O Corpo Revivido: Memórias “Pós”-Covid

Abstract The work is composed of two mutually structuring moments. First, it briefly and critically reconstructs the broader spectrum of the health crisis surrounding Covid-19 that came to light in 2019 and which, in a distant or more recent period, received unique attention in the literary work of Shakespeare and Camus. Second, it provides an account of an experience in which the author, once a victim of the pandemic, retains memories that still have a therapeutic impact on the post-hospital period. Broadly speaking, by looking at this double and mutual record, the text advocates the thesis that such memories are an invitation to permanent reflection without, however, losing sight of another way of life as a possible utopia, whether as a diagnosis or as an antidote to the crisis. From this perspective, Merleau-Ponty’s mature work becomes, in particular, an indispensable guide as a backdrop in this scenario by bringing to light the symptomatically dazzling aspect of the human condition and its ills. The ongoing project of a nouvelle ontologie , in the philosopher’s final itinerary, emblematically circumscribed as “ontological rehabilitation of the sensible,” embraces, in turn, this task and commitment. It is, in short, a philosophy thought from the deepest dimension of our carnality, an experience of thought archaeologically rooted as intertwined with life and, therefore, not indifferent to pain and suffering. It is to this extent that the reflection contains, as a final proposition, the premise that the marks left, in flesh and blood, in the light of the revived experience of the body, greatly prospect a horizon of meaning to be better understood and reconstructed.