973157

research-article2020
LCH0010.1177/1743872120973157Law, Culture and the HumanitiesDias and Deluchey

LAW, CULTURE
AND
THE HUMANITIES
Article

Law, Culture and the Humanities

The “Total Continuous War”

1­–18
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1743872120973157
https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872120973157
Neoliberal Governmentality, journals.sagepub.com/home/lch

Disposable Bodies and

Protected Lives

Bárbara L. C. V. Dias
and Jean-François Y. Deluchey
Federal University of Pará, Brazil
Le Studium / University of Tours, France

Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we very often heard the expression “We are at war,” but the
warlike tactics that appeared more visibly during the pandemic have been long before used and
deployed against the most precarious bodies among us (Butler). In fact, the “danger” constituted
by the narrative of fighting the pandemic served in imposing security apparatus and exceptional
measures, as well as deepening the “structural reforms” that neoliberal governments consider as
their sole task to carry out (Federici). Thus, the rhetorical resource of the pandemic danger gave
legitimacy to the expansion of warlike strategies with the complacency of the whole population.
In the present paper, drawing on an analysis of what we consider to be the main neoliberal
governmental strategies in the way of dealing with the pandemic, we question the logic of a “total
continuous war” (Foucault), carried out in particular through different bodies hierarchization and
the designs of post-pandemic societies. This reflection has been developed in three steps: first,
we question what is this war that the COVID-19 pandemic made more visible. In a second part,
we observe government tactics and its relation with the rhetoric of war, which allows neoliberal
governments to expose differently the human bodies (Agamben). Finally, we examine the relation
between bio-necro-policies and the urgency of promoting a total continuous war that opposes
disposable bodies to lives that neoliberal governments seek to protect.

Corresponding author:
Jean-François Y. Deluchey, Full Professor, Department of Law, Federal University of Pará, Para, 66075-110,
Brazil. Le Studium / University of Tours, France.
Email: jfdeluchey@gmail.com
2 Law, Culture and the Humanities 00(0)

Keywords
war, COVID-19, pandemic, governmentality, neoliberalism, precarious life, disposable bodies,
Brazil, Bolsonaro

. . .not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not
ceased to be victorious

—Walter Benjamin, 1940, On the Concept of History

After the World Health Organization has recognized COVID-19 as a pandemic, we lis-
tened, read, and watched the expression “We are at war” along with a whole iconography
of political rulers embodying such an argument in front of TV cameras. On April 12,
2020, Donald Trump declared “We are winning, and will win, the war on the Invisible
Enemy! “ Following the rhetoric of war, the death toll of COVID-19 in New York City
has been compared with the victims of the Vietnam War or September 11. But who is this
“Invisible Enemy?”
If we consider that the enemy is the COVID-19 virus, we will not be able to under-
stand what war we are actually facing. Precedents have taught us that warring arguments
are often mobilized to promote the implementation of shock policies, exception meas-
ures, and other security normative apparatuses (dispositifs). As Maurizio Lazzarato
rightly stated, “We live in ‘apocalyptic’ times, in the literal sense of the word—times that
manifest, times that make us see.”1 The question is to know what is this war that the
COVID-19 pandemic “manifests” and “makes us see” and that may only be answered by
taking the word “war” seriously. Our hypothesis is that the COVID-19 pandemic and the
governing strategies of exposing bodies, held by various governments, “manifest, ”
indeed, a war. As a matter of fact, the war the pandemics manifested is a “total war,” as
Deleuze and Guattari defined in A Thousand Plateaus2: “Total war is not only a war of
annihilation but arises when annihilation takes as its ‘center’ not only the enemy army,
or the enemy State, but the entire population and its economy.”
The point is that, even before the pandemic, the “total war” had already taken place.
As such, it is altogether a total and a continuous war. As Michel Foucault taught us in
Society Must be Defended,

. . . politics is the continuation of war by other means. Politics, in other words, sanctions and
reproduces the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war. Inverting the proposition also means
something else, namely that within this “civil peace,” these political struggles, these clashes

  1. See M. Lazzarato, Le capital déteste tout le monde. Fascisme ou Révolution (Paris: Éditions
Amsterdam, 2019), p. 9. To be published in English in March 2021: M. Lazzarato, Capital
Hates Everyone. Fascism and Revolution (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2021).
 2. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
(Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 421.
Dias and Deluchey 3

over or with power, these modifications of relations of force—the shifting balance, the
reversals—in a political system, all these things must be interpreted as a continuation of war.

Indeed, we can observe that the government decisions apparently used in the “war
against the virus” were long before used as warlike tactics deployed against the most
precarious bodies among us. Thus, the “danger” constituted by the narrative of fighting
the pandemic served in imposing security apparatuses and exception measures, as well
as deepening the “structural reforms” that neoliberal governments consider as their sole
task to carry out. With the spreading of the COVID-19 “invisible enemy,” the governed
are once again urged to adhere to a governmentality that promotes obedience and volun-
tary servitude. It is this war that seeks to be both brought about and made invisible by the
governmental strategies.
Drawing on an analysis of what we consider to be different governmental strategies in
the way of dealing with the pandemic, we will disclose the logic of this “total continuous
war,” carried out through a hierarchization of different bodies and the designs of post-
pandemic societies, in close relation with the neoliberal order framework and its govern-
mental strategies and apparatuses.
Based on the hypothesis that the pandemic manifested a social logic based on the civil
total and continuous war, we understand that the present article has the function of
explaining what type of war this is, and what are its expressions and consequences. Our
position is that by making explicit what social and political phenomenon it is about, we
will be able to resist and understand before it.

