Opinion <https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion>
Meet the Philosopher Who Is Trying to Explain the Pandemic
Giorgio Agamben criticizes the “techno-medical despotism” of quarantines
and closings.
Christopher Caldwell
ByChristopher Caldwell
Mr. Caldwell is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
Immigration, Islam and the West.”
* NY Times, Aug. 21, 2020
*
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Giorgio Agamben’s position on the coronavirus has cost him
considerable support among members of the Italian intellectual
establishment.
Giorgio Agamben’s position on the coronavirus has cost him considerable
support among members of the Italian intellectual
establishment.Credit...Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images
Stumping for regional candidates in Tuscany this month, Italy’s former
interior minister Matteo Salvini waved around a surgical mask — and
pointedly did not wear it. Covid-19 has taken more than 35,000 lives
since it struck Italy in January. But now the daily death toll is
typically in single digits, and Mr. Salvini, the leader of the
anti-immigration League party, wants to put the country back to work.
“Italians are being held hostage, kept at a distance, masked,” he
hollered, “and meanwhile they let thousands of lowlifes land their boats
and do what they want, go where they want, spit, infect. Enough is enough!”
People cheered. But half of them kept their masks on.
This is a common pattern in the Western countries (and American states)
where Covid-19 fatalities are dwindling. The arguments for freedom may
be strong — but they are put awfully crudely. The arguments for
discipline and prevention may often be resented — but they have a lot of
scientific authority behind them, and they carry the day. Better safe
than sorry. Late last month, Italy’s parliament voted to extend the
government’s state of emergency until Oct. 15.
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. This was a favorite idea of the
French philosopher Michel Foucault, who used it to explain how experts
had expanded definitions of criminality and sexual deviancy. One of
Italy’s most celebrated thinkers, Giorgio Agamben, has recently applied
similar insights to the coronavirus, at the risk of turning himself into
a national pariah.
In late February, Mr. Agamben began using the website of his publisher,
Quodlibet, to criticize the “techno-medical despotism” that the Italian
government was putting in place through quarantines and closings. Mr.
Agamben, 78, is a philosopher of language, art and meaning. Since 1995,
he has focused on what he calls the “archaeology” of Western political
institutions, devoting a monumental nine-volume work, “Homo Sacer,” to
excavating their hidden logic. Some of his earlier work was translated
by Michael Hardt, the Duke professor and co-author of the radical campus
classic “Empire/.”/
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The part of the Italian intellectual establishment that calls itself
“radical” has been Mr. Agamben’s milieu for half a century. His position
on the coronavirus has cost him its support. Paolo Flores d’Arcais, the
influential editor of the bimonthly MicroMega, accused Mr. Agamben of
“ranting.” The newspapers La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera and Il
Foglio all called him a/negazionista/regarding the coronavirus, using a
word generally reserved for those who deny the Holocaust happened. Just
as unexpected as these repudiations was the sudden receptivity to Mr.
Agamben’s recondite philosophy in the pages of La Verità and Il
Giornale, newspapers more often sympathetic to Mr. Salvini’s League.
Last month, Quodlibet published Mr. Agamben’s collected posts in an
expanded volume called “Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics.”
(That’s a rough translation; the book does not yet exist in English.) In
hindsight, Mr. Agamben missed a few things in the first days of the
coronavirus. For instance, he relayed the National Research Council’s
description of Covid-19 as a kind of influenza — true enough in most
cases, but far from the whole story. Today, however, with the Italian
crisis receding, and with a measure of calm restored to the public
discussion, we can see his book for what it is: not a work of scientific
crankery or crackpot policymaking but an on-the-spot study of the link
between power and knowledge.
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Mr. Agamben’s name may ring a bell for some Americans. He was the
professor who in 2004, at the height of the “war on terror,” was so
alarmed by the new U.S. fingerprinting requirements for foreign visitors
that he gave up a post at New York University rather than submit to
them. He warned that such data collection was only passing itself off as
an emergency measure; it would inevitably become a normal part of
peacetime life.
His argument about the coronavirus runs along similar lines: 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. Many European governments,
including Italy’s, have developed national contact tracing apps that
allow them to track their citizens using cellphones.
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Wars have bequeathed to peacetime a “series of fateful technologies,”
Mr. Agamben reminds us, from barbed wire to nuclear power plants. Such
innovations tend to be ones that elites were already//agitating for, or
that align with their interests. Epidemics, he suggests, are no
different. He believes that the fateful inheritance of the coronavirus
will be social distancing. He is puzzled by the term, “which appeared
simultaneously around the world as if it had been prepared in advance.”
The expression, he notes, “is not ‘physical’ or ‘personal’ distancing,
as would be normal if we were describing a medical measure, but ‘social’
distancing.”
ImageNurses practiced social distancing while protesting for better
working conditions following the coronavirus pandemic in Rome’s
Piazza del Popolo square, in June.
Nurses practiced social distancing while protesting for better working
conditions following the coronavirus pandemic in Rome’s Piazza del
Popolo square, in June.Credit...Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press
His point is that social distancing is at least as much a political
measure as a public health one, realized so easily because it has been
pushed for by powerful forces. Some are straightforward vested
interests. Mr. Agamben notes (without naming him) that the former
Vodafone chief executive Vittorio Colao, an evangelist for the digitized
economy, was put in charge of Italy’s initial transition out of
lockdown. Social distancing, Mr. Agamben believes, has also provided
Italy’s politicians with a way of hindering spontaneous political
organization and stifling the robust intellectual dissent that
universities foster.
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.”
In fact, “the threshold that separates humanity from barbarism has been
crossed,” Mr. Agamben continues, and the proof is in Italians’ treatment
of their dead. “How could we have accepted, in the name of a/risk/that
we couldn’t even quantify, not only that the people who are dear to us,
and human beings more generally, should have to die alone but also — and
this is something that had never happened before in all of history from
Antigone to today — that their corpses should be burned without a funeral?”
Mr. Agamben has always been fascinated by such instances of common
customs or historic institutions getting emptied out of their long-held
meanings. In books less punchy and direct than the present one, he has
described this process with the word/inoperosità/.//It means “idleness,”
but idleness of a kind that can generate new systems of belief and new
dangers. Whatever it is, it has made itself felt not just in Italy but
in all Western societies in recent months, perhaps in the United States
most of all.
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