Hannah Richter is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research develops innovative pathways for contemporary political theory, particularly through links to systems and complexity theory as well as indigenous thought and anti-colonial resistance. Her monograph The Politics of Orientation: Deleuze meets Luhmann (2023) explores the rise of post-truth populism via the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Niklas Luhmann. Anther monography, Challenging Anthropocene Ontology: Modernity Ecology and Indigenous Complexities, is forthcoming. Amongst others, her work has been published in International Political Sociology, the European Journal of Social Theory and European Journal of Political Theory.

‘Examining the politics of knowledge production, Viral Critique reaches beyond being yet another volume on the impact of the pandemic. The editor’s take offers a much-needed, broader approach to ask how thinking has changed and how we might change our thinking. The contributions are sharp, compelling, and collectively they rethink fundamental relations between social lifeworlds and theory.’-Jasbir K Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability

• Introduction—COVID-19, viral social theory and immunitarian perceptions: a case for postfoundational critique 1. Critique, clinic, and care in times of COVID 2. An evental pandemic: thinking the COVID-19 ‘event’ with Deleuze and Foucault 3. Derrida, autoimmunity, and critique 4. Giorgio Agamben's political formalism 5. The biopolitical economy of the COVID-19 pandemic and the possibilities for an affirmative biopolitics 6. Redefining ‘safe bodies’: queering the shifting body politics during the COVID-19 pandemic 7. Vaccine apartheid and settler colonial sovereign violence: from Palestine to the colonial global economy 8. What is COVID capitalism? 9. Low-skill no more! essential workers, social reproduction and the legitimacy-crisis of the division of labour 10. Sublimating the commodity 11. Post-COVID ecology: mutation, immunology, and inequivalence in Jacques Derrida’s aneconomy12. Democratic politics in virulent times: three vital lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic 13. Beyond fairness: the COVID-19 pandemic as an expression of environmental injustice

Hannah Richter is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research develops innovative pathways for contemporary political theory, particularly through links to systems and complexity theory as well as indigenous thought and anti-colonial resistance. Her monograph The Politics of Orientation: Deleuze meets Luhmann (2023) explores the rise of post-truth populism via the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Niklas Luhmann. Anther monography, Challenging Anthropocene Ontology: Modernity Ecology and Indigenous Complexities, is forthcoming. Amongst others, her work has been published in International Political Sociology, the European Journal of Social Theory and European Journal of Political Theory.

‘Examining the politics of knowledge production, Viral Critique reaches beyond being yet another volume on the impact of the pandemic. The editor’s take offers a much-needed, broader approach to ask how thinking has changed and how we might change our thinking. The contributions are sharp, compelling, and collectively they rethink fundamental relations between social lifeworlds and theory.’-Jasbir K Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability

• Introduction—COVID-19, viral social theory and immunitarian perceptions: a case for postfoundational critique 1. Critique, clinic, and care in times of COVID 2. An evental pandemic: thinking the COVID-19 ‘event’ with Deleuze and Foucault 3. Derrida, autoimmunity, and critique 4. Giorgio Agamben's political formalism 5. The biopolitical economy of the COVID-19 pandemic and the possibilities for an affirmative biopolitics 6. Redefining ‘safe bodies’: queering the shifting body politics during the COVID-19 pandemic 7. Vaccine apartheid and settler colonial sovereign violence: from Palestine to the colonial global economy 8. What is COVID capitalism? 9. Low-skill no more! essential workers, social reproduction and the legitimacy-crisis of the division of labour 10. Sublimating the commodity 11. Post-COVID ecology: mutation, immunology, and inequivalence in Jacques Derrida’s aneconomy12. Democratic politics in virulent times: three vital lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic 13. Beyond fairness: the COVID-19 pandemic as an expression of environmental injustice