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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This book examines how the Covid-19 pandemic can be described as a biopolitical crisis, taking into account a fact often overlooked by commentators: Covid-19 is a zoonosis, a disease transmissible between animal species. The Sars-Cov2 virus causing this respiratory disease circulated in bats before passing to humans under as-yet mysterious conditions, and it was transmitted from humans to other species, notably mink and deer.
Building on Michel Foucault’s revival of the term “biopolitics” and related notions (disciplinary power, pastoral power, cynegetic power), this book traces a set of public health measures taken over the last two centuries to control epidemics. It underlines how the need to conserve virus strains in order to identify and anticipate their mutations has given rise to cryopolitics, a set of techniques aimed at suspending the living in order to defer death. The book then questions the emancipatory scope of this cryopolitics by examining interspecies solidarity built by the warning signals sent by animals to humans about coming threats, be they pandemics, natural disasters, or climate change. By blurring the boundaries between the wild and the domestic resulting from the process of domestication, the politics of zoonoses relies on sentinels who preserve the memory of signs from the past to prepare living beings for future threats by involving them in a common ideal.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Opening: Covid-19 displayed as pandemic and zoonosis
A. Objects
B. Animals
Notes
Introduction: Wild thought about biopolitics
Notes
1 Biopower: Disciplining individuals, regulating populations
1.a Public hygiene and mental health
1.b Biotechnology, biosafety, and biolegitimacy
Notes
2 Pastoral power: Watching over humans like sheep
2.a A benevolent and sacrificial power
2.b Veterinary medicine and breeders’ knowledge
Notes
3 Cynegetic power: Catching the prey’s perspectives
3.a Colonial slavery and hunting societies
3.b Virus hunters and disease reservoirs
Notes
4 Cryopolitics: Conserving collections in nature reserves
4.a The mutations of influenza viruses
4.b The cold chain in markets and laboratories
4.c Storing living beings in reserves and museums
Notes
5 Planetary health: Anticipating disasters with animals
5.a Responsibility: from pandemics to global warming
5.b Participation: the ideal of justice through war
Notes
6 Sentinels: Building a new form of solidarity
6.a The frontiers of the immune system
6.b Remembering the signs of the past to prepare for future disasters
Notes
Conclusion: Environmental pathologies, animal studies, and the critique of capitalism
Notes
Index of Names
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Opening: Covid-19 displayed as pandemic and zoonosis
Introduction: Wild thought about biopolitics
Begin Reading
Conclusion: Environmental pathologies, animal studies, and the critique of capitalism
Index of Names
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Sylvia, art historian and anthropologist of the future
Solidarity Between Species
Living with Animals Exposed to Pandemic Viruses
Frédéric Keck
polity
Copyright © Frédéric Keck 2025
The right of Frédéric Keck to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6689-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024941809
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
This book, begun at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, after a series of media interventions and online conferences that led me to repeat the positions defended in my previous book Avian Reservoirs, sometimes at the risk of caricaturing them, has benefited from discussions with long-standing interlocutors and encounters with new ones in very real seminars, which in my view must continue to nourish intellectual life, despite the new possibilities offered by digital work.
I would like to thank Mathias Delori, Katia Genel, Jakob Vogel, Maiween Roudault, and Denis Thouard for hosting me at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin in the spring of 2022, as part of the Marc Bloch Chair at EHESS, followed by a summer school in September 2022, at a time when Germany was an excellent vantage point for observing political transformations in Eastern Europe and for rethinking emancipation at the intersection of philosophy and the human sciences.
For the past five years, the Master’s degree in Environmental Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales has been a venue for the invention of interdisciplinary teaching practices and knowledge contents, from which this book is partly derived. Thanks to Christophe Bonneuil, Marc Elie, Thomas Leroux, and Geneviève Pruvost for allowing me to take part in this intellectual adventure.
I would like to thank Philippe Descola, Pascal Lamy, and Frédéric Worms for their invitation to teach at the European Anthropology Chair at the École normale supérieure de Paris between 2021 and 2023, as well as my PhD students, who took part in the seminar on human–animal relations: Keltoum Boumejdane, Rongtai Chen, Philippe Drugeon, Anna Dupuy, Mathilde Gallay-Keller, and Nan Nan. Thanks also to Emmanuel Didier for the seminar we ran together on “One Health” in 2022 as part of the “Humanités médicales” Master’s program, and to Marc Fleurbaey for hosting me at the ENS’s Centre de formation sur l’environnement et la société.
I was able to present the book’s most daring hypotheses at the Cercle Lucien Herr’s seminar on socialism. I would like to thank Milo, Sacha, and Ulysse Lévy-Bruhl for their discussion of these proposals, which owe them a lot.
