Reading the COVID-19 emergency with and beyond Foucault: The liberal subject and everyday practices of mobility

Abstract

Since the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, most analyses have used a Foucauldian perspective to investigate the disciplinary and surveillance mechanisms that (il/liberal) states introduced to contain the spread of the virus. Focussing on the Italian context, I suggest that, despite the mobility restrictions, the government retained overall its liberal rationality. Italian institutions did not aim to create a state of police nor to transform subjects into docile bodies. By reading the COVID-19 emergency with Foucault, I suggest approaching COVID-19 restrictions through the concept of governmentality, and propose that Italian institutions, at different levels, structured people’s fields of action by persuading, encouraging, and incentivising certain behaviours during the pandemic. However, I also suggest reading the COVID-19 emergency beyond Foucault by engaging with the work of Michel de Certeau and investigating the many ‘antidisciplinary practices’ through which people ‘metaphorized’ dominant (disciplinary) norms.

Two Years of the COVID-19 Crisis: Anxiety, Creativity and the Everyday

“…This was achieved by reorganizing their lives inside and outside their home, rearranging their social lives, finding ways to protect themselves and inventing new modalities of public protest. In very general terms, it is the characteristic of the liberal and existential subject that emerged during the pandemic years-that is, the subject who freely chose whether to accept, resist or overcome restrictive norms [59]-as well as the subject whose decisions were elaborated from their lived experience of the pandemic.…”