Security Beyond Biopolitics: The Spheropolitics, Co-Immunity and Atmospheres of the Coronavirus Pandemic

The recent pandemic of Covid-19 has stimulated much intellectual and academic debate and has, perhaps more than anything else, reaffirmed the importance of biopolitics and of other related concepts and approaches. At the same time, however, the observable political, security and emergency responses to the pandemic exhibited a series of ‘biopolitical failures’ and governmental reluctance and incompetence. Moreover, on the level of theory, narrating the politics of coronavirus as the total protection of ‘bare life’ (a zero-sum trade-off between state power and the community of humans) and of life defined by its biological attributes and by its evolutionary belongingness to a particular species appear to be much too reductive. Generally speaking, then, dealing with the entanglements of life human bodies, lifeless viruses, spaces, airs and atmospheres calls for a conceptual expansion beyond the strictly biopolitical. This paper’s contribution is twofold. First, it aims to reimagine the concept of immunity, along with its social, political and security overlays, through the prism of the spherological theory of Peter Sloterdijk. According to Sloterdijk, humans are ontologically predisposed to living in spheres, that is, in enclosed and permeable lifeworlds which provide them with protection and give their lives meaning. Humans are, in other words, predisposed to seek out and construct distinctly spherical modes of life – self-enclosed, climatised and immunised lives that are the product of complex dialectics between biologies (bodies), spaces and atmospheres and unfold in organisational social systems of connected isolations. This recognition that life is always already a situated life, both spatially and atmospherically, not only posits an irreducible ontological body-space-atmosphere nexus that constitutes – and must constitute – all (conceivable) lifeworlds for either individuals or communities, it also elevates the concept and the practice of bio-politics into the realm of sphero-politics, tasked with the (organised) navigation and negotiation of the atmospheric, spatial and bodily properties and dynamics of human lifeworlds. And secondly, the paper will draw attention to the security dispositif of the household. While certainly belonging among the most widely discussed aspects of the Covid period in social discourse, the security and immunological attributes ascribed to the household as a protective sphere which people around the world have walled themselves in (or were relegated to) against the threat of Covid-19 have been by far the most neglected ones in the academic discourse. The pandemics have reinforced the security and immunological dispositif of the household and cemented it as the primary sphere of human belonging and a primary immunological system of encasing human lifeworlds. The emergency politics of the Czech Republic will be presented to provide an empirical setting for the theoretical discussion. Not only does the Czech case showcases the inefficiencies of traditional biopolitical readings of the coronavirus pandemic, it also demonstrate the strong spheropolical dimension of Covid policy-making. The article concludes with a summary of the discussion.