This book has benefited from discussions I was fortunate to have for several years with Andrew Lakoff and Christos Lynteris. I am grateful to them for inviting me to present my research to colleagues at the Universities of Southern California in Los Angeles and St. Andrews in Scotland, as well as to Claire Sagan for inviting me to Vassar College, and to Domenico Perrotta for inviting me to the University of Bergamo and to the Congress of Ethnography and Qualitative Research in Italy.
Laurent Jeanpierre initiated this book on biopolitics and accompanied it with Bruno Auerbach and Stéphanie Chevrier through its wanderings to completion at La Découverte. I thank John Thompson for his early interest in the translation of this book at Polity.
The book benefited from the precise, helpful, and kind comments of Romain Graziani, Violette Pouillard, and Mélanie Roustan.
Joëlle Soler has built a strong link in her quest for “holy places” between the socialism of her homeland Tarn and the ecology of the Seine-et-Marne, where we now live. She knows how much I owe her, and for which I can never thank her enough.
Opening: Covid-19 displayed as pandemic and zoonosis
If an anthropologist of the future were to curate an exhibition displaying how humanity has experienced Covid-19, in the way that anthropologists of the past have presented distant societies to European audiences in museums, she might choose four objects and four animal species, which would represent the “material culture” and “ethno-zoology” of humanity today. These objects and animals have indeed populated the imagination of contemporary societies during this pandemic, in ways that remain to be analyzed and understood. The Covid-19 pandemic led humans to globally disseminate objects that had appeared in different places over the past two centuries, standardizing them according to international norms and hybridizing them with more traditional techniques of epidemic control. But Covid-19 is also a zoonosis, i.e. a disease transmitted between different animal species, which explains why the virus that caused it was so unpredictable. Here, then, are four objects and four animals, accompanied by information that might guide visitors through this exhibition.
A. Objects
–
The respirator.
Covid-19 is a respiratory disease, which first infects the lungs, with secondary symptoms in the nervous system such as loss of taste or fatigue, grouped together under the term “long Covid.” Patients with severe respiratory symptoms, such as choking, were treated in intensive care hospital wards, using respirators to ventilate them artificially. These machines, which involve heavy interventions on the bodies of patients who must be regularly turned over and may be placed in an artificial coma, require the constant presence of nursing staff at their side. In times of emergency, hospital space must be reorganized to accommodate these priority patients. These techniques take over from the “iron lungs” invented in Boston in 1928 to combat poliomyelitis, benefiting from advances in artificial respiration in aviation during the twentieth century. The production of artificial respirators, whether rudimentary or high-tech, was greatly accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
1
–
The mask.
Initially a protective tool for hospital staff, the “surgical mask” spread to the entire population to protect against the transmission of Covid-19 by capturing droplets from the mouth and nose. Mainly worn in public transport and enclosed public places, where it was sometimes imposed by governments through sanctions, it was also worn in intimate spaces, with some people reluctant to remove their mask in front of others for reasons of precaution or modesty. It has thus profoundly redefined what it means to be a person (the term
persona
designates the mask in Latin Antiquity) confronted with the threat of respiratory disease circulating in the atmosphere shared by humans. Manufactured industrially from plastic or more traditionally from textile, it has become one of the waste products of contemporary societies, raising new issues of recycling. An archaeologist of the future may find that the only trace of this pandemic is an increase in the layer of plastic produced by humans since the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, thanks to the invention of the plastic surgical mask in the 1950s, this piece of cloth, introduced into hospitals in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, and imposed in the public arena after the work of Chinese physician Wu Liande on pneumonic plague in 1910 and on the occasion of the Spanish flu of 1918, was transformed into an industrial product, in such a way that the stockpiling of masks for hospitals became a criterion for evaluating a modern state.
2
–
The vaccine.
Covid-19 is an infectious disease caused by a virus called SARS-Cov2. In the absence of antiviral treatment for those who were already infected, and despite the hopes raised by advocates of hydroxychloroquine or artemisinin, vaccinating the uninfected population was the best public health strategy for curbing the pandemic, since it put an end to “stop-and-go” policies alternating lock-down and release of the population. The speed of vaccine production by pharmaceutical laboratories in Europe and North America, using the latest messenger RNA technology, surprised all observers and revived mistrust of vaccination, which has been a major trend on both continents over the last thirty years. The development of an inactivated vaccine by the pharmaceutical industries in Russia and China, less effective than messenger RNA vaccines but easier to distribute, and the World Health Organization’s calls for international solidarity under the Covax initiative, making vaccines a “common good of humanity,” have raised hopes on the possibility of sharing them with the countries of the South. The global distribution of a Covid vaccine offers a glimpse of a world in which SARS-Cov2 would be eradicated, but doses of vaccine would have to be manufactured regularly to respond to mutations in the virus. Two hundred and twenty years after its invention by Edward Jenner, and one hundred and forty years after its extension by Louis Pasteur, the vaccine, a pharmaceutical product supervised by the state and distributed to citizens as part of mass campaigns, has thus become an essential component of public health policies to combat pandemics.
