Several times in my previous interventions I have evoked the figure of bare life. In fact, it seems to me that the epidemic shows beyond any possible doubt that humanity no longer believes in anything except in the bare existence to be preserved as such at any price. The Christian religion with its works of love and mercy and with its faith to the point of martyrdom, political ideology with its unconditional solidarity, even trust in work and money seem to take second place as soon as bare life it is threatened, albeit in the form of a risk whose statistical entity is fleeting and deliberately indeterminate.
The time has come to clarify the meaning and origin of this concept. For this it is necessary to remember that the human is not something that can be defined once and for all. Rather, it is the place of an incessantly updated historical decision, which each time fixes the boundary that separates man from animal, what is human in man from what is not human in him and outside of him. When Linnaeus searches for a characteristic note for his classifications that separates man from primates, he must confess that he does not know it and ends up putting next to the generic name homo only the old philosophical adage: nosce te ipsum , know yourself. This is the meaning of the term sapiens that Linnaeus will add in the tenth edition of hisSystem of nature : man is the animal who must recognize himself as human in order to be so and for this reason he must divide - decide - the human from what is not.
The device through which this decision takes place historically can be called an anthropological machine. The machine works by excluding animal life from man and producing the human through this exclusion. But in order for the machine to work, exclusion must also be an inclusion, that between the two poles - the animal and the human - there is an articulation and a threshold that together divides and joins them. This articulation is bare life, that is, a life that is neither properly animal nor truly human, but in which the decision between the human and the non-human takes place each time. This threshold, which necessarily passes inside man, separating biological from social life in him, is an abstraction and a virtuality,homo sacer , that anyone can kill without committing a crime, in the ancient world; the enfant-sauvage , the wolf-man and the homo alalus as the missing link between the monkey and the man between the Enlightenment and the century. XIX; the citizen in the state of exception, the Jew in the Lager, the overcomatous in the resuscitation room and the body preserved for the removal of organs in the century. XX.
What is the figure of bare life that is in question today in the management of the pandemic? It is not so much the patient who is isolated and treated as a patient has never been treated in the history of medicine; rather, it is the infected or - as it is defined with a contradictory formula - the asymptomatic patient, that is, something that every man is virtually, even without knowing it. In question is not so much health, but rather a life that is neither healthy nor sick, which, as such, as potentially pathogenic, can be deprived of its freedoms and subjected to prohibitions and controls of all kinds. All men are, in this sense, virtually asymptomatic sufferers. The only identity of this life fluctuating between disease and health is to be the recipient of the swab and vaccine, which, like the baptism of a new religion, they define the inverted figure of what was once called citizenship. Baptism is no longer indelible, but necessarily provisional and renewable, because the new citizen, who must always show the certificate, no longer has inalienable and undecidable rights, but only obligations that must be incessantly decided and updated.
If you are looking for a beautiful, flexible space to power out work for a day, or a new longterm HQ for your startup, Trellis has 24/7 options for private offices, dedicated desks, and open seating.
To keep you and the community safe, Trellis has over 30 health measures in place, including daily Health Check monitoring and touchless temperature taking, nanocrystal self-sanitizing wraps on high-touch surfaces, extensive air filtration, and touchless entry and transactions.
In 7th grade I had read Brave New World for the second time. I then read Brave New World Revisited. I probably was more influenced between that moment and age 30 by Huxley than Orwell. Now I am influenced by Agamben.
Medicine as a religion
That science has become the religion of our time, what men think they believe, has long been evident. In the modern West, three great belief systems have coexisted and to some extent still coexist: Christianity, capitalism and science. In the history of modernity, these three "religions" have necessarily crossed each other several times, entering into conflict from time to time and then reconciling in various ways, until they progressively reach a sort of peaceful, articulated coexistence, if not a real collaboration. in the name of common interest.
