Persona, the Mask and the Anomic Person

LELL, HELGA

In the Realm of Corona Normativities II. The Permanence of the Exception.

Vittorio Klostermann Verlag

Lugar: Frankfurt; Año: 2022; p. 327 - 336

The case that I present in this paper points out that the Coronacrisis provokes: a) law losing its capacity to force conducts, b) increasing difficulties for law to generate courses of actions perceived as legitimate and binding; and c) challenges to law in order to create new ways of achieving widespread social complying to legal rules. In the frame of the law as culture paradigm, thinking about normativity requires considering factors such as religion, historical institutions, rituals and costumes, communication acts and forms, aesthetics, etc. In this case I will refer to the Argentinean context during the emergency of Covid-19 as a breaking moment in which, although the society is used to economic, political and sanitary crisis, normativity and social bonds have been especially destroyed. My thesis here is that when normativity, particularly legal normativity, gets to be fuzzy and uncertain, individuals cannot perform as persons in legal scene. The risk is that the narration of law on how persons can and should be considered does not work anymore and then social order (or some part of it) disappears, social control gets weaker and fear increases.