Part of the "De-Activated City" series.

Contextualised by the current social circumstances amid the coronavirus pandemic (2020), the paper examines a world landscape after the pandemic. Taking inspiration from George Orwell’s novel, 1984, the alternative reality is described as a place where people are willing to sacrifice individual freedom for public health and consequently live in a permanent state of fear and insecurity.

The research centres on the bio-political philosophy studied by both Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. The latter mentions ‘naked life’, in which survival becomes the only human raison d’être, and the state of exception becomes the new normal. Extracting two keywords of ‘biopolitics’ and ‘biopower’, mentioned by Foucault, the author explores a speculative society and its collective ideology.