The new fact is that between science and the other two religions an underground and relentless conflict has reignited without us realizing it, the victorious results of which for science are today before our eyes and determine in an unprecedented way all aspects of our existence. This conflict does not concern, as it was in the past, theory and general principles, but, so to speak, worship practice. Science, in fact, like every religion, knows different forms and levels through which it organizes and orders its own structure: the elaboration of a subtle and rigorous dogmatic corresponds in practice to an extremely broad and capillary sphere of worship that coincides with what we call technology.
It is not surprising that the protagonist of this new religious war is that part of science where dogmatics is less rigorous and the pragmatic aspect stronger: medicine, whose immediate object is the living body of human beings. Let us try to establish the essential characteristics of this victorious faith with which we will have to deal in increasing measure.
1) The first feature is that medicine, like capitalism, does not need any special dogmatics, but merely borrows its fundamental concepts from biology. Unlike biology, however, it articulates these concepts in a Gnostic-Manichean sense, that is, according to an exasperated dualistic opposition. There is a god or an evil principle, the disease, in fact, whose specific agents are bacteria and viruses, and a god or a beneficial principle, which is not health, but healing, whose cultic agents are doctors and therapy. As in any Gnostic faith, the two principles are clearly separated, but in practice they can become contaminated and the beneficial principle and the doctor who represents it can be wrong and unwittingly collaborate with their enemy, without this in any way invalidating the reality of dualism and the need for the cult through which the beneficial principle fights its battle. And it is significant that the theologians who must establish its strategy are the representatives of a science, virology, which has no place of its own, but is situated on the border between biology and medicine.
2) If this cultic practice was up to now, like every liturgy, episodic and limited in time, the unexpected phenomenon we are witnessing is that it has become permanent and all-pervasive. It is no longer a question of taking medicines or undergoing a medical examination or surgery when necessary: the whole life of human beings must become the place of an uninterrupted cultic celebration at every moment. The enemy, the virus, is always present and must be fought incessantly and without possible respite. The Christian religion also knew similar totalitarian tendencies, but they concerned only a few individuals - monks in particular - who chose to place their entire existence under the banner of "pray without ceasing". Medicine as a religion takes up this Pauline precept and, at the same time,
3) The practice of worship is no longer free and voluntary, exposed only to sanctions of a spiritual nature, but must be made mandatory by law. The collusion between religion and profane power is certainly not a new fact; It is entirely new, however, that it no longer concerns the profession of dogmas, as was the case with heresies, but exclusively the celebration of worship. The profane power must ensure that the liturgy of the medical religion, which now coincides with the whole of life, is duly observed in fact. That we are dealing here with a cultic practice and not a rational scientific need is immediately evident. By far the most frequent cause of mortality in our country are cardio-vascular diseases and it is known that these could decrease if you practice a healthier way of life and if you stick to a particular diet. But it had never occurred to any doctor that this form of life and diet, which they recommended to patients, would become the subject of a legal regulation, which decreedex lege what to eat and how to live, transforming the whole existence into a health obligation. Precisely this has been done and, at least for now, people have accepted as if it were obvious to give up their freedom of movement, work, friendships, loves, social relations, their religious and political beliefs.
Here we measure how the two other religions of the West, the religion of Christ and the religion of money, have given the primacy, apparently without a fight, to medicine and science. The Church has purely and simply denied her principles, forgetting that the saint whose name the current pontiff has taken embraced lepers, that one of the works of mercy was to visit the sick, that the sacraments can only be administered in presence . Capitalism for his part, albeit with some protest, has accepted productivity losses that he had never dared to take into account, probably hoping to later find an agreement with the new religion, which on this point seems willing to compromise.
