Lacanian Biopolitics of COVID-19

Abstract

Abstract A public debate has raged in Europe and the Americas for the last year, almost as predictable in its substance as in its form: Has the suppression of individual liberties, in the form of lockdowns, curfews, imposed mask-wearing, and vaccination justified by and indeed legitimated by the sanitary crisis? On virtually all levels of public debate, positions have been formulated on the right (or responsibility) of public authorities to require citizens to take measures in the name of their own personal health and the health of others. In International Studies, biopolitics has become the go-to concept for both analyzing and politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic. Three variants of biopolitical analysis dominate, overlapping, and mutually dependent: those stemming the insights of Foucault’s late work, those inspired by Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and those that extended the global analysis of Hardt and Negri. In a recently published book, The Inverse of Biopolitics, Laurent interprets biopolitics in an alternative vein, finding in the final phase of Lacan’s teaching, beginning around 1970, a preoccupation with the “speaking body,” condensed in the hybrid term parlêtre, both speaking-being and being-speaking. This article draws out the implications of this alternative conceptualization of biopolitics for the analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic.