Contagion and Confinement

Abstract

This article takes two epidemics, one historical and the other allegorical, for comparison against the current Covid-19 crisis. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year consists of a narrator whose objectivity and existence are ambiguous. José Saramago’s Blindness, published in the original Portuguese as an “essay,” traces the journey of a cluster of citizens through a polis afflicted by a sudden, infectious outbreak. The respective experiences of confinement: at home, in a disused mental hospital, and within the wider spaces of the city, are analysed in this article with reference to Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, alongside seminal works by Giorgio Agamben, Michel de Certeau and Susan Sontag. The article also aims to indicate how the current Covid-19 crisis may provide a scene of reading, alongside a contemporary response from Slavoj Žižek.