4) The medical religion has unreservedly collected from Christianity the eschatological instance that it had dropped. Capitalism, by secularizing the theological paradigm of salvation, had already eliminated the idea of an end of time, replacing it with a state of permanent crisis, without redemption or end. Krisis is originally a medical concept, which designated in the Hippocratic corpus the moment when the doctor decided whether the patient would survive the disease. Theologians have taken up the term to indicate the Final Judgment which takes place on the last day. If we look at the state of exception we are experiencing, we would say that the medical religion combines the perpetual crisis of capitalism with the Christian idea of an ultimate time, of an eschaton .in which the extreme decision is always in progress and the end is both precipitated and delayed, in the incessant attempt to be able to govern it, without, however, ever resolving it once and for all. It is the religion of a world that feels at the end and yet is unable, like the Hippocratic physician, to decide whether it will survive or die.
5) Like capitalism and unlike Christianity, the medical religion does not offer prospects of salvation and redemption. On the contrary, the healing he aims at can only be temporary, since the evil God, the virus, cannot be eliminated once and for all, on the contrary it changes continuously and always takes on new forms, presumably more risky. The epidemic, as the etymology of the term suggests ( demos is in Greek the people as a political body and polemos epidemiosin Homer the name of the civil war) is first of all a political concept, which is preparing to become the new terrain of world politics - or non-politics -. Indeed, it is possible that the epidemic we are experiencing is the realization of the world civil war which, according to the most attentive political scientists, has taken the place of the traditional world wars. All nations and all peoples are now permanently at war with themselves, because the invisible and elusive enemy with which they are struggling is within us.
As has happened several times throughout history, philosophers will again have to come into conflict with religion, which is no longer Christianity, but science or that part of it that has taken the form of a religion. I do not know if the fires will be lit again and books will be put on the index, but certainly the thought of those who continue to seek the truth and reject the dominant lie will be, as is already happening before our eyes, excluded and accused of spreading false news (news, not ideas, since news is more important than reality!). As in all moments of emergency, real or simulated, the ignorant will again be seen slandering philosophers and scoundrels trying to profit from the disasters they themselves have caused. All this has already happened and will continue to happen,
Several times in my previous interventions I have evoked the figure of bare life. In fact, it seems to me that the epidemic shows beyond any possible doubt that humanity no longer believes in anything except in the bare existence to be preserved as such at any price. The Christian religion with its works of love and mercy and with its faith to the point of martyrdom, political ideology with its unconditional solidarity, even trust in work and money seem to take second place as soon as bare life it is threatened, albeit in the form of a risk whose statistical entity is fleeting and deliberately indeterminate.
The time has come to clarify the meaning and origin of this concept. For this it is necessary to remember that the human is not something that can be defined once and for all. Rather, it is the place of an incessantly updated historical decision, which each time fixes the boundary that separates man from animal, what is human in man from what is not human in him and outside of him. When Linnaeus searches for a characteristic note for his classifications that separates man from primates, he must confess that he does not know it and ends up putting next to the generic name homo only the old philosophical adage: nosce te ipsum , know yourself. This is the meaning of the term sapiens that Linnaeus will add in the tenth edition of hisSystem of nature : man is the animal who must recognize himself as human in order to be so and for this reason he must divide - decide - the human from what is not.
The device through which this decision takes place historically can be called an anthropological machine. The machine works by excluding animal life from man and producing the human through this exclusion. But in order for the machine to work, exclusion must also be an inclusion, that between the two poles - the animal and the human - there is an articulation and a threshold that together divides and joins them. This articulation is bare life, that is, a life that is neither properly animal nor truly human, but in which the decision between the human and the non-human takes place each time. This threshold, which necessarily passes inside man, separating biological from social life in him, is an abstraction and a virtuality,homo sacer , that anyone can kill without committing a crime, in the ancient world; the enfant-sauvage , the wolf-man and the homo alalus as the missing link between the monkey and the man between the Enlightenment and the century. XIX; the citizen in the state of exception, the Jew in the Lager, the overcomatous in the resuscitation room and the body preserved for the removal of organs in the century. XX.
