Memento Mori: COVID-19 and the Political Imaginary of Death

Abstract

The paper contrasts two complementary ways of conceptualising death in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, notably death-in-the-plural, which involves death as an objective and collective phenomenon that occurs on the level of whole populations, and death-in-the-singular, which involves the ways in which individuals and communities deal ‘subjectively’ with death. It reconstructs how the sudden ‘breaking in’ of death as it occurs during a pandemic affects the ‘normally’ stratified political economy of life and opens up spaces of resistance on the basis of the ‘resilient cohabitation’ of those most exposed to death.