Several of the key concepts of biopolitics have come under scrutiny since the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic. This volume brings into discussion how biopolitics can be conceptualized critically within a milieu of mass healing, such as in India. Contributors to this volume discuss crucial themes like geropolitics and pandemic reflections on the question of old age, borders and logistics in a world emerging from the pandemic, immunization of humans and humanization of immunity, thus defining the Indian contexts of the biopolitical problematic. Extending its analysis into a retrospective vision of thought traditions and socio-political underpinnings that shaped modernity and post-coloniality in India, it also explores the medico-therapeutical discourse embedded in philosophy of medicine and philosophical modernity tracing its interstitial positioning as therapeutic-assemblages in a milieu of mass healing.
This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of biopolitics, philosophy, political philosophy, sociology, science and technology studies, medical sociology, health and well-being, and cultural studies.
Introduction 1. Geropolitics: Pandemic and the Figure of the Elderly in the United States and India LAWRENCE COHEN 2. Human Relationality, Platformization of Economy, and Pandemic Transitions BRETT NEILSON 3. Covidian Dilemma: To Perpetuate or not to Perpetuate the Distress of the Poor SUSAN VISVANATHAN 4. Humanisation of Immunity and the Immunisation of Humans: State of the Problem SOUMYABRATA CHOUDHURY 5. ‘Psychagogy’ or Pedagogy?: Techniques and Ethos of Philosophical Therapeutics ROSHNI BABU 6. Body or/and Life?: Assemblages in the Age of Mass Healing K. V. CYBIL
Biography
K. V. Cybil is Associate Professor with the Department of Humanities at IIT BHU, Varanasi. He has been associated with the Social Science Research Council, New York (2005), Indian Council for Social Science Research, New Delhi (2012), and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (2013), as part of research fellowships. He has contributed articles in journals including the Economic and Political Weekly, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, and The Sociological Review. His recent work is an edited book, Social Justice: Interdisciplinary Inquiries from India (Routledge, 2019). He has contributed articles on Desire, Body, and Capitalism: Dalit Literature and Becoming Political in a Postcolonial World, in Deleuze, Guattari and India: Exploring a Post-Colonial Multiplicity (Routledge, 2022), and Narayana Guru and the Formation of Political Society in Kerala, in The Routledge Handbook of Other Backward Classes in India (2022). His current work is a social-anthropological study of systems of thought based on technology in India.
