Two factors can help explain such a disproportionate response.
Let us consider the serious limitations of freedom imposed by the executive decree:
- A prohibition against leaving the affected municipality or area for all people in that municipality or area.
- A prohibition against entering the affected municipality or area
- The suspension of all events or initiatives (regardless of whether they are related to culture, sport, religion, or entertainment), and a suspension of meetings in any private or public space, including enclosed spaces if they are open to the public.
- The suspension of educational services in kindergartens and schools at every level, including higher education and excluding only distance learning.
- The closure of museums and other cultural institutions as listed in article 101 of the Statute on cultural heritage and landscape, and in executive decree number 42 from 01/22/2004. All regulations on free access to those institutions are also suspended.
- The suspension of all kinds of educational travel, in Italy and abroad.
- The suspension of all publicly held exams and all activities of public offices, except essential services or public utility services.
- The enforcement of quarantine and active surveillance on individuals who had close contact with confirmed cases of infection.
Agamben's essay has provoked virulent responses. For example, writing in the Chronicle, Anastasia Berg claims it reveals "the dressing up of outdated jargon as a form of courageous resistance to unreflecting moral dogma." In his beautiful essay (which I quoted approvingly last week), Justin Smith writes, "Agamben is pushing a species of Trumpian doubt-mongering by claiming that the “disproportionate reaction” to the pandemic is nothing more than an assertion of authoritarian biopolitics. Honestly, at this point whoever’s left of the vanguard of continental philosophy should probably just start hawking men’s vitamin supplements on late-nite TV." Berg, too, treats Agamben "like a bemused Fox News anchor."
As regular readers know, I find thinking with Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Judith Butler especially useful complements to my analytical training in reflecting on the extended political present. I do so not because they are especially good pundits nor because I agree with them -- they would find my liberalism if not dangerous than ridiculous --, but because they help me discern beyond the limitations of my commitments. If my past blogging has not convinced you of the utility of this, cést la vie. By contrast, I have kept my distance from Agamben because I find his theological frameworks and obsession with Schmitt less fruitful. Even so, in reading the responses to Agamben, one wonders if Corona-virus isn't being treated as the opportunity to rid the world of certain kind of intellectual pathogens.* And part of me thinks 'good riddance, too.' But this digression is written from the perspective of the part that does not.
The first thing to notice is that Agamben relies on scientific authority. And he is wise enough to treat its position in conditional terms: "If this is the real situation." To put matters simply: Agamben was not so much irresponsible. So unless he was cherry-picking, he was an unlucky pundit relying on a mistaken epistemic authority. "The National Research Council (Cnr) is the largest public research institution in Italy." So, to assimilate him to Fox and late-nite TV is simply unfair. The collapse of the medical system in Lombardy was simply not foreseen the end of February.
As an aside, I don't mean to suggest one should never doubt respectable epistemic authority. As Eric Winsberg and I argue in the New Statesman about the present context, when the relevant application of the science is not quite sorted out -- say, due to lack of high quality data/evidence -- or when the moral and political trade-offs that are undertaken with the backing of authoritative science are not made transparent, it can be necessary to be critical of even the best science of the moment. By February, and a regular traveler, I was baffled by the lack of action by European authorities to test for and control the spread of the virus in the light of the news from Wuhan.
Second, as Berg admits, and Yuval Noah Harari points out in a wise essay in the Financial Times, policies that may well be justified in and by an emergency are often very hard to undo. So, there is nothing wrong with Agamben's instinct to warn against the actions of the Italian government (and others). Just this month the (2001) Patriot act was renewed, again, for 77-days.
Third, Agamben may well be right that the pandemic will be the "pretext" to pass a lot of legislation. But rather than being evidence of political dishonestly or a "growing tendency to rely on the state of exception" this is actually evidence of quite ordinary politics. Parliamentary politics is the art of what it is possible; and when people are afraid or attentive -- both the natural response to a pandemic -- a willingness to compromise and get things done is likely. A crisis creates openings to shift coalitions and lines of alignment. This is why ideas like basic income and debt jubilees have moved from the fringe to the center. What would be helpful is a means to distinguish new policies that foreseeable advance and entrench the politics of fear from those that do not.**
Now, one may think I am charging Agamben with a kind of confirmation bias. That the real problem with Agamben's approach is that he is in the grip of his own paradigm to see in every response confirmation of his claim that "once again manifest here is the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm." (Bold in original.) The confirmation bias is also visible Agamben's follow up piece: "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."
