Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, warned us about these days of covid, lockdown, government mandates, compliance, rebellion, and questions of freedom, surveillance, and individual sovereignty. Agamben's philosophy gives language to the crisis of security, regulation, and pandemic that modulates every aspect of our current global situation. In this way we might say that Agamben's biopolitical philosophy culminates in the lived experience of our present moment.
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Agamben interrogates Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty ("Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception") to its limit concept: indeed, where Schmitt identifies the relationality between the who within the political order and the subjects of the sovereign's dictates, Agamben pushes further into the question of the very threshold of the political order itself. Agamben, like Walter Benjamin before him, identifies the crumbling of the State structures whereby the state of emergency has become the rule rather than the exception. Thus Agamben writes, "the time is ripe to place the problem of the originary structure and limits of the form of the State in a new perspective" (12). For Agamben, it is a most urgent matter---an "urgency of catastrophe"---to identify this political threshold and, moreover, to give language to a sacredness of life eroding (if not totally eroded) under the failed and failing structures of the State.
Schmitt's Political Theology establishes the rule of law dependent on a "regular, everyday frame of life" whereas the exception---more interesting in its novel irregularity---"thinks the general with intense passion." "The exception does not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives off the exception alone," Schmitt contends in deference to Soren Kierkegaard's similar theologization of the exception. For Agamben, the exception is the most interesting threshold of political order because it is where "The rule applies...in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it" (18). The exception is that which is ex-capere, taken outside---it is not excluded per se, but it is set outside of the framework as a unique entity in suspension to that which is inside. To this phenomena, Agamban gives the name relation of exception to the extreme dialectic in which something is included because of its exclusion. This threshold between the two---that which is regular, internal, ordered, everyday; and that which is chaotic, external, disordered, and rare---is what Agamben delineates as the state of exception. One is a movement, a relationality, a dialectic; the other is a space, a localizable coordinate, a plane of being.
At this threshold of both relation and of the state of exception lies the paradox of sovereignty in which there is an "irreducible link uniting violence and law" (63) thereof. In Critique of Violence Benjamin observes that violence both posits a law and preserves it---a law comes into being in order to combat an act of transgression or criminality, but in order to maintain the law, the threat of violence legitimates the law thereby enacted. To break this tautological destruction that this dialectic perpetuates between the law and violence, Benjamin identifies that which he calls "divine violence"---a violence that deposes the law insofar as it dissolves or eradicates the constitutive link between the two (i.e., violence and law). The bearer of this link between violence and law Benjamin terms "bare life," and it is this bare life that interests Agamben. Indeed, what is the value of this "bare life" at the intersection between the law and violence?
There is a predominant assumption in our twenty-first century worldview that human life is sacred however much this elevation of life does not exist in classical Greek philosophical discourse. Agamben's project, therefore, is an analysis of the process by which human life came to be considered sacred and the ways in which the state of the exception operates in proximity (or even in constitutive relationality) with sovereignty. What, therefore, makes something sacred? Agamben writes, "the structure of sacratio arises out of the conjunction of two traits: the unpunishability of killing and the exclusion from sacrifice" (81). Said differently, the homo sacer may be put to death according to the law which is preserved through violence; and yet this same homo sacer, by nature of his ordinary existence, is not fit for sacrifice to the divine realm. The homo sacer has not undergone the consecratio which moves him from the human to the divine realm (from the profane to the sacred), but is, paradoxically, still set outside, ex-capere, of the human law when the law permits him to be put to death. Agamben identifies the double exclusion and double capture from both the human and the divine law in the identity of the homo sacer: "What defines the homo sacer is therefore not the originary ambivalence of the sacredness that is assumed to belong to him, but rather both the particular character of the double exclusion into which he is taken and the violence to which he finds himself exposed" (82).
