Corona Politics as ‘Politics of Exception’

The governing of the Corona pandemic reveals discourses and practices of ‘exception’ in times of crisis. Whereas health-related personal and societal restrictions have been unavoidable, health policies have also increasingly interacted with security policies. In this paper, I propose an understanding of corona politics as a “politics of exception” (Fritsch/Kretschmann 2021), that is, as a set of exceptional regulations and practices in the legal and political realm of contemporary constitutional democracies in Western Europe. I draw on discussions in political theory, criminology and postcolonial studies on ‘states of exception’ and show how these offer conceptual perspectives to situate Corona politics within historical and contemporary articulations of exceptional practices of Western bourgeois democracies. Central in this regard is the distinction between petty states of exception (Fassin 2014), meaning everyday ‘outside the law’ practices like racial profiling, and large states of exception (Lemke 2017), that is, formal states of emergencies. Corona-related politics are not only embedded in formal legal and political dispositifs; they have also operated through ‘petty states of exception’, e.g. the increased policing of vulnerable groups, especially ethnicised and racialized groups, youth or homeless people. From a postcolonial perspective, Corona-related ‘politics of exception’ also reveal the expansion of Othering practices from the ‘margins’ of the society to the centre, which results in a framing of larger parts of the society as potential Others, reflected in the increased criminalization of (liberal and leftist) protest as ‘hostile groups’. Understanding Corona politics as politics of exception shall allow me to contribute to intersectional perspectives on discourses of ‘threat’, ‘crisis’ and ‘security’ in the context of the pandemic by emphasizing their embeddedness in the relation between the (neo-)liberal bourgeois state and exceptional practices as part of its (surviving) logic.