Pandemic Time and Wartime, All Out of Joint

Abstract

Over four sections, the paper approaches the biomedical and biopolitical production of COVID-19 by linking the discourse of the pandemic and the discourse of war. The first section considers the drift and imposition of martial language, discourses and analogies in relation to framing and conceptualizing the pandemic. The second section describes the military territorialization and martial genealogy of K’jipuktuk (Halifax) to think through the pandemic. The third section considers how the object of population is shared by military counterinsurgency methods and pandemic public safety measures in relation to the idea of proportionality and acceptable losses. The fourth section ends by engaging with notions of biopolitical pre-existing conditions in advance of COVID-19 to consider the provision and production of safety in a post-pandemic recovery.