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49 Neth. J. Legal. Phil. 3 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/njlp49 and id is 1 raw text is: This article from Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy is published by Boom jaridisch asd made available to asosieme bezoeker DISCUSSION Biopolitics and the Coronavirus Foucault, Agamben, Zizek Lukas van den Berge As described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, measures to be taken in the case of an epidemic in the French town of Vincennes in the seventeenth cen- tury include what is currently known as a full lockdown, Chinese style.' The gates of the city are closed and people are confined in their own houses, with the doors of each house being barred from the outside by representatives of the govern- ment. The streets and other public spaces are occupied by a well-ordered militia of syndics and sentinels serving as the population's meticulous guards and inspec- tors. Foucault's account of these measures serves as an overture to his description of panopticism as a modern form of government. As Foucault has it, 'the plague as a form, both real and imaginary, of disorder' finally served to legitimate 'the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life'.2 The haunting memory of epidemics and the chaos associated with it would thus have paved the way for 'biopolitics' as a system of constant surveillance and discipline in which governmental control pertains directly to the physical existence of citizens.3 In related fashion, Giorgio Agamben has diagnosed modern policies and practices of state control over the bodies of citizens as the 'biopolitical paradigm of the modern', a 'concealed matrix' of contemporary political life that usually hides behind the civilized mask of liberal democracy.4 In times of emergency, however, modern state power would tend to show its true face, resorting to the 'state of exception' in which the bare life of citizens is subject to unmediated power.5 In Agamben's view, the current response to the outbreak of the coronavirus in west- ern countries is just another example of this. With terrorism exhausted as a legiti- mation for exceptional measures, the 'invention of an epidemic' would now serve 1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pan- theon Books, 1977), 195-200. 2 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 197-198. 3 See, e.g., Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978, ed. Michel Senellart, tr. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1-28, with specific regard to the management of epidemics at 24-26. For a handsome overview of Foucault's concept of biopolitics more in general, see Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 33-52. 4 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 69; 99. 5 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, tr. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1-31. Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy 2020 (49) 1 3 doi: 10.5553/NJLP/.000097

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