Philosophy, Biopolitics, and the Virus: The Elision of an Alternative 9781666923780, 9781666923797, 1666923788

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Philosophy, Biopolitics, and the Virus

Philosophy, Biopolitics, and the Virus The Elision of an Alternative Michael Lewis

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lewis, Michael, 1977– author. Title: Philosophy, biopolitics, and the virus : the elision of an alternative / Michael Lewis. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023024633 (print) | LCCN 2023024634 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666923780 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666923797 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: COVID-19 (Disease)—Government policy. | Medical policy—Moral and ethical aspects. | Public health—Moral and ethical aspects. | Biopolitics— Philosophy. | Agamben, Giorgio, 1942– Classification: LCC RA644.C67 L485 2023  (print) | LCC RA644.C67  (ebook) | DDC 362.1962/4144—dc23/eng/20230626 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023024633 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023024634 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To my three lionesses.  ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌In honour of all those whose thoughts, words, and deeds have been defamed, and who continued in spite of that to think, speak, and act against what they were told was to ward off an evil only putatively worse, and to all those who have been damaged in any way by either form of constriction.

Contents

Preface ix ‌‌Introduction ‌‌

1

Chapter 1: The Invention of an Epidemic Chapter 2‌‌: Statistics and Their Vicissitudes



21

41

Chapter 3‌‌: The Unity of the Non-pharmaceutical Response Chapter 4: The Paradox of Immune Community, from Deconstruction to Biopolitics Chapter 5: Exposure and the Question of Sacrifice



69 81



111

Chapter 6‌‌: Giorgio Agamben: Against Sacrifice and the Logic of Auto-immunity 135 Conclusion: Beyond the Epidemic as Politics Postlude: The Closure of the Logos Notes

147 157

161

Bibliography Index





233

249

About the Author



257

vii

Preface

The author finds himself in the curious and uncomfortable position of knowing full well that he is not well qualified to write this book, but at the same time aware that a book of this type needs to be written, and written urgently— for reasons that the book is concerned to analyse. One can only hope that its mere existence, and the pathways it clumsily attempts to open and reopen, the way-markers it erects so as to direct its readers down paths as yet untaken, will act as an impetus for others more competent to repeat the task in a more satisfying way. And there are signs that this work is already being undertaken. Part of the reason for the author’s unpreparedness is that he never imagined that such a book would be necessary, not least because it never occurred to him that human beings would accept, as if there were no alternative, the rightness of a species of universal house-arrest imposed upon the innocent, which in quasi-medical terms has been described as a ‘quarantine of the healthy,’ but this already casts as much shadow as it sheds light. In truth, so obviously abhorrent does such an acceptance seem to us that it barely needs refuting— the text itself refers to some of the many places in which this is illustrated clearly enough. What remains to be established is how such positions came to be upheld so fervently that the very idea of an alternative, and the very notion of a book such as this, will no doubt result in its author receiving some ‘funny looks.’ Our task is to make some headway in explaining how the notion of an alternative came to be eradicated from public discourse. This elision was successful to a degree that its authors, if such there be, can hardly have dreamed of. Our task is, first of all, to uncover the traces of that erasure. Michael Lewis Newcastle upon Tyne Winter 2022–Spring 2023

