Biopower: “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations’’ (Foucault 1980: 143)

Mahmudul H Sumon

How long mundane statistics (of death, recovery, and spread of the virus) will keep us at home? I came to think about these lines when I was doing some cleaning work in the kitchen today. The connection between COVID 19 and biopolitics was too obvious from the very beginning.

Perhaps, I was thinking along these lines because I was tired! Perhaps, I was thinking to escape from this reality.

Folks on the road (engaged in informal labour) have escaped this organization much before and for more real reasons! Calling them “stupid” is really a stupid thing that the media can stop. People on the roads are just resisting bio-power. Foucault said, where there is power, there is resistance!

Photo: The Triumph of Death, fresco, Palermo, Italy (artist unknown).