The outbreak of Covid-19 and state reactions to it have laid bare the ways in which human biology and life itself become the subject of governance in contemporary political systems. Indeed, while primarily the global pandemic is to be seen as a health (and, subsequently, economic) crisis in action, it has also demonstrated the intrusiveness of even democratic regulation, expanding it from public and social matters to personal life and even the inside of the human body. As manifested by the tight monitoring and enforcement of quarantine and self-isolation measures, promotion of apps, tracking health, behaviour, and movement, calls for certain groups, primarily defined in terms of age and underlying medical conditions, to be isolated, supposedly for their own and society’s good, proposals for the introduction of ‘immunity passports’ that would make biology the source of privilege, the boundaries between the human body, the person as the object of regulation, and political power have become blurred. This new, enhanced regulatory power is what Foucault has over four decades ago termed biopower, defining it in The Will to Knowledge as ‘a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations’. Likewise, in Society Must Be Defended, Foucault argues that the main enemy of contemporary societies is no longer another race or cultural entity but any deviation that threatens the dominant account of human biology, the latter being geared around optimal economic productivity. When translated into actual modes of implementation, biopower becomes biopolitics, i.e. measures through which the state maintains control over the physical bodies of the population, from mandatory medical check-ups to annual paid leave that is supposed to prepare the body for more work ahead. As the preceding examples indicate, in normal times such biopolitical measures are difficult to isolate and often even seem beneficial. In contrast, the Covid-19 crisis has laid the biopolitical regimes bare, demonstrating the levels of intrusiveness that the states are ready to go to and the grip that state power structures have on human biology. As the human body becomes securitised, both the amount and depth of even democratic repression expands, and that can be done largely with public support as the alleged reduction of bodily risk becomes the selling point of deep subjection. As a result, this paper concludes by framing the present situation as decisive choice: whether societies are going to allow the newly found biopolitical power over the securitised body to become the new normal or whether this intrusiveness and the illusion of the governable risk-free body are rejected.
