Coronocracy as the Post-covid-19 Paradigm of Immuno-State: Theoretical and Conceptual Insights

The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in profound cultural and political metamorphoses of the imagination, interpretation, and organization of the immunization complex of state and society. Starting from the premise that these immunitary transformations tend to become the disciplining norms/standards, this paper seeks to profile their general attributes. First, it detects the discrepancy between the metanarratives of the pandemic’s universal biomedical natural course and symbolically heterogeneous vernacular narratives of the pandemic’s cultural courses. The semiurgic production of the pandemic, i.e. authentic COVID-19 cultures, is one of its most important characteristics. Second, it detects the discrepancy between the “pathogenization of politics” and the “politicization of pathogens”. While the technocratic “pathogenization of politics” involves the engagement of default state platforms, the “politicization of pathogens” is the process of designing new political platforms of biopower. Finally, COVID-19 leads to the perpetuation of the pandemic extra-legitimacy of ruling structures and the recomposition of biological identity from individual protection toward collective protocols. A general attempt to discursively essentialize the biomedical component, to normalize the “state of exception”, affords us the possibility to define any post-COVID-19 state/society governance and organization as a democratic, authoritarian, or hybrid “coronocracy”.