Sovereign power and the politics of the pandemic as elementary parasitic social relation (66 pages) (original) (raw)
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My analysis of 18th century plague stresses the importance of a discursive approach to the analysis of illness, in order to understand the components of health policy as rational technology, which brings out social dispositives and facilitates the observation and evaluation of the population as a whole. The genealogical investigation of plague discourse concentrates on the emergence of a specific biopolitical rationality, which enables regulation of the population and control of individuals. My analysis looks at the emergence of this way of thinking, how it was employed and the way in which it functioned (in terms of its observation and description techniques), so that this discursive process can be seen as having created an exemplary set of preconditions for how AIDS is currently confronted. The discourse on plague is interpreted as a means of constructing illness, whereby its epidemic characteristics are seen as being linked to the structure of its meanings. The discursive space should ideally be permeated by a completely discursive typology of infection, which makes it possible to examine the biotechnical colonisation of the population. The discourse surrounding epidemics therefore always requires that the discourse anticipates the epidemic, prescribes the symbolic form of infection and excludes no–one, so that it can speak to everyone. In this way, the qualities and characteristics of epidemic illnesses are subsumed within the expressive categories of plague discourse, in order to create a text which itself functions as a form of symbolic infection.
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Tracing the Ambiguity of the Posthuman Condition amid the Pandemic: A Biopolitical Rendition
Over the years, humans have evolved in par with rise of information technology and science into a being that has the capability of a machine or possess the power to enslave all the machines with the tip of the fingers, which eventually resulted in the subsequent breach between the humans and their commitment towards the nature due to the humongous exploitation of its resources by humans. With the outbreak of the corona virus, the centrality of human was deconstructed which resulted in the disintegration of the closed hegemonic hierarchal system. Even though humans became the part of the rhizomatic model, inclusive of all forms of life, the pandemic also called for the incorporation of every aspect of the society into its fold, including the power structures of the society. The focus of this paper is on the ambiguous nature of the posthuman condition during the pandemic by drawing the ambivalent aspect of Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalism with its subtle yet dynamic associations with the concept of biopolitics of Michel Foucault. This paper further traces the relationship that exists between the posthuman state, the carnivalism, and the state of emergency during a pandemic.
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Biopolitics occupies a central role in contemporary debates over new political and governance strategies around the world. Based on the Hobbesian assumption of a “mutual relation between protection and obedience” the sovereign power of modern states seems to be founded with the purpose of the preservation and protection of life. But what happens if we look at the present pandemic, whereby governments are struggling against an “invisible enemy” to pursue this end, facing at the same time the problem of keeping up with the growth that sustains the wealth of our economies? Through the discussion of four contemporary, and often antagonistic, takes on biopolitics – Foucault’s understanding of biopower; Agamben’s critique of the logic of sovereignty; Esposito’s concept of immunitas; and Mbembe’s necropolitics – the aim of my paper will be to shed light on the theoretical implications of the pandemic for the foundations of political authority and the definition of modern sovereignty.
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The circulation of the SARS-COV-2 virus has generated a whole range of economic, social, health and securitarian effects on the planetary population, the consequences of which are not only reduced to the containment of mass contagion, but have had an impact on the daily lives of humans. As a result of the biopolitical strategies implemented by different States, the biological life of human beings is currently governed by other means justified in order to maintain health or prevent death from COVID-19 disease. The essay main goal is to analyze this event through concepts proposed and developed by Michel Foucault concerning biopower and biopolitics. These concepts can criticize the power over life exercised by both States and international organizations seeking to regulate the effects of the virus and disease. Also, through the framework of biopolitics, we can show the characteristic event of the 21st century: the transition from epidemics and endemics to pandemics. What this essay is trying to show is the extreme biologization of the lives of humans who cannot delinquete from that identity, on which it operates a whole series of biopolitical strategies to control it.
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This study investigates the reasons for why people seek new political beginnings after historical plagues. The search for such political restarts appeared during the outbreaks of epidemics, but also they still exist among current historians. This investigation is conducted through historical and contemporary interpretations of epidemics. This study concentrates on examples from European and Muslim worlds, but also looks at that of China. It concludes that the meanings assigned to plagues are intertwined with the historical development of political power and its justification by the societies in question.
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In this paper, I intend to investigate the extent to which neoliberalism operates, through the apparatus of coronavirus, to create and hierarchize the forms of life, within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Inspired by Foucault's genealogy, I seek to address this issue based on his reflections, in dialogue with Judith Butler and other authors. I conclude that the framework of neoliberalism establishes the norms by which the coronavirus apparatus unevenly distributes the precarious conditions of lifethe less suited these conditions are to the model of subjectivity of the entrepreneurs of the self, the more precarious they are.
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This essay brackets the history of the modern subject between the moment of its formation in the seventeenth century and that of its postmodern demise in the latter part of the century just past. These brackets also mark two ages of the plague: bubonic in the first, and (among others, present and pending) the "plague" of AIDS in the second. Can we understand the relation between these two histories as more than a chronological coincidence? Personhood-whether regarded as the integrity of a somatic body or as a function of that body's incorporation in the political or natural order of things-is put under special pressure by the crisis of plague. Furthermore, recognizing an affinity between the construction and deconstruction of the modern subject on the one hand, and plague times on the other reveals the prehistory of our own posthumanist engagement with epidemic disease. This essay thus addresses the subject of the plague "subject" then and now. Finally, the essay frames the plague subject in terms of biopolitical theory while arguing that the historical claims of biopolitics must be adjusted to account for the history of the plague.
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The ongoing pandemic seems to have has dramatically affirmed the relevance of the notion of biopolitics and the subject of life more broadly. The notion was, however, developed by Michel Foucault in a very different social and political context from that of ours. After investigating the background and implications of his analysis, this article focuses on Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito's reappropriation of biopolitics and the metaphysical turn that they brought about. Besides these approaches, the notions of bio-economy and bio-capitalism open up new pathways that are more attentive to today's economic and social realities. Within the light of these questions and Agamben's and Esposito's theoretical elaborations, Marxist approaches to metabolism and social reproduction apprehend the question of life in an decisive way, directly connected to the will to construct an alternative to the form of Disaster Capitalism that currently menaces nature and humanity.