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The Pandemic and the Politics of the Body

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The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the social, political, and cultural consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic is viewed as a liminal case of the politics of the body, given the radical restrictions imposed on bodies in its wake. Two interpretive frameworks—biopower and somaesthetics—are contrastively employed to explore body/power relations and the soma’s potential. It is shown that, contrary to the fears of the utter subjugation of the body to the state ignited by the biopower perspective, the pandemic was an opportunity for the development and improvement of the body, which can be recognized and appreciated if the somaesthetics perspective is adopted.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Stephanie Nolen, “W.H.O. Ends Global Health Emergency Designation for Covid,” New York Times, May 5, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/health/covid-who-emergency-end.html (accessed 27 June 2023).

  2. 2.

    Alison Young, Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk (Nashville: Center Street, 2023).

  3. 3.

    Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bordoni, State of Crisis (Cambridge: Polity Press 2014), 55.

  4. 4.

    Ian Sampler, “New Data Links Covid-19’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Wuhan Market,” Guardian, March 17, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/covid-19-origins-raccoon-dogs-wuhan-market-data (accessed 27 June 2023).

  5. 5.

    Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

  6. 6.

    Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” trans. Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry 47(52) (Winter 2021): 58–62, on p. 59.

  7. 7.

    Mbembe, “Universal Right,” 60.

  8. 8.

    Mbembe, “Universal Right,” 62.

  9. 9.

    Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

  10. 10.

    Peter Gluckman and Binyam Sisay Mendisu, “What the Covid-19 Pandemic Reveals About the Evolving Landscape of Scientific Advice,” in UNESCO Science Report: The Race Against Time for Smarter Development, ed. Susan Schneegans, Tiffany Straza, and Jake Lewis (Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2021), 3–8, on p. 6.

  11. 11.

    John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: New American Library, 1950), 160–1.

  12. 12.

    Manuel Castells, “Informationalism, Networks, and the Network Society: A Theoretical Blueprint,” in The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited by Manuel Castells (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2004), 3–45, on p. 3.

  13. 13.

    Amanda Machlin, Bodies of Democracy: Modes of Embodied Politics (Bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2022), 82.

  14. 14.

    Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, “Democracy under Lockdown: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Global Struggle for Freedom,” Freedom House, October 2020, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/COVID-19_Special_Report_Final_.pdf (accessed 15 December, 2022).

  15. 15.

    Ayesha Anwar, Meryem Malik, Vaneeza Raees, and Anjum Anwar, “Role of Mass Media and Public Health Communications in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Cureus 12(9), September 2020, doi: https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.10453.

  16. 16.

    “Editorial,” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 20(8) (August 2020): 845, https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30565-X.

  17. 17.

    Jonathan Henssler et al., “Mental Health Effects of Infection Containment Strategies: Quarantine and Isolation—a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 271(2) (2021): 223–34, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-020-01196-x.

  18. 18.

    David Harvey, “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19,” Jacobin Magazine, March 20, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus-political-economy-disruptions (accessed 16 April 2023).

  19. 19.

    Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Belknap Press, 2014), 479.

  20. 20.

    Eurofound (2023), Economic and Social Inequalities in Europe in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg Inequality and Covid-19, Inequality.org, https://inequality.org/facts/inequality-and-covid-19/#racial-inequality-covid (accessed 29 May 2023).

  21. 21.

    David Cox, “Interview with Immunologist Akiko Iwasaki,” The Guardian, May 27, 2023.

  22. 22.

    Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 308.

  23. 23.

    Francis Bacon and Tommaso Campanella, New Atlantis & The City of the Sun: Two Classic Utopias, (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2018).

  24. 24.

    Isaac Asimov, The Naked Sun (New York and Toronto: Bantam Books, 1957), 52.

  25. 25.

    Alessandra Lemma, The Digital Age on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Practice and New Media (New York: Routledge, 2017), 17.

  26. 26.