1.  What War Is This, Anyway?

First, we must examine which continuous war is this, that the COVID-19 pandemic
made even more visible. If we carefully observe its manifestations, we can see that this
“continuous war” is total: it has no end, no truce, and no limit and applies, as Deleuze and
Guattari to “the entire population and its economy.” Essentially, it presents itself as a
peace effort, under the disguise of an institutional, social, legal, and economic normality.
In other words, for the generalization of the escalation of war aggressions to take place
“in peace,” it is necessary to operate and disseminate a discourse on the normalization
and naturalization of ongoing violence. Such normalization is added to the denial and
naturalization of death. These three phenomena walk together in order to establish a
logic in which war and peace become synonymous, as well as exception and rule, coup
d’état and governance, politics and police, neoliberalism and civil war. That is why, first
and foremost, this war is communicational and involves the corrosion and misrepresen-
tation of language, the perversion of enunciation and a systematic inversion of the value
of words and the meaning of discourse itself.
This total continuous war seeks to deepen the inequalities that structure our societies,
and to legitimize this inequality as a natural hierarchy. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his
pandemic episode analysis,3 the recurrence and urgency of the discourse that we should

  3. See S. Zizek, Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World (New York / London: OR Books, 2020).
4 Law, Culture and the Humanities 00(0)

have to return as soon as possible to a “normal life” and, above all, to the regular course
of economic activities, is based on a triumphant capitalist animism, that treats social
phenomena, such as markets or financial capital, as “living entities.” The Slovenian phi-
losopher adds: “If one reads our big media, the impression one gets is that what we
should really worry about are not the thousands who have already died and the many
more who will, but the fact that ‘markets are panicking.’4”
Civil war is first and foremost mobilized so that we would not be able to understand
that our situation is deeply political and establishes a kind of refined barbarism that
builds a strong state for the rich and presents a state of nature for the poor. This civil war
situation, as we have already pointed out, has become more visible in the pandemic (in
some countries, such as Brazil, more explicitly than others). In the health crisis, we have
all been able to observe to what extent the protection of certain lives, through isolation
and medical care, is guaranteed at the expense of the daily struggle for survival and expo-
sure to the death of others.
If, as several authors point out (Federici, Mbembe, Amin, Wallerstein, Lazzarato,
Davis, Chamayou, etc.) the model of such a war comes from colonialism, it is no longer
directed against the native populations of distant lands, but takes place in the metropolis
itself, in an endocolonialism of global scale (Lazzarato). It is a war within and against the
population, unilaterally launched by the “uber-rich” and their lackeys, where the distinc-
tions between peace and war, between combatants and non-combatants, between the
economic, the political and the military are diluted.
With the expansion of neoliberal reason, war, economy and politics become camps
without distinction. In this context, the politics of capital is the continuation of war by all
means at its disposal, but this war, paradoxically, aims at transforming peace into a form
of war of all against all, at both the micro and macro levels. It is not only a war aimed at
docilizing and disciplining bodies, but also at promoting tactics of elimination and neu-
tralization of bodies that are not suitable for that reason. Thus, the governmentality of
neoliberal governance is a civil war. And this global civil war is a total continuous war.
This war, besides camouflaging itself in the indistinctness of the military, the economic
and the political, is based on the spectacular mobilization of securitarian or salvationist
rhetoric that promotes a state of widespread insecurity and the spread of constant fear.
This is why Foucault (in Society Must Be Defended) draws our attention to the need
to reverse von Clausewitz’s aphorism that war is the policy pursued by other means.
From the 19th century onward, it is politics itself that becomes continued war by other
means: “the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe
that relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, lan-
guage, and even the bodies of individuals.”5 In this sense, politics is the sanctioning and
renewal of the imbalance of forces manifested in war and force.
In the passage from the 18th to the 19th century, war is no longer exclusively exer-
cised by means of conventional weapons and battles, but through the emergence of a new

 4. Op. cit., p. 44.

  5. See M. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”. Lectures at the College de France, 1975–
1976. (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 15–16.
Dias and Deluchey 5

way of doing politics, biopolitics, and its technique of governmentality based on bodies
and population control. According to Foucault, this new power mechanics focuses more
on the bodies than on the earth and its product (This is where Foucault receives voracious
criticism from post-colonialism.) The question would then be more about the manufac-
ture of subjects than about the genesis of sovereigns. It is in this factory that we find the
discourse about the war founded on bodies, on the racial and emerging biological of the
end of the 19th century. The war no longer of one individual against the other but the
society as the battlefield of a total war: we are necessarily someone’s adversaries.
In this way, the social body is seen from two races and this division needs to be erased
in the social body in order to naturalize the continuous confrontation of a super race and
a sub race. This erasure will express itself in the form of biological-racist discourses on
degeneracy. There, biopolitics also carries its tanatopolitics (Agamben) or necropolitics
(Mbembe). The biopolitics of capital will assume as its objective the purification of the
social, which institutes a new form of normalization of the social, which goes through the
erasure of everything that is not pure and that may come to corrupt the healthy part of its
body. For this reason, Foucault taught us that, with the consolidation of capitalism, war
is more closely associated to the problem of race:

War. How can one not only wage war on one’s adversaries but also expose one’s own citizens to
war, and let them be killed by the million [. . .], except by activating the theme of racism? [. . .]
In the nineteenth century—and this is completely new—war will be seen not only as a way of
improving one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race (in accordance with the themes of
natural selection and the struggle for existence), but also as a way of regenerating one’s own race.
As more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong will become all the purer.6

