A Foucauldian enquiry in the origins of the

COVID-19 pandemic management (Critique in

Times of Coronavirus)
by Gerasimos Kakoliris | 11 May 2020
 Arnold Böcklin, Plague, 1898, Kunstmuseum Basel
Is the substantially global management of the coronavirus
pandemic a novelty or would it be possible to trace its origin
in an earlier order of things? Could the specific model
selected for the governance of the ongoing pandemic be
subjected to a certain genealogy? According to the text on
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), Michel Foucault
defines genealogy, or otherwise “effective” history, as a
method of analysis of the descent, or the emergence of a
specific practice.1 Referring to descent in the context of
Foucauldian genealogy entails analysing the nexus of
complex, multiple and multiform relations of power and
knowledge at the origin of a given practice.
In his lecture on January 15th, 1979, which is included in the
volume Abnormal. Lectures at the Collége de France 1974-
1975,2 as well as in the chapter entitled “Panopticism”
in Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (1975),3 Fou
cault seems to offer us, in an exceptionally illuminating way, a
perspective on the conception of the ongoing management of
the COVID-19 pandemic, which is, in fact, the management
model of the plague. Αt the beginning of the 18th century, the
“model of the inclusion of plague victims” as he named it,
superseded the “model of the exclusion of the lepers” (A, 44).
Contrary to the management of leprosy, which required the
leper’s exclusion from society for putting everyone in danger,
the management of the plague placed in the centre of a
disciplinary mechanism not only the plague victim but the
general population in its totality. The purpose of this
disciplinary mechanism was to prevent the spread of the
contagious disease by imposing a strict control on the
circulation of bodies.
What characterized leprosy was its rarity; the fact that it was
subject to a slow development and was not highly contagious,
while its external traits were obviously noticeable, making the
diagnosis of the disease easily performed by common people
or the priests. On the contrary, the plague, like COVID-19
today, is highly and rapidly contagious, via direct or indirect
contact, thus affecting the entire populations in a short period
of time. This made the plague impossible to control simply by
shutting those carrying the disease out of the confines of the
town, especially as their detection was a difficult task. The
particular traits of the disease required the transformation of
its management: Contrary to leprosy, the simple binary
division of the population between the healthy and diseased,
and the consequent expulsion of the latter was not effective
any longer.
A specific distinction of an epidemic or a pandemic, is its
dissemination from one body to the next, its circulation or
flow among a multiplicity of bodies. An epidemic or pandemic
disease circulates through the everyday circulation of bodies
per se. What accelerates the spread of the disease is not only
its transmissibility, but also the vehicles for its transmission
(from animals to humans, from one individual to the next,
from one city to the next, from one port or airport to the
next). In fact, the denser and broader the circulation of bodies
is, the more efficient the networks for the circulation are, the
easier the virus’s circulation becomes. As Eugene Thacker
notes, “An epidemic could only be an epidemic – and not
simply ‘endemic’ – if all circulations are flowing, if the
networks of trade and travel are functioning
correctly.”4 Therefore, what marked the management of the
pandemic plague was the attempt to handle the circulation of
the disease through the control of the circulation of bodies.
Controlling the disease entailed the articulation of a topology,
within which intervention and selective obstruction of a
network, or a form of circulation was possible.
In contrast to the management of leprosy, which mobilized
“rituals of exclusion”, the management of the plague “gave
rise to disciplinary projects” (DP, 198). In the case of the
plague, the “massive, binary” division of the diseased versus
the healthy, as well as the subsequent expulsion of the former
from the town has been proven impossible. On the contrary,
the management of the plague requires multiple separations
of the populations and spaces, for “individualizing
distributions” of spaces – that is, everyone has to be exactly
where they are required to be – as well as “an organization in
depth of surveillance and control” of these divisions and
separations. For Foucault, all this led to “an intensification
and a ramification of power” (ibid).