3
–
The cell phone.
This is a new public health tool linked to the digitization of contemporary societies, whereas the other three objects have been used to control epidemics for at least a century. Through applications containing barcodes, it can summarize data on individuals (their infection by the virus, their different doses of vaccine) and inform them about potential virus carriers in their environment. During the Covid-19 pandemic, this application enabled individuals to make more informed decisions about their travels, and it allowed public authorities to monitor these travels. As a dematerialized version of the tracing policy chosen by certain countries to limit the pandemic as an alternative to confinement and vaccines, it is indissociable from the more rudimentary materiality of the test, a cotton swab that individuals have to insert into their orifices to find out if they are carriers of the virus. These applications and tests found a particularly well-developed form in China’s “zero-Covid policy,” reinforcing measures to control the population movements and to measure “social credit” that were already in place before the Covid-19 pandemic.
4
B. Animals
–
The bat.
Coronaviruses very similar to those causing Covid in 2019 have been found among rhinolophids in southern China and Southeast Asia. While it had been known since the 1950s that bats could transmit rabies through their bite – which remains exceptional for certain so-called “vampire” species in South America – it was discovered in the 1990s that they were also transmitting new viruses called Hendra and Nipah to humans in Australia and Southeast Asia, through horses, pigs, or fruit they had infected. The emergence of SARS-Cov1 in China in 2002, causing the epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), was explained with certainty by the transmission of a coronavirus – whose mild forms had until then been studied by veterinarians in pigs – from bats in southwest China to civets consumed in major cities such as Guangzhou. Two recent phenomena are mentioned to explain that new viruses are emerging in bats: deforestation, forcing bats to move to trees closer to human habitats, and new breeding practices for horses and pigs, bringing them closer to the forests and caves where bats breed, thus multiplying the number of intermediate species between bats and humans, and therefore the opportunities for their viruses to be transmitted to new species. Over the last forty years, it has been discovered that bats harbor a large number of viruses that are potentially dangerous to humans, due to their unique characteristics: they make up a quarter of all mammalian species, they live in dense multi-species colonies where they exchange large numbers of viruses that constantly cross species barriers, and they have developed immune defenses that enable them to withstand the metabolic cost of flight, notably a microbiota of restricted size and mechanisms for repairing the chromosomes carrying their genetic information.
5
–
The pangolin.
The identification of bats as reservoirs of coronaviruses left aside the question of the intermediate animal that transmitted SARS-Cov2 to humans. In April 2020, Chinese authorities suggested that the pangolin might be the intermediate animal between bats and humans, after viruses close to SARS-Cov2 were found by Chinese researchers in Malaysian pangolins.
6
This discovery turned the attention of health authorities and the media to the international traffic of pangolins, whose scales are consumed in traditional Chinese medicine as a remedy for fevers. The International Union for Conservation of Nature banned the sale of Asian pangolins in 2000, which redirected international pangolin trafficking to Africa. The pangolin is thus an indicator of the transformation of a traditional hunting practice into a prestige consumption practice organized by an international market, which can go as far as new breeding practices of wild animals to supply new forms of traditional medicine. But the pangolin was an emblematic species for conservation in China for the last twenty years, which may explain that it was brought on the public scene at the start of the Covid pandemic.
7
–
The mink.
Mink farms tested positive for the SARS-Cov2 virus in Holland in June 2020 and in Denmark in November 2020, presumably due to infection by humans working on the farms. Health authorities were less concerned about mink mortality in these farms, slightly increased by the presence of SARS-Cov2, than about the appearance of a viral mutation that could be transmitted to humans and compromise the undergoing vaccination campaign. Denmark, the world’s leading producer of farmed mink for fur (with 28% of global production, followed by Poland and China), ordered the slaughter of twelve million mink using gas. As the decomposing corpses rose from the ground, farmers were forced to dig them up and incinerate them, sparking media images that travelled around the world. The European public discovered that mink had been farmed industrially since the 1850s in North America to compensate for the decline in beaver fur production by trappers, then introduced at the end of the nineteenth century in Northern Europe, where their fish-based diet was replaced by protein compounds. The mink was domesticated more recently than the ferret, which also belongs to the mustelid family and was prized in medieval Europe for its sociability, scent (musk) and ability to detect game, making it a companion species at court and for the hunt. More recently, ferret breeding has developed to provide laboratories with animal models for the study of respiratory diseases such as influenza, since ferrets sneeze like humans. An animal species that has long been involved in human social practices linked to hunting has thus been transformed into a commodity for a century, but the health crisis has once again made it a bearer of warning signals for humans.
