Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease

Agnes Horvath is a political theorist and sociologist. Founding editor of the Journal International Political Anthropology, she was an affiliate visiting scholar at Cambridge University from 2011 to 2014. She is the author of Modernism and Charisma (Palgrave, 2013) and Political Alchemy: Technology unbounded (Routledge, 2021), the co-author of The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary, Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology; and co-editor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality; Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations; Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion; and Modern Leaders: In Between Charisma and Trickery.Paul O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Sociology at United Arab Emirates University in Abu Dhabi, and is a main editor of the Journal International Political Anthropology. His research and writing are centred on the anthropological foundations of home and community, the dynamics of modernity and globalisation, the intersection between society and its physical environment, the emergence and disintegration of structures of meaning, and the mediatisation and virtualisation of contemporary social life. He has published articles in journals including Memory Studies, Mobilities, International Political Anthropology and the Irish Journal of Anthropology, as well as in the Dark Mountain Anthology of ecological writing. He is the author of Home: The Foundations of Belonging (Routledge, 2018), which examines the idea of home from an anthropological and historical perspective as a centre around which we organise routines and experiences, endowing the world with meaning and order. With Marius Benta, he is co-editor of The Technologisation of the Social: A Political Anthropology of the Digital Machine (Routledge, 2022), exploring how technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality.

• List of figuresList of contributorsPreface Introduction: liminal politics in the new age of disease: Technocratic mimetism Liminality and modernity in sickness and in health Rulers of liminality: on imbecility, or contemporary modes of gaining and operating power ‘The most despotic of all regimes’: Covid-19 and the political anthropology of expertise Pandemonium: authority and obedience under lockdown ‘No human’s land’: comparing war rhetoric and collective sacrifice in the Great War with the pandemic Corruption and the firefighter effect: on the commodification of liminal professions Sovereign power and the politics of the pandemic as elementary parasitic social relation Trickster parasite: about the snake pit of oozing diseaseConclusionIndex

‘Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease is both a timely and enduring examination of how to understand the politics of disease where the normal rules of life no longer apply. From the transformation of our daily interaction with our fellow human beings to societal decisions of whether to close the economy and suspend electoral politics, the authors of this collection explore what are the limits of our decisions as social, cultural, and political beings. A thoughtful and provocative account of what constitute politics in this age of pandemics, Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease asks questions that are neglected and provide answers that are not definitive.’ - Lee Trepanier, Chair and Professor of Political Science, Samford University, USA‘We are not living in a post-covid world, but in one in which the measures against covid have continued to evolve and transform social life. This book traces the changes in authority, expertise, and regimentation produced in response to covid, and the ways in which social and personal life is being recreated in response to the changes. It is a radical and indispensable starting point for thinking about these questions.’ - Stephen Turner, Distinguished University Professor, University of South Florida, USA‘Whether the COVID-19 event was a viral pandemic or a pandemic panic, it is not over. For its supporters among the "experts," it never will be. We will be "living with COVID" for the foreseeable future. What can that prospect possibly mean? Pragmatically, it means an expansion of our—by now pervasive but conventional—technology-mediated existence. And second, it means an exponential increase in the tyrannical efficiency of the surveillance state, which is hardly confined to the PRC. Thinking about this novel condition and this novel regime requires imagination as well as analytical rationality. The authors have brought both to bear on a contingent reality that presents itself as necessary. That is the lie at its heart. We can take some comfort not so much in the stupidity of our new tyrants—though as a North American, that seems to me to be their primary domestic attribute—as that they are worthy only of ridicule. How it all plays out over the next few decades as the friction increases between the second reality within which the new tyrants live (and into which they seek to drag the rest of us) and the commonsensical reality within which most of us still live carries tremendous consequences. The authors of this important study invite us to contemplate the options and understand what they mean.’ - Barry Cooper, Professor of Political Science, University of Calgary, Canada‘An urgent, provocative and fascinating attempt to re-think the Covid pandemic and its traces in a kind of fractal way; separate but linked patterns of analysis undergirded by conceptual concerns for ideas such as authenticity, grace and beauty, seemingly outmoded by the opportunistic technocratic mediatisation and datafication of life itself which has been turbo-charged by the pandemic restrictions and their pliant reception. The dynamic force of the endeavour is to do the work of thought to perhaps allow escape from the sterile condition of endless fearful and confused suspension in a liminoid expectant haze of waiting for the release engendered, ironically, by the coming of the next crisis and the next set of constraints.’ - Eugene McNamee, Professor, School of Law, Ulster University, UK‘This book is an indispensable guide for understanding the pandemic and the exceptional politics surrounding it. Whilst richly sourced with empirical material on the actions of health professionals, governments, and extra-governmental institutions in the response to COVID, it addresses the potentially irreversible consequences for the relations between citizens and their states. Concealed by opaque processes in which unaccountable experts and managers imposed their agendas, this global emergency has suspended ‘normality’, subjected citizens to severe restrictions of their freedoms, and even created front lines between enemies inside societies. This book asks uncomfortable but entirely legitimate and urgent questions regarding the quality of governments, the powers of technocratic managerialism and the conspicuous absence of defence of basic human rights. Most importantly, it evokes the probability of the impending next great emergency. This poignant effort to make sense of how exceptional politics risks losing all measure is extremely lucid and makes for very rewarding reading.’ - Harald Wydra, Professor of Politics, University of Cambridge, UK‘A must-read and timely collection of critical reflections on the pandemic as a state of exception, sharing important analyses of certain ‘blind spots’ - what the pandemic reveals about ‘the age of disease,’ ‘trickster logic’, ‘liminal politics’ and ‘technocratic mimetism.’ - Professor Maggie O'Neill, Head of the Department of Sociology & Criminology, University College Cork, Ireland