ABSTRACT
In the wake of the pandemic, biopolitics – the reflection on the ways in which politics relates to biology introduced by Michel Foucault – has been declared dead, allegedly unable to grapple with twenty-first-century questions. Yet while biopolitical reflection has indisputably had shortcomings, it can prove illuminating in interpreting a self-styled “liberal” pandemic strategy like that of Sweden. After showing that the notion of herd immunity was a core component of the Swedish strategy, I argue that it implicitly built on the ethical calculus of utilitarianism: sacrificing the lives and safety of weaker groups in society for the good of the whole. I show that this ethics is permitted by a biopolitical conceptual apparatus that operates on the level of the “population”, totalised as a homogenous whole (by way of concepts of folkhälsa, “society as a whole”, “the economy” and folkhemmet). This conceptualisation then allows for the systematic exclusion of certain groups, along the lines of the biopolitical “including exclusion” theorised by Roberto Esposito. I will show how this mechanism is at work particularly in the exclusion of the elderly and risk-group parents of school-children.
