Post-pandemic. Ghosts and science fiction

Abstract

In this article we propose to think about the post-pandemic, giving priority to the point of view of science fiction. Here we follow the logic that Silvia Schwarzböck chose to think about the “return of Democracy” in Argentina. Post-dictatorship, says Schwarzböck, is the continuation of dictatorship by other means: those of false life as the only horizon, and since aesthetics is the discipline that thinks rigorously in terms of untruth, it is this discipline that enables the possibility to think about what is unthinkable for philosophy. We resort to the post- as the sign of the untruth (fiction), whose horizon of possible action constructs scenarios according to the rules of fiction. Between the dire future of the apocalypses already happened and the ends of the world that do not end, the syntagm "post-pandemic" speaks of the returning time that returns us to the stasis of a dense present. It also speaks of the need to fictionalize the pandemic (or its minion, the virus) according to the rules of a speculative fable. An aesthetics and a politics.