Editorial. Covid-19 and the reconfiguration of the political

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Amelie Kutter, Elena Dück, Christiane Barnickel, Juli 5, 2022

The Covid-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is only one among many recent ‘transboundary’ crises that painfully bring to light how connected and precarious our lives are. Like the preceding financial and Eurozone crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic reveals the unequal distribution of vulnerability and burden that is characteristic of most societies in the early 21^st century. Being presumably a zoonotic disease that emerges from the destruction of natural habitats by humans and spreads via global production chains, Covid-19 also points to the transformation that the globe is undergoing, induced by our way of life.[1]

However, while the Covid-19 pandemic might be revelatory of many current crisis tendencies, it is, at its semantic core, a medical crisis in the original Greek sense of the word crisis: a moment deciding a person’s life or death, depending on whether medical intervention yields recovery or fatal collapse (for a discussion see Galvão Debelle dos Santos). Therefore, talk of the Covid-19 pandemic is specific, and a specific discourse of crisis, in that it connotes crisis and epidemiology in its literal medical meaning. Discourses of Covid-19 deal with indications and measurements of infection, prevention and cure. They highlight virologists’ assessments and ‘pharmaceutical interventions’ derived from their analyses. In addition, discourses of Covid-19 deal with ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’, government measures that mean to contain contagion: vaccination campaigns, quarantine and lock-downs, social distancing and hygiene rules, mobility restrictions and protective apparel, including face masks. And last but not least, discourses of Covid-19 deal with a range of repercussions, the loss of lives, health and livelihood, enclosure and isolation, the prescriptiveness and arbitrariness of government decrees, the burden of multitasking, the lure and hassle of digital tools, the lack of physical, social and juvenile peer interaction, the resulting psychic strain and emotional breakdown. They signal how deeply Covid-19 has affected our feelings and interactions.

The focus on Covid-19 and the political

We, the editors of this first issue of the Crisis Discourse Blog, were keen to find out what discourse analysis can contribute to cognising the implications of Covid-19. Discourse analysis points us to less obvious conventions of talk and configurations of knowledge, by which we construct a crisis and limit or transgress the ways in which we act on it.[2] Using a discourse-analytical lens might help us to disentangle the mediatized drama of crisis and navigate more clearly through its social and political implications. We assembled an authors’ workshop [i] on discourses of the Covid-19 crisis and gathered researchers from various European, disciplinary and discourse-theoretical backgrounds. They brought pieces written from those angles and engaged in an intense collaborative review process.

We are now proud to be able to present to the reader a rich collection of carefully crafted blog posts. You will find analysis and reflection on how Swedish health institutions communicate with migrants as ‘vulnerable’ groups, what categorisations of ‘vulnerability’ are pertinent in English-language academic publications and how Czech humorous memes on Covid-19 construct in- and outgroups on social media. You will also learn how this taxonomy of social relations feeds into configurations of discourse that shape our political space. Discover how ‘solidarity’ became an empty signifier in German Covid-19 debates, how representations of the ‘Anti-Vax’ collective in Italian mainstream media reproduced the ‘responsible pandemic subject’, what the biopolitics of the pandemic were (actually) about and how discourses of Covid-19 did and did not ‘securitize’ while conjuring up emergency intervention .

The Covid-19 pandemic, including its discourses and politics, has obviously been the subject of joint publications before.[3] This present collection extends the spectrum by adding a special focus.

The authors explore the repercussions the pandemic has had on ‘the political’, on what constitutes our political struggle and political identities in the pandemic era. They observe that Covid-19 has left a legacy in the ways in which we communicate, do and imagine politics. This might seem trivial at first sight. After all, we all have witnessed the sudden intrusion of government action into seemingly unpolitical aspects of everyday life and the massive political mobilisation that accompanied containment measures. However, the authors of this special edition prompted us to move beyond the familiar perception of politics as public decision-making or political mobilisation that forms alongside known ideological cleavages, be they opposing the radical right to the liberal left, populists to the establishment or health security concerns to that of personal freedom.

