The “Total Continuous War” and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Neoliberal Governmentality,Disposable Bodies and Protected Lives

1. What War Is This, Anyway?

First, we must examine which continuous war is this, that the COVID-19 pandemic made even more visible. If we carefully observe its manifestations, we can see that this “continuous war” is total: it has no end, no truce, and no limit and applies, as Deleuze and Guattari to “the entire population and its economy.” Essentially, it presents itself as a peace effort, under the disguise of an institutional, social, legal, and economic normality. In other words, for the generalization of the escalation of war aggressions to take place “in peace,” it is necessary to operate and disseminate a discourse on the normalization and naturalization of ongoing violence. Such normalization is added to the denial and naturalization of death. These three phenomena walk together in order to establish a logic in which war and peace become synonymous, as well as exception and rule, coup d’état and governance, politics and police, neoliberalism and civil war. That is why, first and foremost, this war is communicational and involves the corrosion and misrepresentation of language, the perversion of enunciation and a systematic inversion of the value of words and the meaning of discourse itself.

This total continuous war seeks to deepen the inequalities that structure our societies, and to legitimize this inequality as a natural hierarchy. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his pandemic episode analysis, ³ the recurrence and urgency of the discourse that we should have to return as soon as possible to a “normal life” and, above all, to the regular course of economic activities, is based on a triumphant capitalist animism, that treats social phenomena, such as markets or financial capital, as “living entities.” The Slovenian philosopher adds: “If one reads our big media, the impression one gets is that what we should really worry about are not the thousands who have already died and the many more who will, but the fact that ‘markets are panicking.’ ⁴ ”

Civil war is first and foremost mobilized so that we would not be able to understand that our situation is deeply political and establishes a kind of refined barbarism that builds a strong state for the rich and presents a state of nature for the poor. This civil war situation, as we have already pointed out, has become more visible in the pandemic (in some countries, such as Brazil, more explicitly than others). In the health crisis, we have all been able to observe to what extent the protection of certain lives, through isolation and medical care, is guaranteed at the expense of the daily struggle for survival and exposure to the death of others.

If, as several authors point out (Federici, Mbembe, Amin, Wallerstein, Lazzarato, Davis, Chamayou, etc.) the model of such a war comes from colonialism, it is no longer directed against the native populations of distant lands, but takes place in the metropolis itself, in an endocolonialism of global scale (Lazzarato). It is a war within and against the population, unilaterally launched by the “uber-rich” and their lackeys, where the distinctions between peace and war, between combatants and non-combatants, between the economic, the political and the military are diluted.

With the expansion of neoliberal reason, war, economy and politics become camps without distinction. In this context, the politics of capital is the continuation of war by all means at its disposal, but this war, paradoxically, aims at transforming peace into a form of war of all against all, at both the micro and macro levels. It is not only a war aimed at docilizing and disciplining bodies, but also at promoting tactics of elimination and neutralization of bodies that are not suitable for that reason. Thus, the governmentality of neoliberal governance is a civil war. And this global civil war is a total continuous war. This war, besides camouflaging itself in the indistinctness of the military, the economic and the political, is based on the spectacular mobilization of securitarian or salvationist rhetoric that promotes a state of widespread insecurity and the spread of constant fear.

This is why Foucault (in Society Must Be Defended) draws our attention to the need to reverse von Clausewitz’s aphorism that war is the policy pursued by other means. From the 19th century onward, it is politics itself that becomes continued war by other means: “the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals.” ⁵ In this sense, politics is the sanctioning and renewal of the imbalance of forces manifested in war and force.

In the passage from the 18th to the 19th century, war is no longer exclusively exercised by means of conventional weapons and battles, but through the emergence of a new way of doing politics, biopolitics, and its technique of governmentality based on bodies and population control. According to Foucault, this new power mechanics focuses more on the bodies than on the earth and its product (This is where Foucault receives voracious criticism from post-colonialism.) The question would then be more about the manufacture of subjects than about the genesis of sovereigns. It is in this factory that we find the discourse about the war founded on bodies, on the racial and emerging biological of the end of the 19th century. The war no longer of one individual against the other but the society as the battlefield of a total war: we are necessarily someone’s adversaries.

