Fenomenología de las esferas. Ritos “sustitutorios” de duelo en tiempos de pandemia, una lectura sloterdijkiana

Abstract

In the context of the current pandemic, the ways of dying and comforting those who die, as well as those who remain, have been drastically modified. Phenomena like the lonely death, the suspension of funeral rituals and the reduction of the burials to their minimum expression, force us to come into an unknown area: that of mourning for the loss of mourning, a non-space whose habitability is attempted to be achieved through small rites and substitutive ceremonies on a private and domestic scale.

The main characteristics of these rituals can be clarified from Peter Sloterdijk’s “spheres theory”. This supposes, in the first place, an understanding of the matter in terms of a lived space’s phenomenology, in which rituals of mourning are authentic releasers of affective and symbolically habitable worlds. Secondly, this perspective frames these inquiries in a de-ritualized modernity context. From these developments, we will undertake a sloterdijkian interpretation of the spatiality that belongs to the substitutive ritual by reference to the implied in the substituted ritual. In this way, we will examine a possible reading of the mourning rituals in the framework of the current pandemic.