ix

‌‌Introduction‌‌1

There is no way for the author to tell, as these words are being read, what the status of the event will be, but even if the social experiment that has been conducted on us for the last two and a half to three years remains in a lull, this by no means obviates the analysis that is to come. As we shall see, when the epidemic is considered from the point of view espoused in the present work, in no way could this affair be said to be ‘over and done with.’ This is not least for the reason that, in the responses that were made, which imposed explicitly and avowedly totalitarian measures in order to effectively legally prohibit a populace from becoming ill, a bizarre and thoroughly sinister precedent has been set. No understanding of this aspect was displayed by the medical men and the natural scientists—some no doubt speaking, albeit far beyond their competence, in good faith—who were at least the mouthpieces for the strategy that had been decided upon in this affair. Their competence is restricted solely to the realm of nature and the physical; the cultural and the social, which remain the province of the humanities and the social sciences, are more or less rigorously off limits for them. But we might circumscribe their competence more broadly, and this time with half an eye on philosophy, a discipline which sits comfortably in neither the natural nor the social sciences, and for which we are attempting to speak here: the knowledge of the doctors and the natural scientists is confined to the present, in which the punctuality of facts is confined. And this purview is insufficiently broad in the present case: once something impossible or unthinkable has become possible and thinkable, it will forever remain so. Thus the future, in terms of what could potentially beset us, has been permanently changed by the decisions made in the early months of 2020 (or perhaps much earlier). At the time of writing (in the early autumn of 2022, and now, given the pace of publishing, at the time of its final reworking in the midwinter of 2022–2023), the attempt to employ the strategy of legally mandated distancing and separation as a form of immunisation has been temporarily paused. But although these ‘measures’ are no longer in effect, they endure all the 1

2

Introduction

same. The gesture of incarcerating (at least nominally) an entire population, indiscriminately quarantining those who are deemed potentially but not actually ill, on a national and international scale, was inconceivable to those who would be subjected to it before March 2020, but now that it has been made, it will remain eternally possible—unless something is done about it. This gives us a particularly poignant example of why the positivist thinking of the doctors and the natural scientists is inadequate to our situation: a ‘fact’ is rarely if ever simply a fact. That this was done once means that it may be done again: such a response has become a resort for the future, quite possibly as a remedy for other ills or with other purposes ostensibly in mind. This is why we need to employ another type of thinking in order to unmask the procedure that gave rise to the inauguration of that precedent: philosophy. Philosophy’s task is to uncover the decisions and the subsequent concealment of these decisions—their forgetting or silencing—that underlie the creation of such things as ‘facts.’ SILENCING OF SILENCING: A MULTIPLICITY WITHIN UNITY If not quite a forgetting of forgetting, there has been a silencing of silencing: in the journalism of Law this has come to be described as a ‘super-injunction’ (and which might more properly be called a meta-injunction)—a second order injunction which enjoins that the injunction itself be kept a secret. The silencing must itself be silenced if it is to remain truly and absolutely unheard. It must be altogether forgotten that a decision was ever made, and that there ever was an alternative. In general, with a proliferating array of media able to amplify even the most marginalised voices, including those which have been muffled in the mainstream, such an attempt at silencing could only ever be imperfect, despite the best efforts of those in charge of the principal social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, foremost among them) who were charged with the duty of censorship that governments themselves, often for constitutional reasons, were themselves unable to carry out directly.2 Given the almost inevitable porosity of the containment, official censoriousness often adopts the form of a distortion or smear rather than absolute elision. Some of the finest and most rational among these stifled voices have not ceased to speak altogether, but they have had their words forestalled and inevitably prefaced by a health warning that disarms them a priori by stating that the authors of such words are, effectively, mad, bad and dangerous to know: illogical, immoral, and to be shunned by respectable society, by all the means that such an excommunication can employ these days, when so many