    Sergio Benvenuto, “Forget About Agamben,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Coronavirus and Philosophers), March 20, 2020, https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/coronavirus-andphilosophers/ (accessed 18 May 2023).

  27. 27.

    Giorgio Agamben, “The Invention of the Epidemic,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Coronavirus and Philosophers), February 26, 2020, https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/coronavirusand-philosophers/ (accessed 18 May 2023).

  28. 28.

    Giorgio Agamben, “Clarifications,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Coronavirus and Philosophers), March 17, 2020, https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ (accessed 18 May 2023).

  29. 29.

    Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 181.

  30. 30.

    Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Viral Exception,” in Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics and Society, eds. Fernando Castrillón and Thomas Marchevsky (Oxon: Routledge, 2021), 27.

  31. 31.

    Roberto Esposito, “Cured to the Bitter End,” in Coronavirus, 28–9.

  32. 32.

    Bruno Latour, “Is This a Dress Rehearsal?” Critical Inquiry, March 26, 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/ (accessed 10 May 2023).

  33. 33.

    Latour, “Dress Rehearsal.”

  34. 34.

    Yanping Gao, “On the Path of Somaesthetics: An Interview with Richard Shusterman,” in Shusterman’s Somaesthetics: From Hip Hop Philosophy to Politics and Performance Art, ed. Jerold J. Abrams (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022), 261–78, on pp. 261–2.

  35. 35.

    Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Time Beyond the Clock (New York: Random House, 2023), xi-xii.

  36. 36.

    Karolina Fila-Witecka, Adrianna Senczyszyn, Agata Kołodziejczyk, Marta Ciułkowicz, Julian Maciaszek, Błażej Misiak, Dorota Szczesniak, and Joanna Rymaszewska, “Lifestyle Changes Among Polish University Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18(18): 9571 (2021): 14, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18189571.

  37. 37.

    Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1.

  38. 38.

    Giorgio Agamben, “Requiem for the Students,” trans. D. Alan Dean (May 23, 2020), https://d-dean.medium.com/requiem-for-the-students-giorgio-agamben-866670c11642 (accessed 9 June 2023).

  39. 39.

    Michael V. Bronstein, Erich Kummerfeld, Angus MacDonald III, and Sophia Vinogradov, “Willingness to Vaccinate Against SARS-CoV-2: The Role of Reasoning Biases and Conspiracist Ideation,” Vaccine 40(02), (2021): 213–22.

  40. 40.

    Lemma, Digital Age, 17.

  41. 41.

    Lemma, Digital Age, 36.

  42. 42.

    Lemma, Digital Age, 37.

  43. 43.

    Hans-Helmuth Gander, “Between Strangeness and Familiarity: Towards Gadamer’s Conception of Effective History,” Research in Phenomenology 34(1) (2004): 121–36, on p. 122.

  44. 44.

    Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).

  45. 45.

    Koczanowicz, Politics of Time, 68.

  46. 46.

    Koczanowicz, Politics of Time, 69.

  47. 47.

    Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Oxford: Signal Books 2016), 308.

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  • Fila-Witecka, Karolina, Adrianna Senczyszyn, Agata Kołodziejczyk, Marta Ciułkowicz, Julian Maciaszek, Błażej Misiak, Dorota Szczesniak, and Joanna Rymaszewska. 2021. “Lifestyle Changes Among Polish University Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18(18): 9571, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18189571.

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    Google Scholar 

  • Gluckman, Peter, and Binyam Sisay Mendisu. 2021. “What the Covid-19 Pandemic Reveals About the Evolving Landscape of Scientific Advice.” In UNESCO Science Report: The Race against Time for Smarter Development, ed. Susan Schneegans, Tiffany Straza, and Jake Lewis, 3–8. Paris: UNESCO Publishing.

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  • Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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  1. Faculty of Humanities, SWPS University, Warsaw, Poland

    Leszek Koczanowicz

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Koczanowicz, L. (2023). The Pandemic and the Politics of the Body. In: The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44833-1_3

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