The Biopolitical Turn of the Post-Covid World
Leftist and Neoliberal Insights of Puzzling Biopolitics
Copyright (c) 2021 Serban Oana
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
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 key-domains such as labour, social cohesion, security, infodemia, domestic life and good governance.
Keywords:
How to Cite
References
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1st ed.). Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2002). Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive. Zone Books.
Agamben, G. (2005). State of exception. University of Chicago Press.
Albert, C., Baez, A. & Rutland, J. (2021). Human security as biosecurity: Reconceptualizing national security threats in the time of COVID-19. Politics and the Life Sciences, 40(1), 83–105. Online: https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2021.1
Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt.
Buciu, L. (2020, September 23). Criza de Euthyrox s-a terminat. Romania va putea produce medicamentul. Ziarul Financiar. Online: https://www.zf.ro/eveniment/premierul-a-facut-anuntul-criza-euthyrox-s-a-terminat-romania-va-19564661
Camus, A. (1942). Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Gallimard.
Camus, A. (1951). L’Homme révolté. Gallimard.
Chernoff, A. & Warman, C. (2021, February 2). Down and out: Pandemic-induced automation and labour market disparities of COVID-19. Vox Eu. Research based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists. Online: https://voxeu.org/article/pandemic-induced-automation-and-labour-market-disparities-covid-19
Cunningham, A. (2008). Epidemics, Pandemics and the Doomsday Scenario. Historically Speaking, 9(7), 29–31. Online: https://doi.org/10.1353/hsp.2008.0035
Cuschieri, S. (2020, May 30). COVID-19 panic, solidarity and equity – the Malta exemplary experience. Journal of Public Health. Online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-020-01308-w
De Mata, I. (2020). European Solidarity During the COVID-19 Crises. Eurohealth, 26(2), 16–20.
Derrida, J. (2000). Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Stanford University Press.
Esposito, R. (2008). Immunisation and Violence. Biopolitica. Online: https://biopolitica.flinders.edu.au/publication/immunization-and-violence/
Flood, B. (2020, October 7). Jane Fonda says coronavirus is ‘God’s gift to the left’ because it could help Biden defeat Trump. Fox News. Online: https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/jane-fonda-says-coronavirus-gods-gift-left-help-biden-defeat-trump
Foucault, M. (1984). What Is Enlightenment. In P. Rainbow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 32–50). New York, Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (2003). Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. New York, Picador.
Harari, Y. (2020, April 28). COVID-19 may bring new surveillance era. BBC World News. Online: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-52441339
Harari, Y. (2021). Yuval Noah Harari on COVID-19: ‘The biggest danger is not the virus itself’. DW. Online: https://www.dw.com/en/virus-itself-is-not-the-biggest-danger-says-yuval-noah-harari/a-53195552
Heidegger, M. (2013). The Question Concerning Technology. Perennial.
Kant, I. (2018). Perpetual Peace. A Philosophical Essay. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Korinek, A. & Stiglitz, J. (2021). Covid-19 driven advances in automation and artificial intelligence risk exacerbating economic inequality. BMJ, 367–372. Online: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n367
Lorenzini, D. (2020). Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus. Critical Inquiry, 47(S2), 40–45. Online: https://doi.org/10.1086/711432
Nancy, J-L. (1983). L’impératif catégorique. Flammarion.
Norrlöf, C. (2020). Is covid-19 a liberal democratic curse? Risks for liberal international order. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 33(5), 799–813. Online: https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2020.1812529
Owens, B. (2021, May 30). Nature isn’t really healing. The Atlantic. Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/05/pandemic-lockdowns-nature-wildilfe/619054/
Pascoe, J. & Stripling, M. (2020). Surging Solidarity: Reorienting Ethics for Pandemics. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 30(3–4), 419–444. Online: https://doi.org/10.1353/ken.2020.0022
Siisiäinen, L. (2018). Foucault, Biopolitics and Resistance (1st ed.). Routledge. Online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315180496
The “Elie Wiesel” National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania (2020). Raport de monitorizare a antisemitismului in Romania. Online: https://www.inshr-ew.ro/raport-antisemitism-romania-2019-2020/
Walsh, J. (2014). ‘The Hidden Point of Intersection’. Rethinking the Relationship Between Sovereignty and Bio-politics in Foucault and Agamben. The University of Puget Sound. Online: https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=psupc
