The gates of the city are closed and people are confined in their homes, with the doors of each house being barred from the outside by representatives of the government. That does not mean, however, that his critique should not be taken very seriously.Īs described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, measures to be taken in the case of an epidemic in the French town of Vincennes in the seventeenth century include what is currently known as a ‘full lockdown’, Chinese style. Evidently, Agamben has been proven wrong in his appraisal of the spread of the virus as an invented epidemic, nothing to be actually worried about from a public health perspective. Some commentators have even called to ‘ defend society from Giorgio Agamben ’, dismissing his statements as the dangerous ‘ramblings of a 77-year old man’ who should be de-platformed as soon as possible. Understandably, Agamben’s assessment of the current crisis has met with overwhelming criticism. With terrorism exhausted as a legitimation for exceptional measures, the ‘ invention of an epidemic ’ would serve as an ideal pretext for scaling up such measures almost beyond limitation. The governmental reaction to the outbreak would be just another example of the tendency to use the state of exception as a normal paradigm for government. According to Agamben, Covid-19 is not too different from the normal flus that affect us every year.
In some recent blog posts, Italian star philosopher Giorgio Agamben frames the governmental response to the outbreak of the coronavirus in Italy and elsewhere as ‘ frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded’. Posted on 31 March, 2020 Biopolitics and the Coronavirus: in Defence of Giorgio Agamben Lukas van den Berge
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