Moreover, it is not until the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 where the mere fact of birth gives each human his or her own individual claim to sovereignty: "The principle of nativity and the principle of sovereignty, which were separated in the ancien régime (where birth marked only the emergence of a sujet, a subject), are now irrevocably united in the body of the "sovereign subject" so that the foundation of the new nation-state may be constituted" (128). Here, as Hannah Arendt has observed, nativity comes to imply nation so that the Rights of Man become intricately bound with the Rise and Fall of the Nation State in which he or she is born. Further, with the overthrow of King Louis XVI, the citoyens assume the position of the sovereign so that each individual person becomes elevated not only to national citizen but also on par with the former sovereign (les membres du souverain as Jean-Denis Lanjuinais referred to the people of France at the 1792 convention).
Today, the refugee crises at the borders of Europe and the United States challenge this notion of modern sovereignty defined by a mutually constitutive interpretation of nativity and nationality. Agamben writes, "Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes the secret presupposition of the political domain---bare life---to appear for an instant within that domain" (131). Refugee camps become the geopolitical space of exception, a biopolitical paradigm that disrupts bare life from the fragile and tenuous framework of natal/national sovereignty.
But beyond the refugee camp, any kind of camp---a quarantine camp, for example---becomes "the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule" (168-69). Further, laws or mandates that are devised and imposed based on the cases of exception rather than the cases of average, ordinary, predictable patterns (as Schmitt defines the rule of law), similarly operate in accordance with the suspended state of exception that imposes draconian, specific, and overreaching applications of the law to arenas that are otherwise ordinary, healthy, and functioning without such forceful surveillance and regulation. "In the camp, the state of the exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order" (169). The Nazi camps remain the most extreme example of the state of exception "insofar as its inhabitants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life"; further "the camp was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation" (171).
The camp is the materialization, the explicit manifestation, of the state of exception in which "bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction" (174) so that we enter into the liminality of the camp, however innocuous it may be, every time such a space is created. "In this light, the birth of the camp in our time appears an an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself" (ibid.). As the camp becomes a fourth constitutive element in the order of the state, the nation (nativity), and geographic location/land, the ordinary life of the polis or the city will, by extension, also have to adapt to the failure of the system to incorporate those of a-political status: "we must expect not only new camps but also always new and more lunatic regulative definitions of the inscription of life in the city" (176).
For Agamben, "it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West" (181), and we can see this playing out with governmental obsessions with isolation camps to quarantine the sick or the asymptomatic. The camp is the new extrajuridical space where laws can be suspended or haphazardly created and applied---with varying levels of violence and subjugation---depending on the whims of an autocrat or an individual enforcer's interpretation or persuasions. We are now at a point in time where globalist interests have posited the benefits of a borderless global conglomerate thereby initiating a "global civil war" of national versus globalist objectives.
Because so much of Agamben's work predicts the very crises of sovereignty, borders, isolation, and health mandates that we are experiencing today, Agamben himself has issued public statements on his theory of bare life vis-a-vis the coronavirus pandemic. As one can imagine, he identifies a tyranny of medicine as a new religion enforced on a population as a juridical norm: "That we are dealing here with a cultic practice and not a rational scientific demand is immediately obvious." Agamben identifies that cardiovascular disease still supersedes the risk of death of covid, and yet doctors have not demanded by decree ex lege a prescribed diet, exercise, and national health requirement. And yet, with covid, "Precisely this has been done and, at least for now, people have accepted, as if it were obvious, renouncing their own freedom of movement, work, friendships, loves, social relations, their own religious and political convictions." Agamben argues that covid obsession has taken over Christianity and capitalism as the primary global cult worship.
Agamben writes powerfully on the state of coronavirus exception that has dominated all other narratives and marginalized any truth seeker that questions the logic, rationality, the ethics, or the morality of the autocratic medical tyranny subjugating the people of the planet since January 2020. Agamban's closing arguments:
As has happened many times in the course of history, philosophers must again enter into conflict...clearly 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 fake news (news, not ideas, because news is more important than reality!). As in all moments of emergency, real or simulated, we see once again the ignorant slander philosophers and scoundrels seeking to profit from the disasters that they themselves have provoked. All this has already happened and will continue to happen, but those who testify to the truth will not stop doing so, because no one can bear witness for the witness.
Here is Agamban's article in English translation by Dr. Adam Kotsko; and here is his article in the original Italian. I agree with Agamben.
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