8
–
The deer.
While tests on dogs, pigs, poultry, and cattle have all been negative for SARS-Cov2, cats have been shown to replicate the virus, but not in sufficient quantity to cause transmission to humans.
9
In January 2022, an outbreak of Covid-19 was discovered in Hong Kong among humans who frequented a pet shop where Syrian hamsters had been imported from Holland: the slaughter of 2,000 hamsters in Hong Kong put an end to this route of disease transmission.
10
On the other hand, significant circulation of SARS-Cov 2 has been discovered in white-tailed deer in the USA, with rates ranging from 30 to 40 percent depending on the states in which the deer population was tested. The origin of this transmission remains mysterious, whether it be infected carcasses or contaminated water, but such prevalence in wildlife precludes the use of eradication methods such as culling techniques applied to mink and hamster. Instead, the US wildlife authorities have launched an extensive program of regular deer sampling and a prevention campaign aimed at hunters to limit direct contact between humans and deer.
11
The discovery of cases of SARS-Cov2 in mink and deer thus qualifies Covid-19 not only as an emerging disease, in the sense that the virus would have crossed species barriers by passing from bats to humans via an intermediate species such as the pangolin, but also as a zoonosis, in the sense that the virus has the capacity to return to other animal species after passing through humans, in a permanent mutation mechanism that makes its definitive eradication impossible.
12
Notes
1.
See Alejandro de la Garza, “The surprisingly long history of the ventilator, the machine you never want to need,”
Time
, April 7, 2020.
2.
See Bruno Strasser and Thomas Schlich, “A history of the medical mask and the rise of throwaway culture,”
Lancet
396 (10243), 2020.
3.
See Anne-Marie Moulin,
L’aventure de la vaccination
(Fayard, 1993); Philippe Sansonetti,
Tempête parfaite. Chronique d’une pandémie annoncée
(Seuil, 2020); Anne-Marie Moulin and Gaëtan Thomas, “L’hésitation vaccinale, ou les impatiences de la santé mondiale,”
La vie des idées
, May 4, 2021.
4.
See Séverine Arsène (ed.), “Façonner l’Internet chinois: Dispositifs politiques, institutionnels et technologiques dans la gouvernance de l’Internet,”
Perspectives chinoises
, 2015: 4.
5.
See Linfa Wang and Christopher Cowled,
Bats and Viruses: A New Frontier of Emerging Infectious Diseases
(Wiley, 2015); Antoine Laugrand and Frédéric Laugrand,
Des voies de l’ombre: quand les chauves-souris sèment le trouble
(Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 2023); Frédéric Keck and Arnaud Morvan
, Chauves-souris. Rencontres aux frontières entre les espèces
(CNRS Editions, 2021).
6.
K. Xiao, J. Zhai, Y. Feng, N. Zhou, X. Zhang, J.J. Zou, N. Li, Y. Guo, X. Li, X. Shen, et al., “Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-related coronavirus from Malayan pangolins,”
Nature
583, 2020.
7.
See Chris Coggins,
The Tiger and the Pangolin: Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China
(University of Hawai’i Press, 2003); Kong Xiao et al., “Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-related coronavirus from Malayan pangolins,”
Nature
583, 2020; Mathieu Quet, “Le pangolin pris au piège de la commodisation de la nature,”
La vie des idées
, April 28, 2020.
8.
See Françoise Fenollar et al., “Mink, SARS-CoV-2, and the Human–Animal Interface,”
Frontiers of Microbiology
12, 2021; Alexander Etkind, “Barrels of fur: Natural resources and the state in the long history of Russia,”
Journal of Eurasian Studies
2 (2), 2011.
9.
See Jianzhong Shi et al., “Susceptibility of ferrets, cats, dogs, and other domesticated animals to SARS-coronavirus 2,”
Science
368 (6494), 2020.
10.
See Smriti Mallapaty, “How sneezing hamsters caused a Covid outbreak in Hong Kong,”
Nature
, February 4, 2022; Hui-Ling Yen et al., “Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 delta variant (AY.127) from pet hamsters to humans, leading to onward human-to-human transmission: a case study,”
Lancet
12: 399 (10329), March 2022.
11.
See Suresh V. Kuchipudi, “Multiple spillovers and onward transmission of SARS-Cov-2 in free-living and captive White-tailed deer,”
PNAS
119 (6), 2021.
12.
See Najmul Haider et al., “COVID-19-Zoonosis or Emerging Infectious Disease?”
Frontiers of Public Health
8, 2020.
