Ludzko-wirusowe hybrydy jako wyzwanie dla narracji o wybuchu epidemii i neoliberalnej biopolityki

Artykuł powstał w ramach projektu, który został sfinansowany ze środków Narodowego Centrum Nauki (NCN)

The article starts with Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent supposition that the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the precarious foundations of the Western developed and progressive societies, laying bare the mechanism of their biopolitical regime. Following Nancy’s argument, the article draws first on the example of a few recently published French Corona Fictions which depict contagion as one of many, tightly entangled factors, mostly of an anthropogenic nature. From this perspective, the article then offers a close reading of two speculative pandemic fictions fabulations of the turn of this century: the novel "The Blood Artists" (1998) by American novelist and screenwriter Chuck Hogan, and "Rifters" trilogy (1999-2005) by Canadian SF author Peter Watts. Both revisit and morph the outbreak narrative, introducing a new type of protagonist - the human-viral hybrid - to reveal the workings of biopower and geontopower as yet another form of structural violence inherent in the late liberalism.