How to desire control

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a once-in-a-generation unfolding of the ideas of the normal and the pathological into one another in a public and spectacular way. The following essay attempts to examine this confusion of the relationship between health and disease in the body politic through special reference to a nationally televised address by the Indian Prime Minister at the outbreak of the pandemic. It interrogates the ways in which the pandemic has functioned as a cover for extending a state of exception through the arts of government. It also glimpses at the ways in which the idea of the citizen has been inverted to create a governmentalized subject desiring to be controlled.