Introduction: Wild thought about biopolitics
Using the argumentation and documentation methods of social anthropology, this book aims to answer the following question: how do we think about the forms of critique and emancipation in the age of pandemic viruses? It opened with a project for an exhibition on the Covid-19 pandemic because exhibitions pose the same problem as argumentations, but with different documents. An exhibition involves a “curatorial” approach that aims to heal (cure) humans through attention (care) to the things between which it is necessary to sort (krinein) in order to make them visible in public space.1 Since we have all suffered the Covid-19 pandemic as subjects of contemporary societies, we can respond to the concerns and questions it has raised by displaying the material traces this event has left in our memories, as museums have done for societies of the past. But it is also possible to make a retrospective diagnosis of this pandemic by reflecting on the categories through which we think more generally about zoonoses and, through them, relations connecting us to all living beings.
The Covid-19 pandemic threatened the ideals on which modern societies are founded because it gave rise to archaic fears associated with contagion. States adopted authoritarian measures of quarantine, lock-down and vaccination, undermining individual freedom. The extraordinary spread of the SARS-Cov2 virus among human populations revealed inequalities between human populations in their exposure to diseases and in their access to healthcare technologies. But this pandemic has also highlighted new forms of solidarity between humans, bats, pangolins, mink, and deer, since we have all been affected by the same zoonosis. While humans have reflected during the Covid-19 pandemic how they could emancipate themselves from constraining forms of power, they also realized they were exposed to the same diseases as other animals, who suffer from more violent forms of surveillance, vaccination, lock-down, and killing.
Therefore, the Covid-19 pandemic has questioned the relationship between life and power, in a way that forces us to ask what modern societies understand by “life” and “power,” and to reset the modern project of emancipation on new foundations. What does it mean to “make live,” “make die,” “let live,” and “let die,” when human populations are locked-down in their homes for months to avoid contagion, sometimes dying alone for lack of access to healthcare, when citizens are encouraged to vaccinate themselves to contain an unknown virus, and can no longer access public places if they don’t, when minks or hamsters are slaughtered to avoid viral mutations in their bodies, when bats are caught and bled to extract virus samples, when deer are kept away from domestic animals to prevent them from transmitting a virus that has already spread widely within their species?
This book approaches these questions through the concept of biopolitics, coined in 1976 by the philosopher Michel Foucault to describe the formation over the last two centuries of a power to “make live and let die.” Many commentators have used this term to describe the techniques of quarantine, containment, vaccination, surveillance, and anticipation that enabled public authorities to limit the spread of Covid-19.2 Reflection on the “power” involved in these biopolitical measures could lead either to the denunciation of a globalized state manipulating populations into buying masks and vaccines, according to an updated version of conspiracy theory, or to the more subtle but also more discouraging questioning of a power that infiltrates social interactions through individuals’ suspicions about the infectious potential of their neighbors, framed as a “capillary” view on power.3 Conspiracy theory thus confuses two political registers, which Foucault aimed to distinguish: the sovereign register of the state, which acts through laws in the service of a people, and the biopolitical register of government, which acts through norms to protect a population. Noting the “capillary” extension of medical power into the beliefs and practices of modern individuals, conspiracy theory attributes to it a “deep state” that is more extensive than the forms of sovereignty. It is founded on the will to fight this invisible enemy, while it has not analyzed the conjunctural and reversible alliances between the state and government.4 This book, by contrast, seeks to show that there is not a uniform biopolitics from which modern subjects should emancipate themselves, but several forms of the relationship between knowledge and power in modern and non-modern societies, which redefine the project of emancipation according to the ways in which humans domesticate animals. It thus seeks to include animals in the modern project of emancipation according to the techniques of knowledge and power in which they are caught up.
When the term “biopolitics” was introduced into the social sciences by Michel Foucault in 1976, it essentially concerned human populations in the face of diseases such as plague, which has been controlled in the modern age by a policy of quarantine imposed on persons and commodities, as well as smallpox, which can be controlled by vaccination because it is not regularly transmitted from animals to humans. It did not seem to apply to animal populations, even though the emergence of the Ebola virus in 1976 demonstrated the role of primates in the circulation of new pathogens. Discussions of biopolitics therefore lack any consideration of what animals do when they introduce new pathogens into the human population. The control and monitoring of pandemics concerns not only cities where humans live in close proximity to each other, but markets, farms, forests, caves, where humans live with animals. How is biopolitics transformed when it operates not in territories where populations are exposed to risks, but in infrastructures where disasters occur at the borders between species?
The notion of biopolitics appeared in public debate at the same time as the notion of zoonosis in the 1970s but, until then, they had rarely been brought together. The joint appearance of these two notions indicates that a transformation was underway in relations between the human species and its environment. On the one hand, health issues have played an increasingly important role in political organization, notably through risk insurance, to the extent that Michel Foucault defined man as “an animal whose politics place his existence as a living being in question.”5 On the other hand, the distribution of animal species has changed dramatically, with the mass extinction of a large number of wild species and the increase in domesticated species for human consumption, transforming the ecosystems in which microbes mutate.