In this way, the social body is seen from two races and this division needs to be erased in the social body in order to naturalize the continuous confrontation of a super race and a sub race. This erasure will express itself in the form of biological-racist discourses on degeneracy. There, biopolitics also carries its tanatopolitics (Agamben) or necropolitics (Mbembe). The biopolitics of capital will assume as its objective the purification of the social, which institutes a new form of normalization of the social, which goes through the erasure of everything that is not pure and that may come to corrupt the healthy part of its body. For this reason, Foucault taught us that, with the consolidation of capitalism, war is more closely associated to the problem of race:

War. How can one not only wage war on one’s adversaries but also expose one’s own citizens to war, and let them be killed by the million [. . .], except by activating the theme of racism? [. . .] In the nineteenth century—and this is completely new—war will be seen not only as a way of improving one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race (in accordance with the themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence), but also as a way of regenerating one’s own race. As more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong will become all the purer. ⁶

It is worth remembering that Agamben continued with this Foucaultian reflection pointing to the fact that the voluntary creation of a permanent state of exception (even if, eventually, not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic states. ⁷ This condition of permanence of the State of Exception, for Agamben, was also born at the end of the 19th century. Thus, the Italian points out that through the spread of the “legal civil war”, deepened through the perception that the sovereign can establish his own reason as a technique, there is a consequent indifferentiation between absolutism and democracy itself. This strategy of indifferentiation gained even more strength as a technique of governmentality after the “9/11” of 2001. After the “9/11,” the state of exception increasingly tends to present itself as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics and is now radically incorporated as a legal-normative strategy.

Wood also points to the new doctrine of war after the “9/11” event when President Bush proposed that the United States “rid the world of evil-doers” with Operation Infinite Justice. ⁸ In his September 21, 2001 speech, George Bush announced:

How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command—every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war—to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network. ⁹

A few days later, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in the Labour Party Convention that the current campaign should be part of a project to reorder our world: “let us re-order this world around us,” he said. ¹⁰ For many, there was nothing new in these statements, as in fact the United States and its allies constantly resorted to military action to pursue their imperial interests and sustain their economic hegemony since the end of World War II. What is new, however, is the ideological character of this world civil war, which presents itself as peace while it is total and continuous war.

Silvia Federici says that the connection between war and integration into the world economy is not usually recognized this way because it is called globalization and presents itself as an economic project. Its first and most visible weapons are structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, privatizations, and intellectual property rights that make up a global framework of financialization of social relations. All these “policies” are responsible for the immense transfer of wealth from the Global South to the metropolises of the Global North, without requiring territorial conquests, supposedly operating only by peaceful means. ¹¹

In the same vein, Grégoire Chamayou, in his work Manhunts, described the techniques of depredation of men who become preys, and showed how these techniques are indispensable to establish and reproduce the relations of domination and sovereignty. ¹² These hunting and predation techniques appear to Chamayou in the tension between the cynegetic model and the pastoral model. The cynegetic model can be found at various moments in history, but its most evident account, for Chamayou, is in the Old Testament in the figure of Nemrod, considered the first king in human history, founder of the city of Babel, and presented as a powerful hunter. . . of humans. Here appears the exercise of cynegetic technique and domination based on force, explicit violence, immanence (and not transcendence), the defense of order and hierarchy given by nature and institutionalized violence in the figure of the idolater, the first king of Babel.

In the cynegetic technique of domination the hunter has to chase his preys and capture them either to immobilize them or to exterminate them. The hunter takes and consumes even the extenuation and death of the prey and its territory. The tactic most used by the cynegetic power is the separation of the individual from his group, as this makes him easy to capture.

