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Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness
The Italian philosopher’s interventions are symptomatic of
theory’s collapse into paranoia.
By Anastasia Berg March 23, 2020
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Giorgio-Agambens/248306?key=z5yodZPXH1-Hi8hgwdp9akWHjXrno6FVQZE24qkIFpuxgIOSVaMjuRtSAg7_lBhSjNkRkZwNTBOR1RVbUlDYW
Fwc0VzOU93TXZka2U1QVJRUkFwZGJhdElSbw&cid=wsinglestory_41_1&fbcli
d=IwAR3g67ghodcyGmnV3_q9OFqTKh83Hvn3DRUL2CuVNHUDBP1QN-LOo9yUvM
The unprecedented uncertainty amid the coronavirus pandemic
has decimated our carefully laid plans and unsettled our minds at
equal pace. Anxiety manifests in an utter inability to concentrate;
our efforts to "work from home" are largely consumed by staring
blankly at Twitter, the homepages of The New York
Times and The Guardian, and Medium posts stuffed with
impenetrable graphs and dubious advice. These circumstances
call not for more epidemiological modeling, we think, but for
philosophy. The question — "What should I do?"— is, after all, a
variant of the first philosophical question, namely, how should I
live?
Just in time, someone apparently well-suited for the task arrives.
The Italian philosopher and cultural theorist Giorgio Agamben
has long served as a model of how philosophical reflection can
help us evaluate the moral implications of catastrophes of an
order the mind can barely comprehend, most famously the
Holocaust. He is especially well known for his work on the
intellectual and political history of the very concept of "life," and
the threat that political sovereignty poses to it.
In two short pieces (the first, "The State of Exception Provoked
by an Unmotivated Emergency," an article for the Italian daily
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newspaper Il manifesto, translated into English and posted by the
journal Positions Politics; the second, "Clarifications," posted
originally in its English translation on the humanities blog An und
für sich), Agamben brings his trademark conceptual apparatus to
bear on the global response to the coronavirus pandemic. The
emergency measures for the "supposed epidemic of coronavirus,"
he writes, are "frantic, irrational, and absolutely unwarranted."
Coronavirus, Agamben insists (in the last days of February!) is "a
normal flu, not much different from those that affect us every
year."
As most readers will have learned by now, even under the most
conservative of estimates, coronavirus’s fatality rate is 10 times
greater than that of the common flu — 1 percent to the common
flu’s 0.1 percent. But, after all, we came to Agamben for a break
from facts. What matters to Agamben is not the empirical
situation but the political one. And here we find Agamben in
classic form. The real "state of exception," and therefore the real
threat, is not the disease itself. It is the "climate of panic" that "the
media and the authorities" have created around the disease, which
allows the government to introduce the extreme kinds of
restrictions on movement, congregation, and ordinary sociability
without which our daily life and work quickly become
unrecognizable. The lockdowns and quarantines are, indeed, just
one more manifestation of "the growing tendency to use the state
of exception as a normal governing paradigm." The government,
he reminds us, always prefers to govern by exceptional measures.
In case you are wondering how literally we are meant to take this
piece of critical-cum-conspiracy theory, he adds that "once
terrorism was exhausted as a justification," the next best thing is
the "invention of an epidemic."
Like a bemused Fox News anchor, Agamben concludes that travel
bans, canceling public and private events, closing public and
commercial institutions, and enforcing quarantine and
surveillance are all simply "disproportionate": a cost too high to
pay to protect oneself from just one more ordinary disease.
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In a widely circulated response, the French philosopher Jean-Luc
Nancy, who identifies Agamben as an "old friend," takes
exception to Agamben’s focus on government as the sole culprit
of the crisis, but concedes his general argument about the perils of
a perpetual state of panicked existence: "an entire civilization is
involved, there is no doubt about it." Yet the most noteworthy
part of Nancy’s reply is its closing note: "Almost thirty years ago
doctors decided that I needed a heart transplant. Giorgio was one
of the very few who advised me not to listen to them. If I had
followed his advice I would have probably died soon enough. It is
possible to make a mistake."
Nancy is right: Mistakes can be made. But is Agamben’s
dogmatic skepticism toward institutional intervention of all kinds
rightly classified as a mistake? Or has an intellectual habit
become a pathological compulsion? Either way, Nancy’s small
personal anecdote reveals just what is at stake in Agamben’s
polemical pose, applied to the real world: the life of loved ones,
especially the old and vulnerable.
Not that Agamben would allow his old friend’s words, not to
mention the devastation that has continued ravaging Italy, to rattle
his confidence. The deaths of hundreds of Italians per day seems
only to have hardened his resolve.
In his second piece, titled simply "Clarifications," Agamben
graciously concedes that an epidemic is upon us, leaving behind
the misleading empirical claims. (Well, almost, and the exception
is worth noting: Agamben claims that "There have been more
serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought for that
reason to declare a state of emergency like the current one, which
prevents us even from moving." This is false. As Agamben’s
intellectual godfather Michel Foucault details in Discipline and
Punish, as early as the 1600s, preparations for the plague included
the complete restriction of movement between and within towns
in Europe: "Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he
moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or
punishment.") For the most part, Agamben focuses his
clarification on another, principled objection to the draconian
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measures implemented across the world: How much sacrifice is
too much?
Agamben correctly observes that the question of the
proportionality of the response is not a scientific one; it is moral.
