[D66] The Coronavirus: Biopolitics and the Rise of ‘Anthropocene Authoritarianism’

[Antid Oto]

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

By
David Chandler
eng.globalaffairs.ru
9 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Feng.globalaffairs.ru%2Farticles%2Fcoronavirus-authoritarianism%2F>

/*If the lesson of the global response to the Coronavirus is that 
humanity itself is the problem, then Anthropocene Authoritarianism looks 
set to pose a larger long-term challenge to our ways of life than the 
virus itself.*/

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 analyze 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).

/[...]/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20200407/2995d31e/attachment.html>