What is the figure of bare life that is in question today in the management of the pandemic? It is not so much the patient who is isolated and treated as a patient has never been treated in the history of medicine; rather, it is the infected or - as it is defined with a contradictory formula - the asymptomatic patient, that is, something that every man is virtually, even without knowing it. In question is not so much health, but rather a life that is neither healthy nor sick, which, as such, as potentially pathogenic, can be deprived of its freedoms and subjected to prohibitions and controls of all kinds. All men are, in this sense, virtually asymptomatic sufferers. The only identity of this life fluctuating between disease and health is to be the recipient of the swab and vaccine, which, like the baptism of a new religion, they define the inverted figure of what was once called citizenship. Baptism is no longer indelible, but necessarily provisional and renewable, because the new citizen, who must always show the certificate, no longer has inalienable and undecidable rights, but only obligations that must be incessantly decided and updated.
April 16, 2021
Giorgio Agamben
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One more example of the insanity:
More MADNESS
If you are looking for a beautiful, flexible space to power out work for a day, or a new longterm HQ for your startup, Trellis has 24/7 options for private offices, dedicated desks, and open seating.
To keep you and the community safe, Trellis has over 30 health measures in place, including daily Health Check monitoring and touchless temperature taking, nanocrystal self-sanitizing wraps on high-touch surfaces, extensive air filtration, and touchless entry and transactions.
In 7th grade I had read Brave New World for the second time. I then read Brave New World Revisited. I probably was more influenced between that moment and age 30 by Huxley than Orwell. Now I am influenced by Agamben.
Medicine as a religion
That science has become the religion of our time, what men think they believe, has long been evident. In the modern West, three great belief systems have coexisted and to some extent still coexist: Christianity, capitalism and science. In the history of modernity, these three "religions" have necessarily crossed each other several times, entering into conflict from time to time and then reconciling in various ways, until they progressively reach a sort of peaceful, articulated coexistence, if not a real collaboration. in the name of common interest.
The new fact is that between science and the other two religions an underground and relentless conflict has reignited without us realizing it, the victorious results of which for science are today before our eyes and determine in an unprecedented way all aspects of our existence. This conflict does not concern, as it was in the past, theory and general principles, but, so to speak, worship practice. Science, in fact, like every religion, knows different forms and levels through which it organizes and orders its own structure: the elaboration of a subtle and rigorous dogmatic corresponds in practice to an extremely broad and capillary sphere of worship that coincides with what we call technology.
It is not surprising that the protagonist of this new religious war is that part of science where dogmatics is less rigorous and the pragmatic aspect stronger: medicine, whose immediate object is the living body of human beings. Let us try to establish the essential characteristics of this victorious faith with which we will have to deal in increasing measure.
1) The first feature is that medicine, like capitalism, does not need any special dogmatics, but merely borrows its fundamental concepts from biology. Unlike biology, however, it articulates these concepts in a Gnostic-Manichean sense, that is, according to an exasperated dualistic opposition. There is a god or an evil principle, the disease, in fact, whose specific agents are bacteria and viruses, and a god or a beneficial principle, which is not health, but healing, whose cultic agents are doctors and therapy. As in any Gnostic faith, the two principles are clearly separated, but in practice they can become contaminated and the beneficial principle and the doctor who represents it can be wrong and unwittingly collaborate with their enemy, without this in any way invalidating the reality of dualism and the need for the cult through which the beneficial principle fights its battle. And it is significant that the theologians who must establish its strategy are the representatives of a science, virology, which has no place of its own, but is situated on the border between biology and medicine.