What emerges from this collection of blog posts is a much more nuanced view of ‘the pandemic political’. The surprising new insights that they offer, which we comment on further below, are due to the specific perspectives that authors chose. For most contributors to this special edition, becoming a blogger on CriDis meant sharing their personal experiences of Covid-19 and reflecting on the views and ethics one developed from them. Lived experience without doubt shaped their perceptions and interpretation of the Covid-19 crisis. While reading their blog posts, we thus learn about others’ intellectual ways of coping with the pandemic. In addition, we gain a comparative perspective on what such coping meant in different national contexts of pandemic crisis management. National contexts certainly influence our perception of ‘normalcy’ because we are socialised in them. They are particularly important in experiences of Covid-19, however, because Covid-19 is a public health crisis, and public health crises continue to be managed primarily by national administrations, in often idiosyncratic ways. Most authors decided to make these national specificities an explicit part and ‘case’ of their analysis. Reading their blog posts enables us to spot similarities and differences in national crisis management and put them in perspective.

The collection of blog posts is rich in yet another way. It demonstrates the complementary or alternative insights that are revealed when one applies different traditions of discourse research. This edition has contributions that draw on linguistic pragmatics, media-aesthetics, conceptual history, Foucauldian discourse and governmentality analysis, or hegemony studies. The authors’ reading of the pandemic is also informed by their choice of a specific CriDis rubric. The rubrics of the Crisis Discourse Blog offer different genres of critical reading and prompt the writer to re- and deconstruct the current debate in specific ways. Reviews follow a rather classical format. They systematically collect and review works of contemporary intellectual debate on a certain topic, such as the securitization of Covid-19 or social exclusion, and contrast valuable insights with regrettable neglects. CriDis reviews additionally assess how the reviewed works themselves are implicated in the crisis debate, how they reinforce or overcome certain narrow conceptions of what is at stake.

Slippery concepts investigate ambiguous terms that have become widespread and instrumental in the current crisis debate, such as ‘solidarity’, ‘exceptionality’ or ‘biopolitics’ in Covid-19 debates. Slippery concepts assess the conceptual history of the term, look at shifts in contemporary usage and possible alternative meanings. Through this genre of critical reading, the authors develop a deeper understanding of the slipperiness of a term and of how contemporary uses can be situated and confronted. A snapshot presents the pinpoint analysis of a specific feature of a crisis debate, such as targets of mockery in social media memes, the figure of the Anti-Vax in Italian media or the ‘health broker’ in official Swedish health campaigns, usually drawing on a piece of ongoing discourse research. The method of critical reading that applies to snapshots is implied by the chosen discourse approach, more precisely, by the heuristic tools, concepts and methods that the chosen tradition of discourse research has established. Contributors to this special issue have experimented with these genres and produced, through them, a range of surprising insights into the Covid-19 pandemic.

Surprising new insights into the Covid-19 pandemic

A widespread assumption about the Covid-19 pandemic is that it both facilitated exceptional executive politics (see Elena Dück’s post) and introduced more comprehensive biopolitical control, that is, our bodies and health have become more thoroughly integrated into states’ techniques of public health surveillance (see Raili Marling’s post). The blog posts teach us, however, that ‘securitization’, the conjuring up of an existential threat that justifies extended governmental power, did not apply in all pandemic contexts. In fact, as Elena Dück highlights, a strange mix of securitization and de-securitization occurred, and emergency responses varied greatly. Perhaps more alarmingly, securitizing public justification was not even necessary for governments to assume exceptional power, not even in Europe’s liberal democracies. Galvão Debelle dos Santos suggests that the recurring experience and discourse of crisis that has prevailed during the past decade already entails and performs exceptionality. In this context of epic crisis construction, governing by exception has become an accepted routine that may proceed without securitizing justification.

Nevertheless, routinized exceptional government has not rendered biopolitical control pervasive. The startling insight to be derived from Raili Marling’s and Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta’s contributions is that, in European liberal democracies, the pandemic was not primarily managed by oversight and control of residents’ health and social distancing, even if this was suggested by the complicated bureaucratic measures with which one had to comply. Raili Marling reveals that in Estonia, where e-biopolitics, the digitised management of public health, has made great progress, the tools available were not used and measures were evaded, so that the country ended up in ‘biopolitical failure’, seeing many deaths.

