Social isolation as a pandemic device: biopolitical reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The article focuses on a theoretical inquiry about whether we can speak of “pandemic devices” in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic – which affected behaviors, lifestyles, work practices, and the relationship with the health of the world population over the years 2020-2022. The concepts of device, world, bare life, action, biopolitics, necropolitics, plurality, techno-image, and the direct implications that sanitary measures imposed on everyone impel us to ask how such formulations, present in the philosophical perspectives of authors such as Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe and Vilém Flusser, can contribute to address conflicts and think about the urgencies of the present time, considering the social phenomenon of the pandemic, and in particular isolation. In summary, we seek to investigate: how can some biopolitical aspects help us to conceive events marked by loneliness, helplessness, illness, and death, that we witness? What kind of proximity do we start to have with the experience of appearing to the other basically through techno-images, i.e., through devices? Finally, moving between a global and a local (Brazil) perspective, we also seek to shed light on what impacts the Covid-19 pandemic has had on politics – a sphere in which action is, par excellence, the matter and form of plurality