2) If this cultic practice was up to now, like every liturgy, episodic and limited in time, the unexpected phenomenon we are witnessing is that it has become permanent and all-pervasive. It is no longer a question of taking medicines or undergoing a medical examination or surgery when necessary: the whole life of human beings must become the place of an uninterrupted cultic celebration at every moment. The enemy, the virus, is always present and must be fought incessantly and without possible respite. The Christian religion also knew similar totalitarian tendencies, but they concerned only a few individuals - monks in particular - who chose to place their entire existence under the banner of "pray without ceasing". Medicine as a religion takes up this Pauline precept and, at the same time,
3) The practice of worship is no longer free and voluntary, exposed only to sanctions of a spiritual nature, but must be made mandatory by law. The collusion between religion and profane power is certainly not a new fact; It is entirely new, however, that it no longer concerns the profession of dogmas, as was the case with heresies, but exclusively the celebration of worship. The profane power must ensure that the liturgy of the medical religion, which now coincides with the whole of life, is duly observed in fact. That we are dealing here with a cultic practice and not a rational scientific need is immediately evident. By far the most frequent cause of mortality in our country are cardio-vascular diseases and it is known that these could decrease if you practice a healthier way of life and if you stick to a particular diet. But it had never occurred to any doctor that this form of life and diet, which they recommended to patients, would become the subject of a legal regulation, which decreedex lege what to eat and how to live, transforming the whole existence into a health obligation. Precisely this has been done and, at least for now, people have accepted as if it were obvious to give up their freedom of movement, work, friendships, loves, social relations, their religious and political beliefs.
Here we measure how the two other religions of the West, the religion of Christ and the religion of money, have given the primacy, apparently without a fight, to medicine and science. The Church has purely and simply denied her principles, forgetting that the saint whose name the current pontiff has taken embraced lepers, that one of the works of mercy was to visit the sick, that the sacraments can only be administered in presence . Capitalism for his part, albeit with some protest, has accepted productivity losses that he had never dared to take into account, probably hoping to later find an agreement with the new religion, which on this point seems willing to compromise.
4) The medical religion has unreservedly collected from Christianity the eschatological instance that it had dropped. Capitalism, by secularizing the theological paradigm of salvation, had already eliminated the idea of an end of time, replacing it with a state of permanent crisis, without redemption or end. Krisis is originally a medical concept, which designated in the Hippocratic corpus the moment when the doctor decided whether the patient would survive the disease. Theologians have taken up the term to indicate the Final Judgment which takes place on the last day. If we look at the state of exception we are experiencing, we would say that the medical religion combines the perpetual crisis of capitalism with the Christian idea of an ultimate time, of an eschaton .in which the extreme decision is always in progress and the end is both precipitated and delayed, in the incessant attempt to be able to govern it, without, however, ever resolving it once and for all. It is the religion of a world that feels at the end and yet is unable, like the Hippocratic physician, to decide whether it will survive or die.
5) Like capitalism and unlike Christianity, the medical religion does not offer prospects of salvation and redemption. On the contrary, the healing he aims at can only be temporary, since the evil God, the virus, cannot be eliminated once and for all, on the contrary it changes continuously and always takes on new forms, presumably more risky. The epidemic, as the etymology of the term suggests ( demos is in Greek the people as a political body and polemos epidemiosin Homer the name of the civil war) is first of all a political concept, which is preparing to become the new terrain of world politics - or non-politics -. Indeed, it is possible that the epidemic we are experiencing is the realization of the world civil war which, according to the most attentive political scientists, has taken the place of the traditional world wars. All nations and all peoples are now permanently at war with themselves, because the invisible and elusive enemy with which they are struggling is within us.
As has happened several times throughout history, philosophers will again have to come into conflict with religion, which is no longer Christianity, but science or that part of it that has taken the form of a religion. I do not know if the fires will be lit again and books will be put on the index, but certainly the thought of those who continue to seek the truth and reject the dominant lie will be, as is already happening before our eyes, excluded and accused of spreading false news (news, not ideas, since news is more important than reality!). As in all moments of emergency, real or simulated, the ignorant will again be seen slandering philosophers and scoundrels trying to profit from the disasters they themselves have caused. All this has already happened and will continue to happen,
2 May 2020
Giorgio Agamben