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- Herausgeber: ERIS
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
In this volume, the renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has collected all of his fierce, passionate, and deeply personal interventions regarding the current health emergency. Alongside and beyond accusations, these texts variously reflect upon the great transformation affecting Western democracies. In the name of biosecurity and health, the model of bourgeois democracy—together with its rights, parliaments, and constitutions—is everywhere surrendering to a new despotism where citizens seem to accept unprecedented limitations to their freedoms. This leads to the urgency of the volume's title: Where Are We Now? For how long will we accept living in a constantly extended state of exception, the end of which remains impossible to see? "An on-the-spot study of the link between power and knowledge." ––Christopher Caldwell, NEW YORK TIMES "Agamben is right that our rulers will use every opportunity to consolidate their power, especially in times of crisis. That coronavirus is being exploited to strengthen mass-surveillance infrastructure is no secret." ––Marco D'Eramo, NEW LEFT REVIEW "A fascinating intervention on the encroaching state of biosecurity we are witnessing before our very eyes." ––Colby Dickinson "Fear makes thinking harder. Yet there is an urgent need to think, and to question every aspect of our current situation. The philosopher, which Agamben truly embodies, is a figure that must be heeded." ––Nina Power
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ERIS
An imprint of Urtext
Unit 3, 2 Dixon Butler Mews
London W9 2BU
All rights reserved
Second paperback edition
Copyright © Giorgio Agamben, 2021
Translation © Valeria Dani, 2021
Originally published in Italy in 2020 by Quodlibet as
A che punto siamo? L’epidemia come politica
with new chapters added and updated in
September 2021 for the present edition
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Printed and bound in Great Britain
The right of Giorgio Agamben to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77
of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
ISBN 978-1-912475-35-3
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior permission in writing from Urtext Ltd.
Cover: detail from Michael Sweerts, Plague in an Ancient City,
c.1650, oil on canvas (Los Angeles, LACMA)
Designed by Alex Stavrakas
Contents
Foreword
1 The Invention of an Epidemic
2 Contagion
3 Clarifications
4 Where Are We Now?
5 Reflections on the Plague
6 The State of Exception Has Become the Rule
7 Social Distancing
8 A Question
9 Bare Life
10 New Reflections
11 On Truth and Falsity
12 Medicine as Religion
13 Biosecurity and Politics
14 Polemos Epidemios
15 Requiem for the Students
16 Two Notorious Terms
17 Law and Life
18 State of Emergency and State of Exception
19 The Face and the Mask
20 What Is Fear?
21 Bare Life and the Vaccine
22 Philosophy of Contact
23 War and Peace
24 Gaia and Chthonia
25 On the Time to Come
Notes
About the Author
Foreword
The ship is sinking, and we are debating its cargo.
—Jerome, Hier.Epist. 123.15.11
This collection of texts was written during the state of exception that the ongoing health emergency has created. They are targeted interventions, sometimes very brief, that attempt to think through the ethical and political consequences of the so-called ‘pandemic’ and, at the same time, to define the transformation of political paradigms that the measures of exception have wrought.
Almost a year now into the emergency, we should consider the events we have witnessed within a broader historical perspective. If the powers that rule the world have decided to use this pandemic—and it’s irrelevant whether it is real or simulated—as pretext for transforming top to bottom the paradigms of their governance, this means that those models were in progressive, unavoidable decline, and therefore in those powers’ eyes no longer fit for purpose.
During the Crisis of the Third Century that unsettled the Roman Empire, Diocletian and Constantine launched a series of radical reforms of its administrative, military, and economic structures, instigating changes that would culminate in the Byzantine autocracy. In the same way, the dominant powers of today have decided to pitilessly abandon the paradigm of bourgeois democracy—with its rights, its parliaments, and its constitutions—and replace it with new apparatuses whose contours we can barely glimpse. In fact, these contours are probably not entirely clear even to those who are sketching them.