Another assumption prevailing in debates on Covid-19 is that the degree of failure, success and contestation of pandemic crisis management follows from the design of policies, their biopolitical closure, the harsh or accommodative, arbitrary or reasoned character of government measures. The blog posts point us, instead, to the importance of pre-existing discourse configurations and the ongoing negotiations among government and social groups. Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta, for instance, shows in his snapshot on the Italian case that those who acted ‘responsibly’ during the pandemic had become involved in ‘responsibilisation’ before. They had been called on to self-discipline, whether concerning their economic or lifestyle activities, and to take on responsibility for security tasks that would otherwise have been implemented by public and private authorities.

We learn from his analysis, but also from comparing the Italian to the Czech , Swedish and German cases, that support or contestation of pandemic crisis management depended on how the crisis was constructed in official campaigns, both mainstream and social media. Following Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta, Italian mainstream media reinforced ‘responsibilisation’ by constructing a perceived adversary, the No-Vax. It homogenized anti-vaxxers, thereby affirming, as its reversal, the compliant responsible subject. Hannah Broecker shows that, in the German debate on the pandemic, ‘solidarity’ became a slippery concept, alternating between empathy with health workers, care for the vulnerable, and compliance with health security measures. Moreover, it performed as an empty signifier, which antagonist political projects used to project their irreconcilable interpretations of the nature of the crisis.

The opposition of the responsible and compliant vs the irresponsible and noncompliant subject is a common trait that can, indeed, be found in the German, Italian and Czech Covid-19 debates and across different realms and genres of public-political discourse. It also manifests in humour and figurative expressions, as Iveta Žákovská’s analysis shows. Part of the figurative repertoire of Covid-19 discourses is the image of the sheep. The sheep is metaphorically transposed to societal relations and used to delineate the obedient ‘sheeples’ against the rebellious, but also courageous, ‘black sheep’. This play on figurative language is taken up in Amelie Kutter’s graphic illustrations accompanying this issue.

Yet, the blogposts warn us, that the seemingly universal stereotypes draw on well-established national tropes and, in the case of humour, insider jokes (see Iveta Žákovská’s post). The opposition of the responsible and the irresponsible subject might be a shared trait of pandemic discourse that suggests what the appropriate response to a crisis and, indeed, ‘normality’ should be. However, ‘normality’ itself is not a neutral concept, but the result of political discourses and practices that may vary greatly from country to country.

The blogposts also remind us not to become too obsessed with features of discourse that are specific to the Covid-19 pandemic. They make us reflect on shared understandings and practices that extend beyond the very pandemic or are reinforced as it runs its course. The blog posts by Iveta Žákovská, Kathrin Kaufhold, Christiane Barnickel and Dorothea Horst reveal that existing constructions of social groups and ascribed attributions are used to demarcate inclusion and exclusion, belonging and othering, thereby stigmatising some groups as outgroups. Among the most prominent groups are ethnic or migrant groups, who are assumed to be particularly vulnerable and therefore targeted in distinct ways in public health campaigns , but who are also often blamed for the rise of infections or constructed as a threat. Moreover, discourses of the pandemic redraw existing social taxonomies by reframing people in certain professions as ‘heroes’ or ‘system-relevant’ , or by introducing new oppositions, e.g., between vaccinated people and anti-vaxxers.

Going beyond representations of social relations, the snapshot by Kathrin Kaufhold shows that difficulties in reaching out to migrant outgroups in public health campaigns lie, in fact, in the institutional practice of Swedish public health institutions themselves. Migrant-targeting health campaigns, though designed with the intention to universalise the health service, reflect legal constraints and complicated compromises of the Swedish health system, rather than issues arising in migrant communities. ‘Health brokers’ are then employed to bridge the gap and engage with migrant communities, yet still, they perpetuate the paternalistic assumption that the problem lies in characteristics of ‘the migrant’, instead of in the health system. In their review of existing discourse analyses on social groups during the pandemic, Christiane Barnickel and Dorothea Horst show that meta-reflection on the sociological categories used is often missing among academics who want to reveal social exclusion.

