Episode 10: Pandemics as a Politics of Death in the Anthropocene: Is a Virus a Dispositif?

Posted Date: January 7, 2021

Episode Description: In this episode, LAC members Müge Gedik and Camila Gutiérrez interview Dr. Eduardo Mendieta (Penn State, UP) about his project on the anthropocentric COVID-19 virus in terms of an apparatus of pandemic governmentality in the Anthropocene as well as the role of colonialisms and slavery in the production of the Anthropocene, including European colonialism that initiated a process of extraction of resources and bodies that lead to the destruction of indigenous peoples and ecosystems. Topics include how globalization, mega urbanization, mass transportation and tourism, vectors of contagion enable the global spread of viruses in the epoch of the Anthropocene today, in which globalized humans become the facilitator of a global pandemic such as that of COVID-19. We discuss how neoliberal politics of extraction change the metabolism of the earth through changes in the seas, the atmosphere, and on the land; and the detrimental consequences of climate crisis and the following politics of death on black, indigenous, latinx, and people of color. The discussion continues on how the politics of death that follow European colonialism and modernity emerge out of the genocide of indigenous peoples, native American peoples, and the slave trade. We explore the relationship of causality between colonization, globalization, and the exchange of viruses and bacteria that occurred in this process, and the correlation between microparasites (virus, bacteria) and macro parasites (kings, autocratic governors). 

Guest Biography

Dr. Eduardo Mendieta is a professor of Philosophy as well as an affiliated faculty at the School of International Affairs, the Bioethics, and Latino Studies programs at the Pennsylvania State University. 

He was born in Colombia, Bogotá, but grew up in central New Jersey in the United States. He studied at Rutgers University, Union Theological Seminary, the New School for Social Research, and the Goethe University in Frankfurt. His research interests include Frankfurt School Critical Theory, especially the work of Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst; Latin American philosophy, Liberation Philosophy, and the work of Enrique Dussel –which he has translated–, and Latino/a Philosophy. He has done work on and with Angela Y. Davis, whom he considers to be part of the Critical Theory traditions. 

His guiding philosophical idea is that philosophy takes place in and through bodies that are always located in unique institutional spaces, which affect its imaginary. Residing in Central Pennsylvania, he is interested in taking up his work on prisons, hyper-penality, and the revitalization of racism in the U.S.

He is the author of The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel’s Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002) and Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (2007). He is the co-author of The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011) and The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon (2019). In 2017, he received the Frantz Fanon outstanding achievement award. A recent article titled “Antinomies of a Pandemic: Lady Philosophy in Blue Plastic Gloves” has been published in Philosophy Today.

Project Title: The Anthropocenic Virus

The Anthropocene appears an era in which human time and natural time have begun to converge, intermingle, and reciprocally disrupt planetary time. Human history and natural history have become so interlinked and mutually clocking that we now live in one time: the time of natural catastrophe that turns out to be the time of human disaster. Many processes, factors and dynamics are gathered under the name of the “Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene is the part and parcel of globalization, begun with the Colombian Exchange that brought planetary life into a new encounter that resulted in the intended and unintended exchange of viruses, bacterias, and microbial high-jackings and colonizations. 

The Anthropocene displays mega-urbanization along with mega-industrialization of agriculture, and thus, with deforestation and the depletion of biotic commons of “life” on the planet.  This so-called era also demonstrates that humans have become a geological force that has already left its tectonic stigmata on the surface of the earth. The Anthropocene, then, is another name for a new form of thanatopolics, a politics of death. It is also a dissimulator, and a misnomer, as behind the “Anthropos” concealed is a global system of unsustainable economics. 

Capitalism, with its appearance in colonization, slavery, imperialism, global wars, human trafficking, and genocides is not simply “anthropos” as the malevolent or naive agent. How we prepare for the encounter between humans and pushed to the border of social interaction of unknown viruses, has always been and has become more of a social fact than ever. Foucault’s concept of dispositive/apparatus facilitates an analysis of how a “virus” can and has become a “dispositif” in a new form of governmentality: neoliberal governmentality, one that has turned into pandemic governmentality.

Dr. Eduardo Mendieta’s Philo-fiction

In the first few months of the COVID19 pandemic, Professor Mendieta took refuge in creative writing, drafting a series of fictional letters where he communicates with the Trump administration. If a philosopher could get through to Trump, what would they say? Professor Mendieta channels Borges and Calvino and portrays these scenarios with a clever touch of humor. Here is an excerpt, which Dr. Mendieta reads in this episode:

[The letter contains another paragraph, in which a third recommender is quoted: “Mendieta, in another brilliant essays, titled most felicitously: “The Poetics of MAGA: The Mythopoesis of Trump’s Rhetoric,” argues that Trump should be placed among the great men of the twentieth century, who were also masterful crafters of language.

These were men who had literary ambitions and who contributed to the shelves of great transformation of national languages, and in this way, they also gave birth to new authentic peoples: Stalin, who superseded Lenin on his stylization of dialectical materialism; Mao, who made Marx speak in Chinese, thus making him audible and intelligible to millions of peasants; Saddam Hussein, who brought Arabic into the twentieth century; General Franco who verb by verb, phrase by phrase, pulled the Spanish from the Baroque torpor into which Cervantes had bewitched them; and certainly Hitler, who as philologist Victor Klemperer demonstrated, brought the German language to new literary heights, not reached since Martin Luther, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and Asterix the Gaul.” Then, one of my absolute favorite lines from all of my oeuvre is quoted: “Great Leaders are also Great Poets: They are makers of people who give birth to them by their feats of poetic generativity. Poesis, the art of language (Sprachkunst), becomes ethnogenesis. One language, one true people. Trump’s tweets were the hammer that shattered the anvil of democratic elitism and the arrogance of college educated girls. To Hitler’s poetic: ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end,’ we have to add Trump’s gold aphorism: ‘I rule that the cure cannot be worse than the illness. The ill were fated to perish. If coronavirus does not weed them out, ICE will get them.’”]

 

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