The Biopolitics of the Coronavirus Pandemic: Herd Immunity, Thanatopolitics, Acts of Heroism

The coronavirus pandemic offers a rare opportunity to critique the biopolitical argument and a chance to reveal the life-and-death nexus, which is often clandestine in its operation. In this context, death rather than life is “put to work” under a biopolitical mode of production. Herd immunity is a case in point, an embodiment of how biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics as a specific means of contemporary accumulation and domination. Important here is to trace how, in the name of COVID-19, herd immunity exemplifies a thanatopolitical economy that values life based on its sacrificability to capital. Concomitantly, the thanatopolitical aspects of present-day immunity strategies are (re)produced through performative acts of heroism. The performance of “political glorification” and the “collective cheering” of the sacrifice of workers designated as essential together justify and normalize the political sacrifice of life to capital, maintaining life at the expense of those rendered disposable by the thanatopolitical register of neoliberal economies.