The management of the pandemic introduces the individual
bodies to a specific network of disciplinary relations. The
plague as a form of disorder, real or imaginary, has discipline
“as its medical political correlative” (ibid). According to
Foucault, “[t]he plague is met by order; its function is to sort
out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is
transmitted when bodies are mixed together” (DP, 197). The
regulation and control of maintaining order penetrate “even
the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of
the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary function of
power” (DP, 198).
The restrictions placed upon the circulation of bodies, means
that they ought to have a spatial positioning determined in
advance. Their movement is determined by a strict
framework whose breach entails punishment. A “small penal
mechanism” is situated at the centre of every modern
disciplinary control, which Foucault terms as “normalizing
judgement” (DP, 177), and which punishes a set of behaviours
deviating from what the mechanism determines as permitted.
Its purpose is the creation of a docile body specific to the
condition of the pandemic through the fear of the penalty,
which in current days assumes the form of a fine or even
imprisonment. Besides the penalty of conduct, what is at
stake is also the moralization of conduct. The “carefree”
circulation of bodies is not only a criminal offense but a moral
one too. Hence, the disobedient body is labelled as
“irresponsible”, in contrast to the obedient body of the
“responsible” citizen. Irresponsible institutions may not exist,
but irresponsible citizens certainly do! The individualistic
ethics of neoliberalism require social responsibility on behalf
of the individual. Nonetheless, at the same time,
neoliberalism undermines any notion of social sensitivity and
responsibility when, for instance, it dismantles the welfare
state, or refuses access to decent life conditions to a number
of persons.
The movement of bodies is constantly and continually
monitored. The body is monitored in order to curtail the
dangerous communication channels. This is achieved through
an individualized “spatial partitioning”.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes the disciplinary
strategy of “partitioning” as the strict delimitation of a given
space, in which each individual has their own position, so as
to exclude the possibility of the individual’s pointless move,
their disappearance or the futile and dangerous interaction
with others. The disciplinary space tends to be divided into as
many parts as the bodies or elements it is meant to separate:
“Particular places were defined to correspond […] to the need
to supervise, to break dangerous communications” (DP, 143-
144). The aim is the elimination of diffuse circulation of
individuals, “their unusable and dangerous coagulations”, as
well as the decomposition of “massive or transient pluralities”
(DP, 143). The partitioned, enclosed space enables the
interruption of any dangerous communication, as well as the
evaluation of everyone’s behaviour and the possible sanctions
in the case of misbehaviour.
Inside such topography of bodies, everyone “is fixed in his
place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life,
contagion or punishment” (DP, 195). The “hierarchical
observation” (DP, 170) of bodies work relentlessly. The gaze is
always vigilant. Controlling the movement of the bodies and
disciplining them is achieved through their surveillance.
Hence, while “leprosy calls for distance”, the plague, like the
coronavirus, “implies an always finer approximation of power
to individuals, an ever more constant and insistent
observation” (A, 46).
The exile of the leper and the containment of the plague do
not belong to the same “political dream”. The political dream
lurking behind the management of leprosy is the dream of a
“pure community”. On the contrary, what lurks behind the
management of the plague is the dream of a “disciplined
society”. It is the “dream” of a power, which, in the name of
containment of the infectious virus threatening the
population, is exercised in an exhausting and total manner
upon the society as a whole – thus, making each of the subject
upon which it is exercised entirely transparent. In a sense, the
political dream of the plague-stricken town represents the
obliteration of politics itself. The plague-stricken town, as
Foucault noted, expresses the “utopia of the perfectly
governed city”. It is a town “traversed throughout with
hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town
immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that
bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies” (DP, 198).
The epidemic of the plague, “envisaged as a possibility at
least”, constitutes, as Foucault maintains, a laboratory to test
an “ideal” way for disciplinary power to be exercised. Like the
jurists, who “placed themselves in imagination in a state of
nature” in order to “make rights and laws function according
to pure theory”, the rulers were dreaming of the plague
condition as an opportunity “in order to see perfect
disciplines functioning” (DP, 199).
