A Political Ontology of the Pandemic: Sovereign Power and the Management of Affects through the Political Ontology of War

Mattias Lehtinen,Tuukka Brunila

doi:10.3389/fpos.2021.674076

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has made relevant questions regarding the limits and the justifications of sovereign power as nation states utilize high degrees of power over populations in their strategies of countering the virus. In our article, we analyze a particularly important facet of the strategy of sovereignty in managing the affects caused by a pandemic, which we term the ontology of war. We analyze the way in which war plays a significant role in the political ontology of our societies, through its aiming to produce a unified political subject and an external enemy. Taking our theoretical cue from Butler’s thinking on frames of recognizability we extend her theory through augmenting it with affect theory to argue for how the frame of recognizability produced by the ontology of war fails to guide our understanding of the pandemic as a political problem, a failure that we analyze through looking at the affective register. We argue that the main affect that the nation state tries to manage, in relation to the pandemic, through the ontology of war is anxiety. We show that the nation state tries to alleviate anxiety by framing it through the ontology war, this leads to the appearance of a potentially racist and nationalist affective climate where the “enemy” is no longer felt to be the virus, but members of other nations as well as minorities. We argue that the pandemic reveals both the political ontology of war central to the foundation of our political communities, and how this ontology is used by the nation state to manage feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Ultimately, as we will discuss at the end of this article, this leads to failure.

Highlights

Across the globe, the unfolding pandemic has provoked an overwhelmingly state-centric response that seeks to deal with the negative impact that the pandemic has on a medical, social, economic, and political level
To sum up our discussion so far, we have argued for understanding the virus as an event that produces anxiety, which is framed through political ontology to give the anxiety a referent, which turns it into fear, an affect that can be controlled and managed
The frame of war that the nation state puts into action reveals the significant inadequacy of the political ontology that the nation state rests on, especially so concerning the failure of this frame to capture the central problematic of the virus

Summary

A Political Ontology of the Pandemic

Sovereign Power and the Management of Affects through the Political Ontology of War. Specialty section: This article was submitted to Comparative Governance, a section of the journal. We analyze a important facet of the strategy of sovereignty in managing the affects caused by a pandemic, which we term the ontology of war. Taking our theoretical cue from Butler’s thinking on frames of recognizability we extend her theory through augmenting it with affect theory to argue for how the frame of recognizability produced by the ontology of war fails to guide our understanding of the pandemic as a political problem, a failure that we analyze through looking at the affective register. We argue that the main affect that the nation state tries to manage, in relation to the pandemic, through the ontology of war is anxiety.

INTRODUCTION

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS