COVID-19, viral social theory and immunitarian perceptions – a case for postfoundational critique

Abstract

The special issue that this paper introduces is published in 2022, two and a half years after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swept large parts of the world, in many cases prompting political measures that meant the interruption of economic production and social life as we knew it. While the pandemic is still unfolding, and it remains uncertain whether and how societies will learn to live with COVID-19’s viral threat, many countries have eased or even completely abolished pandemic restrictions, putting an end to the above moment of interruption. There is, at least for now, and at least in the Western world, a collective sense of easing, the perception that we have passed the peak of the pandemic, that the worst is over. This position of relative hindsight both creates an opportunity and poses a challenge for a collection of papers on the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, the moment seems apt to reflect on and examine the pandemic in its entirety, its conditions, stages of unfolding and consequences (Wark 2020). Especially the early months of the pandemic were marked by a flood of philosophical dispatches issued from the homes to which theorists suddenly found themselves confined. Some were speculating about the politically transformative potential of the pandemic rupture, the chance to create a new collectivist politics out of the ruins of neoliberalism that the pandemic would leave behind (Žižek 2020a, 2020b; Nancy 2020; Stimilli 2020). Others prompted readers to look behind the curtain of the pandemic emergency to either uncover how self-reproductive sovereign power was orchestrating a global crisis in response to a relatively harmless virus (Agamben 2020) or to reveal climate change as the underlying, actual catastrophe (Latour 2021; Malm 2020). Beyond the euphoric dreams, premature dismissals and catastrophism of these early accounts, papers written and published in the long durée of the pandemic are able to produce a more measured, nuanced assessment of the changes and continuities that mark pandemic societies. But on the other hand, any such theoretical retrospective is, at this point, confronted not with one but indeed with two pandemics: the global spread of COVID-19, and the philosophical event that followed when social theory, with viral speed and exponential growth, became infected with the pandemic event. The above thinkers are just some of