Ficciones víricas y ficciones sacrificiales. Notas sobre biopolítica y contagio en España

Abstract

This article examines the limits of neoliberal discourse as deployed in two different narrative lines, which have become ubiquitous in mass culture over the last few years: fictions of viral infection and fictions of social sacrifice. The first ones include zombie movies and narratives of contagion broadly considered (28 Days Later, Land of the Dead, The Walking Dead, Contagion, Containment, Contracted, etc.); the second ones typically concern a dystopian civilization whose stability can only be guaranteed by the sacrifice of one or several of its members, usually under the guise of a game (The Hunger Games, The Purge, The Cabin in the Woods, Elysium, The Thinning, or The Maze Runner). These two narratives' shared focus on immunization sets them apart from narratives that rely on the threat of —and conflict with— some form of otherness, but it also seems to condemn them to the dead end of neoliberal ideology, where the new order leaves no room for a viable alternative. As I intend to show, however, fictions of contagion and sacrificial fictions are already paving the way towards an overcoming of such dead end. By linking these accounts to two milestone moments of recent Spanish history, the birth of reality TV during the early 2000s and the first outbreak of the Ebola virus in Madrid in 2014, I try to demonstrate that neoliberal ideology is, in its purest form, a traumatic discourse that can only manifest itself as a state of exception, one that ultimately gives way to something else.