Pandemic and Race: Un(fore)seen Circumstances, Same Old Biopolitics of Extraction and Use?

Abstract

In the article, I suggest that the interplay between pandemic and race, instead of opening paths towards an understanding of mutual interconnectedness and vulnerability, deepens the existing structural racial inequality by reinforcing the existing necropolitical regimes of exclusion and amplifying the importance of race in biopolitics. First, I question the biopolitical uses of race, discern the general capitalization of life and highlight the colonial nature of epidemiology. Further, I focus on the neoliberal subjectivity of the new working class and argue that the Foucauldian imperative “make live or let die” gave way to the differentiation between lives to be saved and lives to be risked. Then, I claim that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the race-based necropolitics of usable bodies and the biopolitics based on the distribution of differential vulnerability. Finally, I analyse decolonial, politico-economic, ecological, and solidary remedies that might help to find a way out of the current necropolitical condition.