The “war against COVID-19” has hegemonically adopted the basis of the cynegetic technique, establishing a logic of capture, immobilization, and extermination of certain bodies, considered abject, following a logic of immunization based on the hierarchies naturalized by the capital. The neoliberal reason, and its naturalization of the social hierarchies, uses a rhetoric of strength and normalization of inequality, as well as the reduction of the possibilities of political imagination in a population that is attacked, above all, on the basis of its organic solidarity. After all, for the cynegetic technique, it is fundamental that the subject is separated from his flock to be better captured. Hence the question of opposing the immunity of the group to the choices of the individual.

In a war, a strategy is sought through the use of certain tactics and the mobilization of certain resources. In this respect, the total continuous war that became more visible during the pandemic episode looks like a Foucault’s apparatus (dispositif). ¹³ Tactics therefore bring together agents, discourses, and resources, and organize them in a coherent way so that together they can seek the realization, if possible, of the desired strategy on a total and continuous basis.

One of the most important tactics in this war, revealed by the pandemic, is to construct a rhetoric that allows to transfer to the virus (COVID-19) the problems or crises that were not generated by it. As if the pandemic had generated the problems that are now visible to us. Such as unemployment, the problems of the health systems and blatant social inequality. Such problems are presented, like the virus, as natural problems and not as socially constructed problems, built through choices and political practices of domination. The first tactic is then to promote a rhetoric that presents the virus as our greatest enemy, with the objective of justifying the state of exception presented as necessary for its warlike confrontation. In a society of the spectacle, as Guy Debord taught us, the false is presented as truth. ¹⁴

In recent reflection published on April 10, 2020, Federica Caso asked, “Are we at war?” ¹⁵ In this article, Caso stresses the importance of the rhetoric of war in the coronavirus pandemic. According to her,

In this pandemic, the war rhetoric has spread as fast as the coronavirus itself. Recently, US President Donald Trump has characterized himself as a wartime president. Hospitals are preparing for war and healthcare workers are heralded as the frontline soldiers in the war against COVID-19. While Economists ask how the coronavirus war economy will change the world.

Of course, there is nothing new about it, as Caso states:

This is not the first time that the language of war is stretched to contexts that are not legalistically wartimes. In the last fifty years, we have heard of the war of drugs, the war on poverty, the war on crime, and the war on plastic. War is a powerful metaphor. It is an effective, immediate, and emotive tool to communicate urgency to the general public. It also conveys a sense of struggle and righteousness that can justify exceptional measures. ¹⁶

The problem, according to Caso, is that “the coronavirus pandemic is not only invoking metaphors from war, it is also unleashing war rhetoric,” which is not the same:

The coronavirus is not an enemy. It is a parasitic agent attaches to living organisms to generate new viral particles. There is no war to be waged against such a thing, and we should consider carefully before continuing to use the war rhetoric.

The use of the rhetoric of war to describe the pandemic cannot be seen only as a metaphor, but as a tactic to naturalize under the pandemic the total continuous war that was already occurring, transferring to the pandemic (a “natural phenomenon”) the responsibility for the problems created by neoliberal, necropolitical governmentality.

2. Government Tactics and Rhetoric of War

Which bodies have been exposed in the pandemic? We will see here that there happened a social, racial, and gendered differentiation among the bodies and lives that have been exposed the most during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Basically, during the periods of confinement, the services considered “essential” were preserved, as defined in legal norms issued by the executive powers of each country. For instance, the French government’s choice had been to define the “non-essential activities” and prohibit them during the Covid-19 lockdown from March 17 to May 11. On March 18, the French media “francetvinfo.fr” published what was really at stake in the pandemic lockdown:

Coronavirus: what is an “essential” economic sector? The government wants to prevent the French economy from coming to a complete standstill in the midst of a coronavirus epidemic, but does not wish to formally establish a list of ‘essential’ economic sectors.

