The inevitable conclusion of Agamben’s critique of the state of exception is that
the task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally defined boundaries in order to then reaffirm the primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves ultimately grounded in it. From the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to return to the state of law.33
This position is very different from the liberal-democratic one as it does not call for the restoring of democratic “checks and balances” but rather for the very halting of the whole machine of the modern state. The way out from our contemporary predicament consists, for Agamben, in nothing less than the messianic overcoming of Western politics as we know it. In his interventions on the pandemic Agamben almost seems to deplore the inglorious end of the bourgeois democracies that he has built a career criticizing, but his current call for “new forms of resistance”34 must be soberly read (despite and against his current apocalyptic tones) in the context of his philosophical critique of the state of exception. What this resistance will consist in cannot be defined or described a priori, but if there is one thing that the 2020 pandemic has taught us, it is that this new political strategy cannot be reduced to an all-too-common and essentially anarcho-libertarian focus on individual freedoms (to which also Agamben’s project ultimately amounts35) but will have to be a positive collective project towards the common good.
CARLO SALZANI is Guest Scholar at the Messerli Research Institute of the University of Vienna, Austria. His recent publications include the volumes Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2020), co-edited with Felice Cimatti, and Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage (2018), co-edited with Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte
I don't think that there's enough billionaires on Steve's list. I didn't see any Blackrock or Rothschilds there (although I skimmed so may have missed) and Bill Gates is just a bagman for other billionaires. We should get him to list them, every single one of them.
Resistance
The inevitable conclusion of Agamben’s critique of the state of exception is that
the task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally defined boundaries in order to then reaffirm the primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves ultimately grounded in it. From the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to return to the state of law.33
This position is very different from the liberal-democratic one as it does not call for the restoring of democratic “checks and balances” but rather for the very halting of the whole machine of the modern state. The way out from our contemporary predicament consists, for Agamben, in nothing less than the messianic overcoming of Western politics as we know it. In his interventions on the pandemic Agamben almost seems to deplore the inglorious end of the bourgeois democracies that he has built a career criticizing, but his current call for “new forms of resistance”34 must be soberly read (despite and against his current apocalyptic tones) in the context of his philosophical critique of the state of exception. What this resistance will consist in cannot be defined or described a priori, but if there is one thing that the 2020 pandemic has taught us, it is that this new political strategy cannot be reduced to an all-too-common and essentially anarcho-libertarian focus on individual freedoms (to which also Agamben’s project ultimately amounts35) but will have to be a positive collective project towards the common good.
CARLO SALZANI is Guest Scholar at the Messerli Research Institute of the University of Vienna, Austria. His recent publications include the volumes Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2020), co-edited with Felice Cimatti, and Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage (2018), co-edited with Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte
I don't think that there's enough billionaires on Steve's list. I didn't see any Blackrock or Rothschilds there (although I skimmed so may have missed) and Bill Gates is just a bagman for other billionaires. We should get him to list them, every single one of them.