The replacement of the leprosy model by the plague model,
corresponds to a particularly significant historical process,
which Foucault terms as “the invention of positive
technologies of power”. The response to leprosy is “a negative
reaction”, that is, “a reaction of rejection, exclusion, and so
on”. On the contrary, the response to the plague, or to the
coronavirus today, is “a positive reaction”. It is a reaction
which includes confinement, observation, production of
knowledge and, eventually, the multiplication of the effects of
power through the accumulation of observation and
knowledge. As Foucault maintains, it constitutes the pass
“from a technology of power that drives out, excludes,
banishes, marginalizes, and represses, to a fundamentally
positive power that fashions, observes, knows, and multiplies
itself on the basis of its own effects.” (A, 48).
It is the contention of this short intervention attempted here,
that the management of the plague during the 18th century,
similarly to the management of COVID-19 today, carries
within it the two basic forms of biopower that is the power
over life, which according to Foucault, was developed from
the 17th century onward. Biopower is compared to sovereign
power, which predominated in pre-modern societies, where
the monarch had a “right of life and death” over his subjects.
The concept of biopower is addressed mainly in the last
chapter of the first volume
of The History of Sexuality (1976),5 entitled “Right of Death
and Power over Life”, as well as in the lecture of March 17th,
1976, which is included in the
book/volume “Society Must Be Defended”. Lectures at the
Collége de France, 1975-76.6 Foucault defines biopower as the
“explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving
the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations”. 7 In
particular, power over life was developed in two basic forms.
The one which seems to have developed first was termed by
Foucault as the “anatomo–politics of the human body”;8 it
revolves around and centers on the disciplines of the body,
that is around systems of control, aiming at producing docile
bodies. An example of such form of power is the plague
management model which emerged at the end of the
17th century, as mentioned above. The second form assumed
by biopower is the one of the “biopolitics of the population”;
it revolves around interventions and regulatory controls
aiming not at individual bodies but at the management of
population.9 The constant disciplinary control, as a way of
managing the pandemic, according to Foucault, is
constitutive of “an attempt to maximize the health, life,
longevity, and strength of individuals. Essentially, it is a
question of producing a healthy population” (A, 46).
Similarly, what is witnessed during the period of the COVID-
19 pandemic, is the enormous increase of disciplinary power,
which, in the name of the population and the development of
specific strategies, controls, excludes and limits the human
body. The aim of the political “dream” of power during the
management of the ongoing pandemic is the production of
docile, disciplined bodies, in the name of life preservation and
death prevention. Therefore, what becomes clear in the kind
of management put in place, is that we are still living under
the system of power which was inaugurated at the advent of
modernity by the political and medical management of the
plague, and which is found in the diptych of life and
discipline.
According to the lecture “What is Critique?” delivered
at Société française de philosophie on May 27th, 1978,
Foucault upholds that the “governmentalization” of Western
societies from the 16th century onward cannot be separated
from the question of “how not to be governed?”. Foucault
explains this question in the following way: “‘how not to be
governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles,
with such and such an objective in mind and by means of
such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by
them.’”10 Therefore, along with the “veritable explosion of the
art of governing men (sic)”, “a kind of general cultural form,
both a political and moral attitude, a way of thinking, etc.”, is
born, which Foucault names as “the art of not being governed
or better, the art of not being governed like that and at that
cost.”.11
Consequently, would it be possible to argue for a different
management of the pandemic, one which would not aim at
the subjection of bodies and would not end in the
implementation and strict compliance to a set of disciplinary
measures – designed to make up for the reluctance or
inability to practically protect life, especially of those living
under conditions of increasing precariousness – as dictated
by the neoliberal governing of the pandemic? In other words,
would it be possible for “an alternative politics of bios”, to
emerge, as Panagiotis Sotiris asked in his article “Against
Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?”, a different
biopolitics which “combines individual and collective care in
non coercive ways.”? In his view, that would involve “the
decisions for the reduction of movement and for social
distancing in times of epidemics, […] would be the result of
democratically discussed collective decisions.” Fear, passivity
and the discipline of citizens could be replaced by collective
effort, mutual support and aid, solidarity and care. 12
Gerasimos Kakoliris is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Philosophy at the National and Kapodistrian
University of Athens, Greece