Immunity and Contagion: Transformations of Biopolitics in the Time of the Pandemic

How does the pandemic affect the notion of biopolitics? Immunity and Contagion offers a twofold perspective on the notion of biopolitics: on the one hand, it examines the negative effects of the pandemic, such as mourning, melancholy, dispossession, affective disorders, as well as social and racial inequalities; on the other hand, it reveals the need to redefine biopolitics as a positive attempt to survey, govern, and overcome the crisis. The pandemic encourages us to reformulate biopolitics in positive terms so that it would take into account all forms of human, biological, and geological life and becomes capable of operating on a planetary scale.