On the same day, the French Minister of Economy stated that “I invite all employees of companies that are still open, activities that are essential to the functioning of the country, to visit their workplaces.” ¹⁷ The argument was both neoliberal and biopolitical: in a worldwide economic competition, bodies should be put at risk for the benefit of the (market) community stake. However, both German and French governments adopted quite soon a nearly complete lockdown. ¹⁸ Even if economy is considered of main importance, both governments had to consider human lives as priorities in their governmental strategies.

The case of United States of America is quite different. By May 19, 2020, the federal guidance had been established in three languages (English, Spanish, and French) by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), one of the US Department of Homeland Security, and has been called “CISA Guidance on Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers.” ¹⁹ According to National Conference of States Legislature (NCSL), by June 23, 41 states in the United States had some guidance upon who and who is not an “essential worker” (or “critical infrastructure worker”). In this document, NCSL stated that

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, essential workers are those who conduct a range of operations and services that are typically essential to continue critical infrastructure operations. Critical infrastructure is a large, umbrella term encompassing sectors from energy to defense to agriculture. ²⁰

Among the 41 states, 20 of them chose to follow the federal guidance, and 21 chose to create their own guidance.

On March 16, the US federal government issued a note called “The President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America.” ²¹ In this short document, President Trump briefly defined what the “critical infrastructure industry” was and encouraged all workers to be present in the workplace. While, on one hand, the document advocated “work or engage in schooling FROM HOME whenever possible,” on the other hand,

If you work in a critical infrastructure industry, as defined by the Department of Homeland Security, such as healthcare services and pharmaceutical and food supply, you have a special responsibility to maintain your normal work schedule. You and your employers should follow CDC guidance to protect your health at work.

In the document published on May 19, it is specified from the beginning that “This list is advisory in nature. It is not, nor should it be considered, a federal directive or standard. [. . .] Individual jurisdictions should add or subtract essential workforce categories based on their own requirements and discretion”, showing how much scope the local authorities had for deciding to narrow or loosen the social isolation advocated by the WHO.

The US Department of Homeland Security document establishes many activities as essential (see figure 1). Apart from small businesses selling products that are not related to health or food, bars, restaurants, and other leisure facilities, very few economic activities have fallen outside the spectrum of the “essential critical infrastructure.”

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Figure 1.

USA Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers, May 2020. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency.

Of course, the US document also promotes the confinement of “non-essential workers” and promotes the remote work. On the other hand, the document does not show great concern for the lives of American workers, as we can read in the (cynical) item N.8 do documento: “Critical infrastructure employers have an obligation to limit to the extent possible the reintegration of in-person workers who have experienced an exposure to COVID-19 but remain asymptomatic ways that best protect the health of the worker, their co-workers, and the general public.” For Trump, if it should be “America First,” this slogan probably means “American Capital First” and “American People in Second Place.”

We were able to observe, for example, that neither activities related to primary or higher education were considered “non-essential.” The National Conference of States Legislature (NCSL) asks:

Why It’s “Essential”? Child care providers are often referred to as the workforce behind the workforce. Parents and employers rely on child care to allow them to work and conduct business resulting in an estimated economic impact of over $99 billion in revenue and spillover to other industries. This is especially evident in the current public health crisis as states are depending on child care providers to continue to operate to provide care for the children of essential workers, even as they have almost uniformly closed K-12 schools.

In this case, we can see that the exposed bodies are preferably the bodies of populations considered subordinate, women, and racialized people. In fact, according to NCSL, “The predominately female (94%) early care and education workforce is more racially and linguistically diverse than K-12 teachers. People of color comprise 40% of early care and education professionals, and 22% are foreign-born.” ²²

In relation to “retail workers,” who will supply the American population with food and health products, the NCSL makes the following statement:

Demographically, 40% of retail workers are women [. . .]. Cashiers, who earn an average of $8.25 per hour, are predominantly women, whereas delivery drivers, who earn an average of $16.20, are predominantly men. [. . .] The racial makeup of the retail sector mirrors that of the overall workforce: 62% non-Hispanic white, 17% Hispanic, 13% African American and 5% Asian.

