“NO DOSE WITHOUT POISON”: READING THE PSYCHOPOLITICS OF MEDICINE AND THE EPIDEMIC IMAGINATION IN SELECT CONTAGION NARRATIVES IN FICTION

Abstract

Interest in (re)emerging infectious diseases and the development of an evaluative socio-semantic narrative of epidemiology have led to a wave of interdisciplinary analyses of contagion narratives and medicine in the intersecting fields of literary studies, cultural theory, philosophy, and medical history. In epidemiology, the contagion poses as a colossally greater villain in the social imagination, but with the public knowledge of controversies around clinical trials of drugs and vaccines since AIDS, Ebola and the more recent COVID-19 pandemic, the politics of public health measures are now under scrutiny as well. This is because the Cartesian principle of the mechanical body had the effect of solidifying the utopic principle of medicine and its institutional apparatuses. Thus, substances and modes of healing have been omitted from the material and figurative perceptions of the diseased body, with modern biopolitical power structures aiding this omission to paint medicine in a perpetually glorious light. As a result, the originary identity of medicine as the ambivalent pharmakon is summarily ignored, whose multiple meanings include, either singly or simultaneously, poison, remedy, scapegoat, recipe, tint, philtre, drug, counterspell, and talisman. In the modern contagion narrative, the pharmakon is a concoction of various aspects of the living world, including laboratory practices, political and commercial interests, activist propaganda and media narratives. Furthermore, the stories that (re)emerge from the silent recesses of the body, which has imbibed the pharmakon, are no less complex, giving rise to corporealities that convey the hypnotic, hauntological structure of the disease itself. In the modern era, medicine operates within a thanatopolitical framework, shaped by war, statecraft, and the politicisation of death; therefore, it no longer solely pursues utopian goals like eradicating disease or achieving immortality but instead reflects desires for separation and control. Modernity marks a shift where epidemic responses became tools for geopolitical power, and medical responses have grown increasingly militarised, with scientific research serving biosecurity interests. In the 21st century, technological advances such as genomic and telemedicine have transformed healthcare but also deepened inequalities, corporatised care, and alienated the human subject from healing and compassion. This research has attempted to use the metaphor of the pharmakon and its associated entities as the conceptual tool in my research to explore a range of contagion narratives and examine how the suppression of its impact serves for further movement, locus and play of the contagion. It has focused on the nature of medicine as a haunting biopolitical entity, as well as a complex corporeal process, lived in relation to social meanings and practices invested in human and social bodies.