And the answer is not obvious. Here, at least, Agamben arrives at
a serious question. This is exactly the kind of question we had
hoped the humanist could help us answer.
Agamben’s way of addressing it is framed by a distinction
between "bare life" — our biological survival — and something
he holds in higher regard; call it social or ethical life. "The first
thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country
obviously shows is that our society no longer believes in anything
but bare life," he observes. In our hysterical panic, exerting
herculean efforts to avoid physical harm, we have made ourselves
vulnerable to loss of a far higher order: sacrificing our work,
friendships, extended families, religious rites (first among them,
funerals), and political commitments. In this way, we might
preserve ourselves biologically, but
Agamben dresses up outdated
we will have eliminated in the
jargon as courageous
process anything that gives life
resistance.
meaning, that makes it worth living.
What is more, the exclusive focus on survival at any cost, on the
preservation of "bare life," not only constitutes a spiritual defeat
in its own right, but turns us against one another, threatening the
possibility of meaningful human relationships and thus any
semblance of "society": "Bare life — and the danger of losing it
— is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates
them." Paranoia drives us to view other human beings "solely as
possible spreaders of the plague," to be avoided at all costs. Such
a state, where we all dedicate ourselves to a battle against an
enemy within us, lurking in every other person, is "in reality, a
civil war." The consequences, Agamben predicts, will be grim
and will outlast the epidemic. He concludes:
Just as wars have left as a legacy to peace a series of inauspicious
technology, from barbed wire to nuclear power plants, so it is also
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very likely that one will seek to continue even after the health
emergency experiments that governments did not manage to bring
to reality before: closing universities and schools and doing
lessons only online, putting a stop once and for all to meeting
together and speaking for political or cultural reasons and
exchanging only digital messages with each other, wherever
possible substituting machines for every contact — every
contagion — between human beings.
To be clear, Agamben is right that the costs we are paying are
exceedingly high: The response to the epidemic exacts great
sacrifices from us as individuals and from society as a whole.
Moreover — and putting to one side the conspiratorial paranoia
— there is a real risk that the virus will lower public resistance to
political measures that threaten democratic self-governance:
increased use of surveillance, the
expansion of executive powers, and
restrictions on the freedom of movement
and association.
Coronavirus Hits Campus
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide
health crisis is affecting campuses.
The Coronavirus Is Upending Higher Ed. Here Are the Latest Developments.
After Coronavirus, the Deluge PREMIUM
5 Lessons From Campuses That Closed After Natural Disasters PREMIUM
Observing potential costs, however, is the easy part. What is
much more difficult and much more perilous is getting clear on
what it is exactly that we are sacrificing for. Agamben is right that
a life dedicated solely to our own biological survival is a human
life in name only, and that to voluntarily choose such a life is not
merely a personal sacrifice but a form of societywide moral selfharm. But is this really what we are doing?
There are of course those who refuse to bow to the
recommendations of the authorities — the Florida spring
breakers, the St. Paddy’s Day pub crawlers. Are these the moral
heroes Agamben is calling for? In the meantime, those of us who
have, with heavy hearts, embraced the restrictions on our
freedoms, are not merely aiming at our own biological survival.
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We have welcomed the various institutional limitations on our
lives (in fact sometimes hoped our governments would introduce
these sooner), and we have urged our friends and family
(especially our stubborn parents!) to do the same, not to ward off
"the danger of getting sick," not for the sake of our bare life, and
indeed not for the sake of the bare life of others, but out of an
ethical imperative: to exercise the tremendous powers of society
to protect the vulnerable, be they our loved ones or someone
else’s.
We are doing all of this, in the first place, for our fellow people
— our parents, our grandparents, and all those who are, by dint of
fate, fragile. Nothing could be further from our minds than the
maintenance of their "bare life": We care about these people
because they are our kin, our friends, and the members
of our community.
My fiancé and I canceled our summer wedding last week. We did
it so that our guests, including my partner’s high-risk father,
might be able at some later date to safely attend the social
celebration of our decision to tie our lives to one another’s. We
are now cooped up in our apartment, "isolating," so that we may
be able to visit his father, later, without endangering his health, if
we ever make it back to London. With any luck, we may all get to
celebrate that wedding together one day after all. With any luck,
our children will one day meet their grandfather. Agamben
laments that we are sacrificing "social relationships, work, even
friendships, affections, and religious and political convictions" to
"the danger of getting sick." But we are not making sacrifices for
the sake of anyone’s mere survival. We sacrifice because sharing
our joys and pains, efforts and leisure, with our loved ones —
young and old, sick and healthy — is the very substance of these
so-called "normal conditions of life."
"What is a society," Agamben asks, "that has no value other than
survival?" Under certain circumstances, this is a good question;
under these circumstances, it is a blind one. Is this the society
Agamben believes he is living in? When this philosopher looks
around him, does he truly see nothing but the fight for "bare life"?
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If so, Agamben’s "clarification" may be revealing in a way he
hadn’t intended. We might think of it as a very lucid example of
"bare theory": the dressing up of outdated jargon as a form of
courageous resistance to unreflecting moral dogma. Sometimes it
is advisable to hold off on deploying the heavy theoretical
machinery until one has looked around. If we are after wisdom
about how to live today, we should look elsewhere.
Anastasia Berg is a junior research fellow in philosophy at the
University of Cambridge and an editor at The Point. This article
is part of The Point’s Quarantine Journal.