Giorgio Agamben has been influential in critical circles in the social sciences for quite some time now. He has been deeply worried of how the COVID-19 pandemic has been exploited as an opportunity to bring in authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and a new political rationality centered around biosecurity. He decries..."the new paradigm of biosecurity, to which all other exigencies will have to be sacrificed. It is legitimate to ask whether such a society can still be defined as human or whether the loss of sensible relations, of the face, of friendship, of love can be truly compensated for by an abstract and presumably completely fictitious health security".
https://medium.com/@ddean3000/biosecurity-and-politics-giorgio-agamben-396f9ab3b6f4
Are there scholars from within the academic left who have picked up this line of thought to develop it? In my home discipline human geography I've been surprised by the lack of deep criticism (so far!) against the authoritarian management of the pandemic and the brutally quick undermining of hard-won freedoms in the name of a very elastic notion of "safety". This press release describing the situation in August 2020 in Melbourne sent chills down my spine:
https://kyil-extra.com/melbourne-police-state/
The debate in the latest issue of Dialogues in Human Geography didn't strike me as genuinely critical despite the self-professed label of "critical geographer" many of the invited parties espouse. I checked Derek Gregory's blog, since he was instrumental in popularizing Agamben's thoughts in critical geography, but there's no entry on Agamben & COVID-19. Radio silence...
By the way, if an Anglo-American publisher reads this, please consider translating into English Patrick Zylberman's book Tempêtes microbiennes, Gallimard 2013. Agamben praises it highly in the blog entry I linked to above:
"Already in a book published seven years ago, now worth rereading carefully (Tempêtes microbiennes, Gallimard 2013), Patrick Zylberman described the process by which health security, hitherto on the margins of political calculations, was becoming an essential part of state and international political strategies. At issue is nothing less than the creation of a sort of “health terror” as an instrument for governing what are called “worst case scenarios.” It is according to this logic of the worst that already in 2005 the World Health Organization announced “2 to 150 million deaths from bird flu approaching,” suggesting a political strategy that states were not yet ready to accept at the time. Zylberman shows that the apparatus being suggested was articulated in three points: 1) the construction, on the basis of a possible risk, of a fictitious scenario in which data are presented in such a way as to promote behaviors that allow for governing an extreme situation; 2) the adoption of the logic of the worst as a regime of political rationality; 3) the total organization of the body of citizens in a way that strengthens maximum adherence to institutions of government, producing a sort of superlative good citizenship in which imposed obligations are presented as evidence of altruism and the citizen no longer has a right to health (health safety) but becomes juridically obliged to health (biosecurity). What Zylberman described in 2013 has now been duly confirmed".
I find Bernd Käpplinger 's observation about Giorgio Agamben's language quite apt. For me, Agamben's language is as radical as his philosophy. The language is far from being lucent.
I also agree that Giorgio Agamben's critique had no impact on scientific community. Undoubtedly, currently we have to face a really difficult health problem. But, this is not the sole health problem of the community. Decisions should be based on sound scientific evidence, especially when interventions are applied to healthy people.
I had not heard of him in all honesty. But the theme is particularly relevant. I have just written an article focused on Shoshana Zuboffs surveillance capitalism and how track and trace technologies are being ushered in, with the intention to normalise surveillance, offering the potential for new forms of social control under the 'price worth paying' discourse.
I agree with the previous comments.
Albeit Agamben gave new and fruitful impulses to debates on certain topics like the relationship between society and state, his writings and articles are often characterized by a slightly dramatic style. Especially comparing some aspects of the current situation with some of the Nazi-Regime, attesting the citizens a silent acceptance of a disproportionate oppression and blaming the church and lawyers for being inactive seems obviously exaggerated. By describing medicine, and natural sciences in general, as an instrument to control society and underestimating the (still in large part unknown) risks of the virus, Agamben represents a rather small group of academics who fundamentally question the role science has in modern culture. Thus, his input hasn't received a lot of resonance.
I found out yesterday this interesting blog entry on Agamben & COVID-19, and from personal communication with the author (Dr. Irfan Ahmad, Senior Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity) there are hopes that it might be developed into a full peer-reviewed article:
Article Ahmad, Irfan. 2020. "Coronavirus, Naked Life and the Importa...
To my surprise, The New York Times run a piece on Giorgio Agamben and COVID-19 on August 21st. Full text here: http://archive.vn/Fp47E
Some highlights:
"In a society that respects science, expertise confers power. That has good results, but it brings a terrible problem: Illegitimate political power can be disguised as expertise".
"The emergency declared by public-health experts replaces the discredited narrative of “national security experts” as a pretext for withdrawing rights and privacy from citizens. “Biosecurity” now serves as a reason for governments to rule in terms of “worst-case scenarios.” This means there is no level of cases or deaths below which locking down an entire nation of 60 million becomes unreasonable".
