Fear and power today:

biopower under question

Abstract

The nexuses between fear and power made explicit by the COVID-19 pandemic suggest two limits to the contemporary relevance of the concept of biopower. First, conservative populist leaders such as Trump and Bolsonaro did not instrumentalize the fear of the virus. Second, citizens in several countries voluntarily adhered to lockdown measures before any governmental imposition, mobilized by a solidarity grounded in shared vulnerability. The article reconstructs Foucault’s argument on the nexuses between fear and power in the three books in which he centrally addresses the question of the abnormal (History of Madness, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality) and examines the meaning of the displacements that occurred during the pandemic.