It is worth remembering that Agamben continued with this Foucaultian reflection

pointing to the fact that the voluntary creation of a permanent state of exception (even if,
eventually, not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices
of contemporary states, including so-called democratic states.7 This condition of perma-
nence of the State of Exception, for Agamben, was also born at the end of the 19th cen-
tury. Thus, the Italian points out that through the spread of the “legal civil war”, deepened
through the perception that the sovereign can establish his own reason as a technique,
there is a consequent indifferentiation between absolutism and democracy itself. This
strategy of indifferentiation gained even more strength as a technique of governmentality
after the “9/11” of 2001. After the “9/11,” the state of exception increasingly tends to
present itself as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics and is
now radically incorporated as a legal-normative strategy.
Wood also points to the new doctrine of war after the “9/11” event when President
Bush proposed that the United States “rid the world of evil-doers” with Operation Infinite
Justice.8 In his September 21, 2001 speech, George Bush announced:

 6. Op. Cit., p. 257.

  7. See G. Agamben, Homo Sacer. L’intégrale 1997–2015. “L’usage des corps,” vol. 4.2 (Paris:
Seuil, 2016).
  8. See E. M. Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2005).
6 Law, Culture and the Humanities 00(0)

How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command—every
means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every
financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war—to the disruption and to the defeat of
the global terror network.9

A few days later, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in the Labour Party Convention
that the current campaign should be part of a project to reorder our world: “let us re-order
this world around us,” he said.10 For many, there was nothing new in these statements, as
in fact the United States and its allies constantly resorted to military action to pursue their
imperial interests and sustain their economic hegemony since the end of World War II.
What is new, however, is the ideological character of this world civil war, which presents
itself as peace while it is total and continuous war.
Silvia Federici says that the connection between war and integration into the world
economy is not usually recognized this way because it is called globalization and pre-
sents itself as an economic project. Its first and most visible weapons are structural
adjustment programs, trade liberalization, privatizations, and intellectual property rights
that make up a global framework of financialization of social relations. All these “poli-
cies” are responsible for the immense transfer of wealth from the Global South to the
metropolises of the Global North, without requiring territorial conquests, supposedly
operating only by peaceful means.11
In the same vein, Grégoire Chamayou, in his work Manhunts, described the tech-
niques of depredation of men who become preys, and showed how these techniques are
indispensable to establish and reproduce the relations of domination and sovereignty.12
These hunting and predation techniques appear to Chamayou in the tension between the
cynegetic model and the pastoral model. The cynegetic model can be found at various
moments in history, but its most evident account, for Chamayou, is in the Old Testament
in the figure of Nemrod, considered the first king in human history, founder of the city of
Babel, and presented as a powerful hunter. . . of humans. Here appears the exercise of
cynegetic technique and domination based on force, explicit violence, immanence (and
not transcendence), the defense of order and hierarchy given by nature and institutional-
ized violence in the figure of the idolater, the first king of Babel.
In the cynegetic technique of domination the hunter has to chase his preys and capture
them either to immobilize them or to exterminate them. The hunter takes and consumes

 9. Read “Text of George Bush’s speech,” The Guardian, September 21, 2001. https://bit.
ly/3gokn5g (accessed May 15, 2020).
10. Read Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour Party Convention, 02 October 2001, “Full text: Tony
Blair’s speech (part two),” The Guardian. https://bit.ly/32jD6de (accessed May 15, 2020).
11. See S. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle
(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012). In this matter, Foucault exceeded himself by emphasizing
that the fight for the bodies replaced, in the 19th century, the war with land and wealth. These
two wars were always articulated together, the conquest of lands and riches was founded
before in the hierarchy of the bodies still in the XV century, as Federici pointed out.
12. See G. Chamayou, Manhunts. A Philosophical History (Princeton / Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2012).
Dias and Deluchey 7

even the extenuation and death of the prey and its territory. The tactic most used by the
cynegetic power is the separation of the individual from his group, as this makes him
easy to capture.
The “war against COVID-19” has hegemonically adopted the basis of the cyn-
egetic technique, establishing a logic of capture, immobilization, and extermination
of certain bodies, considered abject, following a logic of immunization based on the
hierarchies naturalized by the capital. The neoliberal reason, and its naturalization of
the social hierarchies, uses a rhetoric of strength and normalization of inequality, as
well as the reduction of the possibilities of political imagination in a population that
is attacked, above all, on the basis of its organic solidarity. After all, for the cynegetic
technique, it is fundamental that the subject is separated from his flock to be better
captured. Hence the question of opposing the immunity of the group to the choices of
the individual.
In a war, a strategy is sought through the use of certain tactics and the mobilization of
certain resources. In this respect, the total continuous war that became more visible dur-
ing the pandemic episode looks like a Foucault’s apparatus (dispositif).13 Tactics there-
fore bring together agents, discourses, and resources, and organize them in a coherent
way so that together they can seek the realization, if possible, of the desired strategy on
a total and continuous basis.
One of the most important tactics in this war, revealed by the pandemic, is to construct
a rhetoric that allows to transfer to the virus (COVID-19) the problems or crises that
were not generated by it. As if the pandemic had generated the problems that are now
visible to us. Such as unemployment, the problems of the health systems and blatant
social inequality. Such problems are presented, like the virus, as natural problems and
not as socially constructed problems, built through choices and political practices of
domination. The first tactic is then to promote a rhetoric that presents the virus as our
greatest enemy, with the objective of justifying the state of exception presented as neces-
sary for its warlike confrontation. In a society of the spectacle, as Guy Debord taught us,
the false is presented as truth.14
In recent reflection published on April 10, 2020, Federica Caso asked, “Are we at
war?”15 In this article, Caso stresses the importance of the rhetoric of war in the corona-
virus pandemic. According to her,

In this pandemic, the war rhetoric has spread as fast as the coronavirus itself. Recently, US
President Donald Trump has characterized himself as a wartime president. Hospitals are
preparing for war and healthcare workers are heralded as the frontline soldiers in the war against
COVID-19. While Economists ask how the coronavirus war economy will change the world.

