved presences.
Man dreamed of being "augmented" to increase his faculties tenfold?
Here he is confined, deprived of the simplest use of his senses, ready to sacrifice what makes his humanity: touch, see, smell, listen, taste ...
Read also: Masks, barrier gestures: what new civility after one year of Covid?
Marie de Hennezel, Olivier Rey *, Fabrice Hadjadj, Martin Steffens and Jean-Robert Pitte looked at these five senses so tested during this year, the springs, intimate movements and resonances of which they explore for us.
It appears from reading these thinkers that the hour of the "declaration of war" - this strange war, locked up, distanced, masked ... - was, also, paradoxically, that of a capitulation, of a renunciation, of a 'an abandonment or rather successive abandonment of which we
perhaps
did
not immediately grasp the scope in ourselves.
They show us that it would be futile to believe that the deprivation that we suffer is not, in depth, a mutation.
Because this diffuse but deep suffering, this “wear and tear of the soul”
(Boris Cyrulnik) which has crept into our society, is that of this man of flesh, blood, earth, today as if he has been amputated. even and of the sap of the world, that of this being of relationship whose true nature is today undermined.
TOUCH
>> Marie de Hennezel: "We have sorely missed touch for a year"
TASTE
>> Jean-Robert Pitte: "The complaint of the closed restaurant, a mark of Latin countries"
HEARING
>> Martin Steffens: "The confinement has placed us before the ambiguity of silence"
THE SMELL
>> Fabrice Hadjadj: "We are living the advent of a world without odor"
VIEW
>> Olivier Rey: "The screens now dispense us from moving around the world"
