The paper explores how Hannah Arendt’s oppositions ‘public-private’ and ‘intimate-social’ can be used as an analytical tool to better understand a very concrete, extreme situation: the state of emergency triggered when an epidemiological outbreak hits a city, totally altering its inhabitants’ lives. Studied observation of what specific individuals (be they imagined or real) feel and think during times of epidemic is an underutilized tool that may prove helpful in studying epidemics themselves. Focusing on Camus’ The pest and events in the city of Oran, the article looks at how victims of the plague felt about their public or private lives and their intimate and social ties.
plague; pest; epidemic; public-private; intimate-social