Part of the online lecture series "Disaster and Disease in North America"

Pandemic as Political Phantasy

Crises and disasters always call into question the State’s ability to not just handle the disaster, but also to manage the ensuing social disruption. Pandemics affect not just individual bodies but the body of society. Fictions about contagious diseases deal with the ways in which the State relates to this body of society, they cast a light on - as it were - the "biopolitical imaginary". My talk will present three movies about pandemics in which the State is put to a test of managing the catastrophe through biopolitical interventions. The movies Contagion (Soderberg 2011), Outbreak (Petersen 1995) and Blindness (Meirelles 2008) present three different models of the State’s biopolitical handling of a catastrophe. While Contagion presents a model of regulation of the pandemic, Outbreak deals with the tragic choices the State might have to make in the face of looming danger. Blindness, by far the most gloomy of these movies, depicts the horrors of an absent State that rules only by confinement and exclusion.