Presence, care and politics

Presence, care, and politics are intimately linked. Faced with contemporary biopower that controls bodies and attacks our free will, cultivating inner presence becomes resistance and a path towards true democracy.

Definitions

• Presence is an intention of anchoring oneself to engage in a real dialectic of our relationship with the world. Real in the sense that we are ourselves anchored.
• Care is very little practiced in the medical context, unfortunately. Care is attention to the environment, to our internal biological environment, through the foods we ingest, the activities we engage in. It is also attention to the context in which we live, the relationships we maintain, the professions we practice. It is also consideration for the other; generally, the other human, but also the other object, the other animal, the other plant. This environment, this context that we care for, creates capacities for robustness, resilience, and immunity. The mental state of trust or fear, for example, is part of care. And care also has to do with acknowledging a reality and the intention to improve it.
• Politics consists in the organization of human collectives. It can be democratic or authoritarian, respectful of dignity or destructive, horizontal or vertical, serving the majority or serving the most powerful.

The intention of presence as care

The intentional manifestation of presence places the person in a situation of independence and anchoring in their fundamental values. Thus, a person present to themselves, that is, capable of thinking for themselves, thanks to an intimate knowledge of themselves, which has nothing to do with erudition and not even with intelligence in its usual definition, will be less easily subjected to a politics that does not respect them. Thus, this present and anchored person is naturally in care of themselves and those around them, that is, a personal responsibility for their environment. They may be more naturally contesting of unjust, unfounded, and arbitrary policies.

Biopower and biopolitics

Michel Foucault developed the concept of biopower, which was later extended by Giorgio Agamben with the concept of biopolitics. In these visions of power, there are the choices made by the powerful to control, normalize, and manage life. This is an evolution from the old sovereign power, the old regime where the right to make die or let live reigned, to the right to make live and let die; the terms are reversed. This biopower may seem altruistic and indeed it has allowed collective advances in life expectancy. We are always in civilizations of biopower, which transform into biopolitics, for a collective management of life, of control and discipline over bodies, morals, and social practices in general. They are accompanied by increased control, consequently, by an explicit attack on the presence of each individual, that is, their free will.

Today, as biopower has converted into biopolitics, it is always put at the service of the powerful, who are today the large capitalist shareholders, it is accompanied by choices from which no one can escape, under the pretext of the common good. Biopower always refers to its history and all the improvements in living conditions it has allowed in the past to legitimize itself. But this situation is cracking, its hypocrisy is beginning to show, for example with the United States, a country in which obesity is extremely widespread, which is one of the countries in the world where it is most dangerous to give birth and which is also one of the countries in the world with the lowest average life expectancy.

Biopower and the Covid crisis

From the beginning of the Covid crisis in March 2020, we saw the prohibition in France by the Order of Physicians of treating conditions due to the Covid-19 virus, as counterintuitive as that may seem. The media did not insist on the subject, but yes, general practitioners had to, under penalty of being prohibited from practicing, violate almost all of their Hippocratic Oath by being prohibited by the power, biopower therefore, from making any prescription, any research for treatment or care for patients considered carriers of the Covid-19 virus. The only right they had was to prescribe Doliprane. Physicians who wished to treat their patients, if not the causes, at least the symptoms of this virus, did so by pretending that they were treating them for conditions other than Covid-19. Thus, at that moment, we saw how politics attacked not only presence but also care.

In all the health discourses transmitted by the French authorities during the two years of this crisis, no advice on care or prevention was given. Almost immediately, the myth of a future miraculous product was brandished. Initially, the drug Remdesivir, quickly banned not without Europe being forced to buy it for 1 billion euros, then the vaccines, nine months later, which were going to be the only solutions proposed. The vaccines against Covid-19 never protected against transmission, were never designed in this sense, thus the message “all vaccinated, all protected” was a lie, which was known from the start by political leaders. And the very important deficiencies in zinc and vitamin D suffered by all Covid patients, with the very numerous scientific studies done outside the West on the benefits of high-dose prescriptions of vitamins D and zinc, were never recommended and were even prohibited.

It may seem inconsistent that a power deliberately decides not to care for its populations in the face of a dangerous epidemic. In reality, this epidemic was only dangerous for very elderly, untreated people, and people with comorbidities, also untreated, who could die quite quickly in respiratory distress. Why did they die? Because they were not treated, precisely. But for the vast majority of the population, children, adolescents, and adults up to 65 years old, the risk of this virus was almost nil. Therefore, the lack of care decided by the political authorities could obviously not produce a hecatomb, but deaths only among a small category of the population.

