The State of Care: Re-reading Juli Zeh’s Corpus Delicti (2009) post-2020

The explorative thought piece takes Juli Zeh’s 2009 novel Corpus Delicti: Ein Prozess as a starting point to think through the concept of care from the vantage point of a post-2020 society still managing the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first half of the chapter summarizes the media discourse in the early days of the pandemic and Zeh’s own responses to the German government’s sanctions read alongside the premise of her popular dystopian novel. The second half provides a cursory sketch of four possible modes of caring that appear in the novel by drawing on feminist theoretical writings on care as a relational, political, and highly ambivalent act. These four modes are: self-care, community care, ideological care, and speculative care. Ultimately, these modes of caring connect to an overarching notion of state care, or the caring state, that is dismantled and reaffirmed in oscillating fashion throughout the novel.