13. For a synthesis about the concept of “Apparatus” (Dispositif) and “Strategy” by Foucault,
read J.-F. Deluchey, “Sobre estratégias e dispositivos normativos em Foucault: considerações
de método.” Revista da Faculdade de Direito da UFG. v.40, n.2, Jul/dec 2016, pp. 175–96.
14. See G. Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
15. See F. Caso, “Are We at War? The Rhetoric of War in the Coronavirus Pandemic”. The
Disorder of Things. April 10, 2020. https://bit.ly/3gocInw (accessed June 19, 2020).
8 Law, Culture and the Humanities 00(0)

Of course, there is nothing new about it, as Caso states:

This is not the first time that the language of war is stretched to contexts that are not legalistically
wartimes. In the last fifty years, we have heard of the war of drugs, the war on poverty, the war
on crime, and the war on plastic. War is a powerful metaphor. It is an effective, immediate, and
emotive tool to communicate urgency to the general public. It also conveys a sense of struggle
and righteousness that can justify exceptional measures.16

The problem, according to Caso, is that “the coronavirus pandemic is not only invok-
ing metaphors from war, it is also unleashing war rhetoric,” which is not the same:

The coronavirus is not an enemy. It is a parasitic agent attaches to living organisms to generate
new viral particles. There is no war to be waged against such a thing, and we should consider
carefully before continuing to use the war rhetoric.

The use of the rhetoric of war to describe the pandemic cannot be seen only as a meta-
phor, but as a tactic to naturalize under the pandemic the total continuous war that was
already occurring, transferring to the pandemic (a “natural phenomenon”) the responsi-
bility for the problems created by neoliberal, necropolitical governmentality.

2.  Government Tactics and Rhetoric of War

Which bodies have been exposed in the pandemic? We will see here that there happened
a social, racial, and gendered differentiation among the bodies and lives that have been
exposed the most during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Basically, during the periods of confinement, the services considered “essential” were
preserved, as defined in legal norms issued by the executive powers of each country. For
instance, the French government’s choice had been to define the “non-essential activi-
ties” and prohibit them during the Covid-19 lockdown from March 17 to May 11. On
March 18, the French media “francetvinfo.fr” published what was really at stake in the
pandemic lockdown:

Coronavirus: what is an “essential” economic sector? The government wants to prevent the
French economy from coming to a complete standstill in the midst of a coronavirus epidemic,
but does not wish to formally establish a list of ‘essential’ economic sectors.

On the same day, the French Minister of Economy stated that “I invite all employees of
companies that are still open, activities that are essential to the functioning of the coun-
try, to visit their workplaces.”17 The argument was both neoliberal and biopolitical: in a
worldwide economic competition, bodies should be put at risk for the benefit of the
(market) community stake. However, both German and French governments adopted

16. Op. Cit.

17. R. Ebenstein, “Coronavirus : c’est quoi, un secteur économique ‘essentiel’? “, franceinfotv,
March 18, 2020. https://bit.ly/31iMXka (accessed July 19, 2020).
Dias and Deluchey 9

quite soon a nearly complete lockdown.18 Even if economy is considered of main impor-
tance, both governments had to consider human lives as priorities in their governmental
strategies.
The case of United States of America is quite different. By May 19, 2020, the federal
guidance had been established in three languages (English, Spanish, and French) by the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), one of the US Department of
Homeland Security, and has been called “CISA Guidance on Essential Critical
Infrastructure Workers.”19 According to National Conference of States Legislature
(NCSL), by June 23, 41 states in the United States had some guidance upon who and who
is not an “essential worker” (or “critical infrastructure worker”). In this document, NCSL
stated that

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, essential workers are those who
conduct a range of operations and services that are typically essential to continue critical
infrastructure operations. Critical infrastructure is a large, umbrella term encompassing sectors
from energy to defense to agriculture.20

Among the 41 states, 20 of them chose to follow the federal guidance, and 21 chose to
create their own guidance.
On March 16, the US federal government issued a note called “The President’s
Coronavirus Guidelines for America.”21 In this short document, President Trump briefly
defined what the “critical infrastructure industry” was and encouraged all workers to be
present in the workplace. While, on one hand, the document advocated “work or engage
in schooling FROM HOME whenever possible,” on the other hand,

If you work in a critical infrastructure industry, as defined by the Department of Homeland

Security, such as healthcare services and pharmaceutical and food supply, you have a special
responsibility to maintain your normal work schedule. You and your employers should follow
CDC guidance to protect your health at work.

In the document published on May 19, it is specified from the beginning that “This list
is advisory in nature. It is not, nor should it be considered, a federal directive or standard.
[. . .] Individual jurisdictions should add or subtract essential workforce categories based

18. FRANCE, Arrêté du 14 mars 2020 portant diverses mesures relatives à la lutte contre la propa-
gation du virus covid-19. Journal Officiel de la République Française (JORF), n.0064, March
15, 2020, text n.16. https://bit.ly/32fHYA8 (accessed July 19, 2020). OUEST FRANCE,
“Coronavirus. L’Allemagne ferme ses commerces jugés ‘non essentiels’”, March 16, 2020.
https://bit.ly/31mWEhn (accessed July 19, 2020).
19. United States of America. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. Guidance on the
Essential Critical Infrastructure Workforce: Ensuring Community and National Resilience in
COVID-19 Response. Version 3.1. https://bit.ly/2EiKm0V (accessed May 19, 2020).
20. United States of America. National Conference of State Legislatures, “COVID-19: Essential
Workers in the States”, May 21, 2020. https://bit.ly/32jDrww (accessed July 10, 2020).
21. United States of America. The White House. “The President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for
America”. March 16, 2020. https://bit.ly/2Ei6ubK (accessed July 10, 2020).
10 Law, Culture and the Humanities 00(0)

