Infecting Humanness: A Critique of the Autonomous Self in Contagion

Abstract

Despite the common association of contagion with pathology, Woo argues for an alternative understanding that breaches the imagined wall between self and other, inside and outside, safe and dangerous, or human and less-than-human. Through the concept of “touch” (the etymological root of “contagion”) in both physical and psychological senses, this chapter approaches contagion as an entanglement in which the modern idea of self as an autonomous unit is infected through social and moral proximity to otherness. Woo constructs this infectious interpersonal space as productive for its potential to dissolve the boundaries constructed to protect a sense of individual subjectivity which is never truly actualized. Outbreaks are thus conceived as active political sites where restrictive orders of what it means to be human and worth living are not only reproduced but also reconfigured. Woo calls for the need to cultivate contagious sensibilities and modes of living that resist the dominant structure of containment and hierarchical conception of humanness.