PANDEMIC AND BIOPOLITICS

The circulation of the SARS-COV-2 virus has generated a whole range of economic, social, health and securitarian effects on the planetary population, the consequences of which are not only reduced to the containment of mass contagion, but have had an impact on the daily lives of humans. As a result of the biopolitical strategies implemented by different States, the biological life of human beings is currently governed by other means justified in order to maintain health or prevent death from COVID-19 disease. The essay main goal is to analyze this event through concepts proposed and developed by Michel Foucault concerning biopower and biopolitics. These concepts can criticize the power over life exercised by both States and international organizations seeking to regulate the effects of the virus and disease. Also, through the framework of biopolitics, we can show the characteristic event of the 21st century: the transition from epidemics and endemics to pandemics. What this essay is trying to show is the extreme biologization of the lives of humans who cannot delinquete from that identity, on which it operates a whole series of biopolitical strategies to control it.