Beyond Bare Life: AIDS, (Bio)Politics, and the Neoliberal Order

Abstract

The emergence of AIDS/HIV marked an epochal shift away from the almost omnipotent status accorded medical knowledge and its sanitized language for suffering even in relation to death, which had been long banished from the concerns of those preoccupied with life and their seemingly limitless capacity to control it. AIDS also cast a premodern pall over emancipated pleasures, the amoral, free-wheeling desires that animated advanced consumer societies. The disease was later deflected onto Africa as the primal other, Africa as a symbol of dangerous desire, as the projection of a self never properly tamed. The author calls attention to a whole series of undemocratic values, attitudes and institutional practices, both cultural and governmental, which have systematically suppressed and undermined AIDS treatment in states of the Global South like South Africa. She dwells on how various AIDS action groups are fighting back against those undemocratic values and practices and how in doing so they are deepening the moral content of a democratic project held hostage by the sinister rhetoric of “bare life and the states of exception” that is invoked whenever convenient by a liberal polity in order to ward off the victims of a pandemic. Even as the author recounts the creativity and efficacy of these counter-hegemonic practices directed at negligent authorities, avaricious pharmaceutical companies and opportunistic NGOs, she reminds the reader to reckon with the pitfalls and contradictions that accompany a struggle waged under the darkening horizon of global capital.