This policy had a very great damage, as many people died from the Covid virus, due to the lack of care. By not being treated for weeks, while subjected to a virulent virus, and arriving in respiratory distress in the emergency room, it is too late to treat. Some survived, others did not. And it is true that the vaccines reduced the risks of respiratory distress due to the Covid virus. But untreated flu is just as dangerous as the Covid virus. And by the way, today, in 2025, there is no less Covid virus than there was 5 years ago, 4 years ago, 3 years ago, 2 years ago, simply today we treat, because pharmaceutical laboratories offer patented drugs, other than vaccines.

No vaccine in history has been developed as quickly as the Covid vaccines, they were distributed to billions of humans on Earth while they were still in the experimental phase. Indeed, the only possible authorization, the only exception for a drug to be distributed in the experimental phase is the absence of any other treatment. It is precisely for this reason that there was no care. Covid represented a windfall for capitalism, with a very virulent epidemic, which produced very few deaths, but a virus that spread a lot. There was a great opportunity to scare people about the danger, to prohibit care in order to be able to propose a providential drug, the vaccine, which it never was, all the more so with the very numerous side effects it produced. And thus, in two years, the fortunes of the powerful billionaire shareholders of pharmaceutical laboratories doubled in two years. This is unprecedented in the history of capitalism. And this thanks to a virus that was in reality very little dangerous, except for a certain category (unless they had been treated).

People present to themselves, taking care of themselves during this period, they could not accept this liberticidal, incoherent policy, denying presence and care. Why were some able to continue to take care of themselves and their context? And for example, like myself having taken all the “risks”, without being vaccinated, why have I never contracted Covid? I took care of myself, I took vitamin D, zinc, vitamin C, preventive care. Thus, through this care, I have never been sick, even though I have never deprived myself of acts a priori presented as eminently dangerous, namely being in physical relation with other human beings.

The twelve thousand French caregivers, which is not nothing, these are not one hundred people, twelve thousand people who, through their knowledge, their skills, their anchoring in themselves, their refusal to be dominated by these media fears of which they saw well in their real context of care that it was fiction, who refused to be vaccinated for very good reasons, were suspended without pay for two years, before being finally reinstated, because we really need care staff! These people were in no way more dangerous to patients than vaccinated people, insofar as the vaccine did not protect against transmission. Therefore, vaccinated people could very well be carriers and transmitters of the virus. The vaccine did not cancel the virus in them at all. The vaccine simply immunized them better against death in case of severe respiratory illness, in the absence of care. That was its only therapeutic interest.

Care through the micropolitics of groups

Thus, unvaccinated caregivers were much more aware of care thanks to their anchoring in their presence, and thus invite us, in my opinion, to rethink politics from another place, to rethink politics from presence and care that is singular to each individual and which, by capillarity, can only create a society that is both more democratic and in better physical and mental health. I mean the society in today’s world which, yes, has grown through biopowers, which have negative as well as positive effects. But today we are no longer two centuries ago, we are today, with the acquired scientific knowledge, sometimes poorly acquired indeed, but which are still acquisitions, and we have today political capacities based on what we can call the micropolitics of groups (David Vercauteren), of which we now know that they are much more constructive of a general democracy than an authoritarian and normative politics coming from above, which does not take into account and is not capable of taking into account the real and life, that is, all the specificities of contexts, environments, and people.

Digital for care

And digital, instead of being used as a tool for generalized surveillance, control of populations, can be, from the micropolitical point of view, on the contrary, a tool for aggregating diverse knowledge and much more flexible and attentive collective management to all the specificities of small environments whose information can be put in relation beneficially, thanks to digital technologies. Thus, digital, in the way we can use it, can be a tool for knowledge, mutual knowledge, which can be beneficial to care, presence, and politics in its democratic sense. But we can never separate any of these three terms: presence, care, and politics.

And it was unfortunate during the Covid period to see some philosophers engaged in political subjects or in care subjects, obeying an absurd authoritarianism, at the exclusive service of the powerful, blinded as they were, no doubt by their fear and ultimately unfortunately by their lack of presence, which can be fully explained by political, financial ties, which, of course, bias the gaze and make even the a priori most enlightened minds can be abused by the most hackneyed political techniques.

I allow myself to quote the beginning of the poem “Howl” by Alan Ginsberg, 1956: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”