In this sector, it appears that non-Hispanic white lower class is among the populations that are more exposed to death than richer non-Hispanic whites, demonstrating that, despite Trump has a reputation of representing white lower class, the exposition of people to death corresponds as well to a social class criteria.

In Brazil, by Decree No. 10282 of March 20, President Jair Bolsonaro also established which public services and economic activities were essential, exempt from the sanitary measures provided for in Law No. 13979/20 to face the pandemic. Article 3 §1 of this decree states that “Public services and essential activities are those indispensable to meet the unavoidable needs of the community, thus considered those that, if not met, endanger the survival, health or safety of the population.” The objective is to allow, in the name of everyone’s “freedom,” that any economic activity capable of impacting on the macroeconomic indicators of the Country can be restricted. In the same sense, paragraph 3 indicates that

Restrictions on the movement of workers that may affect the functioning of public services and essential activities, and of loads of any kind that may lead to the lack of supply of the necessary genders to the population are prohibited.

The neoliberal exposure of socially vulnerable bodies—and especially of racialized bodies—was the rule followed by most Western governments. We have seen that in the United States early childhood services have been guaranteed, 94% of which are provided by women, the vast majority of whom are non-white. In France, in the area of health, women represent 76% of the employees, and still with great disparities: 97.7% of the private caregivers of the elderly, sick, and disabled, 90.7% of the nursing techniques, 87.4% of the nurses, but only 37.2% of the doctors. ²³ In Brazil, women also represent 90.4% of nurses and 87% of nursing techniques, but only 36% of physicians. In France, women also represent 94.3% of domestic workers (in Brazil, they are 92%), and 90% of supermarket cashiers, but France does not produce statistics referring to skin color or ethnic origin, which contributes to make invisible the differentiated exposure of racialized bodies.

On June 2, Michelle Bachelet, former president of the Chile Republic and now UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that “The data tells us of a devastating impact from COVID-19 on people of African descent, as well as ethnic minorities in some countries, including Brazil, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.” ²⁴ She added:

In many other places, we expect similar patterns are occurring, but we are unable to say for sure given that data by race and ethnicity is simply not being collected or reported. [. . .] The appalling impact of COVID-19 on racial and ethnic minorities is much discussed, but what is less clear is how much is being done to address it.

The same UN News report states that

In Brazil’s Sao Paulo city, people of colour are 62% more likely to die from COVID-19 than white people. In France’s Seine Saint-Denis department where many minorities live, higher excess mortality has also been reported. In the United States, the COVID-19 death rate for African Americans is reported to be more than double that of other racial groups. Similarly, government data for England and Wales shows a death rate for black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi people that is nearly double that of white people, even when class and some health factors are taken into account.

The coronavirus pandemic has also revealed that our hospitals are now highly technological but cannot accommodate a lot of patients in the event of a crisis. The budgetary and political choices made by governments lead to great disparities in the proposal of hospital beds by 1,000 inhabitants: 13 in Japan and South Korea, 8 in Germany or Russia, 6 in France and Belgium, 5 in Cuba or Argentina, but only 4 in China, Finland, or Greece, around 3 in the United States, Italy, or Spain, less than 3 in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Brazil, Denmark, Ireland and Sweden, and 84 Global South countries share a lower rate of two hospital beds per 1,000 inhabitants, until reaching the extremely low rate of 0.10 in Mali. ²⁵

Since the 1980s, the development of medical technology and the treatment of diseases that previously kept patients in hospitals has led to a general reduction in hospital beds. In a Eurostat study that compared hospital bed capacity in 34 countries in Europe, 28 reduced the absolute number of their available beds between 2012 and 2017. ²⁶ England, a good student of neoliberal governmentality, has halved its number of beds from approximately 300,000 available in 1987 to less than 150,000 in 2014. ²⁷ In Brazil, between 2009 and 2017, governed by Lula’s Workers’ Party until 2016, the reduction of beds was only 5.5%. ²⁸ In just three years in the governments of Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, between 2017 and 2019, this reduction reached 6.2%, totaling 28,300 units. In these three years, the biggest reduction was in the public health system, whose supply fell by 14.3%, while the number of beds in the private sector increased by 18.2%. ²⁹ We can clearly observe that there is no naturality in the impact that the pandemic can have on a country: it is primarily about political decisions seeking to choose between investing in the public health sector or privatizing and deregulating a sector that has proved to be of prime government importance in the pandemic crisis.

