Paul Preciado – Learning from the Virus – March 28th, 2020

If Michel Foucault had survived the scourge of AIDS and had resisted until the invention of tritherapy he would be 93 years old today: would he have willingly accepted to have locked himself up in his apartment on rue Vaugirard? The first philosopher in history to die from the complications generated by the acquired immunodeficiency virus has bequeathed us some of the most effective notions to think about the political management of the epidemic that, amid panic and misinformation, become as useful as a good cognitive mask.  

The most important thing we learned from Foucault is that the living (and therefore mortal) body is the central object of all politics. Il n’y a pas de politique qui ne soit pas une politique des corps (there is no politics that is not a politics of the bodies). But the body is not for Foucault a given biological organism on which power then acts. The very task of political action is to manufacture a body, put it to work, define its modes of reproduction, prefigure the modes of discourse through which that body is fictionalized until it is capable of saying “I”. All of Foucault’s work could be understood as a historical analysis of the different techniques through which power manages the life and death of populations. Between 1975 and 1976, the years in which he published   Discipline and Punish and the first volume of the History of Sexuality , Foucault used the notion of “biopolitics” to speak of a relationship that power established with the social body in modernity. He described the transition from what he called a “sovereign society” to a “disciplinary society” as the passage from a society that defines sovereignty in terms of decision and ritualization of death to a society that manages and maximizes the lives of populations in terms of national interest. For Foucault, biopolitical governmental techniques extended as a network of power that went beyond the legal sphere or the punitive sphere, becoming a “somato-political” force, a form of spatialized power that extended throughout the entire territory until it penetrated the individual body.