Illustration of a man in front of a lowered iron curtain in Tunis, Tunisia – Adrian Dascal / Unsplash
EDIT: For these summer holidays, find in “Minute Papillon! »Our audio series to reflect on how the global health crisis has transformed us. For this third part, Peggy Avez, associate and doctor of philosophy, discusses the notion of freedom in the time of the coronavirus
What world have we fallen into with the Covid-19 pandemic? In less than six months, our societies, our freedoms, our links have been disrupted by the coronavirus.
20 minutes podcast offers you a series imagined as a philosophical break. A time to take some distance. Philosophers, sociologists, great witnesses answer the following questions: how is the epidemic redefining our lives? How does it modify our relationship to our body, to that of others? What is boredom, is it a necessary evil?
Table Of Contents
Voluntary renunciation of our freedoms
For this third episode, we are talking about freedom: what is our freedom in the era of the coronavirus? To answer, Peggy Avez, doctor and associate in philosophy, researcher, creator of the site Simone et les philosophes. In his work The reverse side of freedom (Publications of the Sorbonne), she writes in particular that freedom is born and reborn in the face of constraints, obstacles, but that it resists and exists only in contrast.
In this podcast led by Laure Cometti, journalist at 20 minutes, Peggy Avez looks back on the collective acceptance of confinement in France, mid-March, and the voluntary renunciation of our freedoms. When the government no longer manages a state, but the life of the inhabitants, their health, can it be more intrusive, even authoritarian?
“Feeling of arbitrariness”
“In a context of panic, we only see the search for security, and we are looking more to see how this security is incompatible with our freedom,” she underlines. The philosopher suggests that, even in a situation of panic, we must keep a form of discernment. “What security is necessary for my freedom? But what is the freedom I am sacrificing? »Asks Peggy Avez.
Referring to the new rules of deconfinement, “this feeling of arbitrariness gives us the impression that everything is on borrowed time,” she notes. And this feeling generates another feeling, that of insecurity.
Regarding freedom and constraints, Peggy Avez finally notes that “in this crisis, we saw freedoms were only privileges, and this is not a project of democratic society”.
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