For neoliberal reason based on the “truth” of the market and the radical calculation of utility, empty beds are not profitable. And besides the lack of beds, most countries that apply neoliberal governmentality still faced problems of lack of medical equipment, such as respirators, facial masks, and hand sanitizer. The political economy of this shortage is quite common: many countries in the West have outsourced the production of medical equipment such as face masks and ventilators to reduce costs.

The tactic of transference in the use of the rhetoric of war in the pandemic hides the fact that the economic model on which we administer hospitals and medical care is deficient, if not sick. The recognition that many health systems have been weakened by the capitalist-neoliberal reason for efficiency, cost reduction, and profit maximization is the starting point for the construction of resilient hospitals and the precariousness of the care workforce.

One of the policy conclusions of the COVID-19 pandemic is that we cannot transfer vulnerability to just a few. Another conclusion has proved that there is a link between poor health and socioeconomic conditions. Most cases of precariousness are created by social policies, which means that coronavirus will hit some social groups harder than others. For example, in Australia, this disparity is revealed by health guidelines that indicate that while the cut in vulnerability for non-Aboriginal Australians is 60 for those with pre-existing conditions, and 70 for those without conditions, it is 50 for the people of the First Nations. ³⁰ As Chelsea Bond explains, poor health in Aboriginal communities is the product of 200 years of neglect; while the health agenda focused on finding cures for diseases endemic to Europe and affecting settlers, Indigenous people were denied access to medical treatment and control over their health agenda. ³¹

In Brazil, indigenous and quilombolas communities were particularly affected by the pandemic: “Our leaders are leaving. This brave disease that no one knows about is decimating our peoples,” said Jacir José de Souza of the village of Maturuca and former coordinator of the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR). Souza continued: “I appeal to the authorities to look at the indigenous people with more attention. Send doctors, nurses who understand this disease to the communities before the situation worsens.” ³² Bolsonaro took advantage of the pandemic to follow his attempt to acculturate or exterminate the indigenous population, stimulating invasions of their lands by cattle ranchers, soybean planters, and miners and offering them chloroquine, which has already been proven not to cure and can kill.

On multiple occasions, the use of the rhetoric of war in the COVID-19 pandemic has served to mask the real war that is, in fact, continued in our neoliberal political and economic system and that ends our immunity and turns us into vulnerable and precarious bodies in the face of this virus.

The United States of Trump and Brazil of Bolsonaro demonstrate a clear option for necropolitics. On every possible occasion, the two rulers (among many others) made the option of leaving their national population unprotected, betting that only the most vulnerable would die, abject of the market and of the maximization of capital production.

In the case of Brazil, the situation is even more exemplary. In a report, the Court of Appeals of the federal government points out that of the R$38.9 billions destined to the Federal Government for the Combat of COVID-19, only R$11.4 were spent. In one of the stretches of the Court’s report, the federal units, according to data from the Ministry of Health, which had higher mortality rates for COVID-19, are the ones that received the least funds in terms of per capita income to fight the pandemic ³³ .

