Pandemic, Event, and the Immanence of Life

This volume reflects on different regional and national experiences of the Covid 19 pandemic, with contributions from India, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, Italy, United States, and Canada.

This book draws upon a number of approaches but especially the works of Deleuze and Guattari, Agamben, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Latour, and Serres. It looks at the methodological aspects of treating the pandemic, focuses on laying out the posthuman condition of the event largely problematizing the immanence of life which affirms the transversal Deleuzian ethic of life, and extends the politics of life to the domain of immunology. Together, the authors make it apparent that the pandemic is a multifaceted event, or many different kinds of events – virological, informational, phenomenological, social, and discursive. The authors skilfully develop these different dimensions of the pandemic event and show the relations between them. These essays will enrich the reader’s understanding of the pandemic and its effects, while demonstrating the depth and breadth of the resources that humanities scholarship can mobilize to help us understand such phenomena.

This volume will be useful to students of posthumanism, medical humanities, health communication, political communication, semiotics, literature, cultural theories, and major strains of thought from contemporary continental philosophy.

NY Manoj is currently assistant professor at Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, and visiting fellow at the Global Centre for Technology in Humanities, Kyung Hee University, South Korea. He is the founding general secretary of Deleuze and Guattari Studies in India Collective, which has already organized six international conferences and numerous workshops on Deleuze and Guattari in India and the convener of the World Congress on Deleuze and Guattari 2020 held in New Delhi. Formerly a fellow at Centro Incontri Umani Ascona, Switzerland, currently he is associated with an international research project on critical postmedia studies in Asia in collaboration with Teikyo University, Japan and Kyung Hee University, South Korea. He is the coeditor of the books titled Deleuze, Guattari and India: Exploring a Post-Post Colonial Multiplicity (Routledge 2022) and Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia (Bloomsbury, London 2023).

Saima Saeed is professor at the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance (CCMG) and foreign students’ advisor, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Published in well-known journals including Journalism Studies, Society and Culture in South Asia, and Economic and Political Weekly, she is the author of Screening the Public Sphere: Media and Democracy in India (Routledge 2013). She has been project director of major research projects funded by Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and the University Grants Commission (UGC) and has earlier served as the media coordinator of JMI. Prior to joining academia, she has worked in leading news channels based in New Delhi. Her research interests include journalism and news studies, media and democracy, media and the margins, and history of media technologies and cultures.

Paul Patton is the Hongyi chair professor of Philosophy, Wuhan University, and Emeritus professor of philosophy at The University of New South Wales, Australia. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and has served on the Council of the Australasian Association of Philosophy and the Executive Committee of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy. He has published widely on Deleuze and other continental philosophers and translated Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. He is the author of Deleuze and the Political (Routledge, 2000) and Deleuzean Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford 2010).