Yet these two trends are conceived within quite different frameworks, which explains why they don’t meet. The notion of biopolitics is conceived within the statistical framework of risk management, while the notion of zoonoses is conceived within the ecological framework of disaster anticipation. The conjunction between these two phenomena bears witness to a historical fact that becomes increasingly clearer today: while warning signals have multiplied over the last four decades about ecological disasters resulting from the extension of the industrial way of life, liberal societies thought of them as risks for individuals.
The founder of social anthropology in France, Claude Lévi-Strauss, posed the problem of disease control quite differently from Michel Foucault, using the term pensée sauvage, recently translated as “wild thought.” By this term, Lévi-Strauss meant not “the thought of savages,” but thought “in a sylvatic environment” (à l’état sauvage). When it finds itself in a forest rather than in a planned countryside, human thinking is not finalized by a performance objective, but elaborates a set of classifications from animals and plants to solve all kinds of problems. According to Lévi-Strauss, Indian societies in the southeastern United States identify animals and plants in their environment to diagnose and treat disease: they “treat pathological phenomena as the consequence of a conflict among men, animals, and plants. Irritated by humans, animals send them diseases; plants, the allies of humans, counterattack by providing remedies.”6 This formulation of the biopolitical problem resonates strangely with some of the statements we have heard about the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, bats or pangolins have been said to “revenge,” 7 and mink corpses emerging from Danish soil after slaughter as well as deer carrying SARS-Cov2 across American forests have appeared as “ghosts” haunting humans to potentially transmit the pandemic virus.8 The idea of animal vengeance is a very strange one for modern societies, who posit a separation between humans and non-humans in their intellectual capacities; it is closer to hunter societies, who attribute intentionalities to animals and plants to better mark the differences between specific materialities.9
When one says that “nature revenges itself,” one explains the emergence of SARS-Cov2 by the intention of bats to send viruses to humans to punish them for deforestation, but this explanation makes little sense in the eyes of modern science, which emphasizes the random nature of biological mutations.10 It is, however, the exact symmetry of the opposite thesis, according to which the emergence of SARS-Cov2 is caused by the intention of humans to manufacture biological weapons in order to frighten populations, and thus sell them vaccines protecting them against an evil manufactured by humans. This rather simplistic form of conspiracy theory attributes evil intent to humans, ignoring all the complications and uncertainties of manipulating biological material, just as the idea of bat revenge ignores the instabilities and complexities of the animal chain that led a coronavirus to travel from a forest in southern China to airports around the world. For ecologists who study the correlations between viral emergence and biodiversity loss, the problem is rather to understand how the random mutation of a virus is selected and amplified by a change in the ecosystem, be it deforestation, climate change, urbanization, or industrial livestock farming.11
Organizing the encounter between Foucault’s “biopolitics” and Lévi-Strauss’s “wild thought” around Covid-19 means tying together two threads that were woven without intersecting between the 1960s and 1970s to think about this event: the random emergence of a new virus that crosses species barriers in a way that brings the global economy of human activities to a halt. When Foucault introduced the notion of biopolitics into the human sciences in 1976, it was the year of the publication of Gary Becker’s book, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior,12 which marked the extension of neo-liberal logic to all living beings; but it was also the year of the eradication of smallpox and the emergence of Ebola, which led international health authorities to anticipate emerging infectious diseases by monitoring pathogens that crossed species boundaries in animal reservoirs.13 When Lévi-Strauss published La pensée sauvage in 1962, it was the end of the Algerian war, which put an end to France’s colonial history, forcing anthropologists to invent new forms of collaboration with indigenous knowledges; but it was also the year of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the United States and the second edition of Frank Macfarlane Burnet’s Natural History of Infectious Diseases in Great Britain, which warned of the effect of pesticides on the trophic chain of ecosystems in which humans live, and of influenza viruses circulating in wild birds and amplifying in domestic animals.14 The neo-liberal revolution analyzed by Michel Foucault in the United States, which accelerated the global extension of capitalism by empowering individuals capable of taking risks, is inextricably linked to the failed reception of warning signals about the health consequences of ecological transformations, whether through the production of new toxins or the emergence of new viruses.15 The Ebola virus emerging in 1976, followed by HIV/AIDS, Nipa, Hendra, avian and swine flu viruses, up to SARS coronaviruses, was the first of a series of such warning signals.