3. A Bio-Necro-Policy Strategy

Our hypothesis here, is that, to the “total continuous war,” correspond a bio-necro-policy strategy held by neoliberal governments, which justifies and deepens a radically different exposition of lives and bodies to death and disease during the COVID-19 pandemic. The rhetorical use of war in the pandemic has sought to hide the fact that the real war is the (necro)politics of producing precarious bodies and the bio(politics) from which bodies import or are the object of mourning; That is, it is confirmed that neoliberal-capitalist governmentality has imposed a necro-government of lives whose strategy consists of naturalizing a radical distinction between lives, and adjusting policies in the sense of “make live” a few and “let die” or even “make die” many bodies exposed to illness, death, and social precariousness. ³⁴

Part of this central strategy of this civil war is the radical selectivity of the victims to whom the biopolitical tactic of putting people to death falls, supported by the strengthening of a social and racial apartheid that becomes health segregation. In the bio-necro-political framework, it is denied that bodies are only more exposed to the virus because they are exploited by bodies that are preserved from exposure, with a kind of immune surplus value. In this sense, Judith Butler points out:

These normative frameworks establish in advance what kind of life will be a life worth living, what life will be a life worth preserving, and what life will become worthy of being mourned. Such views of lives pervade and implicitly justify contemporary war. Lives are divided into those representing certain kinds of states and those representing threats to state-centered liberal democracy, so that war can then be righteously waged on behalf of some lives, while the destruction of other lives can be righteously defended. ³⁵

This division of lives between those who should live and those who can or should die is one of the central characteristics of neoliberal bio-necro-political governmentality, and the main character of the radical distinction regime constituted by capitalist reason. The rhetoric of war and disease, placated in racist justification, serves to justify this bio-necro-political governmental regime, and Judith Butler is right to state that this is exactly the function of war: “War is precisely an effort to minimize precariousness for some and to maximize it for others.” ³⁶ Giorgio Agamben had already insisted on this point:

the development and triumph of capitalism would not have been possible, from this perspective, without the disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which, through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak created the “docile bodies” that it needed. ³⁷

Neoliberal reason will radicalize liberal freedom, making it a “new way of the world,” ³⁸ a bio-necro-political, totalitarian and hegemonic reason. So hegemonic that Judith Butler, along with all the other intellectuals of the critical current, wonders how to operate resistance to a reason that has occupied our daily lives, our bodies and our minds militarily:

Our ability to respond with outrage depends upon a tacit realization that there is a worthy life that has been injured or lost in the context of war, and no utilitarian calculus can supply the measure by which to gauge the destitution and loss of such lives. But if we are social beings and our survival depends upon a recognition of interdependency (which may not depend on the perception of likeness), then it is not as an isolated and bounded being that I survive, but as one whose boundary exposes me to others in ways that are voluntary and involuntary (sometimes at once), an exposure that is the condition of sociality and survival alike. ³⁹

Hence the importance for our bodily survival of a recognition of social interdependence and that which is attacked by neoliberal policies. Now, the pandemic dramatically exposes this condition of survival in interdependence, whether voluntary or involuntary. The protection (survival) and delimitation of my body depends on a recognition of this interdependence. Butler points out that the limit of the body never fully belongs to the person, but to the sociability that constitutes the body: “But as much as the body, considered as social in both its surface and depth, is the condition of survival, it is also that which, under certain social conditions, imperils our lives and our survivability.” ⁴⁰ For this reason, neoliberal governmentality develops through bio-necro-political impulses. The fact that a person’s body never fully belongs to him or her can also come from a world of unwanted physical contact that stems from the fact that the body finds its capacity for survival in social space and time; and this exposure or expropriation is precisely exploited in the case of acts of coercion, constraint, physical violation, and undesirable violence.

At this point, the question is how this strategic war conducted by neoliberalism produces techniques of government that fabricate in human beings the awareness of being defenseless and without the right to defense and how these technologies capture these social movements. Elsa Dorlin in her book To Defend Oneself ⁴¹ will draw our attention to the production of the “defensive devices” mobilized for the production of subjects with or without the possibility of self-defense. Government technologies used in total continuous warfare not only lead to an awareness of the ineffectiveness of resistance, but produce it. Impotence is the main effect of the power devices of a neoliberal policy that destroys the possibilities of resistance through various technologies based on the racialization of bodies.

