ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the emergence of epidemics of infectious diseases based on their ability to transform power relations in society and to reconfigure notions of time and history, based on a case presented in the animated series The Amazing World of Gumball (2011–2019), in which the story revolves around the (mis)adventures of Gumball Watterson (a 12-year-old blue cat) and his adopted brother Darwin Watterson (a 10-year-old redfish). The episode “The Joy” (Season 3, Episode 4) tells the story of a mysterious epidemic of joy that originates in a hug given by Richard Watterson to his sons Gumball and Darwin. The disease, apparently affecting the nervous system of the victims, later spreads rapidly among Elmore Junior High School students through physical contact of affection. In this chapter, Vital examines how the invisible pathogen and the epidemic of joy are phenomena that resemble, respectively, what Jane Bennett points to as a force and an agentic swarm, dramatically altering the power relations between the characters and calling into question the composition of time itself. On the one hand, the pathogen favours the horizontalisation of necropolitical power by allowing the patients to choose who should live and who should die by simply hugging the chosen target to effect contamination. On the other hand, the joy epidemic draws attention to the active participation of phenomena at once material and discursive, which redefine the notions of past, present, and future, in addition to the very definition of history. The chapter suggests history as a perpetual change in the relations and coexistence among different life forms in a non-linear time, formed by disruptive processes.