The defining feature, however, of this great transformation that they are attempting to impose is that the mechanism which renders it formally possible is not a new body of laws, but a state of exception—in other words, not an affirmation of, but the suspension of, constitutional guarantees. The transformation, in this light, presents similarities with what happened in Germany in 1933, when the new Chancellor Adolf Hitler, without formally abolishing the Weimar Constitution, declared a state of exception that lasted for twelve years and effectively invalidated the constitutional propositions that were ostensibly still in force. While in Nazi Germany it was necessary to deploy an explicitly totalitarian ideological apparatus in order to achieve this end, the transformation we are witnessing today operates through the introduction of a sanitation terror and a religion of health. What, in the tradition of bourgeois democracy, used to be the right to health became, seemingly without anyone noticing, a juridical-religious obligation that must be fulfilled at any cost. We have had ample opportunity to assess the extent of this cost, and we will keep assessing it, presumably, each time the government again considers it to be necessary.
We can use the term ‘biosecurity’ to describe the government apparatus that consists of this new religion of health, conjoined with the state power and its state of exception—an apparatus that is probably the most efficient of its kind that Western history has ever known. Experience has in fact shown that, once a threat to health is in place, people are willing to accept limitations on their freedom that they would never theretofore have considered enduring—not even during the two world wars, nor under totalitarian dictatorships. The state of exception, which has (for the moment) been extended until 31 January 2021, will be remembered as the most prolonged suspension of legality in Italian history—carried out entirely without objections from the citizenry or, significantly, from their institutions. After the example of China, Italy became the Western laboratory where experiments in new governing techniques were conducted in their most extreme forms. It is probable that when future historians make sense of what was really at stake in this pandemic, this period will appear as one of the most shameful moments in Italian history, and those who led and governed during it as reckless individuals lacking all ethical scruples.
If the juridical-political apparatus of the Great Transformation is the state of exception, and the religious apparatus is science, on the social plane this transformation relied for its efficacy upon digital technology which, as is now evident, works in harmony with the new structure of relationships known as ‘social distancing’. Human relationships will have to happen, on every occasion and as much as possible, without physical presence. They will be relegated—much as was already happening—to digital devices that are becoming increasingly efficacious and pervasive. The new model of social relation is connection, and whoever is not connected tends to be excluded from relationships and condemned to marginalisation.
What accounts for the strength of the current transformation is also, as often happens, its weakness. The dissemination of the sanitation terror needed an acquiescent and undivided media to produce a consensus, something that will prove difficult to preserve. The medical religion, like every religion, has its heretics and dissenters, and respected voices coming from many different directions have contested the actuality and gravity of the epidemic—neither of which can be sustained indefinitely through the daily diffusion of numbers that lack scientific consistency. The first to realise this were probably the dominant powers, who would never have resorted to such extreme and inhuman apparatuses had they not been scared by the reality of their own erosion. For decades now, institutional powers have been suffering a gradual loss of legitimacy. These powers could mitigate this loss only through the constant evocation of states of emergency, and through the need for security and stability that this emergency creates. For how long, and according to which modalities, can the present state of exception be prolonged?
What is certain is that new forms of resistance will be necessary, and those who can still envision a politics to come should be unhesitatingly committed to them. The politics to come will not have the obsolete shape of bourgeois democracy, nor the form of the technological-sanitationist despotism that is replacing it.
One
The Invention of an Epidemic
Il Manifesto, 26 February 2020
As we face the frenetic, irrational, and unprovoked emergency measures adopted against a supposed epidemic, we should turn to the National Research Council (CNR). The CNR not only confirms that “an epidemic of SARS-CoV-2 is not present in Italy”, but that, in any case,
the infection, according to the epidemiological data available today for tens of thousands of cases, causes mild/moderate symptoms (a sort of influenza) in 80–90% of cases. Ten to fifteen per cent can develop pneumonia, but even then, the progress in most cases is benign. It is calculated that only four per cent of incidents need to be hospitalized in intensive care.
If this is the case, why do the media and the authorities go out of their way to cultivate a climate of panic, establishing a state of exception which imposes severe limitations on mobility and suspends the normal functioning of life and work?
