Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics
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Review of Giorgio Agamben (2021). Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics
Trans. V. Dani. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield. 104 pp. ISBN 9781538157602 (Paperback)
Reviewed by: John Reader 1,2,✉
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PMCID: PMC8264487
The End of Politics as Civic Participation
On 26 June 2021, Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in the UK government and the minister probably most closely associated with the response to the pandemic, resigns having been caught on camera failing to observe his own social distancing rules. An ironic illustration of Agamben’s telling summary of the pandemic times: ‘We are facing a paradox: the end of all social relations and political activity is presented as the exemplary form of civic participation.’ (Agamben 2021: 60). Hancock contravenes this new approach to civic participation by making the mistake of combining a social relationship with political activity and becomes another victim (albeit a painless one) of the pandemic.
Agamben has written one of the most critical academic responses to the events of the last 18Â months and raised concerns that some might find exaggerated. The context is his own nation of Italy, and the book consists of a series of short articles and interviews produced up until November 2020, so in advance of the roll out of the various vaccines across the world. Even so, many questions and uncertainties remain about where we are and what the future now holds. Whether or not one fully agrees with his interpretation, there is much here that demands attention.
https://salvage.zone/agambens-polemic-on-biopolitics-state-and-capital/
Eli B. Lichtenstein | April 15, 2020
There are two thoughts to keep in mind, then. Firstly, that states are bad. Secondly, that even as mutual aid, solidarity, and the building of worker’s power are every day more and more essential means of survival, so the state, too, remains an essential means of survival, at least for many. But how can these thoughts be kept in the same mind at the same time? This question isn’t unimportant. For while the state may be in a position to save many lives right now, so it is simultaneously deploying its security apparatuses perhaps on an unprecedented scale. This, at least, is what Agamben gets right: ‘What is worrisome is not so much or not merely the present, but what comes after.’
http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/2994
On Security and Terror"
Giorgio Agamben, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 20, 2001
Security as leading principle of state politics dates back to the the birth of the modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of fear, which compels human beings to come together within a society. But not until the 18th century does a thought of security come into its own. In a 1978 lecture at the College de France (which has yet to be published) Michel Foucault has shown how the political and economic practice of the Physiocrats opposes security to discipline and the law as instruments of governance.Turgot and Quesnay as well as Physiocratic officials were not primarily concerned with the prevention of hunger or the regulation of production, but wanted to allow for their development to then regulate and "secure" their consequences. While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening and to globalization; while the law wants to prevent and regulate, security intervenes in ongoing processes to direct them.In short, discipline wants to produce order, security wants to regulate disorder. Since measures of security can only function within a context of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual initiative, Foucault can show that the development of security accompanies the ideas of liberalism.
And from 2012-https://libcom.org/article/god-didnt-die-he-was-transformed-money-interview-giorgio-agamben-peppe-sava