Figure 1.  USA Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers, May 2020. Cybersecurity &
Infrastructure Agency.
Source: United States of America. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. Guidance on the Es-
sential Critical Infrastructure Workforce: Ensuring Community and National Resilience in COVID-19
Response. Version 3.1. May 19, 2020. p. 5.

on their own requirements and discretion”, showing how much scope the local authorities
had for deciding to narrow or loosen the social isolation advocated by the WHO.
The US Department of Homeland Security document establishes many activities as
essential (see figure 1). Apart from small businesses selling products that are not related
to health or food, bars, restaurants, and other leisure facilities, very few economic
activities have fallen outside the spectrum of the “essential critical infrastructure.”
Of course, the US document also promotes the confinement of “non-essential work-
ers” and promotes the remote work. On the other hand, the document does not show
great concern for the lives of American workers, as we can read in the (cynical) item
N.8 do documento: “Critical infrastructure employers have an obligation to limit to the
extent possible the reintegration of in-person workers who have experienced an expo-
sure to COVID-19 but remain asymptomatic ways that best protect the health of the
worker, their co-workers, and the general public.” For Trump, if it should be “America
First,” this slogan probably means “American Capital First” and “American People in
Second Place.”
We were able to observe, for example, that neither activities related to primary or
higher education were considered “non-essential.” The National Conference of States
Legislature (NCSL) asks:

Why It’s “Essential”? Child care providers are often referred to as the workforce behind the
workforce. Parents and employers rely on child care to allow them to work and conduct
Dias and Deluchey 11

business resulting in an estimated economic impact of over $99 billion in revenue and spillover
to other industries. This is especially evident in the current public health crisis as states are
depending on child care providers to continue to operate to provide care for the children of
essential workers, even as they have almost uniformly closed K-12 schools.

In this case, we can see that the exposed bodies are preferably the bodies of populations
considered subordinate, women, and racialized people. In fact, according to NCSL, “The
predominately female (94%) early care and education workforce is more racially and
linguistically diverse than K-12 teachers. People of color comprise 40% of early care and
education professionals, and 22% are foreign-born.”22
In relation to “retail workers,” who will supply the American population with food
and health products, the NCSL makes the following statement:

Demographically, 40% of retail workers are women [. . .]. Cashiers, who earn an average of
$8.25 per hour, are predominantly women, whereas delivery drivers, who earn an average of
$16.20, are predominantly men. [. . .] The racial makeup of the retail sector mirrors that of the
overall workforce: 62% non-Hispanic white, 17% Hispanic, 13% African American and 5%
Asian.

In this sector, it appears that non-Hispanic white lower class is among the populations
that are more exposed to death than richer non-Hispanic whites, demonstrating that,
despite Trump has a reputation of representing white lower class, the exposition of peo-
ple to death corresponds as well to a social class criteria.
In Brazil, by Decree No. 10282 of March 20, President Jair Bolsonaro also estab-
lished which public services and economic activities were essential, exempt from the
sanitary measures provided for in Law No. 13979/20 to face the pandemic. Article 3 §1
of this decree states that “Public services and essential activities are those indispensable
to meet the unavoidable needs of the community, thus considered those that, if not met,
endanger the survival, health or safety of the population.” The objective is to allow, in the
name of everyone’s “freedom,” that any economic activity capable of impacting on the
macroeconomic indicators of the Country can be restricted. In the same sense, paragraph
3 indicates that

Restrictions on the movement of workers that may affect the functioning of public services and
essential activities, and of loads of any kind that may lead to the lack of supply of the necessary
genders to the population are prohibited.

The neoliberal exposure of socially vulnerable bodies—and especially of racialized

bodies—was the rule followed by most Western governments. We have seen that in the
United States early childhood services have been guaranteed, 94% of which are provided
by women, the vast majority of whom are non-white. In France, in the area of health,
women represent 76% of the employees, and still with great disparities: 97.7% of the

22. United States of America. National Conference of State Legislatures, “COVID-19: Essential
Workers in the States,” May 21, 2020.
12 Law, Culture and the Humanities 00(0)

private caregivers of the elderly, sick, and disabled, 90.7% of the nursing techniques,
87.4% of the nurses, but only 37.2% of the doctors.23In Brazil, women also represent
90.4% of nurses and 87% of nursing techniques, but only 36% of physicians. In France,
women also represent 94.3% of domestic workers (in Brazil, they are 92%), and 90% of
supermarket cashiers, but France does not produce statistics referring to skin color or
ethnic origin, which contributes to make invisible the differentiated exposure of racial-
ized bodies.
On June 2, Michelle Bachelet, former president of the Chile Republic and now UN
High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that “The data tells us of a devastating
impact from COVID-19 on people of African descent, as well as ethnic minorities in
some countries, including Brazil, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.”24
She added:

In many other places, we expect similar patterns are occurring, but we are unable to say for sure
given that data by race and ethnicity is simply not being collected or reported. [. . .] The
appalling impact of COVID-19 on racial and ethnic minorities is much discussed, but what is
less clear is how much is being done to address it.

The same UN News report states that

In Brazil’s Sao Paulo city, people of colour are 62% more likely to die from COVID-19 than
white people. In France’s Seine Saint-Denis department where many minorities live, higher
excess mortality has also been reported. In the United States, the COVID-19 death rate for
African Americans is reported to be more than double that of other racial groups. Similarly,
government data for England and Wales shows a death rate for black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi
people that is nearly double that of white people, even when class and some health factors are
taken into account.

