The Biopolitical Turn of the Post-Covid World. Leftist and Neoliberal Insights of Puzzling Biopolitics

Abstract

As the 21st century became shaped by the matters of public health, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed that it is a trap to believe that we have to choose between the medicalisation of politics and the politicisation of medicine. My thesis is that models of good governance in the post-pandemic world must be shaped by leftist principles, values and practices, in order to ensure not the reopening, but the reconstruction of public life, which needs more than ever overcoming social inequalities and political polarisations, whereas liberal principles should be implemented in order to fix standards of economic performance and efficiency after applying mechanism of recovery. Governments as well as electoral spheres are reticent to biopolitical incursions, historically associated with panoptic systems. I claim that it is time to plead for positivising biopolitics as political humanism. My research will expose twelve themes for disseminating biopolitics as political humanism, focused on sensitive key-domains such as labour, social cohesion, security, infodemia, domestic life and good governance.