The coronavirus response and the difficulty of speaking critically about politics in crisis
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Petter Narby
Försvarshögskolan Sweden
petter.narby@fhs.se
Author(s):
This paper explores what it might mean to speak critically about politics in crisis. In particular, it analyses the difficulties involved in doing so that follow from temporal understandings of crisis as contingency. The motivation for engaging with this problem stems from how the critique of crisis appears to be hampered by the tension between conceptions of crisis as revolutionary moments that reveal social and political inequalities, on the one hand, and as problems that require technocratic solutions that eschew politics and are evaluated in terms of accountability and legality, on the other. Although the argument is primarily conceptual, the paper examines this tension by analysing the politics surrounding the coronavirus pandemic and, more specifically, the UK Coronavirus Act 2020. By its lack of an obvious beginning and by its duration, the pandemic challenges and allows for scrutinising conventional conceptions of crisis as contingency and, thus, for examining the conceptual difficulties they entail. Engaging with Schmitt, Koselleck, and Derrida the paper examines, through the Coronavirus Act, how the understanding of crises as ruptures in normality implies, first, that the temporal separation between normal and exceptional times is superimposed onto the dichotomous understanding of politics as deliberation or decision and, second, that crisis becomes a condition for critique and critique a form of crisis. It is thus argued that the interconnection between politics, critique and crisis, in and through the notion of contingency, makes speaking critically about crisis politics a conceptual aporia and that critique, thus conceived, risk ending up oscillating between and reproducing these binary divisions. The paper ends by sketching a political analysis that instead explores the in-betweens, undecidables and determinations entailed by this aporia.
Contingency: exploring an age-old concept for a new reality