ABSTRACT
Exceptional individuals, who are supposedly able to spread disease to an extraordinarily great number of people, hold a privileged placed in epidemiological reasoning. Chapter 3 examines the emergence of the figure of the “superspreader” during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003 and its application since in epidemiological thinking and epidemic scares across the globe. By examining the science behind it, the chapter proceeds to analyze the impact of the superspreader as a neoliberal epidemiological category that de-prioritizes political, economic, and infrastructural etiologies, favoring instead surveillance-based biopolitics. Having established the ideological function of this figure, the chapter proceeds to examine its mythic operation. In particular, it argues that by embodying the principle of contagion or “virality” as a desired but fatal achievement of human civilization, the superspreader operates as a counter-Prometheus: a figure that delivers a catastrophic, reverse anthropogenesis. Rather than being an ontological reversal that brings humanity “back” to an animal condition, however, this is shown to be a much more radical fall: a relapse to a masterless, zombie-like state of abandonment from both nature and culture.
