Viral Critique

Postfoundational Perspectives on COVID-19

Hannah Richter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032561394
• eBook ISBN: 9781000964868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

This book brings together papers that employ postfoundational theory to critically investigate the social, political, economic and ecological dynamics and power structures that shaped Western democracies, non-Western societies and international politics during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted not only social relations and personal lives across the globe, but also the landscape of postfoundational theory. Giorgio Agamben, one of its most prominent figures, attracted harsh criticism for his suggestion that the pandemic was nothing but an invented tool of state power. In the face of a collectively experienced emergency, it seemed tempting to forgo critical questioning in favour of taking action on a manifestly real, viral threat. Resisting this temptation, this volume makes the case that COVID-19 has rendered postfoundational critique urgently necessary. The chapters collected here use postfoundational theory to unpack the pandemic's global social event beyond dominant narratives of unprecedentedness, exception and necessity. The authors explore where the pandemic has actually altered political, social and economic dynamics. But they also highlight where divisions, inequalities and expropriation continued unchanged, or even reinforced, throughout and after the COVID-19 event. The chapters apply, scrutinise and re-work the writings of postfoundational thinkers from Jacques Derrida, Roberto Esposito and Gilles Deleuze to Jasbir Puar to both offer a better understanding of the pandemic's social reality and to draw from it visions for a different post-pandemic future.
Viral Critique will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Economics and Cultural Studies. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction—COVID-19, viral social theory and immunitarian perceptions: a case for postfoundational critique
• 1 Critique, clinic, and care in times of COVID
• 2 An evental pandemic: thinking the COVID-19 ‘event’ with Deleuze and Foucault
• 3 Derrida, autoimmunity, and critique
• 4 Giorgio Agamben’s political formalism
• 5 The biopolitical economy of the COVID-19 pandemic and the possibilities for an affirmative biopolitics
• 6 Redefining ‘safe bodies’: queering the shifting body politics during the COVID-19 pandemic
• 7 Vaccine apartheid and settler colonial sovereign violence: from Palestine to the colonial global economy
• 8 What is COVID capitalism?
• 9 Low-skill no more! essential workers, social reproduction and the legitimacy-crisis of the division of labour
• 10 Sublimating the commodity
• 11 Post-COVID ecology: mutation, immunology, and inequivalence in Jacques Derrida’s an economy
• 12 Democratic politics in virulent times: three vital lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic
• 13 Beyond fairness: the COVID-19 pandemic as an expression of environmental injustice
• Index