Following on from yesterday’s response to a criticism of my Covid libertarianism post, I’ve only just noticed that Chris has weighed in with a very nice post of his own on Covid subjectivities. I had planned to go through Chris’s post but I actually find much to agree with here. Not that that is a surprise, but in going through it I fear this post will take the form of a series of long quotations broken up by me nodding along, adding very little…
I’m curious to see what more Chris might have to say following my earlier response to Adam. He does such an excellent job of bringing in the various complexities I discuss via Foucault. In fact, the amount of resonance between my second post and Chris’s made me think he was responding to yesterday’s post, not the original one from back in December!
With that being said, go check out Chris’s post, where he draws “business ontology” into the strange bouquet of Covid subjectivities and presages the Foucauldian hydra — “a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted” — that is produced by the libertarian dichotomy of individual and state.
I think our conclusions are largely complementary: “The viral cracking of the ground of subjectivity has opened up chasms with no clear options.” In my tendency towards the millenarian, I’m okay with a lack of clarity. “Baroque sunbursts” and all that…