Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Acknowledgements V
3. Contents VII
4. Introduction: Health and Biopolitics in COVID-19 Times – What Constitutes a Healthy Society? 1
5. Preliminary Remarks for a Biopolitical History of Western Plague Narratives 25
6. How to Manage Plague and COVID-19: Parallels and Differences Between Today and Premodern and Early-Modern Medical Theories 47
7. “Civilization is Sterilization”: Utopia, Biopolitics and the Total Society in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World 59
8. COVID-19 as Event: Mythology and Ritual in Agamben’s Pandemic Dispatches 91
9. Biopolitics, Form-of-Life, A New Use of Bodies 111
10. The Relationality and Representability of Biopolitical Crises 133
11. State Control Versus Humanity: Biopolitics and Health in Juli Zeh’s The METHOD (Corpus Delicti, 2009) 155
12. The Quantified Self: Surveillance, Biopolitics and Literary Resistance 183
13. When “Total War” Joins “People’s War”: China’s Recent Surge of Biopolitics and Its Repercussions in Internet Poetry 205
14. Inside in Immunity, Outside in Community? Discussing Esposito and Framing Pandemic Polemics in France 233
15. Needful Facts, Big and Small: On Bodies, Equality, and Treatment 251
16. About the Authors 265
17. Index 271