If we think about it through this double genealogy, the biopolitical problem posed by the Covid-19 pandemic can be clarified. What is at stake is certainly how we can construct a free, non-authoritarian relationship with these technical objects – respirators, masks, vaccines, and cell phones – and thus appropriate them subjectively in everyday use. But it is also how we can interact with viruses coming from the wild, for which we have no immunity, in ways other than treating them as enemies to be eradicated. Foucault poses the biopolitical problem as that of the liberation of the living, but leaves aside the problem of the domestication of the wild, which is much more central in the thought of Lévi-Strauss.16 Foucault affirms the subjective power of truth against normative forms of power, but pays little attention to the ways in which living beings are conserved against exploitation by a standardizing power, which Lévi-Strauss analyzed in indigenous knowledges. How is the ideal of truth and justice that lies at the heart of the modern project of emancipation reformulated, when it no longer concerns only relations between patients, doctors, pharmacists, and police officers, but also relations between humans and bats, pangolins, minks, and deer mediated by virologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, and ecologists? If statements about pandemic viruses constitute a form of globalized truth, for example about the number of deaths they have caused, or their various mutations after their emergence, how can relations between humans and the other animal species they unequally infect be oriented toward environmental justice to take care of the diversity of lives exposed to them?
Zoonoses have led to collaborations between microbiologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, physicians, veterinarians, and ecologists around microbes that become pathogenic when transmitted between species. In the same way, this book is part of a collective effort to pose this problem with the methods of the social sciences, combining philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and history, in order to understand how societies perceive, manage, and anticipate zoonoses. It approaches the notions of causality, immunity, and health used by veterinary medicine and planetary ecology through a broader questioning of the political formulation of medical issues in modernity and of the emancipation of living beings from modes of exploitation and domination. The first four chapters take up Michel Foucault’s analyses of biopolitics, gradually introducing medical notions – endemic, epizootic, zoonotic, pandemic – and anthropological concepts – pastoral power, cynegetic power, cryopolitics. The last two chapters are more normative: they question the possibility of articulating these various medical concepts and modalities of power with ideals of truth and justice. The book concludes with a reflection on the form of solidarity between humans and other living beings that the international organization of planetary health represents, and with a call to study sentinels in the territories where they give rise to critiques of industrial capitalism, whose pathologies are revealed globally by zoonoses.
Notes
1.
See Paul Rabinow, Preface to Clémentine Deliss (ed.),
Object Atlas. Fieldwork in the Museum
(Kerber, 2012).
2.
See Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, “Covid-19:
une crise biopolitique?
,”
AOC
, June 19, 2020.
3.
The most assertive use of the notion of biopolitics to fuel conspiracy theory is that of the
Manifeste conspirationniste
, published anonymously by Seuil in 2022. Through the style of denunciation, it combines the assignment of a historically coherent cause with the pinpointing of its ramifications in all areas of everyday life. “What is happening is the recomposition of a civic body, no longer on a political, but a biopolitical basis” (p. 69); “the management of the Covid-19 epidemic marks the absolute triumph of biopolitics as a logic at the same time as its practical defeat in open country, unable as it is to cope with a virus that is not so fatal after all” (p. 210).
4.
See Barbara Katz Rothman,
The Biomedical Empire. Lessons Learned from the Covid-19 Pandemic
(Stanford University Press, 2022), p. 24: “Marx was right: the state has essentially become the managing agent of bourgeois interests. Foucault was ultimately wrong: the state has not so much used biopower as biopower has used the state.”
5.
Michel Foucault,
History of Sexuality I
, trans. Robert Hurley (Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 143.
6.
Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Wild Thought
, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt (University of Chicago Press, 2021), p. 185.
7.
Two interviews I gave at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic were given this title, even though I was questioning its relevance: “Les chauves-souris et les pangolins se révoltent.” Interview with Joseph Confavreux,
Mediapart
, March 20, 2020; “La vengeance du pangolin.” Interview with François Moutou and Baptiste Roger-Lacan,
Le Grand Continent
, April 1, 2020.
8.
See Gil Bartholeyns,
Le hantement du monde. Zoonoses et Pathocène
(Dehors, 2021), p. 90. Covid-19 is characterized as a “broad-spectrum” zoonosis, as it is transmitted by a large number of animal species. See Gwenael Vourch, François Moutou, Serge Morand, and Elsa Jourdain,
Les zoonoses. Ces maladies qui nous lient aux animaux
(Quae, 2021), p. 18. Jacques Derrida (
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International
, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Routledge 1994), defines specters in terms of the frequency of the visible and the frequentation of the invisible.
9.
See Philippe Descola,
La nature domestique
.
Symbolisme et praxis dans l’écologie des Achuar
(Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1986); Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,
From the Enemy’s Point of View. Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society
(University of Chicago Press, 1992).
10.
