A Foucauldian Moment or the Longue Durée? COVID-19 in Context

Abstract

The pandemic has produced an explosion of reference to the Foucauldian paradigm of biopolitics with ubiquitous claims that we are living through a truly ‘Foucauldian moment’ (Cot, Le Monde, 2020; Esposito, La Repubblica, 2020). Parallel analyses of the ‘exceptionality’ of the present moment and comparisons to emergency decisions during the totalitarian experiences of the twentieth century (Agamben 2020, 2021) exhibit a similar tendency to think the current crisis only through modern or presentistic eyes. However, pandemics, and their management, long preexist the modern state and the supposed uniqueness of the modern biopolitical constitution. Observing during the pandemic the perturbing return of material artifacts and social technologies that from quarantine to social distancing, from health passport to sanitation of objects and environments, disrupt any easy premodern-modern dichotomy, this chapter suggests a longue durée view of biopolitics to place the present crisis into a more granular context. Even though key biopolitical thinkers tend to cut off modern politics and its crises from a longer and more global view, human history is biosocial and biopolitical through and through. This approach challenges modernism as a form of chronological ethnocentrism that ultimately reproduces a convenient view of the past for the sake of promoting the exceptionality of the present and the role of its critics.