Experiencing Biopolitics

Abstract

I examine the tension between biopolitics and necropolitics through three themes that I have perceived and that are related to my life in Japan. First, I examine the transformation of hospitals and medical care, particularly for the elderly, through my experience of sharing the end of my mother’s life. Modern medicine has made great achievements in treating diseases that used to be fatal, but it has become institutionalized in the context of Big Pharma interests, with no insight into the natural ageing and death of human beings. Second, I discuss how the ecological worldview on parasitism and symbiosis has been distorted by industrial logic, drawing on the work of my esteemed friend and parasitologist Professor Koichiro Fujita, who passed away in 2021. Finally, with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic, I would argue that it is not a sudden phenomenon triggered by a new virus, but in a sense a disaster that has been prepared for decades and must be seen as a war using bioengineering and epidemiology as weapons, rather than tanks and bombs.