Nikita M. Sazonov. Research curator, Posthuman Studies Lab, 119, Mira ave., build. 246, Moscow, 129223, Russian Federation; MA student, Philosophy Department of Lomonosov Moscow State University, 27/4 Lomonosovsky avenue, Moscow, GSP-1, 119234, Russian Federation;

e-mail: nkt.sznv@gmail.com

The article elaborates the coronavirus pandemic condition as a resource for reinventing new directions of biopolitical resistance. Author links the accidence of SARS-CoV-2 with the event that is – geographically and chronologically – adjacent to it, namely, with the scandal against non-laboratory CRISPR/Cas implementation in China. The both events are unified by the common fear of mutations. Although mutation today is both well-used in gene manipulations and investigated variously in the models of cancerogenesis, the situation around it remains like with various materialistic predicaments such as clinamen (atomism), anti-production (Deleuze and Guattari), or event (Badiou and Meillassoux). In regard to materialistic exposition of this problem we should consider mutations as not a simple accidentality but rather as a peculiar principle. They are specific political force which activity is always-already outside of protocols (cellular, medical, digital ones etc.). The outsideness of mutation – grasped in the contrimmunitary dialectic of Greek “onkos” as both an expansion and barbness, both benign and malign progression – perform itself not in the logics of inside/outside, by rather in a special mode of scaling, that is, scale-1. The power of onko-politics reveal itself literally in the coronavirus’ protein spike, but also can be scaled on the higher levels where it faces off against contemporary capitalism and national state. The politics of mutations – due to its transparency both for the protocols of capitalist and state immune systems – can be mobilized in the situation of global crisis of immunitary paradigm.

Keywords: biopolitics, SARS-CoV-2, immunitary paradigm, mutation, onco-politics, protocol

DOI: 10.22394/978-5-93255-592-7_5