Reflections on the plague/The Bare Life and the Vaccine

Agamben

Agamben is detested. Agamben is deplorable. Agamben is attacked for his break with Orthodoxy. Philosophy rejects him. Intellectuals shriek he has gone crazy. Without doubt the great fear seized otherwise normal people like meeting death in a dream. So fearful, so isolated, so in need of a magical talisman to ward off certain death the smart set finds him ideal for 20 minute hate for doubting and speaking his mind that is not their mind.

Agamben: The reflections that follow do not concern the epidemic, but what we can understand from the reactions of men to it. In other words, it is a question of reflecting on the ease with which an entire society has accepted to feel plagued, to isolate itself at home and to suspend its normal living conditions, its working relationships, friendship, love and even its religious and political beliefs. Why were there no protests and oppositions, as it was possible to imagine and as usually happens in these cases? The hypothesis that I would like to suggest is that in some way, albeit unconsciously, the plague was already there, that, evidently, the living conditions of the people had become such, that a sudden sign was enough for them to appear for what they were. - that is, intolerable, like a plague indeed. And this, in a sense,
And what needs to be pondered no less is the need for religion that the situation makes appear. An indication of this, in the pounding discourse of the media, is the terminology borrowed from the eschatological vocabulary which, to describe the phenomenon, obsessively uses the word "apocalypse", especially in the American press, and often explicitly evokes the end of the world. It is as if the religious need, which the Church is no longer able to satisfy, was groping for another place in which to consist and found it in what has in fact become the religion of our time: science. This, like any religion, can produce superstition and fear or, in any case, be used to spread them. Never before has we witnessed the spectacle, typical of religions in moments of crisis, of different and contradictory opinions and prescriptions, ranging from the minority heretical position (also represented by prestigious scientists) of those who deny the gravity of the phenomenon to the dominant orthodox discourse that affirms it and, however, often diverges radically as to the methods of dealing with it. And, as always in these cases, some experts or self-styled such are able to secure the favor of the monarch, who, as in the days of the religious disputes that divided Christianity, takes a side according to his own interests for one current or the other and imposes its measures.
Another thing that makes you think is the obvious collapse of all common beliefs and beliefs. It seems that men no longer believe in anything - except in the bare biological existence that must be saved at any cost. But only a tyranny can be founded on the fear of losing one's life, only the monstrous Leviathan with his drawn sword.
For this reason - once the emergency, the plague, is declared over, if it is - I do not think that, at least for those who have kept a minimum of clarity, it will be possible to go back to living as before. And this is perhaps the most desperate thing today - even if, as has been said, "hope was given only to those who no longer have hope".

March 27, 2020

The bare life and the vaccine

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 labile 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 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 patients. 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 constantly decided and updated.

April 16, 2021