Immunity and Contagion: Transformations of Biopolitics in the Time of the Pandemic

How does the pandemic affect the notion of biopolitics? Immunity and Contagion offers a twofold perspective on the notion of biopolitics: on the one hand, it examines the negative effects of the pandemic, such as mourning, melancholy, dispossession, affective disorders, as well as social and racial inequalities; on the other hand, it reveals the need to redefine biopolitics as a positive attempt to survey, govern, and overcome the crisis. The pandemic encourages us to reformulate biopolitics in positive terms so that it would take into account all forms of human, biological, and geological life and becomes capable of operating on a planetary scale.

J.D. Mininger is Provost at the American University in Bulgaria. His publications include German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno (co-edited with Jason Michael Peck, 2016), as well as numerous scholarly articles on aesthetics, political philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

Denis Petrina, Ph.D. (2022), is a researcher at the Department of Contemporary Philosophy at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. He has published articles and book chapters on biopolitics, affect, and the critique of the subject.

Aistis Žekevičius, Ph.D. (2024), is a junior researcher at the Department of Contemporary Philosophy at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. He is working at the interdisciplinary intersection of biopolitics, postcolonialism, posthumanism, and planetary thinking.

Audronė Žukauskaitė is a chief researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. Her recent publications include an edited volume, Life in the Posthuman Condition: Critical Responses to the Anthropocene (co-edited with S. E. Wilmer, 2023) and a monograph, Organism-Oriented Ontology (2023).