Coronavirus and the Politics of Life:

Part One

Yarkov Halik

The elevation of the Coronavirus to the status of a global pandemic brings to the fore a phenomenon I will call ontological politics.

Ontology is that branch of philosophy which enquires into the nature of Being. A key presupposition in the Western philosophical tradition going back to Plato is that the highest form of being is God. And so, ontology has always been incipiently linked to theology. What distinguishes contemporary ontology from this tradition is that it puts aside the theological dimension (thus Foucault called modern thought an “ontology without metaphysics”); nonetheless, a residue of this dimension remains, in the popular notion that human life is ‘sacred’.

Modern ontology, then, is Being in the form of existence, the philosophy of a being who lives. Ontology enters the political sphere in precisely this form, as the politics which takes as its object the life and living being of individuals. As a consequence, the humanity of man increasingly comes be identified with a vital substance removed from every juridico-political form. But without the latter, persons are necessarily exposed to what both saves and annihilates them. This is why, as Michel Foucault points out, the “formidable power of death” unleashed by the wars of modern states “presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, to optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. . . . It is as managers of life, and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed”.[1]

The idea of a ‘governance of life’ is not exactly new. Foucault traced its origins back to roughly the end of the 17th century, when for the first time in history, large-scale management of populations became the prerogative of the state. Moreover, whilst the Coronavirus has re-activated those bio-political exigencies which arose with the SARS and AIDS pandemics, to name only a few, the politics of life is not limited to such periodic explosions. A durable version of bio-politics has been with us for quite some time now, in the form of the politics of identity and gender, human rights activism and the ecological movement. In which case, if we’re to understand this new global pandemic, we must get a handle on the basic bio-political premises which have long underwritten all our social, political and moral concepts.

The first of these premises is that political questions are regarded as existential. But viewing political conflict as an existential risk, or, equally, defining threats to survival in political terms, changes the very meaning of politics. For one thing, it entails thinking of political activity in biological terms, for instance, as a competition among organisms for survival. But the idea of survival is not appropriate when it comes to framing political policy, whether internal or foreign, and the reason is that organisms compete for sheer existence, whereas political communities compete for a type of existence. Life in the state is qualified by and circumscribed within certain limiting institutional and social norms. Despite what Aristotle says, the human is not a political being by nature.

To the extent that politics is a relative rather than absolute value, political conceptions belong in the domain of what Karl Popper called ‘World 3’. As a product of mind, they include ideas, representations and doctrines. In short, political facts are not part of nature. They are created by human beings. The point is that the attempt to formulate political policies on the basis of naturalistic criteria like survival shifts the focus of politics away from reform towards defending a social community against what are perceived as external or internal threats to its existence. Then power becomes the prerogative of those who specialize in strategies for survival. The trends in this respect are rather obvious’; for example, governments that have become increasingly preoccupied with issues of national security, or the prevalence of the authoritarian ‘strong-man’ type of political leader, whose only goal is to stay in power (that is, to ‘survive’ politically).

On the other hand, if one considers the kinds of questions of interest to the general public lately, from reproductive technologies, the obsession with regimes of self-care, physiological health and personal well-being,[2] to manifold environmental concerns about the future of life on the planet, it’s noticeable that many if not all of them bear directly on the biological conditions upon which human life depends. Referring to the racial ideology of German National Socialism, Rudolf Hess called Nazi politics “applied biology”. The only difference between today’s situation and Nazism is that rather than a racialized body, now it’s a physiological, and psycho-biological body which forms the sole subject of politics.

Quite a few recent news commentators have remarked on the convergence between political, social and economic measures enacted to slow down the spread of the virus and the placement of entire nations on what is effectively a ‘war-footing’. With the qualification, however, that the enemy in this case is not so much a hostile nation as an anonymous biological ‘force’. This is important. Identification of the enemy is a precondition of war. In an effort to specify the distinctive feature of a totalitarian political regime, Hannah Arendt distinguished between the real and the objective enemy. She argues that the latter is particular to Totalitarian politics. What is the meaning of this differentiation, and why should it be relevant to bio-medical politics?

The measures taken to combat the real, that is, political enemy, are bound by certain juridico-political constraints. These constraints largely determine how a political order defines its adversaries and responds to a perceived threat to its own existence. Whereas in the case of the objective enemy, there are no such constraints. A totalitarian political regime does not define its enemies in terms of political or legal concepts. As a result, whilst in conventional war, the enemy combatant has certain legal rights, the objective enemy is effectively placed beyond the protection of the law; their status as enemy does not depend on intent, behaviour or even political identity. In this respect, Arendt rightly identifies the concentration camp as the typical institution of totalitarian politics. The Nazi concentration camps were expressly meant to incarcerate ‘enemies’ of the regime. They were places in which law did not apply and where all the various forms of torture and punishment inflicted on inmates bore no relation whatsoever to any kind of crime or fault. The point is that the objective enemy is “not really suspected of any hostile action”, and “is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked, or whose past justifies suspicion”. Rather, they are “a carrier of ‘tendencies’, like the carrier of a disease”.[3]

