Preexisting Conditions: Recounting the Plague
by: Samuel Weber

Hardcover. NY, Zone Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 214 pages. The philosopher and literary and cultural critic Samuel Weber returns to past narratives of plagues and pandemics to reproduce the myriad ways individual and collective, historical and actual, intentional and unintentional forces converge to reveal how cultures and societies deal with their vulnerability and mortality. The "preexisting conditions"-a phrase taken from the American healthcare industry-of these very cultures converge and collide with the urgent situations of individuals confronting the plague. Texts drawn from the Bible, Sophocles, Thucydides, Boccaccio, Luther, Defoe, Kleist, Holderlin, Artaud, and Camus demonstrate how in the process of narration individuals come to reconsider their relationship to others, to themselves, and to the collectives to which they belong and on which they depend. Clean copy.