On similar grounds, Tim Christiaens – a researcher from KU Leuven – even argued that ‘society must be defended from Agamben’ as he has now turned out to be a ‘coronavirus denialist’ who dangerously underestimates the threat the virus poses. Whereas the privileged are most likely to come out of the crisis relatively unscathed, those already living under precarious circumstances will probably receive the hardest blows, especially if the government forsakes to take active steps to reduce new infections.
Such easy Foucauldian criticism, as Žižek astutely remarks, will not make the reality of the threat go away. As Žižek has it, Agamben’s reaction is ‘the extreme form of a widespread Leftist stance’ of dismissing any form of monitoring as repressive surveillance and any form of active governance as a clear proof of hidden totalitarianism’. 7 x Slavoj Žižek, ‘Monitor and Punish? Yes, Please’, 16 March 2020, (last accessed 28 March 2020). ‘Monitor and punish? Yes, please’, Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek contends in a recent reply.
Understandably, Agamben’s defiance of emergency measures and his assessment of Covid-19 as an ‘invented epidemic’ sparked fierce reactions. 6 x Giorgio Agamben, L’invenzione di un’epidemia, 26 February 2020, (accessed 28 March 2020) see also for an English translation (last accessed 28 March 2020). Those decrees would amount to a response that is completely disproportionate with regard to an illness that is ‘not too different from the normal flus that affect us every year’. In a weblog dating from 26 February 2020, with the number of confirmed corona cases in northern Italy quickly rising, Agamben defies some of the early decrees issued by the government as ‘frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded’. With terrorism exhausted as a legitimation for exceptional measures, the ‘invention of an epidemic’ would now serve as an ideal pretext for scaling up such measures almost beyond limitation. In Agamben’s view, the current response to the outbreak of the coronavirus in western countries is just another example of this. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1-31. 5 x Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, tr. In times of emergency, however, modern state power would tend to show its true face, resorting to the ‘state of exception’ in which the bare life of citizens is subject to unmediated power. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 69 99. 4 x Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. In related fashion, Giorgio Agamben has diagnosed modern policies and practices of state control over the bodies of citizens as the ‘biopolitical paradigm of the modern’, a ‘concealed matrix’ of contemporary political life that usually hides behind the civilized mask of liberal democracy. For a handsome overview of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics more in general, see Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 33-52. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1-28, with specific regard to the management of epidemics at 24-26. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, ed. 3 x See, e.g., Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. The haunting memory of epidemics and the chaos associated with it would thus have paved the way for ‘biopolitics’ as a system of constant surveillance and discipline in which governmental control pertains directly to the physical existence of citizens. 2 x Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 197-198. As Foucault has it, ‘the plague as a form, both real and imaginary, of disorder’ finally served to legitimate ‘the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life’. Foucault’s account of these measures serves as an overture to his description of panopticism as a modern form of government. The streets and other public spaces are occupied by a well-ordered militia of syndics and sentinels serving as the population’s meticulous guards and inspectors. The gates of the city are closed and people are confined in their own houses, with the doors of each house being barred from the outside by representatives of the government. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 195-200.
1 x Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr.
ET AFFECTUS ENGLISH TRANSLATION FULL
As 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.
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