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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.
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Notes
1 To defend the need of communism, Badiou used openly motivational terms: ‘we must take advantage of this epidemic interlude, and even of the – entirely necessary – isolation, to work on new figures of politics, on the project of new political sites, and on the trans-national progress of a third stage of communism after the brilliant one of its invention and the – interesting but ultimately defeated – stage of its statist experimentation’ (Citation2020). I will refer to Žižek below.
2 See Illas Citation2020.
3 Barkan Citation2013. For other great analyses of the transformation of the state in globalization, see Mezzadra and Neilson Citation2019, especially 209–52; and Lindahl Citation2013.
4 As Adam Kotsko has written, ‘[f]ar from a contradiction, a financial sector bailout is precisely the duty of the neoliberal state as ultimate guarantor of market structures’ (Citation2018: 21).
5 For an analysis of global financialization, see, in addition to Lazzarato Citation2012, Lazzarato Citation2015; Harvey Citation2005; Marazzi Citation2010; and Streeck Citation2014.
6 For other analyses of BLM and its contextualization in the history of black struggles, see Taylor (Citation2016); Collier Hillstrom (Citation2018); and Lamont Hill (Citation2016).
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Edgar Illas
Edgar Illas, is an associate professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington. His field of specialization is contemporary Catalan culture. His research interests also lie in political theory, Marxism, biopolitics, and war studies. He has published Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City (2012) and The Survival Regime. Global War and the Political (2020).