A cegueira pandêmica saramaguiana como metáfora de época

The aim of this paper is to offer categories that help to reflect the pandemic event in its cultural impact, which inaugurates a time to search for understanding and a mentality review, in the face of the weaknesses that are unveiled at the time. In this sense, the pandemic event can be linked in the light of the 1995's novel Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, by the Portuguese writer José Saramago, from a Lacanian perspective on the role of the imaginary in the cultural challenge of integrating alterity. Both the Portuguese novel and the Lacanian reference of alterity have been the object of theological hermeneuticsthat indicate their potential for theoretical elucidation of the historical moment in the West, when alterity presents itself as a challenge of the new times, including religion. In this sense, the pandemic event also presents itself as a radical alterity that reveals the real condition in which contemporary society and culture finds itself.