Rethinking biopolitics in the pandemic: Psychopolitics as a new political framework

This article is an attempt to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic that advances beyond Foucault’s biopolitical framework. The article sets out alternative futural imaginaries in the present: critical accounts of contemporary thoughts of psychopolitics which productively and creatively problematise and challenge biopolitics of the world in our contemporary condition. The psychopolitical regime of power forms the conditions of possibility for the production of different types of relations, dependencies, and interactions. The thesis is that a psychopolitical regime of power is what human beings need in order to move beyond the biopolitics of the world to new futures. In this study, how Ghana responded to the pandemic is evaluated within the context of contemporary thoughts of psychopolitics. In conclusion, the article examines how psychopolitics calls into question contemporary governance of crises to construct a new agency of productive imagination in difficult circumstances. The argument is that the pandemic response needs to account for its embeddedness in the thoughts of psychopolitics to move beyond biopolitics of the world to new futures.