The Rejuvenation of the Withering Nation State and Bio-power: The New Dynamics of Human Interaction
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SYMPOSIUM: COVID-19
The Rejuvenation of the Withering Nation State and Bio-power: The New Dynamics of Human Interaction Abdul Wahab Suri
Received: 12 May 2020 / Accepted: 3 August 2020 # Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Pty Ltd. 2020
Abstract The outbreak of COVID-19 comes at the time when a shrinking public sector healthcare is an acknowledged fact in post-colonial societies. The policies adopted by the apparatus of most nation states for the past thirty years or more reveal that providing healthcare to all sections of societies is not a priority. The gradual process of economic liberalization has established “market” as the only legitimate mechanism of the distribution of goods/services as per the efficiency principle. The financial markets are globalized in such a manner that nation states are constantly losing their capacity to perform redistributive functions. State withdrawal from the provision of welfare rights is undermining its moral authority to impose any normative imperative to the people who are being left alone at the mercy of market forces. But the spread of COVID-19 on a global scale has provided an opportunity to the nation state. With the help of healthcare systems, the State has reasserted itself as the ultimate archangel to define human beings and their respective status in the newly emerging nomenclature of the public sphere. In this paper, the rejuvenation of the nation state with respect to bio-power will be discussed in the postcolonial context.
Keywords Governmentality . Bio-power . Healthcare . COVID-19
A. W. Suri (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Karachi, Karachi, Pakistan e-mail: [email protected]
The COVID-19 Discourse and Bio-Power “Who am I?” The central etiological question of human beings has been reasserted once again due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The normative imperative adopted by human beings, that is, “How should I be?”, is generally derived from the answer to the first question. Thus any substantive change to our ontological status will radically transform the epistemological, axiological and, most importantly, political dynamics of the given metrics in which we all have been situated. COVID-19 and the virus that causes it (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)) have given us a new identity as actual or potential carriers. Unlike some other established pandemic diseases, such as leprosy and plague, the asymptomatic presence of the virus has made it more insidious. The fact that human capacity to deal with COVID-19 entails not only a physiological adaptability but also social and economic dislocation may pose a challenge to the nation-state model. The normative challenge is more acute, because my status as a human being, that is, as someone who answers the questions “who am I?” and “how I should be?”, is not easily answered by the nation-state. The COVID-19 discourse will last for a long time because the nation state has had to reverse once again its withering role in the determination of my status as a human being. The reasserted authority
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