Monstrous Unavailability, Frenetic Standstill: Hartmut Rosa in the face of the Covid-19 Crisis

Abstract

After recovering the way in which Hartmut Rosa problematizes the Covid-19 crisis, the general aim of this article is to reconstruct two fundamental concepts in the author’s sociology to evaluate his critical-heuristic scope with respect to that crisis. In the first part of the paper, the basic elements of the critical theory of “social acceleration” are restored, emphasising the concept of “frenetic standstill”, which highlights certain social behaviour observed during the pandemic, in which “digitalisation” plays a preponderant role. In the second part, on the other hand, we approach the critical theory of the “relationship to the world”, turning our attention to the category of “monstrous unavailability”: our intention here is to show to what extent Covid-19 represents a “monster” of unavailability and in what sense it results in “radical alienation”.