The coronavirus pandemic has also revealed that our hospitals are now highly techno-
logical but cannot accommodate a lot of patients in the event of a crisis. The budgetary
and political choices made by governments lead to great disparities in the proposal of
hospital beds by 1,000 inhabitants: 13 in Japan and South Korea, 8 in Germany or Russia,
6 in France and Belgium, 5 in Cuba or Argentina, but only 4 in China, Finland, or Greece,
around 3 in the United States, Italy, or Spain, less than 3 in the United Kingdom, South
Africa, Brazil, Denmark, Ireland and Sweden, and 84 Global South countries share a

23. S. Bessière. “La féminisation des professions de santé en France : données de cadrage”, Revue
Française des Affaires Sociales, n.1, 2005, pp. 19–33. https://bit.ly/3aPxZFj (accessed March
10, 2020).
24. United Nations. Human Rights. Office of The High-Commissioner, Disproportionate Impact
of COVID-19 on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Needs to be Urgently Addressed—Bachelet.
Geneva, June 2, 2020. https://bit.ly/3l9UTMl.
Dias and Deluchey 13

lower rate of two hospital beds per 1,000 inhabitants, until reaching the extremely low
rate of 0.10 in Mali.25
Since the 1980s, the development of medical technology and the treatment of dis-
eases that previously kept patients in hospitals has led to a general reduction in hos-
pital beds. In a Eurostat study that compared hospital bed capacity in 34 countries in
Europe, 28 reduced the absolute number of their available beds between 2012 and
2017.26 England, a good student of neoliberal governmentality, has halved its number
of beds from approximately 300,000 available in 1987 to less than 150,000 in 2014.27
In Brazil, between 2009 and 2017, governed by Lula’s Workers’ Party until 2016, the
reduction of beds was only 5.5%.28 In just three years in the governments of Michel
Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, between 2017 and 2019, this reduction reached 6.2%,
totaling 28,300 units. In these three years, the biggest reduction was in the public
health system, whose supply fell by 14.3%, while the number of beds in the private
sector increased by 18.2%.29 We can clearly observe that there is no naturality in the
impact that the pandemic can have on a country: it is primarily about political deci-
sions seeking to choose between investing in the public health sector or privatizing
and deregulating a sector that has proved to be of prime government importance in the
pandemic crisis.
For neoliberal reason based on the “truth” of the market and the radical calculation of
utility, empty beds are not profitable. And besides the lack of beds, most countries that
apply neoliberal governmentality still faced problems of lack of medical equipment,
such as respirators, facial masks, and hand sanitizer. The political economy of this short-
age is quite common: many countries in the West have outsourced the production of
medical equipment such as face masks and ventilators to reduce costs.
The tactic of transference in the use of the rhetoric of war in the pandemic hides the fact
that the economic model on which we administer hospitals and medical care is deficient, if
not sick. The recognition that many health systems have been weakened by the capitalist-
neoliberal reason for efficiency, cost reduction, and profit maximization is the starting point
for the construction of resilient hospitals and the precariousness of the care workforce.
One of the policy conclusions of the COVID-19 pandemic is that we cannot transfer
vulnerability to just a few. Another conclusion has proved that there is a link between
poor health and socioeconomic conditions. Most cases of precariousness are created by
social policies, which means that coronavirus will hit some social groups harder than
others. For example, in Australia, this disparity is revealed by health guidelines that

25. Index Mundi, “Hospital beds (per 1,000 people)—Country Ranking,” December 28, 2019.
https://bit.ly/3j8jRdu (April 11, 2020).
26. EUROSTAT, “Curative Care Beds in Hospitals, 2012 and 2017 (per 100 000 inhabitants)
Health 2019,” November 20, 2019. https://bit.ly/32mwgDC (July 10, 2020).
27. Sheffield DPH, “Is It the Ageing Population, Need, Demand or Supply that is Causing
Pressure,” November 18, 2016. https://bit.ly/3jjDqQb (accessed July 10, 2020).
28. BRAZIL, FIOCRUZ, “Evolução da rede hospitalar de 2009 a 2017.” https://bit.ly/2FQkUQR
(accessed July 12, 2020).
29. M. Fernandes, “Redução de leitos em hospitais é principal preocupação na resposta ao coro-
navírus”, HuffpostBrasil.com, March 15, 2020. https://bit.ly/31nhqNO (accessed July 12,
2020.).
14 Law, Culture and the Humanities 00(0)

indicate that while the cut in vulnerability for non-Aboriginal Australians is 60 for those
with pre-existing conditions, and 70 for those without conditions, it is 50 for the people
of the First Nations.30 As Chelsea Bond explains, poor health in Aboriginal communities
is the product of 200 years of neglect; while the health agenda focused on finding cures
for diseases endemic to Europe and affecting settlers, Indigenous people were denied
access to medical treatment and control over their health agenda.31
In Brazil, indigenous and quilombolas communities were particularly affected by the
pandemic: “Our leaders are leaving. This brave disease that no one knows about is deci-
mating our peoples,” said Jacir José de Souza of the village of Maturuca and former
coordinator of the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR). Souza continued: “I appeal to
the authorities to look at the indigenous people with more attention. Send doctors, nurses
who understand this disease to the communities before the situation worsens.”32
Bolsonaro took advantage of the pandemic to follow his attempt to acculturate or exter-
minate the indigenous population, stimulating invasions of their lands by cattle ranchers,
soybean planters, and miners and offering them chloroquine, which has already been
proven not to cure and can kill.
On multiple occasions, the use of the rhetoric of war in the COVID-19 pandemic has
served to mask the real war that is, in fact, continued in our neoliberal political and eco-
nomic system and that ends our immunity and turns us into vulnerable and precarious
bodies in the face of this virus.
The United States of Trump and Brazil of Bolsonaro demonstrate a clear option for
necropolitics. On every possible occasion, the two rulers (among many others) made the
option of leaving their national population unprotected, betting that only the most vulner-
able would die, abject of the market and of the maximization of capital production.
In the case of Brazil, the situation is even more exemplary. In a report, the Court of
Appeals of the federal government points out that of the R$38.9 billions destined to the
Federal Government for the Combat of COVID-19, only R$11.4 were spent. In one of
the stretches of the Court’s report, the federal units, according to data from the Ministry
of Health, which had higher mortality rates for COVID-19, are the ones that received the
least funds in terms of per capita income to fight the pandemic33.

