There Is No Society?

The success of "social distancing" as a cure-all to the COVID-19 pandemic proves that neoliberalism has created an insurmountable distance to the very notion of society itself. This rejection is best embodied in Margaret Thatcher's infamous dictum "There is no society," which supplies the title of this anthology, with a crucial question mark added. How can we deal with the paradoxical mix of solitude and imposed togetherness that the pandemic entails? How can culture and critical discourse even continue when public space has been shut down upon the advice of epidemiologists? How do we grasp the new political constellations arising today? Such are the questions tackled by the authors of this anthology, based on the discussion program of the Paranoia TV edition of the steirischer herbst festival.