Discursive view of the political

All contributions to this edition engage – implicitly or explicitly – with conceptual and empirical aspects of the political. This insight is all the more surprising considering that a focus on ‘the political’ was not intended in the call to the workshop. However, discussions during the workshop revealed that, for all contributors, the reconfiguration of political space and political struggle that accompanied the pandemic was a shared concern. No matter how different the phenomena that the contributions assess are, they overlap in one core aspect: they are concerned with boundaries and boundary-drawing of and through ‘the political’. While reading through the blogposts, we further discovered that the authors provide us, in fact, with different discursive views of the political, a conclusion that we will elaborate in the remainder of the editorial.

Unlike ‘politics’, which refers to institutional and procedural aspects of public policymaking, ‘the political’ relates to the underpinnings of political struggle. The most (in)famous definition of ‘the political’ was probably coined by Carl Schmitt, who designated, by this term, a fundamental antagonism between friend and foe, one that, potentially, leads to war. Collectivising enmity or friendship is, according to him, the very essence of politics.[4] With the onset of the discursive turn in intellectual debate and political thought, such foundational assumptions about essential characteristics of the political became problematic. After all, when we take that turn seriously and assume that language and discourse do not reflect, but constitute, (our cognising of) the social world, it is no longer plausible that there is an essence prior to our intersubjective efforts of interpretation.[5] Instead, one realises that our understandings of the political are contingent upon time and space and might be the product of political struggle themselves. This insight is true for most discourse approaches. In linguistic-pragmatic discourse studies, for instance, the political is, above all, a social practice constituted in language use that is specific to the public-political field. In Foucauldian discourse and governmentality studies, which see meaning entrenched in regimes of knowledge, the political emerges from the construction (and subversion) of governable subjects. For discourse studies that rely more thoroughly on poststructuralist theory, the political arises in the moment when these very knowledge regimes are challenged by the political imaginations of those who used to be ‘not accounted for’ and were ‘bracketed’ as the constitutive other.[6]

Discursive perspectives on the political, such as those our authors cast, are often inspired by – inter alia – Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. We will, therefore, resume their thoughts and situate them alongside the contributions to this special edition. For these thinkers, ‘the political’ cannot be reduced to politics – to institutional and procedural questions of policymaking – rather they differentiate between politics and the political.[7] They underline that “everything is constructed as différence […]”^[8] and that constructions of ‘normal’ and ‘normal order’ hinge upon differentiating attributions.^[9] Iveta Žakovská’s and Kathrin Kaufhold’s contributions can be viewed through this lens. Iveta Žakovská shows how differentiating attributions are created in memes, emphasizing that humour does not only function as a relief valve, but also (re-)produces existing boundaries and relies on an othering of the political opponent. Focusing on government practices of communicating expert knowledge to ‘differentiated’ groups, namely to migrant communities in Sweden, Kathrin Kaufhold illustrates how communication campaigns – because they are entangled with institutional practice – (fail to) address the needs of those vulnerable groups.

Regardless of their constructedness, these differentiations constitute a reality that is permeated with inclusions and exclusions: Foucault, for instance, argues that meanings constituted in regulative discourses “[…] delimitate ways of adequately relating to an issue and oneself”.^[10] Furthermore, as meaning-constitutions become sedimented in self-descriptions and textual practices of a specialised social realm (an order of discourse), and hence inscribed in infrastructure, teaching and knowledge production, they regulate what can be said.^[11] He links questions of (genealogies of) regimes of power and knowledge to the political in his notion of governmentality. In Covid-19 discourses, Foucault’s concept of governmentality is employed by Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta to reveal the production of ‘responsible’ citizens, who subject themselves to government measures .

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe make the entanglement with questions of power explicit by arguing that “[…] any social objectivity is constituted through acts of power. This means that any social objectivity is ultimately political and has to show the traces of the acts of exclusion that govern its constitution – what, following Derrida, can be referred to as its ‘constitutive outside’.”[12] By underlining the constructedness of differentiations, Foucault and Rancière, as well as Laclau and Mouffe, try to overcome the (in)famous definition by Carl Schmitt of the political as an antagonist relation between friends and foes.^[13] Chantal Mouffe explicitly departs from the Schmittian argument,^[14] but all of them broaden their view on difference beyond this antagonistic relationship and allow for the inclusion of agonistic relations with ‘the other’. Following Laclau and Mouffe, Hannah Broecker addresses the concept of solidarity to explore ways to overcome antagonistic relations during the Covid-19 crisis.

