An evental pandemic

Thinking the Covid-19 ‘event’ with Deleuze and Foucault

Dados Bibliográficos

ID12848552
AutoresJemima Repo (0000-0001-7598-6589, Newcastle University, autor correspondente), Hannah Richter (0000-0001-5680-6888, University of Hertfordshire)
Ano2022
Volume23
Fascículo2-3
Páginas220-237
Data de publicação2022-07-13
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoDistinktion Journal of Social Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1600-910X • E-ISSN: 2159-9149
EditoraRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1600910x.2022.2086595
OpenAlexW4285395684
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas3
Referências citadas29

As COVID-19 swept the world it also became the subject of a quickly growing body of theoretical scholarship aimed at understanding the social, political and economic implications of the ‘pandemic event’. Taking a step back, this paper draws on Deleuze and Foucault to interrogate whether, and in what way, the COVID-19 pandemic can and should in fact be understood as an event. We first offer a structured overview of existing ‘pandemic theory’ where we highlight that the productivity unfolded by the pandemic event is here either politically or ontologically fixed. Against this background, we show that, in distinct ways, Deleuze’s and Foucault’s concepts of the event caution against reifying a pandemic event. Any political force the pandemic can unfold is always made after the fact, and is contingent on what is (counter-)effectuated from the pandemic, or which discursive dispersions intersect with and unfold from it. We argue for considering the pandemic as evental rather than an event – it is made up of events, and holds the potential to produce events. For critical theory, the significance of the pandemic event is thus in the first place methodological: it gives insight to how (post-)pandemic societies are produced, and where openings for the actualization of alternatives might lie

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Epistemology · Event (particle physics · Pandemic · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Subject (documents · Computer Science · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Global Security and Public Health · Law · Philosophy