As Berg notes this is not so "obviously shown." One may understand people's responses "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." Even so, Berg misses Agamben's point. The emphasis is not on bare life itself, but on the claim that "our society no longer believes in anything." Lurking in Agamben's essays is a Nietzschean claim about nihilism.+
If art, philosophy, culture, and even freedom seem of negligible importance in pandemic times than our attachment to them may seem to a certain mind a mere luxury. If our authentic selves are revealed in time of scarcity and danger, and if, then, we show little concern to such higher things we are revealed as puny, cowardly animals. To such a mind the Hobbesian response to this, that commodious and generous living is only possible once the sovereign creates security, begs the question. Agamben's indictment is that in a crisis we reveal ourselves as last men all too willing to submit to Leviathan.
One can feel the pull of both Hobbes and Nietzsche, and still note that this is a false dilemma in the moment. During the last few weeks I am noticing a heightened need and hunger for the arts and philosophy. Wonderful artistic responses have circulated to the oddly shared experience of confinement in social media (see here for my personal favorite). I have participated in the poem exchange started by anonymous. And undoubtedly somewhere a religion is starting that provides a re-evaluation of values. That is to say, we can outwardly submit to authority, political and scientific, to make at least short-term coordination possible. While inwardly and simultaneously embrace the arts, philosophy, solidarity, and even the critical spirit of freedom.
* Berg and Smith are both associated with The Point Magazine.
**My own view is that with a few interesting exceptions, EU states and institutions have preserved ordinary legality (but there is always Viktor Orbán as contrary evidence). So,I think it would be wiser for him to show more doubt about such matters. See Jens van t Klooster's two posts (here and here) on the ECB for an interesting case study.
+Berg's response -- "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,"" -- misses that entirely. To treat this as the normality worth having is part of Agamben's criticism.
There's also an elementary misunderstanding of the basic maths. The figures quoted are not in dispute - there is general agreement that the virus causes mild to non existent symptoms in a lot of people, symptoms characteristic of a severe flu in another part and very severe symptoms requiring hospitalisation in about 5% of all cases, with a fatality rate among all cases of between 0.4% and 1.6% in all cases (the increasing evidence is that it's a bout 0.8%). What simply does not follow from that is that there's nothing to worry about. The big problem is the rapidity of spread, which mens that with those figures you very quickly get to a situation where the health services collapse. There is a reasonable argument about how best to prevent that and there's strong arguments against both of the two strategies (mild social distancing and herd immunity as in Sweden, the Netherlands and Japan, and tight lockdown). What the policy responses actually show for me is the risk aversion of both publics and governments once the scale of the problem became clear.
Posted by: Steve | 03/30/2020 at 05:45 PM
Third, Agamben may well be right that the pandemic will be the "pretext" to pass a lot of legislation. But rather than being evidence of political dishonestly or a "growing tendency to rely on the state of exception" this is actually evidence of quite ordinary politics. Parliamentary politics is the art of what it is possible; and when people are afraid or attentive -- both the natural response to a pandemic -- a willingness to compromise and get things done is likely. A crisis creates openings to shift coalitions and lines of alignment.
This is exactly right, but it also helps pinpoint what's most frustrating about Agamben's piece, which is not its wrongness but its utter banality. I'm not convinced "bare life" and "states of exception" are entirely useless conceptual construct for thinking about politics, but if I'd only read this essay, I might be.
Posted by: David Watkins | 03/30/2020 at 05:47 PM
The follow-up piece should have started with something along the lines of "The scientific advice on which I relied in February has sadly proved to be wrong, and the measures I criticised then have turned out to be inadequate first steps.Here's how this changes my analysis". The fact that it doesn't (unless I've missed something) is pretty damning
Posted by: John Quiggin | 03/31/2020 at 12:28 AM