Viral Critique: Bioarztchy Against Biopotency in the COVID-19 Age

With the COVID-19 pandemic, critique has reached a certain limit. In the twenty-first century, our world can no longer be analyzed through the frameworks of the society of discipline, of control, of consumers, or of the spectacle. Indeed, neoliberal capitalism has fused these variants into an undifferentiated amalgam that denies any experience that does not submit to its quantitative determinations. The pandemic enters this scene as much more than a disease of the body. It colonizes affects, imposing an omnipresent fear that generates a global reorganization under the sign of (bio)security. To fight the pandemic, it is necessary-in addition to doctors, hospitals, drugs, and security measures-to explore the lines of escape, the mutations that will be required, and the potentialities of a viral critique. This book offers a unique contribution to contemporary debates around critical theory and biopolitics. Written from Brazil and Spain in the midst of the pandemic, it starts from the failures of biopolitical analysis to grapple with the unfolding international recompositions of politics and economy, building a biopotential reading of the new structures of bioarztchial power, a kind of reconfi guration of sovereign and medical dominions.