In Mouffe’s agonistic understanding of democracy and the political, power and conflict are not eliminated, she suggests that…

„[w]hat is specific and valuable about modern liberal democracy is that, when properly understood, it creates a space in which this confrontation is kept open, power relations are always being put into question and no victory can be final. However, such an ‚agonistic‘ democracy requires accepting that conflict and division are inherent to politics and that there is no place where reconciliation could be definitively achieved as the full actualization of the unity of ‚the people‘.“[15]

For Rancière the political moment lies in disruptive interventions and reconfigurations of the normalized order – moments at which marginalized voices (“the part of those who have no part”[16]) become inscribed or inscribe themselves in the normalized order and, hence, reconfigure what can be seen, said and done:

„Political subjectification redefines the field of experience that gave to each their identity with their lot. It decomposes and recomposes the relationships between ways of doing, of being and of saying that define the perceptible organization of the community […].“[17]

While difference remains central for the political, antagonist relations are neither objective nor essential, but the result of discourses that are infused with power relations. Discourse analysis allows us to uncover acts of power and exclusion in the creation of the ‘other’, thus challenging established social objectivities. In their reflections on existing literature on Covid-19, Christiane Barnickel and Dorothea Horst stress the productive nature of discourse. Drawing on Rancière, they argue for the inclusion of a media-aesthetic perspective for a better understanding of how social objectivities are discursively stabilized, but also reconfigured.

Besides coining an antagonist conception of the political, Carl Schmitt also raised the question of the sovereign, linking sovereignty to decisions about a state of exception (“The sovereign is he, who decides about the state of exception”),[18] providing the starting point for Agamben’s thoughts on the state of exception and the question of what it means to act politically.[19] In contrast to Foucault, who describes biopolitics as part of everyday politics in which “[…] reproduction, the birth – and mortality rate, the level of health […] have become subjects of intervening measures and regulative controls”,[20] Agamben links biopolitics to the state of exception.[21] In his view, the state is constantly expanding its biopolitical control,[22] and emergency measures introduced to combat Covid-19 are hence unlikely to be discarded. Engaging with the question of the state of exception, Galvão Debelle dos Santos explores its relations to crisis, arguing that the two concepts need to be kept separate and that the affective dimension of crises has to be more carefully considered . In similar vein, Elena Dück’s contribution addresses the (missing) discursive construction of Covid-19 as a security threat and resulting emergency measures and warns of tendencies to consider most of the measures as instances of securitization. Rather, she argues that this tends to oversimplify and blur significant differences, not only, but also, between countries. Challenging Agamben’s pessimist interpretation of biopolitics during the pandemic, Raili Marling highlights the emancipatory potential of acknowledging our shared vulnerabilities and interdependence. Her blog post encourages us to recognize agency and put trust in the power life, highlighting the Foucauldian argument that meaning-constitutions not only confine perception and experience, but, at the same time, trigger subversion.

What are the implications of casting such a perspective of the political on the Covid-19 crisis? First, we see that, while discourse analysis of the political necessarily focuses on questions of boundary drawing, it also allows us to look at the nature of those boundaries more carefully. The blog posts reveal more nuanced political relations not accounted for in the Schmittian adversary dichotomy and help us to recognise both agonistic and antagonist positioning in political struggle. Secondly, a discourse analysis of the political sheds light on the (re-)production of hierarchies, domination and hegemony, and thus power more generally, through discourses of the pandemic. Thirdly, at a meta-level, a discursive perspective allows us to question the concepts employed by us as researchers and challenge dominant interpretations of the pandemic.

The contributions in this special issue suggest that there is also a certain stance involved in casting a discourse view on the political: their perspectives on discourse are inherently open to alternative ways of constructing the Covid-19 crisis and sceptical of the argument that there are no alternatives. When assuming this stance, the ways in which knowledge of the medical phenomenon Covid-19 was produced, including expert knowledge, can be questioned and revised. The contributions implicitly engage with this question by addressing what information is considered in need of being mediated, what actions are deemed unavoidable (see also Galvão Debelle dos Santos), which subjects are perceived as acting responsibly (see also Iveta Žakovská) or deserving special protection and pointing out the limits of technological solutions. In doing so, they oppose the notion that the ‘right facts’ and technocratic solutions can resolve normative conflicts in societies. They bring us right to the core of the topic of this CriDis special edition – how discourses of Covid-19 (re-)configure the political.

