The Coronavirus: Biopolitics and the rise of ‘Anthropocene Authoritarianism’

With politics suspended, societies under lockdown, Parliaments closed and States of Emergency in force globally (Runciman, 2020) many commentators have turned to Foucauldian-inspired understandings of biopolitics and population control to analyse contemporary events (Horvat, 2020; Agamben, 2020a; Demetri, 2020; Singh, 2020; Sotiris, 2020). Biopolitics has become a key concept in critical discourses of security governance in the last two decades (Rose, 2007; Esposito, 2008; Dillon, 2015). Deriving from the work of Foucault, at the heart of biopolitical thought is the relationship of politics to life as both the basis of governance and as an object to be secured (Foucault, 2007; 2008). For Foucault, ‘life’ was a way of articulating an ‘outside’ to the human world of politics, an outside that appeared natural but was, in fact, a malleable construct (Lemke, 2011).

Read

Read also

Anthropocene Authoritarianism (Critique in Times of Corona)

 

About Giorgio Bertini

Research Professor. Founder Director at Learning Change Project - Research on society, culture, art, neuroscience, cognition, critical thinking, intelligence, creativity, autopoiesis, self-organization, rhizomes, complexity, systems, networks, leadership, sustainability, thinkers, futures ++
This entry was posted in Biopolitics, Coronavirus and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.