Abstract

KLEIN CABALLERO, Alejandro. Thanatopolitics, totalitarianism and coronavirus, a route for excesses. Intersticios sociales [online]. 2021, n.21, pp.99-124.  Epub Aug 30, 2021. ISSN 2007-4964.

The coronavirus pandemic underlines the need to review currently-existing disciplines that manifest alarming totalitarian tendencies in which an excess of mandate becomes complicit in an excess of obedience. This article explains that the “virus” of the coronavirus is a phenomenon that transcends health and acts as a metaphor for current precariousness which leads the social-individual body to feel “threatened” by destabilization. This reality reveals fragile groups that need to surround themselves with paranoid “walls” that foment increasingly severe, fundamentalist, passionately-ideological attitudes that tinge daily life with threats, suspicions, and denouncements. At the same time, virtual logic replaces the logic of the social pact through a cancerous network of exponential multiplication that simplifies thinking and provokes anxiety and insecurity. Finally, the paper indicates how the period of the coronavirus is being utilized as a legitimizer of economicist perspectives that exacerbate the sense of “sanitary urgency”, “social urgency”, and “resource urgency”, and thus contribute to producing even more malaise, helplessness, and paranoia.

Keywords : coronavirus; totalitarianism; cancerous practices.

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