Witnessing the Pandemic with Foucault: Power, Politics, and COVID-19

Abstract

Drawing heavily on the works of Michel Foucault, I examine the different political responses to the pandemic of COVID-19. In the first part of this article, I examine the Chinese government’s response to COVID-19 and expose the relationship between biopower and the political ideal of societies, arguing that technology also entered into the realm of biopolitics and helped society accomplish its political ideal of mobility, productivity, and security. In the second part of this article, I suggest that COVID-19 reshaped and rearranged the power mechanism in societies, arguing that new forms of power might emerge in the future. Synthesizing these two cases, I challenge the reader to reflect critically upon the relationship between the pandemic and the power architecture of societies and suggest that the pandemic might lead to the emergence of new power relations in societies.