"The politics of the pandemic expose a deeper ethical, social and even metaphysical erosion. Mr. Agamben cites Italians’ most beloved 19th-century novel, Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed,” which describes how human relations degenerated in Milan during the plague of 1630. People came to see their neighbors not as fellow human beings but as spreaders of pestilence. As panic set in, authorities executed those suspected of daubing houses with plague germs. When a society loses its collective cool this way, the cost can be high. Rich, atomized, diverse, our society has a weak spot, and the coronavirus has found it. “For fear of getting sick,” Mr. Agamben writes, “Italians are ready to sacrifice practically everything — their normal living conditions, their social relations, their jobs, right down to their friendships, their loves, their religious and political convictions.”
Two October 9th 2020 updates to the discussion:
1. Interesting 20 minute video summary of Agamben's views on COVID-19 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-HDQJQ8FqI&feature=youtu.be
2. This thread/discussion has just received some attention from outside ResearchGate.Net - see this blog entry from Professor Mike Hulme, University of Cambridge, UK: https://mikehulme.org/why-is-the-academic-left-silent-about-the-new-authoritarianism/
It seems as if your Mr Agamben uses the same strategy that he accuses others of using, namely exaggeration and catastrophisation. Catastrophisation is a psychological defense mechanism against the anxieties raised by a new unknown situation. The positive side of this defence mechanism is that the situation can only be better if you expect the worst, and the negative side is that it paralyzes the individual, prevents them from undertaking anything at all and excuses them from taking any responsibility.
It is well possible that regimes that are already authoritarian will use any excuse to suppress their citizens even more, but it is not realistic to view each and every government as an authoritarian entity. Governments have the duty to protect their citizens against a new and potentially lethal disease and have to develop strategies with a lot of unknowns.
For some people it is difficult to comprehend how complex societies are and how many variables have to be taken into account when devising health strategies. To defend against that they imagine a society that is simple, small scaled, transparent, run directly by citizens calling that democratic, but it is a nostalgic defense, longing for something that never was reality. Anarchists fall in this category, and it is a seductive worldview. Every problem can be solved simply and if it is not solved simply, then it is a lie, fake news or a hoax. In this phantasie/world view it is always a small and selective elite who, in their own eyes, are intelligent enough to understand the situation; again a psychological defense against the powerlessness of not-knowing.
In this way, the ultra-left and the ultra-right meet in their conspiracy theories and shake hands. See the demonstrations in Berlin against Covid measures: antivaxxers, neo-nazis, greenies, anarchists, you name it.
The disregard of Giorgio Agamben's lucid analysis and the failure of intellectuals to recognize the totalitarian-technocratic coup that is unfolding right in front of our eyes is stunning to me. Not only has Agamben not been taken up, he has been smeared. We have seen the left fail before, when "leftist" politicians (and some intellectuals as well) embraced the neoliberal revolution. These developments are profoundly disconcerting. If we don't resist this agenda, who will. Thank you for bringing up Agamben, we need people like him.
A hybrid Cold War to make Euro-America "great again" in the context of the rise of Asia led by China as the center of global economic and technological growth is unfolding beneath the Covid Mask, and the Covid State of exception with a play on bio-power and surveillance, but the plan appears to have back-fired..
Karma in real time.. Make no mistake we are back in a Cold War proxy war game as an empire crashes and morphs into the world's biggest Rouge State..
Please see this link and share:
https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/the-covid-mask-an-emperor-with-no-cloths-colonialism-redux-whose-free-open-indo-pacific/
Thank you for raising this interesting question! I have problems to follow the language and the arguments of Agamben, because of a number of reasons. The language chosen by him is rather addressing other academics. I would wish the left would use a language accessible to a wider public.
I like also many of his arguments not, which see bad intentions at work.
I'm rather worrying about many good-spirited people who have a little risk competency and sticking too much to their worries. They seem to accept all measures because of the main goal. I miss the understanding that we spoiling resources presently and in a few years people will be much less have access to resources because of the crisis. And the Western world looks to much at their risks and accepts that millions will went into starvation because of the crisis. I see a march of the lemmings in which the figures are not more contextualised and it is not differentiated if people dying on COVID-19 or with COVID-19.
Overall, I would appreciate to look at the wider pictures and not sticking to just a few indicators and having some virologists and the natural science having the lead in this game. Interdisciplinary approaches are desperately needed and missing!
I find Bernd Käpplinger 's observation about Giorgio Agamben's language quite apt. For me, Agamben's language is as radical as his philosophy. The language is far from being lucent.
Here is my left answet to Agamben Philosophical Necromancy or Accelerationist Hope? A response to Agamben | Lefteast https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/necromancy-or-hope-response-to-agamben/
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