Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness
The Italian philosopher’s interventions are symptomatic of theory’s collapse into paranoia.
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 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.
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 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 we will have eliminated in the process anything that gives life 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 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.
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 self-harm. 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. 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"? 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.
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