[D66] Giorgio Agamben: “The state of exception provoked by an unmotivated emergency”

[Antid Oto]

  Giorgio Agamben: “Clarifications”

By
Adam Kotsko
itself.blog
3 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fitself.blog%2F2020%2F03%2F17%2Fgiorgio-agamben-clarifications%2F>

Translator’s Note: Giorgio Agamben asked me to translate this brief 
essay, which serves as an indirect response to the controversy 
surrounding his article about the response to coronavirus in Italy (see 
here 
<https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia> 
for the original Italian piece and here 
<http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/> for 
an English translation).

Fear is a poor advisor, but it causes many things to appear that one 
pretended not to see. The problem is not to give opinions on the gravity 
of the disease, but to ask about the ethical and political consequences 
of the epidemic. 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. It is obvious that Italians are 
disposed to sacrifice practically everything — the normal conditions of 
life, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections, and 
religious and political convictions — to the danger of getting sick. 
Bare life — and the danger of losing it — is not something that unites 
people, but blinds and separates them. Other human beings, as in the 
plague described in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel, are now seen solely as 
possible spreaders of the plague whom one must avoid at all costs and 
from whom one needs to keep oneself at a distance of at least a meter. 
The dead — our dead — do not have a right to a funeral and it is not 
clear what will happen to the bodies of our loved ones. Our neighbor has 
been cancelled and it is curious that churches remain silent on the 
subject. What do human relationships become in a country that habituates 
itself to live in this way for who knows how long? And what is a society 
that has no value other than survival?

The other thing, no less disquieting that the first, that the epidemic 
has caused to appear with clarity is that the state of exception, to 
which governments have habituated us for some time, has truly become the 
normal condition. 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. People have 
been so habituated to live in conditions of perennial crisis and 
perennial emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their life has 
been reduced to a purely biological condition and has not only every 
social and political dimension, but also human and affective. A society 
that lives in a perennial state of emergency cannot be a free society. 
We in fact live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called 
“reasons of security” and has therefore condemned itself to live in a 
perennial state of fear and insecurity.

It is not surprising that for the virus one speaks of war. The emergency 
measures obligate us in fact to life in conditions of curfew. But a war 
with an invisible enemy that can lurk in every other person is the most 
absurd of wars. It is, in reality, a civil war. The enemy is not 
outside, it is within us.

What is worrisome is not so much or not only the present, but what comes 
after. 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.

On 18-03-2020 14:04, Antid Oto wrote:
>
>
>   Giorgio Agamben, “The state of exception provoked by an unmotivated
>   emergency”
>
> By
> positionswebsite.org
> 3 min
> View Original 
> <https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpositionswebsite.org%2Fgiorgio-agamben-the-state-of-exception-provoked-by-an-unmotivated-emergency%2F>
>
> /This is a translation of an article that first appeared as “Lo stato 
> d’eccezione provocato da un’emergenza immotivata,” 
> <https://ilmanifesto.it/lo-stato-deccezione-provocato-da-unemergenza-immotivata/?fbclid=IwAR17ciygOzmIpolNxACx8WMoRzrPpePxJMN0Tns7ni69ZfwO_QzmHYeYXVk%5C> 
> in/ il manifesto//
>
> In order to make sense of the frantic, irrational, and absolutely 
> unwarranted emergency measures adopted for a supposed epidemic of 
> coronavirus, we must begin from the declaration of the Italian 
> National Research Council 
> <https://www.cnr.it/it/nota-stampa/n-9233/coronavirus-rischio-basso-capire-condizioni-vittime> 
> (NRC), according to which “there is no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy.”
>
> It continues: in any case “the infection, according to the 
> epidemiological data available as of today and based on tens of 
> thousands of cases, causes light/moderate symptoms (a variant of flu) 
> in 80-90% of cases. In 10-15%, there is a chance of pneumonia, but 
> which also has a benign outcome in the large majority of cases. We 
> estimate that only 4% of patients require intensive therapy.”
>
> If this is the real situation, why do the media and the authorities do 
> their utmost to create a climate of panic, thus provoking a true state 
> of exception, with severe limitations on movement and the suspension 
> of daily life and work activities for entire regions?
>
> Two factors can help explain such a disproportionate response.
>
> First and foremost, what is once again manifest here is the growing 
> tendency to use *the state of exception as a normal governing 
> paradigm*. The executive decree (/decreto legge/), approved by the 
> government “for reasons of hygiene and public safety,” produces a real 
> militarization “of those municipalities and areas in which there is at 
> least one person who tests positive and for whom the source of the 
> infection is unknown, or in which there is a least one case that is 
> not connected to a person who recently traveled from an area affected 
> by the contagion.”
>
> Such a vague and indeterminate formula will allow [the government] to 
> rapidly extend the state of exception to all regions, as it is 
> practically impossible that other cases will not appear elsewhere.
>
> Let us consider the serious limitations of freedom imposed by the 
> executive decree:
>
>  1. A prohibition against leaving the affected municipality or area
>     for all people in that municipality or area.
>  2. A prohibition against entering the affected municipality or area
>  3. 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.
>  4. The suspension of educational services in kindergartens and
>     schools at every level, including higher education and excluding
>     only distance learning.
>  5. 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.
>  6. The suspension of all kinds of educational travel, in Italy and
>     abroad.
>  7. The suspension of all publicly held exams and all activities of
>     public offices, except essential services or public utility services.
>  8. The enforcement of quarantine and active surveillance on
>     individuals who had close contact with confirmed cases of infection.
>
>     It is blatantly evident that these restrictions are
>     disproportionate to the threat from what is, according to the NRC,
>     a normal flu, not much different from those that affect us every year.
>
>     We might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a justification
>     for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer
>     the ideal pretext for broadening such measures beyond any limitation.
>
> The other factor, no less disquieting, is the state of fear, which in 
> recent years has diffused into individual consciousnesses and which 
> translates into a real need for *states of collective panic*, for 
> which the epidemic once again offers the ideal pretext.
>
> Therefore, in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom 
> imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for safety, 
> which has been created by the same governments who now intervene to 
> satisfy it.
>
>
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