The Epidemic as Politics by Giorgio Agamben

Anthony

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
I had a chance to read through this short book recently and have included some excerpts below. It's a sort of ethical and political reflection on the consequences of the so-called ‘pandemic’. The author is the only contemporary European philosopher (as far as I'm aware) that has openly challenged the official narrative.

The history of the twentieth century—and, in particular, the rise to power of Nazism in
Germany—shows clearly that the state of exception is the mechanism by which
democracies can transform themselves into totalitarian states. In my country, but not just
here, a state of emergency has been the standard governmental procedure for years.
Thanks to various emergency decrees, the executive power has superseded the legislative,
effectively abolishing the separation-of-powers principle that defines a democracy. Never
before, not even under Fascism and during the two world wars, has the limitation of
freedom been taken to such extremes: people have been confined to their houses and,
deprived of all social relationships, reduced to a condition of biological survival. This
barbarity does not even spare the dead: those who die are being deprived of their right to a
funeral, their bodies instead burned. Doubtless someone will rush to respond that what I’m
describing is only a temporary situation, after which things will go back to how they were
before. It is astonishing that anyone could say this in good faith, given that the very
authorities which proclaimed the emergency endlessly remind us that, when the emergency
is over, we will have to keep observing the same directives, and that ‘social distancing’ (as it
has euphemistically been termed) will be society’s new organising principle.
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.
The hypothesis that we are experiencing the end of a world—the world of bourgeois
democracy that is built on rights, parliaments, and the division of powers—is now spreading
widely. That world is being replaced by a new despotism that, with the pervasiveness of its
controls and with its suspension of all political activity, will be worse than the totalitarianisms
we have known thus far
. Political commentators call it the ‘Security State’—in other words, a
state where ‘for security reasons’ (in this instance for the sake of ‘public health’, a term that
recalls the Reign of Terror’s infamous ‘Committee of Public Safety’) there’s no limit to the
repression of individual freedoms. Control exercised through security cameras and, as is now being proposed,
through cellphones exceeds by far any form of control exercised under totalitarian regimes such as Fascism or Nazism.
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.
The epidemic has made clear that the state of exception, to which our governments have
actually accustomed us for quite some time, has become the normal condition. People are
so used to living in conditions of perpetual crisis, that they seem not to realise that their lives
have been reduced to a purely biological condition that has lost not only its political
dimension, but also that of what is simply human
. A society that exists in a perennial state
of emergency cannot be free. We live in a society that has sacrificed freedom for so-called
‘security reasons’ and has hence condemned itself to living in a perpetual state of fear and
insecurity.
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.
The first thing that the wave of panic which has paralysed the country showed,
was that our society believes in nothing more than bare life. It is now obvious that Italians
are ready to sacrifice practically everything—their life conditions, their social relationships,
their work, even their friendships, as well as their religious and political convictions—when
faced with the risk of getting sick (a risk that, for now at least, is statistically not even that
serious). Bare life, and the fear of losing it, is not something that unites people: rather, it
blinds and separates them.
Fellow human beings, as in the plague described by Manzoni,
are now seen only as potential anointers whom we must avoid at all cost, and from whom
we should maintain a distance of at least one metre.
New paradigm of biosecurity—a paradigm in the name of which all other needs must be
sacrificed. It is legitimate to ask if such a society can still define itself as human, or if the
loss of sensible relationships, of the face, of friendship, of love, can truly be compensated
for by an abstract and presumably absolutely fictitious health security.
I believe that just a single example clearly shows how deeply the biosecurity regime has
transformed all of our democratic political paradigms. In bourgeois democracy, every citizen
had a ‘right to health’. This right has now been transformed, without anyone noticing, into a
legal obligation to be healthy—an obligation that must be fulfilled at all costs.
We have seen
how high this cost is in the unprecedented measures to which citizens have had to subject
themselves.
We might say that people no longer believe in anything, except in a bare biological existence which should be preserved at any cost. But only tyranny, only the monstrous Leviathan with his drawn sword, can be built upon the fear of losing one’s life.
It is not only, and not really, the present but the future that concerns me. Just as wars have
bequeathed us a series of nefarious technologies, it is very likely that, after the health
emergency is over, governments will attempt to continue the experiments they couldn’t
previously complete
: universities will be closed to students, with classes only being
conducted online; we will no longer gather to have conversations about politics or culture;
and wherever possible digital devices will replace any contact—any contagion—between
human beings.
We can only venture hypotheses concerning the forms that government will assume in the
years to come, but what can be inferred from the current experiments is not reassuring.
Italy, as we witnessed during the years of terrorism, is a sort of political laboratory where
new technologies of governance are tested. It does not surprise me that Italy is at the moment spearheading the development of a technology of governance that, in the name of
public health, renders acceptable a set of life conditions which eliminate all possible political
activity, pure and simple.
This country is always on the verge of falling back into Fascism,
and there are many signs today that this is something more than a risk. Suffice to say that
the government has appointed a committee that has the power to decide which news is true
and which should be considered fake. As far as I myself am concerned, most major Italian
newspapers refuse to publish my opinions.
What we are now living through is more than just a staggering imposition on everybody’s
freedoms; it is also a massive campaign to falsify the truth.
Legitimate doubts arise concerning Italy: there was, in spreading panic and
isolating people in their homes, a decision to burden the citizenry with the grave
responsibility governments bear for having dismantled our national healthcare system, and,
later, for having made a series of equally serious mistakes
when confronting the epidemic in
Lombardy. As for the rest of the world, I believe that every state embraces different
modalities as it employs the pandemic data for its own ends, manipulating it to suit its
specific needs.
As for the pandemic, serious research has shown that it did not arrive unexpectedly. As
Patrick Zylberman’s book Tempêtes microbiennes (Gallimard, 2013) crucially documents,
the World Health Organisation suggested a scenario similar to the present one as early as
2005 (during the bird flu), and it furthermore proposed it to governments as a way of
ensuring citizens’ unconditional support!
Every time a value is ascertained, a non-value is, necessarily, established: the flipside of
protecting health is excluding and eliminating everything that can give rise to disease. We
should reflect carefully on the fact that the first case of legislation by means of which a state
programmatically assumed for itself the care of its citizens’ health was Nazi eugenics.
Soon
after his rise to power in July 1933, Hitler promulgated a law for the protection of the
German people from hereditary diseases. This led to the creation of special hereditary
health courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte) that decreed the forced sterilisation of 400,000
people. Less well known is that, long before Nazism, a eugenic politics was planned in the
United States—particularly in California—with robust funding from the Carnegie Institute
and the Rockefeller Foundation, and that Hitler explicitly referenced this model
. If health
becomes the object of a state politics transformed into biopolitics, then it ceases to concern itself first and foremost with the agency of each individual and becomes, instead, an obligation which must at any cost, no matter how high, be fulfilled.
If the powers that govern the world believed that they had to resort to measures and
apparatuses as extreme as biosecurity and the health terror—which they have established
everywhere and without any scruples (but which are now getting out of hand)—this is
because, as all the evidence suggests, they feared they had no other choice if they wanted
to survive.
 
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Thanks for sharing this Anthony.
By the way, there is at least another contemporary European philosopher openly challenging the official narrative : André Comte-Sponville...
 
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