Viral Times: COVID-19, Sovereignty & Biopolitics | Peter Szendy & Timothy Bewes

What kind of society and mode of governance is COVID-19 the metonymy of? Timothy Bewes and Peter Szendy discuss “Viral Times,” Szendy’s reflection on the event and crisis of the coronavirus. “Viral Times” was published on April 15, 2019 by “In the Moment,” the blog of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry, at critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04....
A few days after the publication, Bewes and Szendy explore Foucault’s paradigms of sovereignty and biopolitics, the way these paradigms delineate yet do not exhaust the current moment, and the experience of heterochrony (or plurality of temporalities) at work in the event of COVID-19. They also discuss the relation between Szendy’s reflection and Giorgio Agamben’s earlier intervention on the “state of exception” in Italy.
April 19, 2020
Timothy Bewes, Professor of English, Interim Director of the Cogut Institute
Peter Szendy, David Herlihy Professor of the Humanities and Comparative Literature
Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University