Introduction: Health and Biopolitics in COVID-19 Times – What Constitutes a Healthy Society?

1 The Lost Balance of Care and Control in COVID-19 Times

The term “biopolitics” usually designates the strategies that states use to organize the lives of their citizens through the control of reproduction, welfare and health. In biopolitics, human life and human health become something to be monitored and optimized, to ensure the smooth reproduction of the population as a potential work force. This ordering of life may seem benign, but it imposes considerable controls on human action. This is why the term has been productively used in the analysis of areas where issues of control have major resonance, for example gender, the body, environment, politics, law, social media and surveillance. Biopolitics has become more relevant than ever in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic: societies confronted with a novel virus mobilized to protect public health, and considerable state power was unleashed to achieve this aim. It is thus timely to return to the meaning of this often employed, but equally often poorly understood notion.

The term “biopolitics” is often used to designate some kind of a repressive and controlling power. However, this is not all: the control is imposed to provide care and to achieve desirable outcomes: we all want to enjoy the benefits of a functioning social infrastructure with reliable healthcare, welfare and benefits. There is no doubt that the state providing such services is a major achievement of modern times and few would want to be deprived of these blessings. Nonetheless, there is always the question of the right balance between a paternalizing state and the freedom of the citizens to decide about their lives, that is, the balance between care and control.

It is this balance that has become a matter of intense public debate during the global mobilization in response to the COVID-19 virus. Several world leaders, for example the French president Emmanuel Macron and, before him, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, explicitly declared war on the virus, stressing both danger and the need for collective solidarity in response to the threat. This mobilization has led to biopolitical measures previously unheard of in liberal Western societies,1 resulting in deep and potentially lasting transformations of our societies. In the past three years, we have come to accept controls on our freedom of movement and assembly, limitations to freedom of movement across national boundaries and the reinforcement of what could be called biological citizenship (Rose and Novas 2005, 440). We are still in the midst of it as of this writing and it is not possible to predict which of the new rules will persist and in what forms.

The positions concerning the “right reaction” to what has been presented as the greatest threat to society since World War II by major figures such as then German chancellor Angela Merkel2 seem irreconcilable. In most countries, the different biopolitical measures have been met by vocal responses from a diverse coalition of voices from very different ends of the political spectrum. In many countries, opposing camps have become increasingly extreme in their rejection of opinions diverging from their own, to the extent that it seems almost impossible to have a cultivated conversation on this topic. One either believes that only vaccination (or, now, booster vaccination) can solve the problem and that the unvaccinated represent the obstacle for a return to a normal functioning of society, or that politicians, supported by mainstream media and scientists, have been led into a cul-de-sac by a non-controllable strategy of fear, if not by some evil conspiracy.3

This radical split clearly is not a sign of a healthy society. Health can be defined in different ways and even major national and international institutions are far from pursuing the same ideas in this respect (see Pajević in this volume). Health should not be reduced, however, particularly when applied to society, to an absence of illness or pain. The health of a society cannot be exclusively measured by a narrow physical conceptualization of health. Beyond physical health, there is first of all mental health, which has infinite repercussions on all aspects of individual and social life. In order to evaluate the “health” of a society, we would need not only virologists or internists, but also other medical specialists, including psychologists. We would also need sociologists, historians, political scientists, economists, legal scholars, philosophers, cultural theorists and representatives of arts and humanities and, basically, of all fields of social life. The philosopher of ethics Andreas Brenner calls the COVID-19 times’ focus on one highly specialized discipline of science, presented usually only from one perspective, an example of “tunnel vision” and criticizes the push for homogeneity under the label “science” while ignoring the core of the scientific method.4 This loss of the habits of debate, both in public discourse and in the sciences, derives from the common use of war rhetoric by politicians and media alike (Brenner 2020, 36–37).

The period of the pandemic has seen the deluge of different statistics: on infections, hospitalizations, deaths, and vaccinations, to list the most obvious. Numbers and statistics always require interpretation. Even more: they need to be interpreted in a specific context; on their own, they do not mean much. In the context of today’s information disorder (Hansson et al. 2021), it seems difficult to have a reasonable debate on how to interpret the data we have. However, we have to face the complexity of life and believe in the power of an exchange of ideas in order to maintain an open society and the principles of Enlightenment. In view of the rise of different forms of authoritarianism and wide public support for them even in old democracies, Enlightenment principles should not be thrown out carelessly. After two years of the pandemic, we need to get out of the emergency mode and consider the long-term consequences of the crisis in a more global manner. We need a real debate that includes all aspects of social life, since giving life the absolute status of mere survival carries the risk of totalitarianism. Instead, we should strive for the dignity of life as well as the openness of societies as goals (cf. Brenner 2020, 91).

This discussion requires, perhaps, some distance. This volume proposes an approach coming from the study of cultural representations. Literature has for centuries suggested scenarios for responding to and recovering from pandemics as well as models of society where health policy shapes political structures and common life. While it might be too early to have a clear perspective on the present crisis, we can learn from the previous ones to understand how people respond to fear of death and how they retain or regain full dignity of life. We can also see examples of biopolitical measures established to protect health and their impact on humans as individuals and members of societies. Literary works, we argue, allow us to see something that remains invisible to policy documents and health guidelines: the ambiguity and complexity of human beings, their contradictory wishes and behaviours. The biopolitical management of the present crisis has lacked imagination and we want to provide examples of imaginaries where richer responses to biopolitical crises are modelled.5 This richness comes from fiction and poetic voices in different cultures of the world, but also from in-depth philosophical reflection. It also comes from lived experience. The editors lived in the USA, Estonia, Germany and Cyprus during the pandemic and thus were able to observe very different practices and to appreciate the difference specific locatedness makes in our conceptualization of issues. Our authors’ experiences further expand this range.

Some contributions to this volume focus on different aspects and interpretations of what biopolitics conceptually means and implies, to better circumscribe and seize the issues at stake. Others discuss culturally divergent literary representations that help us to better understand what our societies currently undergo. The volume deliberately does not aim to establish one normative position. The contributions build an ensemble of varying, at times perhaps even contradictory, perspectives. Such a wide range of disciplinary, methodological, historical, geographical and political approaches reflects the complexity of the range of issues raised by the pandemic and the diversity of ways in which people responded to them. The volume does not want to reduce this complexity but to illuminate it, against all tendencies of simplification that are all too common in today’s society. This approach enables us to take a step back and to observe the issue with some distance, the distance of philosophical reflection and of fictional imaginaries, to consider the stakes of the events and of the political decisions taken or still ahead. This distance, we hope, also allows us to tackle issues that the toxic public debate has made harder to discuss because of fear of...