The Subject of the Plague

My analysis of 18th century plague stresses the importance of a discursive approach to the analysis of illness, in order to understand the components of health policy as rational technology, which brings out social dispositives and facilitates the observation and evaluation of the population as a whole. The genealogical investigation of plague discourse concentrates on the emergence of a specific biopolitical rationality, which enables regulation of the population and control of individuals. My analysis looks at the emergence of this way of thinking, how it was employed and the way in which it functioned (in terms of its observation and description techniques), so that this discursive process can be seen as having created an exemplary set of preconditions for how AIDS is currently confronted. The discourse on plague is interpreted as a means of constructing illness, whereby its epidemic characteristics are seen as being linked to the structure of its meanings. The discursive space should ideally be permeated by a completely discursive typology of infection, which makes it possible to examine the biotechnical colonisation of the population. The discourse surrounding epidemics therefore always requires that the discourse anticipates the epidemic, prescribes the symbolic form of infection and excludes no–one, so that it can speak to everyone. In this way, the qualities and characteristics of epidemic illnesses are subsumed within the expressive categories of plague discourse, in order to create a text which itself functions as a form of symbolic infection.

"Introduction" to Camus's The Plague: Philosophical Perspectives, 2023

This collection of eight new essays invites contemporary thinkers to reflect--in light of Camus's original fictional narrative of 1947, The Plague--upon the recent Covid-19 pandemic that spread worldwide, felled millions of victims, and posed moral challenges to us as individuals, governments, and global societies. Introduction written by Weiser presents an overview of Camus's life and novel within his oeuvre and existentialist philosophy, along with summaries of essays by Steven G. Kellman, Jane E. Schulz, Andrew Edgar, Kathleen Higgins, Edward B. Weiser, Cynthia A. Freeland, and Margaret E. Gray. Weiser's essay entitled, "Modern Death, Decent Death, and Heroic Solidarity in The Plague" focuses on the feminist bioethical concept of care arguing that care forms the basis of Camus's message of "heroic solidarity" that continues to resonate in our own time as it offers a lesson of optimism and hope in our own pandemic era of disease, death, and divisiveness. "Introduction" by Peg Brand Weiser available here. For OUPblog post, see https://blog.oup.com/2023/09/pandemic-what-pandemic/ and for a YouTube interview see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0FI7AgiZCE

Centaurus 62:2, 2020

We are currently experiencing one of the most disruptive pandemics in modern history. The outbreak of COVID-19 that was first recorded in Wuhan, China and quickly spread across the globe has resulted in nearly 5 million confirmed cases to date and more than 300,000 deaths. Where we stand now, it is still uncertain how many it will infect or kill worldwide, how long it will continue, and when-if ever-life will return to normal. What we know for sure is that this is a pivotal moment and that we are experiencing a historic event that will transform our societies both profoundly and irreversibly. As we wade into this new age of pandemics, it is critical to rethink how we write the history of pandemics. With a conviction that the past helps us to understand the present and that the present should help us to rethink the past, I turn to the legacy of past plagues. In this essay, I take stock of the lasting legacies of past plagues because they continue to shape the way we think about new pandemics. In particular, I address persistent problems, such as European exceptionalism, triumphalism, and epidemiological Orientalism, that are not only ubiquitous in plague studies, but also staples of public opinion about pandemics, past and present.

Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimetism, 2022

Taking cues from Michel Serres’ masterwork on the parasite, the chapter analyses sovereign power and our rulers’ politics of the pandemic as elementary parasitic social relation. It demonstrates how the presence of plague doctors on Hobbes’ frontispiece of the 1651 edition of the Leviathan is indicative of the sovereign’s knowledge concerning a peculiar science of the living dead that aims at metamorphosis, or the control and transformation of liminal crisis situations. Applied to the contemporary pandemic, the living dead concept captures not only the ontological nature of viruses and of our sovereign rulers as beings of pure relationality, but also refers to the people’s condition between life and death, between the certainty of disease and the uncertainty of life. This liminal state is susceptible to radical social control and change. The current cultural form manifesting the science of the living dead is identified as ideotechnopreneurial power, a parasitic combination of three human types: the ideologue, the technocrat/scientist and the entrepreneur. By focusing mainly on collective lockdowns and analysing them as artificial matrixes of relative transformation, this chapter pins down the exact technique through which the ruling ideotechnopreneurs have achieved the objectification of whole populations to parasitic existence and inhuman government.

Geopolitics Quarterly, 2021

This study investigates the reasons for why people seek new political beginnings after historical plagues. The search for such political restarts appeared during the outbreaks of epidemics, but also they still exist among current historians. This investigation is conducted through historical and contemporary interpretations of epidemics. This study concentrates on examples from European and Muslim worlds, but also looks at that of China. It concludes that the meanings assigned to plagues are intertwined with the historical development of political power and its justification by the societies in question.

CENTAURUS JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE, 2022

In the 17th century, English plague-tract writers began replicating a practice begun some decades earlier by their French and Italian counterparts: creating local histories to better describe the disease and explain how best to manage it. After the great London outbreak of 1665, however, plague deaths often went unrecorded and English tract-writing declined significantly. Without local epidemics to record or historicize, the authors became remote spectators of plague elsewhere, their own outbreaks perhaps now seemingly safe in the past. When plague raged in Marseille in 1720, the disease generated fear but was in some ways a bygone event to English tract-writers. Marketing their tracts as historical accounts, a number of English authors likened the Marseille plague to the epidemics that were forming part of England's social memory. 18th-century English tract-writers relegated their plague epidemics to the past by both firmly historicizing them and making the disease definitively foreign. Plague had not come to an end, but it was no longer their plague.

2020

Over the years, humans have evolved in par with rise of information technology and science into a being that has the capability of a machine or possess the power to enslave all the machines with the tip of the fingers, which eventually resulted in the subsequent breach between the humans and their commitment towards the nature due to the humongous exploitation of its resources by humans. With the outbreak of the corona virus, the centrality of human was deconstructed which resulted in the disintegration of the closed hegemonic hierarchal system. Even though humans became the part of the rhizomatic model, inclusive of all forms of life, the pandemic also called for the incorporation of every aspect of the society into its fold, including the power structures of the society. The focus of this paper is on the ambiguous nature of the posthuman condition during the pandemic by drawing the ambivalent aspect of Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalism with its subtle yet dynamic associations with the concept of biopolitics of Michel Foucault. This paper further traces the relationship that exists between the posthuman state, the carnivalism, and the state of emergency during a pandemic.

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, 2022

Human existence is a continual struggle against various kinds of calamities including infectious diseases like the COVID-19 virus that threatens the vulnerability of human life. It has affected humanity throughout the globe who are either hungry due to financial crisis or hospitalized or even killed because of the virus infections. This enduring threat continues to persist as long as the holding sway of the coronavirus remains unresolved. It is no accident that the pandemic of the century mirrors The Plague (1947) of Albert Camus in which both catastrophic events challenged the social order and the vulnerability of human life. Although the health crisis exists in a different period in the history of mankind, nevertheless, the existential crisis it has created has no different. This paper aims to (1) highlight some of the similar events in both pandemics and (2) argue that the pandemic can be an avenue for religious introspection.

Journal of Public Health

For Albert Camus, plague was both a fact of life and a powerful metaphor for the human condition. Camus engaged most explicitly and extensively with the subject of plague in his 1947 novel, The Plague (La peste), which chronicles an outbreak of what is presumably cholera in the French-Algerian city of Oran. I often thought of this novel-and what it might teach us-during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, I discuss seven important insights from The Plague about epidemics, public health and morality.