Care, Control and COVID-19

Health and Biopolitics in Philosophy and Literature

Raili Marling, Marko Pajević, Raili Marling, Marko Pajević

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9783110799279
• eBook ISBN: 9783110799446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume sheds light on the social and cultural transformations that accompanied the Covid-19 crisis by looking at health and biopolitics from a philosophical and literary perspective.

The biopolitical measures taken globally in response to the crisis have led to previously unheard-of restrictions in liberal societies, resulting in deep and potentially lasting transformations both in social structures and interpersonal relationships. Many researchers have addressed the Covid-19 crisis as a political or epidemiological challenge, but few have paid sufficient attention to the culturally specific reactions and cultural representations of the human beings at the centre of events. Literary analyses capture this human component and give insights into different reactions to, and protests against, the health-political measures addressing the crisis.

This book puts the notion of biopolitics, first extensively theorised in the 1970s, to work in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and uses literary case studies as starting points for discussions of contemporary politics, media, and legal and surveillance regimes. It brings together eleven scholars from six countries with the shared aim of combining literary and philosophical expertise to create a better understanding of the changes in society and political attitudes induced by the ongoing pandemic.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Health and Biopolitics in COVID-19 Times – What Constitutes a Healthy Society?
• Preliminary Remarks for a Biopolitical History of Western Plague Narratives
• How to Manage Plague and COVID-19: Parallels and Differences Between Today and Premodern and Early-Modern Medical Theories
• “Civilization is Sterilization”: Utopia, Biopolitics and the Total Society in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
• COVID-19 as Event: Mythology and Ritual in Agamben’s Pandemic Dispatches
• Biopolitics, Form-of-Life, A New Use of Bodies
• The Relationality and Representability of Biopolitical Crises
• State Control Versus Humanity: Biopolitics and Health in Juli Zeh’s The METHOD (Corpus Delicti, 2009)
• The Quantified Self: Surveillance, Biopolitics and Literary Resistance
• When “Total War” Joins “People’s War”: China’s Recent Surge of Biopolitics and Its Repercussions in Internet Poetry
• Inside in Immunity, Outside in Community? Discussing Esposito and Framing Pandemic Polemics in France
• Needful Facts, Big and Small: On Bodies, Equality, and Treatment
• Index