Two clues might explain this disproportionate response. Firstly, we are dealing with a growing tendency to trigger a state of exception as the standard paradigm of governance. The legislative decree immediately approved by the government “for public health and security reasons” resulted in an actual militarisation
of the municipalities and the areas where at least one person is positive and where the source of transmission is unknown, or in any instance where there is a case not ascribable to a person coming from an area already affected by the virus.
Such a vague and indeterminate formula will allow for the rapid diffusion of the state of exception to all regions, given that other cases are bound to occur elsewhere.
Let us look at the severe limitations on freedom levied by the decree:
This disproportionate response to something the CNR considers to be a normal flu, not too dissimilar to the ones that recur every year, is absurd. We could argue that, once terrorism ceased to exist as a cause for measures of exception, the invention of an epidemic offers the ideal pretext for widening them beyond all known limits.
Secondly, and no less disquietingly, we have to consider the state of precarity and fear that has been in recent years systematically cultivated in people's minds—a state which has resulted in a natural propensity for mass panic, for which an epidemic offers the ideal pretext. We could say that a massive wave of fear caused by a microscopic parasite is traversing humanity, and that the world’s rulers guide and orient it towards their own ends. Limitations on freedom are thus being willingly accepted, in a perverse and vicious cycle, in the name of a desire for security—a desire that has been generated by the same governments that are now intervening to satisfy it.
Two
Contagion
11 March 2020
The anointer! Catch him! Catch him! Catch the anointer!
—Alessandro Manzoni,The Betrothed
One of the most brutal consequences of the panic disseminated in Italy by every means possible during the so-called coronavirus epidemic is the idea of contagion, which forms the basis for the exceptional emergency measures enforced by the government. This idea, unknown to Hippocratic medicine, has its first, unwitting precursor during the pestilences that devastated several Italian cities between 1500 and 1600. This precursor is the figure of the anointer, or plague-spreader, immortalised by Manzoni in his novel The Betrothed, as well as in his essay The History of the Column of Infamy. A Milanese edict for the 1576 plague describes anointers as follows, and encourages citizens to report them:
The governor has learned that some people with a feeble zeal for charity, in order to terrorize and scare the people and inhabitants of the city of Milan and to excite them to some turmoil, are applying ointments—which they consider pestiferous and contagious—to the doors and bolts of houses, to the corners of the city quarters, and to other places around the state, with the intention of bringing the plague to private and public spaces. Many inconveniences arise from this behaviour, which has significantly affected the people of Milan (mainly those who are easily persuaded to believe such things). The governor hereby decrees that anyone, regardless of quality, status, rank, or condition, who reports within forty days of this announcement any person or persons who have favoured, helped, or known about such injury, will be awarded five hundred scudi…
Although there are some differences, the recent orders (issued by the government as decrees that we want to hope—alas, an illusion—will not be voted into law by parliament before they expire) transform, in effect, every individual into a potential plague-spreader, just as the orders against terrorism considered every citizen as a de facto and de jure potential terrorist. The analogy is so exact, that the potential plague-spreader who does not comply with the regulations is punished with imprisonment. Particularly frowned upon is the figure of the healthy or precocious carrier, who infects a multitude of individuals without affording them the possibility of defending themselves against him as they could have from the anointer.
Even sadder than the limitations on freedom implicit in these orders is, in my view, the deterioration of human relationships that they foster. Others, whoever they are—even loved ones—must not be approached or touched. Instead, we should establish between them and ourselves a distance that is one metre by some accounts, but that according to the latest suggestions by the so-called experts should be 4.5 metres (those fifty centimetres are so interesting!). Our neighbour has been abolished. It is possible, given the ethical inconsistency of our rulers, that whoever issued these orders did so under the same fear that they intend to instil in others.
Still, it is difficult not to notice that the situation which these orders create is exactly that which those who govern us have tried to actualise many times before: the closure of universities and schools once and for all, with lessons conducted only online; the cessation of gatherings and conversations on politics or culture; and the exchange of messages only digitally, so that wherever possible machines can replace any contact—any contagion—among human beings.
Three
Clarifications
17 March 2020