The radical impotence among the dominated, the immobile wait before the next coup are also effects of colonial and neo-colonial techniques. Moreover, we should not restrict coloniality and the work of racialization to the sole reference to “race,” skin color or ethnic origin of the individual, but in the broad sense of “state racism” attributed by Foucault. ⁴²

From a bio-necro-political point of view, individuals are controlled as a population (human species) in an era in which security is made one of the most essential references for government outputs, based on a regime of truth built from alleged “natural laws of the market.” The law of the market has to be put into perspective with the concept of “social utility,” which would be determined from a market-centered calculation of the value of life. This valuation work would help to define and differentiate which forms of life deserve or do not deserve to be lived. In extreme cases, this calculation allows to point out which lives need to be neutralized, erased or exterminated (lives unworthy of being lived ⁴³ ). The application of bio-necro-political apparatuses is the object of a calculation of interest that is carried out in the microphysics of the social, although its impulses come from actions perpetuated at the global level by the sovereigns of the order, the largest holders of capital, based on their specific strategies of unlimited accumulation/concentration of capital. As Agamben stated, “In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such.” ⁴⁴ In the pandemic, apart from these choices of precariousness, racialization, and exposure of certain bodies to the benefit of others that could be seen with the naked eye.

Conclusion

In neoliberal governmentality, the regime of truth of the market, associated with the globalization process, have transformed certain bodies into disposable bodies. ⁴⁵ These bodies refer to those who perform precarious work activities, which are also essential to sustain social life. The war tactics target those bodies since they are always the ones that can be subject to death without entailing any public grief. In this sense, we can observe that the pandemic exposed cruelly the hierarchization and disposability of bodies. Hence, COVID-19 appears to be more of a symptom of waging a certain war than a health emergency that would affect everybody equally.

Thanks to the examination of the government strategies built to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, we believe the logic of a “total continued war” could be observed, as well as its corresponding tactics of classification, hierarchization, control, and exposure to death that affect specific human bodies. These war tactics are expressed in legal apparatuses that denote legal segregation within a rule of law that is presented as universal. The mobilization of an “invisible enemy” serves to naturalize this legal segregation before the population. For this reason, the neoliberal governmentality held during the COVID-19 pandemic allows us to foresee to which bodies and to which “subjects of law” this legal segregation applies, and with what consequences for a rule of law that has to be thought of as a permanent state of exception.

In fact, the rhetorical resource of the pandemic danger give legitimacy to the expansion of war strategies, with the complacency of the entire population. As Donatella di Cesare would say, the fear generated by globalization itself, which has reinforced both xenophobia and exophobia, has reduced the subjects’ willingness to participate and be involved in collective decisions, in a continued policy of removal and abjection of bodies from both public and political spaces. ⁴⁶ This fear could even deepen after the pandemic and lead us to disqualify any form of common life, in the name of our own immunity stake.

To combat this strategy of war, we would like to join Patel in making a reversal and speaking out against the theological presumption of the end of history. We can think of history as dissociated from this sacrificial logic. Benjamin, in the text “On the concept of history,” tells us provocatively that, just as the future is not the bright end of time, the past is not the lost and inaccessible place that we normally lead it to be. ⁴⁷ Dead are not completely dead, nor have they completely disappeared. If “even the dead” are not safe, since the enemy is victorious, the opposite is also true: even the dead can be saved if the enemy is defeated, and so Benjamin’s courage before teleology can not only serve to save the living, but also, retrospectively, to save them and the rest of the dead as well.

Therefore, we need to face this shortening of the horizon of the possible promoted as a central tactic of this total continuous war. We do not have to accept the logic of duality and the inevitable fact between the necropolitical logic of the market and the indifference that is expressed in the economic survival or the exposure of my body to the virus.

We must broaden our political imagination and awaken to the fact that this supposed impotence of ours in the face of the invisible forces of the pandemic is a constructed impotence, a carefully crafted and nurtured farce to make us accept the unacceptable. They would serve as a reminder that politics is not only the art of proving what is possible, but also the art of proving what the dominant discourse insists on declaring what is impossible.