Overview

Joshua Clover criticises Bruno Latour's view that the COVID-19 pandemic will give legitimacy and power to the State to, by analogy, act in the future more urgently on the issue of climate change. For Clover, capital is no longer an actor in any given social network, but the cause of climate change and of the imposition of dictates on States in reaction to the present pandemic. The euphemistically called Anthropocene is not a product of humans in general, but of industrial and extractive capital. Hence the inability of biopolitics and its famous dictum, a sovereign that makes live and lets die, to perceive the present pandemic crisis, since the sovereign is completely subjugated to the interests of surplus value and infinite reproduction of capital. Whoever is necessary for the perpetuation of capitalism will die.