It’s no accident that Arendt uses the simile of disease; I want to suggest the category of the objective enemy is the key to bio-politics. Like the totalitarian enemy, a virus-bearing individual is incipiently ‘dangerous’ simply on account of the fact that they’re alive – again, quite aside from questions of guilt or ideological affiliation. The point is that because the objective enemy is defined in expressly non-human terms, bio-politics opens the way for war to become a sort of ‘hygiene operation’. Which is, of course, precisely how Adolf Hitler conceived of the extermination of the Jewish People. It’s no accident that the killing agent used in the gas chambers of Nazi extermination facilities was an industrial pesticide used to eradicate rodents. On the same terms, Hitler justified the German military thrust deep into Eastern Europe and Russia, which involved the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and other ethnic groups considered to be socially inferior. The operation to ‘clear’ Europe of such peoples served no military-strategic purpose; rather, it was carried out on the pretext that these peoples represented a threat to the ‘racial health’ of the German nation.

Of course, likening of Jews to ‘parasites’ or ‘vermin’ – plague of insects, locusts or lice – but also to a virus or a disease, has a long history in the language of anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, what is decisive is that with Nazism, such terminology went well beyond an analogy or a literary figure. For Nazi ideology, the Jews didn’t resemble parasites, they didn’t behave as bacteria – they were bacteria and were to be treated as such. Consequently, the correct term for their massacre is not ‘holocaust’, with its sacred connotations, but ‘extermination’ – exactly the term used for insects, rats, and lice (and so the name for the Final Solution in the Nazi lexicon, ‘Soziale Disinfektion’, was by no means a euphemism).

At the end of the 19th century, Ernest Renan prophesized the coming of “zoological wars”, in which whole armies would be exterminated like vermin. Rather than an organized fighting force to be reckoned with, the bio-enemy is regarded as a menace – a pest or a dangerous disease which must be eliminated. Behind Hitler’s fixation on a global racial struggle was a bio-political conception of social reality which one recent philosopher has characterized as immunological.[4] The likening of Jewish life to an ‘infectious disease’, the notion that the Jewish People represented quite literally a ‘bacteriological’ danger, called forth measures whose aim was to immunize the German population against a deadly threat. Hence the ruthless genocide enacted against Jewish and East European populations, which was meant to prevent the spread of a ‘racial infection’. Hence, also, Heinrich Himmler’s remarks, in his 1944 speech to SS troops in Kharkov, that “[a]nti semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness”.[5]

All of the above, frightening and disturbing as it is, should provoke us to reflect. For one thing, what might it mean that the totalitarian concept of an objective enemy is found to be lurking in the background of our current global health crisis? Simply that politics in our time has for quite some time been in the process of undergoing a comprehensive reorganization. The Coronavirus is only the symptom of a much more widespread contagion, that of bio-medical politics. Just as in the Nazi concentration and death camps, and as the by-now obligatory ideology of human rights makes clear, the preeminent figure of this new political reality is the notion that the humanity of the individual consists in adherence to its own biological material. The being of man is ‘bare life’; denuded of all juridical and ethical determinations, it can only be defined biologically and medically. And yet far from opening up a new era for the spirit, this return to a sort of ontological zero-degree of the human species paves the way to a comprehensive dehumanization that will make the horrific events of 20th century political history seem like a kind of pleasant belle epoque.

It would be much too easy to think of the Coronavirus as some freak occurrence of epidemiology, bursting onto the world-stage, and wreaking havoc and destruction on all the existing social, economic and political structures of our globalized planetary-system. On the contrary, what is happening today, apparently so unprecedented, has only acted to focus and bring together, in a single cataclysmic movement, all the underlying mechanisms of ontological politics so characteristic of our bio-political civilization, mechanisms which have long been assembling silently in the wings, ready and waiting for the opportune moment to be activated.

[1] The History of Sexuality, 137. Moreover if, as Foucault suggests, “genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population” (ibid.).

[2] Here I’m thinking in particular of the explosion of interest nowadays with questions of nutrition, exercise regimes, concerns about health effects of genetically modified foodstuffs, etc..

[3] The Origins of Totalitarianism (Peng. Ed.), 544; Arendt quotes a Nazi legal theorist who suggests that enemies of the regime are counted “not as individuals but as carriers of tendencies endangering the state and therefore beyond the pale of the national community” (ibid., 554, note 96). On this theme see also Roberto Esposito, Bios. Biopolitics and Philosophy, especially Chapter Four, ‘Thanatopolitics (The Cycle of Genos)’.

[4] This term was coined by Roberto Esposito.

[5] Quoted in Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Peng. Ed.)., 505, note 112.