3.  A Bio-Necro-Policy Strategy

Our hypothesis here, is that, to the “total continuous war,” correspond a bio-necro-policy
strategy held by neoliberal governments, which justifies and deepens a radically different

30. See D. Frum, “Trump’s Two Horrifying Plans for Dealing With the Coronavirus: If he Can’t
Confine the Suffering to his Opponents, he is Prepared to Incite a Culture War to Distract his
Supporters.” In The Atlantic, April 19, 2020. https://bit.ly/2EqxhSU
31. Op. Cit.
32. See J. Souza, “Lideranças históricas na Raposa Serra do Sol estão entre as vítimas da Covid-
19”. In Amazônia Real. July 30, 2020. https://bit.ly/3l8CKP7.
33. See Laís Lis, “TCU dá 15 dias para governo explicar estratégia de gastos no combate ao
coronavírus”. G1 GLOBO.COM. July 22, 2020. https://glo.bo/2Emrs9g (accessed August 11,
2020).
Dias and Deluchey 15

exposition of lives and bodies to death and disease during the COVID-19 pandemic. The
rhetorical use of war in the pandemic has sought to hide the fact that the real war is the
(necro)politics of producing precarious bodies and the bio(politics) from which bodies
import or are the object of mourning; That is, it is confirmed that neoliberal-capitalist
governmentality has imposed a necro-government of lives whose strategy consists of
naturalizing a radical distinction between lives, and adjusting policies in the sense of
“make live” a few and “let die” or even “make die” many bodies exposed to illness,
death, and social precariousness.34
Part of this central strategy of this civil war is the radical selectivity of the victims to
whom the biopolitical tactic of putting people to death falls, supported by the strengthen-
ing of a social and racial apartheid that becomes health segregation. In the bio-necro-
political framework, it is denied that bodies are only more exposed to the virus because
they are exploited by bodies that are preserved from exposure, with a kind of immune
surplus value. In this sense, Judith Butler points out:

These normative frameworks establish in advance what kind of life will be a life worth living,
what life will be a life worth preserving, and what life will become worthy of being mourned.
Such views of lives pervade and implicitly justify contemporary war. Lives are divided into
those representing certain kinds of states and those representing threats to state-centered liberal
democracy, so that war can then be righteously waged on behalf of some lives, while the
destruction of other lives can be righteously defended.35

This division of lives between those who should live and those who can or should
die is one of the central characteristics of neoliberal bio-necro-political governmen-
tality, and the main character of the radical distinction regime constituted by capitalist
reason. The rhetoric of war and disease, placated in racist justification, serves to jus-
tify this bio-necro-political governmental regime, and Judith Butler is right to state
that this is exactly the function of war: “War is precisely an effort to minimize precari-
ousness for some and to maximize it for others.”36 Giorgio Agamben had already
insisted on this point:

the development and triumph of capitalism would not have been possible, from this perspective,
without the disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which, through a series of
appropriate technologies, so to speak created the “docile bodies” that it needed.37

Neoliberal reason will radicalize liberal freedom, making it a “new way of the
world,”38 a bio-necro-political, totalitarian and hegemonic reason. So hegemonic that

34. See J.-F. Deluchey, Biopolitics and Death in Brazil: the extermination of the Amazonian (ultra)
peripheral black youth. Research Draft Report. 151 pages. 2019. https://bit.ly/3gnrPgW.
35. See J. Butler, Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), p. 53.
36. Op. Cit., p. 54.
37. See G. Agamben, Homo Sacer. L’intégrale 1997–2015. “Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue”,
vol. 1.1. (Paris: Seuil, 2016), p. 13.
38. See P. Dardot and C. Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde. Essai sur la société néolibérale
(Paris: La Découverte. 2009). Also available in English : P. Dardot and C. Laval, The New
Way of The World: On Neoliberal Society (New York: Verso, 2014).
16 Law, Culture and the Humanities 00(0)

Judith Butler, along with all the other intellectuals of the critical current, wonders how to
operate resistance to a reason that has occupied our daily lives, our bodies and our minds
militarily:

Our ability to respond with outrage depends upon a tacit realization that there is a worthy life
that has been injured or lost in the context of war, and no utilitarian calculus can supply the
measure by which to gauge the destitution and loss of such lives. But if we are social beings and
our survival depends upon a recognition of interdependency (which may not depend on the
perception of likeness), then it is not as an isolated and bounded being that I survive, but as one
whose boundary exposes me to others in ways that are voluntary and involuntary (sometimes
at once), an exposure that is the condition of sociality and survival alike.39

