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<h1 class="css-19v093x">Giorgio Agamben: “Clarifications”</h1>
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<div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-1q5ec3n">Adam Kotsko</span></div>
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<p>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 <a
href="https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia">here</a>
for the original Italian piece and <a
href="http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/">here</a>
for an English translation).</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 18-03-2020 14:04, Antid Oto wrote:<br>
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<h1 class="css-19v093x">Giorgio Agamben, “The state of exception
provoked by an unmotivated emergency”</h1>
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<p><em>This is a translation of an article that first
appeared as <a rel="noopener"
href="https://ilmanifesto.it/lo-stato-deccezione-provocato-da-unemergenza-immotivata/?fbclid=IwAR17ciygOzmIpolNxACx8WMoRzrPpePxJMN0Tns7ni69ZfwO_QzmHYeYXVk%5C"
moz-do-not-send="true">“Lo stato d’eccezione
provocato da un’emergenza immotivata,”</a> in</em>
il manifesto<em></em></p>
<p>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 <a rel="noopener"
href="https://www.cnr.it/it/nota-stampa/n-9233/coronavirus-rischio-basso-capire-condizioni-vittime"
moz-do-not-send="true">declaration of the Italian
National Research Council</a> (NRC), according to
which “there is no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>Two factors can help explain such a disproportionate
response.</p>
<p>First and foremost, what is once again manifest here
is the growing tendency to use <strong>the state of
exception as a normal governing paradigm</strong>.
The executive decree (<em>decreto legge</em>),
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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Let us consider the serious limitations of freedom
imposed by the executive decree:</p>
<ol>
<li>A prohibition against leaving the affected
municipality or area for all people in that
municipality or area.</li>
<li>A prohibition against entering the affected
municipality or area</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>The suspension of educational services in
kindergartens and schools at every level, including
higher education and excluding only distance
learning.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>The suspension of all kinds of educational travel,
in Italy and abroad.</li>
<li>The suspension of all publicly held exams and all
activities of public offices, except essential
services or public utility services.</li>
<li>The enforcement of quarantine and active
surveillance on individuals who had close contact
with confirmed cases of infection.
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>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 <strong>states of collective panic</strong>,
for which the epidemic once again offers the ideal
pretext.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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