The arrival of COVID-19 since early last year has shifted the political conversation in

a panoply of ways, too, in particular, stand out, however.

The first is how some claim the pandemic, which has killed millions and led to an unprecedented

economic demobilization and peacetime, led to a return of the real.

Not as to say, it presents a threat to immediate and overwhelming that it tore through the

previous common sense, which was quickly revealed, in fact, as a series of myths.

The second is how any conversation around a response to COVID-19 is conjoined quite

understandably, debates around surveillance and power.

An example of this is the debates around in COVID passports.

Sure, they may help, many say, but it does not merit giving the state such extraordinary

access to our private lives and further ability to constrain our freedoms.

Both of these points, as well as many others, are discussed at length by Benjamin Bratton

in his new book, The Revenge of the Real, Politics for a Post-Pandemic World.

For Bratton, the task of contemporary politics, something confirmed by COVID-19, is the need

to construct a positive biopolitics through which planetary society can deliberately compose

itself.

This is a task which he sees the European and North American leftes generally unprepared

for their mental fern at just a range around the war on terror and the state of exception.

So is the inadequate response to COVID-19 at a state level, less the result of individual

incompetence or corruption, but rather how our system of government and prevailing orthodoxies

felt to address problems on a planetary scale.

And what does that mean for any hopes to mitigate climate change over the rest of this century?

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