[i] The workshop was organised by the speakers of the DVPW Themengruppe Diskursforschung Christiane Barnickel, Hannah Broecker, Elena Dück and Amelie Kutter. We want to thank Hannah Broecker for her help in organizing the workshop and her feedback on the contributions presented during it.

[1] Asayama, S., Emori, S., Sugiyama, M., Kasuga, F., & Watanabe, C. (2021). Are we ignoring a black elephant in the Anthropocene? Climate change and global pandemic as the crisis in health and equality. Sustainability Science, 16, 695-701. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00879-7

[2] Kutter, A. (2020). Construction of the Eurozone crisis. Re- and de-politicising European economic integration. Journal of European Integration, 42(5), 659-676. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2020.1792466

[3] Erni, J. N., & Striphas, T. (2021). The Cultural Politics of COVID-19, Edited by Cultural Studies, 35(2-3); Musolff, A., Breeze, R., Kondo, K., & Vilar-Lluch, S. (2022). Pandemic and crisis discourse : communicating COVID-19 and public health strategy (1st ed.). London: Bloomsbury Academic; Kortmann, B., & Schulze, G. (Eds.). (2021). Jenseits von Corona. Unsere Welt nach der Pandemie. Perspektiven aus der Wissenschaft. Bielefeld: transcript; Grande, E., Hutter, S., Hunger, S., & Kanol, E. (Eds.). (2021). Alles Covidioten? Politische Potenziale des Corona-Protests in Deutschland. Berlin: WZB.

[4] Schmitt, C. (1991 [1932]). Der Begriff des Politischen. Duncker und Humblot.

[5] Rorty, R. M. (Ed.) (1992). The Linguistic Turn. Essays in Philosophical Method. With Two Retrospective Essays. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.

[6] Kutter, A. (2020). Legitimation in the European Union: a discourse- and field-theoretical view. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 43-59.

[7] Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, p. 28; Mouffe, C. (2010): Über das Politische. Wider die kosmopolitischer Illusion, p. 47; cf. also Marchart, O. & Martinsen, R. (2019). Einleitung. Foucault und die politische Theorie. In O. Marchart & R. Martinsen (Eds.). Foucault und das Politische. Transdisziplinäre Impulse für die politische Theorie der Gegenwart (pp. 1-5). Springer, p. 2.

[8] Mouffe, C. (1996). Democracy, Power and the “Political“. In S. Benhabib (Ed.). Democracy and Difference. Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton University Press, p. 247.

[9] Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, p. 29.

[10] Kutter, A. (2020). Legitimation in the European Union: a discourse- and field-theoretical view. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 55.

[11] Kutter, A. (2020). Legitimation in the European Union: a discourse- and field-theoretical view. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 55.

[12] Mouffe, C. (1996). Democracy, Power and the “Political“. In S. Benhabib (Ed.). Democracy and Difference. Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton University Press, p. 247.

[13] Schmitt, C. (1991 [1932]). Der Begriff des Politischen. Duncker und Humblot.

[14] Mouffe, C. (2000). The Democratic Paradox. Verso, Ch. 2.

[15] Mouffe, C. (2000). The Democratic Paradox. Verso, pp. 15f.

[16] Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, p. 39.

[17] Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, p. 40.

[18] Schmitt, C. (2009 [1922]). Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität. Duncker und Humblot, p. 13.

[19] Agamben. G. (2005). State of Exception. University Of Chicago Press.

[20] Foucault, M. (1977). Der Wille zum Wissen. Suhrkamp, p. 135.

[21] Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press.

[22] Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press.

How to cite this blog post:

Kutter, Amelie, Dück, Elena & Christiane Barnickel (2022), „Editorial. Covid-19 and the reconfigeration of the political.“, Crisis Discourse Blog (CriDis), URL= https://www.crisis-discourse.net/en/2022/07/editorial-covid-19-and-the-reconfiguration-of-the-political/.