K Polynczuk-Alenius1; 1 University of Helsinki, Finland
Discussion
This paper analyses the entanglements between biopower and conspiratorial knowledge in the Polish government’s self-mediated discourse on the 2020 protests against the near-total ban on abortion. It approaches as exercises of biopower both the assault on reproductive rights and the securitization of the ensuing protests as a health hazard. Thinking with the concept of power-knowledge, whereby power and knowledge are viewed as mutually constitutive, this paper proposes that biopower is intertwined here with ‘conspiratorial knowledge’. Conspiratorial knowledge is a product of conspiratorial thinking, which, in its turn, describes an epistemological approach centred on imagining conspiracies as a driving force of history. Empirically, the paper deploys Foucauldian discourse analysis to interrogate a video recording of a speech by Jarosław Kaczyński, the Deputy Prime Minister, posted on YouTube and shared on the Law and Justice’s party website on 27 October 2020 in response to the protests. The video is a clear display of Kaczyński’s proclivity for conspiratorial thinking. The in-depth intertextual analysis dissects the mind-bending theory in which the protests in defence of reproductive rights are recast as a conspiracy bent on a two-pronged destruction of the Polish nation: 1) moral, by attacking the Catholic Church and the ‘moral system’ it represents, and 2) biological, by facilitating the spreading of the virus among the thousands-strong crowds of demonstrators.