Hence the importance for our bodily survival of a recognition of social interdepend-
ence and that which is attacked by neoliberal policies. Now, the pandemic dramatically
exposes this condition of survival in interdependence, whether voluntary or involuntary.
The protection (survival) and delimitation of my body depends on a recognition of this
interdependence. Butler points out that the limit of the body never fully belongs to the
person, but to the sociability that constitutes the body: “But as much as the body, consid-
ered as social in both its surface and depth, is the condition of survival, it is also that
which, under certain social conditions, imperils our lives and our survivability.”40 For
this reason, neoliberal governmentality develops through bio-necro-political impulses.
The fact that a person’s body never fully belongs to him or her can also come from a
world of unwanted physical contact that stems from the fact that the body finds its capac-
ity for survival in social space and time; and this exposure or expropriation is precisely
exploited in the case of acts of coercion, constraint, physical violation, and undesirable
violence.
At this point, the question is how this strategic war conducted by neoliberalism pro-
duces techniques of government that fabricate in human beings the awareness of being
defenseless and without the right to defense and how these technologies capture these
social movements. Elsa Dorlin in her book To Defend Oneself 41 will draw our attention
to the production of the “defensive devices” mobilized for the production of subjects
with or without the possibility of self-defense. Government technologies used in total
continuous warfare not only lead to an awareness of the ineffectiveness of resistance, but
produce it. Impotence is the main effect of the power devices of a neoliberal policy that
destroys the possibilities of resistance through various technologies based on the raciali-
zation of bodies.
The radical impotence among the dominated, the immobile wait before the next coup
are also effects of colonial and neo-colonial techniques. Moreover, we should not restrict
coloniality and the work of racialization to the sole reference to “race,” skin color or
ethnic origin of the individual, but in the broad sense of “state racism” attributed by
Foucault.42

39. See J. Butler, Op. Cit., p. 54.

40. Op. Cit., p. 54.
41. See E. Dorlin, Se défendre. Une philosophie de la violence (Paris: La Découverte, 2019).
42. See M. Foucault, Op. Cit., pp. 228–29.
Dias and Deluchey 17

From a bio-necro-political point of view, individuals are controlled as a population

(human species) in an era in which security is made one of the most essential references
for government outputs, based on a regime of truth built from alleged “natural laws of the
market.” The law of the market has to be put into perspective with the concept of “social
utility,” which would be determined from a market-centered calculation of the value of
life. This valuation work would help to define and differentiate which forms of life
deserve or do not deserve to be lived. In extreme cases, this calculation allows to point
out which lives need to be neutralized, erased or exterminated (lives unworthy of being
lived43). The application of bio-necro-political apparatuses is the object of a calculation
of interest that is carried out in the microphysics of the social, although its impulses come
from actions perpetuated at the global level by the sovereigns of the order, the largest
holders of capital, based on their specific strategies of unlimited accumulation/concen-
tration of capital. As Agamben stated, “In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who
decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such.”44 In the pandemic, apart from these
choices of precariousness, racialization, and exposure of certain bodies to the benefit of
others that could be seen with the naked eye.

Conclusion
In neoliberal governmentality, the regime of truth of the market, associated with the glo-
balization process, have transformed certain bodies into disposable bodies.45 These bod-
ies refer to those who perform precarious work activities, which are also essential to
sustain social life. The war tactics target those bodies since they are always the ones that
can be subject to death without entailing any public grief. In this sense, we can observe
that the pandemic exposed cruelly the hierarchization and disposability of bodies. Hence,
COVID-19 appears to be more of a symptom of waging a certain war than a health emer-
gency that would affect everybody equally.
Thanks to the examination of the government strategies built to confront the COVID-
19 pandemic, we believe the logic of a “total continued war” could be observed, as well
as its corresponding tactics of classification, hierarchization, control, and exposure to
death that affect specific human bodies. These war tactics are expressed in legal appara-
tuses that denote legal segregation within a rule of law that is presented as universal. The
mobilization of an “invisible enemy” serves to naturalize this legal segregation before
the population. For this reason, the neoliberal governmentality held during the COVID-
19 pandemic allows us to foresee to which bodies and to which “subjects of law” this
legal segregation applies, and with what consequences for a rule of law that has to be
thought of as a permanent state of exception.
In fact, the rhetorical resource of the pandemic danger give legitimacy to the expan-
sion of war strategies, with the complacency of the entire population. As Donatella di

43. See G. Agamben, Homo Sacer. L’intégrale 1997–2015. “Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue,”
Op. Cit., p. 110.
44. Op. Cit., pp. 123–24.
45. See G. Agamben, Op. Cit. See J. Butler, Frames of War.
18 Law, Culture and the Humanities 00(0)

Cesare would say, the fear generated by globalization itself, which has reinforced both
xenophobia and exophobia, has reduced the subjects’ willingness to participate and be
involved in collective decisions, in a continued policy of removal and abjection of bodies
from both public and political spaces.46 This fear could even deepen after the pandemic
and lead us to disqualify any form of common life, in the name of our own immunity
stake.
To combat this strategy of war, we would like to join Patel in making a reversal and
speaking out against the theological presumption of the end of history. We can think of
history as dissociated from this sacrificial logic. Benjamin, in the text “On the concept of
history,” tells us provocatively that, just as the future is not the bright end of time, the
past is not the lost and inaccessible place that we normally lead it to be.47 Dead are not
completely dead, nor have they completely disappeared. If “even the dead” are not safe,
since the enemy is victorious, the opposite is also true: even the dead can be saved if the
enemy is defeated, and so Benjamin’s courage before teleology can not only serve to
save the living, but also, retrospectively, to save them and the rest of the dead as well.
Therefore, we need to face this shortening of the horizon of the possible promoted as
a central tactic of this total continuous war. We do not have to accept the logic of duality
and the inevitable fact between the necropolitical logic of the market and the indifference
that is expressed in the economic survival or the exposure of my body to the virus.
We must broaden our political imagination and awaken to the fact that this supposed
impotence of ours in the face of the invisible forces of the pandemic is a constructed
impotence, a carefully crafted and nurtured farce to make us accept the unacceptable.
They would serve as a reminder that politics is not only the art of proving what is pos-
sible, but also the art of proving what the dominant discourse insists on declaring what is
impossible.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The authors received financial support from Le Studium Loire Valley
Institute for Advanced Studies for the research.

46. See D. Di Cesare, “O virus soberano”, In PIAUÍ, April 2020, n.163, https://bit.ly/3hqiczl.
47. See W. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Works (Marcus
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds), Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press / Belknap, 2006).