Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness. By Anastasia Berg
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?
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"
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."....
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Giorgio-Agamben-s/248306?key=z5yodZPXH1-Hi8hgwdp9auzw7CUOQcZmIRByPRADBdBpGgJ7ykajUJwq4UL2ppOpNHBTckJWeWFvbjhaSFVtX3FadTg4T0lYTXRpNWtkMXRMalF4ZWZ4bG5hcw
