Patočka on bare life and political life in the time of the pandemic

Jan Patočka devoted many of his writings to diagnosing the modern condition as an all-encompassing ‘technoscientific’ framework, one that reduces living to a bare life which can be calculated and controlled. In this article, I examine how this framework acts to foreclose the possibility of genuine political life, a life of openness that works against totalizing structures and modes of thought. I show how Patočka’s phenomenological distinction between bare life and political life, together with Foucault’s insights into biopolitics, can be used to better understand public health policy during COVID-19 and to raise critical questions about the direction of post-pandemic society.