Survival gone viral

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the Covid-19 pandemic has made it more evident that the question of survival plays a structural role in the politics of globalisation. Like a virus that feeds off living cells without producing new ones, globalisation builds on blurring the previously differentiated spaces of the state, the market, war, and nature. The pandemic has exacerbated the instability that results from this blurring of the political spaces of modernity. Amidst this instability, survival has become a prevailing and yet liminal condition for the appearance of politics itself. Rather than interpreting this condition as a biopolitical reduction of political life to mere life, as Giorgio Agamben or Roberto Esposito have done, my theorisation claims that global survival has produced a hyperpoliticization of all events and acts of social life. I illustrate these logics with the political centrality of life in the Black Lives Matter movement.