Los Días de la Fiebre de Andrés Felipe Solano: De la Crisis Ontológica a la Realidad Cíborg

Abstract

In Los días de la fiebre, the Colombian writer Andres Felipe Solano recounts his experience in South Korea during the first three months of the pandemic, in 2020. From February to April, Solano describes his personal feelings, as well as his impressions regarding the changes that viral pandemic has introduced in the habits of the inhabitants of this East Asian country. Like other contemporary writers and thinkers who have written about the pandemic and the new normality that it has ushered in, Solano’s narrator uses the current circumstances to reflect on the growing tension between the right to privacy and state intervention, the new challenges imposed by stricter social distancing and isolation rules, and the collapse of Korea’s consumer society, and the collapse of capitalism overall. Beyond these topics, however, Los días de la fiebre is a book in which Solano explores and erases the limits between mind, body and machines, and between living and inanimate beings underlining the risks of post-humanism and a cyborg reality . The virus’s constant threat and the technology deployed to facilitate its detection and prevent its spread lead Solano to modify his self-image and to question both the autonomy and rationality on which rest many of the fantasies of modern man’s domination, and the ontological hierarchies through which this subject has organized his surroundings which are now in crisis.