The Scalpel and the Brush: Explosion and Culture of the Pandemic Body

ABSTRACT

The article adopts the framework of Lotman's last cultural semiotics in order to rethink a thorny contemporary issue, that is, the diffused antagonism against science, medicine, and vaccinations during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemics. The article interprets this irrational animadversion as the outcome of a dialectics that stems at least from the origin of modernity, and precisely from the opposition between a semiotic ideology of stillness, regularity, and order, underpinning the genesis of modern science, and an opposed semiotic ideology of motion, irregularity, and chaos, characterizing most of the modern aesthetics of idealism and singularity. After exploring this opposition through a crucial cultural text situated at the beginning of the tension between these two different approaches to meaning and life, the article concludes that modern sciences and medicine should continue searching for regularities in the world and in the body, for the sake of improving the human quality of life, but should also learn from the cultural semiotics of aesthetic ideologies in times of epistemic incertitude and turmoil, old myths extolling the singularity of the body tend to resurface, jeopardizing the credibility of medicine.