Challenges of Biopolitics Caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic (original) (raw)
Related papers
Revista de Direito da Cidade PANDEMIC AND BIOPOLITICS PANDÊMICA E BIOPOLÍTICA
Revista de Direito da Cidade, 2021
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.
Biopolitics in the COVID-19 pandemic
MultiMedia Publishing, 2020
Biopower refers to the practice of modern nation-states through an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations. Foucault used the term to refer specifically to public health practices, among other regulatory mechanisms. Biopolitics is a concept that takes into account the management of the life and populations of a governed region. Biopolitics produces a generalized disciplinary society and regulatory controls through population biopolitics. Giorgio Agamben states that what is manifesting in this pandemic is the growing tendency to use the state of emergency as a normal paradigm of government. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.29380.04488
V. 13, n. 02, 2021
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.
Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus
Critical Inquiry, 2021
In a recent blog post, Joshua Clover rightly notices the swift emergence of a new panoply of “genres of the quarantine.”1 It should not come as a surprise that one of them centers on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, asking whether or not it is still appropriate to describe the situation that we are currently experiencing. Neither should it come as a surprise that, in virtually all of the contributions that make use of the concept of biopolitics to address the current coronavirus pandemic, the same bunch of rather vague ideas are mentioned over and over again, while other—no doubt more interesting—Foucauldian insights tend to be ignored. In what follows, I discuss two of these insights, and I conclude with some methodological remarks on the issue of what it may mean to “respond” to the current “crisis.”
BEYOND THE VIRUS: There cannot be a pandemic without the State
Ambiente & Sociedade, 2020
Abstract: This paper starts with the acknowledgment of the importance of the State as an order-ing principle for the experience of the pandemic. Such a statement implies two complementary movements - although these will not be exhausted in the following pages. Firstly, it means that the notion of pandemic itself has a genealogy. It means that its emergence is the result of a histor-ical process and of specific political configurations, which are strongly associated with the con-solidation of the modern State. Second, if the treatment of the notion of a pandemic needs to be considered on the basis of its relationship with the state, an analysis of “pandemic” processes is undoubtedly a political debate. I finish by suggesting benefits of a possible approximation be-tween the notion of environmental justice and the critical principles for the analysis of the pan-demic that we are facing.
Biopolitics and legal issues of emergency situations in the context of coronavirus pandemic
E3S Web of Conferences
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of biopolitical issues at the present time. The modern social state and the developing biolaw regulate a lot of private and public legal relations, especially the sensitive sphere of somatic and reproductive human rights, and the biological status of citizens. The most important aspect of national legal regulation, such as the ratio of law and morality, international bio-standards, is being updated, and the status of bioethics and biolaw is being raised. The development of modern genetic engineering and biotechnologies raises the question of the legal boundaries of biopolitics. It has been found that national governments often expand biopolitical impact in situations of emergency and new biohazards, in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper is prepared using doctrinal-legal and comparative-synchronous analysis of legal measures applied by different countries in the field of biopolitics. The research is based on extensive scientifi...
Biosecurity, Economic Collapse, the State to Come - political power in the pandemic and beyond
2023
What kind of state emerges from the pandemic? The pandemic caused two crises, in biosecurity and in the economy. The state was forced to tackle both; but subduing one inevitably exacerbated the other. Emerging from the impossible task of handling two conflicting crises is a new form of state, the state to come. To outline the emerging state, this book offers an in-depth critical account of the state's responses to the biosecurity and the economic crises. It is thus the first study to address both crises ensuing from the pandemic, and to synthesise the responses to them in a comprehensive account of political power. Addressing biosecurity, the book deciphers its key modalities, epistemic premises, its law, the threat it aims to oppose and the ways in which it relates to public health and society-especially its extraordinary power to suspend society. Addressing the economic crisis, the book deciphers the actuality and prospects of both the economy and the state's economic policy. It claims that economic policy is now dual: it adopts countercyclical measures to serve and entrench a neoliberal economy. The responses to the twin crises inform the outline of the emerging state: its structure, logic and legality; its power and its relation to society. This is a state of extraordinary power; but its only purpose is to preserve the social order intact. It is a despotic state: powerful, and set to impose social stasis. This work offers groundbreaking analysis based on our pandemic experience. It is indispensable for critical scholars and students in Politics, Security Studies, Sociology, Law, Political Economy and Public Health. Christos Boukalas is a senior lecturer at Northumbria Law School. He develops a political theory of law, based on legal and state theory. His research focuses on the advent of a new form of law and state in the course of the 21st century. He has widely published critical accounts on British and American security law and policy, including the monograph Homeland Security, its Law and its State.
The Multitude Divided: Biopolitical Production during the Coronavirus Pandemic
Rethinking Marxism, 2020
The past months during the COVID-19 pandemic, many authors have pointed out the relevance of Michel Foucault’s theories of biopolitics for the present situation. Foucault’s theories of biopolitics were further developed by Italian neo-Marxist thinkers to analyze post-Fordist labour conditions. The current pandemic has emphasized the observation made by Foucault that biopolitics is always a differential exposure to risk, as we have seen that some are allowed to stay in lockdown while others have to keep on working. The pandemic has also revealed how post-Fordist labour has always been dependent on deskilled and often outsourced forms of labour, as exemplified by the current rise in platform companies. The exploitative labour practices of the latter, however, will make resistance more difficult than the Italian neo-Marxists imagine.
The Biopolitical Turn of the Post-Covid World
Public Governance, Administration and Finances Law Review, 2021
As the 21st century became shaped by the matters of public health, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed that it is a trap to believe that we have to choose between the medicalisation of politics and the politicisation of medicine. My thesis is that models of good governance in the post-pandemic world must be shaped by leftist principles, values and practices, in order to ensure not the reopening, but the reconstruction of public life, which needs more than ever overcoming social inequalities and political polarisations, whereas liberal principles should be implemented in order to fix standards of economic performance and efficiency after applying mechanism of recovery. Governments as well as electoral spheres are reticent to biopolitical incursions, historically associated with panoptic systems. I claim that it is time to plead for positivising biopolitics as political humanism. My research will expose twelve themes for disseminating biopolitics as political humanism, focused on sensitive...