Normalising death in the time of a pandemic
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1232Keywords:
COVID-19, death, registration, normal, excess, muerte, registro, excesoAbstract
This paper examines a tension in the time of a pandemic between governmental representations of death as an anomaly and techniques for normalising death as an inevitable outcome of life. It contends that the technology of registering a death during the COVID-19 pandemic is conditioned upon differentiating between the normal and the pathological, standards and variations, and average and excess. Indeed, death registration depends on the creation of a new universal nomenclature for ascertaining death causation, which excludes various circumstances of a person’s life in order to stabilise SARS-CoV-2 as a normative category for classification. The paper thus reveals how during a pandemic, registration can been utilised to pathologise specific kinds of death, while unproblematically reifying the concept of a normal death. It argues that what the COVID-19 pandemic exposes, particularly though the productive tension between the rhetoric of death as both an anomaly and inevitable, is that normalising technologies are inextricable from how a panoply of institutions determine what deaths should be counted at all.
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