The Frontiers of Health

We begin this exchange of letters between Nuria Alabao and five thinkers by talking about necropolitics: the application of political and social power to decide who can live and who cannot, to discriminate between possible lives and discardable lives. Those affected, those whom societies catalogue as unproductive, surplus or disposable, those whom the neoliberal system strip of their lands, of the health of their ecosystems, of their bodies, of their work. Europe's migration policies, mass femicides, Europe's interactions with its ex-colonies and the Global South, the way in many places today curable infectious diseases wreak havoc: manifestations of this necropolitics, forms of violence.

Tuberculosis, as do other infectious diseases, unmasks aspects of body, of medicine, of the border between being healthy or not, and offers so many viewpoints that, when considered in all their complexity, provide a portrait of life today: how one lives or dies, suffers, treats or hides an illness says a lot about the world in which we live. But one way to face this landscape of death is none other than the opportunity to forge a common cause, primarily with those who are considered expendable.