Preliminary Materials for a Theory of Devi Sridhar
by Sinéad Murphy Devi Sridhar Following her appearance on Newsnight on Friday January 22nd, Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, tweeted this: https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1353002258779299845?s=20 During the past year, those of us opposed to Government lockdowns have repeatedly asked this question: What has disarmed the populations of apparently democratic societies that they have so quietly accepted the suspension of their freedoms? Devi Sridhar’s tweet – banal as it is – contains all the ingredients for an answer to this question. 2020 did seem, as it unfolded, to impose a sudden reversal of established freedoms. But the surreptitious erosion of those freedoms had, in fact, long been observed. In 1999, for example, the French magazine, Tiqqun, published a short text entitled Preliminary Materials For A Theory Of The Young-Girl, which sketched an outline of the emergent citizen of Western democratic societies, who willingly participates in and perpetuates their own oppression at the hands of global corporate governance, actively consenting to “the molecular diffusion of constraint into everyday life” and to the “immuno-disarmament of bodies”. The Tiqqun text summarized this acquiescent citizen as the “Young-Girl”. The descriptor has met with objections for its alleged misogyny. But it applies to men as well as to women, and to the old as well as to the young, only seeking to ...
