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Reading the COVID-19 emergency with and beyond Foucault: The liberal subject and everyday practices of mobility

Document Cited in Related
Published date01 February 2025
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221130263
AuthorRaffaela Puggioni
Date01 February 2025
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221130263
Politics
2025, Vol. 45(1) 54 –68
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957221130263
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Reading the COVID-19
emergency with and beyond
Foucault: The liberal subject
and everyday practices of
mobility
Raffaela Puggioni
LUISS, Italy
Abstract
Since the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, most analyses have used a Foucauldian perspective
to investigate the disciplinary and surveillance mechanisms that (il/liberal) states introduced to
contain the spread of the virus. Focussing on the Italian context, I suggest that, despite the mobility
restrictions, the government retained overall its liberal rationality. Italian institutions did not aim
to create a state of police nor to transform subjects into docile bodies. By reading the COVID-19
emergency with Foucault, I suggest approaching COVID-19 restrictions through the concept of
governmentality, and propose that Italian institutions, at different levels, structured people’s fields
of action by persuading, encouraging, and incentivising certain behaviours during the pandemic.
However, I also suggest reading the COVID-19 emergency beyond Foucault by engaging with the
work of Michel de Certeau and investigating the many ‘antidisciplinary practices’ through which
people ‘metaphorized’ dominant (disciplinary) norms.
Keywords
de Certeau, governmentality, immobility, Italy, lockdown, quotidian practices
Received: 12th January 2022; Revised version received: 9th September 2022; Accepted: 12th September 2022
Introduction
Since the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, virtually all disciplines have scrutinised its
impact. Within political studies, great attention has been devoted to states’ emergency
powers (Ginsburg and Versteeg, 2021; Spadaro, 2020); new modalities of governing (im)
mobility and (un)freedom (Holwitt, 2021; Jagannathan and Rai, 2021; Shin, 2021; Wolff
et al., 2020); technologies of control and surveillance (Bigo et al., 2021; Eck and Hatz,
2020; Sonn and Lee, 2020); border closures and new emergencies (Casaglia, 2021; Martin
Corresponding author:
Raffaela Puggioni, Department of Political Science, LUISS, Via Romania 32, 00197 Rome, Italy.
Email: rpuggioni@luiss.it
1130263POL0010.1177/02633957221130263PoliticsPuggioni
research-article2022
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