Lessons From the Pandemic: Biopower, Politics and Reality

Frequently described as the return or the revenge of the real, the COVID-19 pandemic poses the question of the relation of politics to reality: does politics produce or construct reality that henceforth exists as its effect or does reality rather pose a limit to political practice, serving as a remainder that politics cannot grasp? While the first solution defines a constructivist approach to politics, the second affirms a realist approach. The article offers a reading of Michel Foucault’s methodological introduction to his Birth of Biopolitics lectures that demonstrates how Foucault’s own response to this question oscillated between realism and constructivism before the constructivist tendency arguably prevailed in the work of Foucault’s followers. In conclusion, I address the implications of reconsidering biopolitics from a realist standpoint.