See Thierry Hoquet,
Le nouvel esprit biologique
(Presses Universitaires de France, 2022).
11.
See Serge Morand,
L’homme, la faune sauvage et la peste
(Fayard, 2020); Marie-Monique Robin and Serge Morand,
La fabrique des pandémies. Préserver la biodiversité, un impératif pour la santé planétaire
(La Découverte, 2021).
12.
See Gary Becker,
The Economic Approach to Human Behavior
(University of Chicago Press, 1976).
13.
See Laurie Garrett,
The Coming Plague. Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
(Penguin, 1995), and David Quammen,
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
(W.W. Norton, 2012). In 1976, historian William McNeill published
Plagues and People
(Anchor Books), a book that played an important role in popularizing the notions of zoonosis and emerging infectious disease, notably when ornithologist and geographer Jared Diamond took up his theses in
Guns, Germs and Steel (
W.W. Norton, 1997).
14.
See Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1962); Frank Macfarlane Burnet,
Natural History of Infectious Diseases
(Cambridge University Press, 1962). Other books that sounded the alarm on environmental degradation by pointing to a systemic cause include Vance Packard’s
The Waste Makers
in 1960, Murray Bookchin’s
Our Synthetic Environment
in 1962, and Ruth Harrison’s
Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry
in 1964.
15.
See Frédéric Keck,
Signaux d’alerte. Contagion virale, justice sociale, crises environnementales
(Desclée de Brouwer, 2020).
16.
Of all the Foucauldian thinkers who have written on the Covid-19 pandemic, Olivier Cheval is the only one who placed the question of domestication at the center, but he sees it as domestication of the “outside” rather than domestication of the wild. See Olivier Cheval,
La domestication du monde
, followed by
Lettres sur la peste
(La Découverte, 2022).
1Biopower: Disciplining individuals, regulating populations
When Michel Foucault proposed the notion of biopower in 1976 in his lectures at the Collège de France and in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, he was critically adopting a term that had been circulating in a normative way for half a century: biopolitics.1 In 1920, the Swedish geographer and political scientist Rudolf Kjellen called “biopolitics” the science of competitive and cooperative relations between social groups, to emphasize that politics is not the result of the free wills of individuals, but of the collective life of a people.2 He thus launched a project for strengthening the state over its vital space, which would be radically and destructively realized by Nazi Germany. The notion of biopolitics was reformulated after the Second World War in the context of growing ecological awareness of the limits imposed by the planet on the development of human activities. Dietrich Gunst defined biopolitics as the regulation of population and the protection of the environment, while Kenneth Cauthen saw it as a project for a planetary society that reinscribes man in a nature spiritualized by Christian joy.3 In 1976, Michel Foucault takes up this notion reflexively and critically, to show how it differs from the classical definition of politics as a relationship between a sovereign and his subjects.
Foucault uses the notion of biopolitics as a weapon against the philosophy of law supposed by his two main opponents in his reflection on power: critical theory, formulated at the time by Herbert Marcuse in Frankfurt, and republican philosophy, expounded at the time by Quentin Skinner at Cambridge.4 For Foucault, to oppose the neo-liberal power being organized in the United States to a non-alienated subject, as in the Marxist tradition, or to a community of rights, as in the British tradition, is to ignore the norms that govern relations between living beings and the forms of subjectivation they give rise to. The discovery of life as an order of phenomena endowed with its own regulations, notably through the formation of biology as separated from other sciences in the eighteenth century, leads to a redefinition of politics as a set of modifiable actions on which it is possible to intervene, in particular with the clinic and the police as new institutions of power.5
The crucial point in Foucault’s redefinition of biopolitics is his understanding of disease as both an individual and collective crisis. Disease is no longer perceived as a divine punishment, analogous to the sovereign’s punishment of a crime, but as a simple deviation from the norm, which can be the object of clinical and statistical knowledge, aligning the patient back within the norm.6 Whereas the classical state acted on individual wills through the form of the law, which defines an action on the basis of its sanction, the modern state acts, according to Foucault, through the norm, which conceives of action as regulable or modifiable. The State, says Foucault, is no longer justified by the figure of the people, resulting from the agreement of free wills, but by that of the population, an aggregate of living beings who reproduce regularly on a territory.7
Foucault takes up the notion of biopolitics as part of a general philosophical reflection on the relationship between power and knowledge. He asks what a body can do in a context where several forms of knowledge are in competition. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the period of interest to Foucault in his reflection on biopower, three types of knowledge were competing: criminal law, public hygiene, and psychiatry.
1.a Public hygiene and mental health
Public hygiene emerged in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century among aristocrats concerned about the effects of the industrial revolution on craftsmen, but it was instrumentalized by the state at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when diseases caused by workers’ labor appeared to be obstacles to economic growth.8
