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Sunday, February 26, 2023

The Prophet of Covid Tyranny

 Three years ago, as the novel coronavirus was making its way from Wuhan to every corner of earth, so did the novel mode of emergency management pioneered in that city: the mass quarantine of healthy individuals, now known by the prison shorthand of “lockdown.” Just as remarkable as the rapid worldwide embrace of lockdown was the dearth of critical reflection on its unprecedented character. Not only had confinement on this scale never been attempted, it had been overtly rejected in most pandemic-response guidance before 2020. In January of that year, the world looked on with shock as China confined more than 10 million of its citizens to their homes overnight; yet by the end of March, most governments and many citizens had come to accept this approach as normal and necessary. Within three months, the “Covid consensus”—as Compact columnist Thomas Fazi and his co-author, Toby Green, call it in their book of that title—hardened into unassailable orthodoxy.

One major exception to the uncritical posture toward this new policy regime—a posture that became especially inflexible among intellectuals of the left—was Giorgio Agamben. The Italian philosopher had been writing for decades about the use of the “state of exception” to suspend normal freedoms and restraints on the exercise of power. This same line of analysis, which secured his intellectual influence in the aftermath of 9/11, made him a pariah during the Covid era.

The denunciations he faced from erstwhile friends and allies—including his longtime English-language translator—didn’t deter Agamben. He continued to reflect critically on the ever-expanding restrictions on basic human life legitimated by the threat of the pandemic, from forced confinement to the mandatory covering of the face—the very “site of politics,” he argued in one essay—to the mass exclusion of the unvaccinated from public life. Three years on, most of what Agamben said has been vindicated. Many of the policies in question are accepted to have been ineffectual at achieving their ostensible aims at best, and disastrously counterproductive at worst. The only thing these measures unquestionably achieved—as Agamben foresaw—was a vast expansion of the power to confine, exclude, and censor.

Nonetheless, Agamben remains persona non grata in the academic precincts where he was once celebrated. Near the end of last year, for instance, a planned symposium on his pandemic writings at Stanford, whose university press has published much of his work in English, was canceled due to complaints from faculty members and students. To this day, much of the academic left remains in thrall to a fantasy that the pandemic was an opportunity to forge solidarity around shared vulnerability. Agamben saw early on that the opposite was true: “Bare life, and the fear of losing it, is not something that unites people.” This is because “fellow human beings … are now seen only as potential [plague] anointers whom we must avoid at all cost.”

In a reflection written a month after his initial column, Agamben asked why, given the imposition of unparalleled restrictions on basic freedoms with so little evidentiary support, there hadn’t been more opposition—and why the little criticism that did surface was so easily dismissed and marginalized. His tentative answer was that, before most of us had even heard the word “coronavirus,” “the plague was somehow already present, even if only unconsciously, and people’s life conditions were such that a sudden sign could make them appear as they really were.” This remains true three years later, even as much of the destructive and tyrannical public-health apparatus improvised in early 2020 has finally been dismantled, even in China. This is one reason why the return of lockdown, perhaps even for new “emergencies” such as “climate,” is entirely plausible, despite the measure’s evident discrediting.

For Agamben, the only “positive dimension” of the situation he contemplated in early 2020 was that “it may be possible that people will start wondering whether their way of life was right in the first place.” The opposite is true today, as we come full circle three years after the remarkable events of early 2020: The only negative dimension of the “return to normal” is the risk that we fall back into the unreflective drift from crisis to crisis that made lockdowns possible.

https://compactmag.com/article/the-prophet-of-covid-tyranny

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