| dc.description.abstract | The abrupt break the COVID-19 made on a planetary scope has forced a number of adaptations of collective life, while its mutating nature and enormous ability to spread brought a deterrent effect due to apparent infection risk. Besides an impulse to purify the society from danger that was born in the public, COVID-19 warned that the politics of collective life evolve on level on material living when encountering such a mysterious non-human entity. Our principal intention in this paper follows this puzzle and aims to reflect upon the intrusion of the COVID-19 based on 20 interviews
conducted with young professionals in Belgrade, Serbia. An aim is to discern how it caused semiotic and interpretative confusion, eventually provoking distinct alternations of everyday spaces that now succumbed to a novel hygiene regime. Our understanding follows recent ontological turns that accentuated an intricate continuum of transactions that humans regularly practice through a coexistence with things, as well as fragile semiotic operations and requires focusing on a horizon where this agential interplay occurs. While we underscore ethical motives of actors to pursue official measures against the spread of the virus as significant, we also argue that politics have to be understood as an evaluative and speculative process. Encounter with the COVID-19, namely, has included not only delimiting of an “enemy” that lead to purifying practices, but also adaptation to uncertain, mutating and acting traits of ‘other’. In this way, we seek to turn towards more engaged and practical definition of politics, as situated, materializied endeavor, centered around distribution of agential properties: rights, identities and substances. | sr |