Introduction

3

channels are open for communication and yet may be used not just to allow speech but to stifle it as well. The first thing we need to do in light of this predicament is to reveal that a silencing, or a forgetting, has taken place. Only then can we begin to render legible and intelligible the inscription that remains to be read under this injunction. This is the book’s own hermeneutic situation: we are tasked with speaking about a suffering and a wrong of which most appear to be simply unaware, even if only because they have shut their eyes to this immense distress and the endless harms that they have tacitly let by. At the same time, this involves us standing alongside those whose reputations have been—in public—the most tarnished, those who have been ‘blocked’ and whom respectable society (or at least the institutional Left) is expected to fleer; indeed, we might well be tempted to consider a priori that it is in these apparently unpromising spots, and in these largely stifled voices, that the truth is most likely to be found. We have in recent days witnessed the scandal of churches closing their doors to a new incarnation of the mediaeval leper, the prohibition of funeral and marriage, the abolition of social and sexual life (absolutely unambiguously for those who live alone), the closure of schools and the rendering-virtual of university and college classes, along with almost every other aspect of cultural life, the intensely cruel and indifferent warping of all lives still in the process of development. All this against the background of a pervasive house arrest and in many cases a solitary confinement, of which the appalling word ‘lockdown’ does not even try to speak euphemistically.3 To so much as raise a murmur against any of these things seems to be considered a matter of bad taste, or even a kind of madness, morally and intellectually. It also means that one cannot simply write in unanimity with a figure such as the philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, perhaps the most prominent of all those cast into these reedy and disreputable margins, who speaks against everything, every single measure, without first considering the very conditions in which speech itself becomes possible—those transcendental conditions which decree what may and may not be said. The procedures that render a certain discourse hegemonic, and others marginal or prohibited, have afflicted our discourse in a number of respects, and their reach extends far beyond the context with which we are here most directly concerned, both within the academy (on topics such as gender and sex) and rather far beyond it (where ‘climate change’ in its construal as an apocalyptic event of human extinction takes pride of place). For reasons yet to be analysed, this process whereby a certain interpretation becomes dominant and indeed exclusive almost always seems to be at its most militant within the university—in precisely the place where rational thought and the ability to countenance alternatives, of all kinds, should feel most at home.

4

Introduction

And yet, the nearest most academics will come to such an attitude will generally be to locate such a rational negotiation in the past and to declare ‘we are all in favour of debate! But that debate is over now.’ We are left to infer that we were out of touch dinosaurs for imagining that the process of questioning was necessarily an infinite one. It is no wonder that Philosophy—which is to say, the infinite prolongation of the question—cannot thrive in such an atmosphere. In light of this, it is at the very least a professional derogation on the part of Continental European philosophers, if not all philosophers, that they should have been so complicit in the silencing of critical voices, or to have kept silent themselves. After Michel Foucault it should have been impossible for philosophers to ignore those voices which have been drowned out by a more powerful discourse, and the truth that is often covered over in the process of stifling. It is more than dispiriting to see that those educated in the tradition of post-Kantian philosophy seem not to have been very serious about their vocation after all, like David Hume nevertheless trusting in the principle of causality enough to play billiards at the close of day, unperturbed by his professed scepticism. These philosophers should have demonstrated the utmost sensitivity to a marginalising exclusion, the violent silencing carried out by the logos in order to render itself watertight, to close upon itself and thus to render the signification of the terms contained within it at least temporarily determinate, or even to assume a certain semblance of finality. These fallen thinkers have helped to forestall the construction of an alternative and less damaging response to recent events. This has created a discursive situation in which it is nearly impossible for us to speak, even now, and from quite close to the start the physical isolation was compounded by an equally troubling intellectual loneliness. This predicament may be conceptualised in terms that Jacques Derrida has rendered familiar in the context of a reading of Emmanuel Levinas and Georges Bataille: there is reason or speech (logos), and beyond it there is violence, the violence that silences or that simply wages war, but also the violence which resists the logos itself. In any case, the Other, the violent one, must be excluded from all civilised debate, altogether unheard or immediately closed down, the position from which it enunciates in advance excluded from the space of reasons, logos—and indeed from the human polis in the most literal sense imaginable, as we have seen in recent days, though less in England than elsewhere. Such is the bellicose ferocity encountered by those who have despite everything dared to lend their voice to such a position. The most undaunted of these, within the realm of Philosophy, is Giorgio Agamben, and indeed, such a welter of invective has been aimed at his texts on the virus that his entire œuvre has been shunted to the very margins of acceptability, and even beyond it—beyond reason and into the realm of the senseless and the violent,

Introduction

5

the irrational and the immoral, not even to be countenanced. Such words, it is said, are not to be debated but rather treated merely as a symptom of some malaise of the mind and the heart—some ‘inhumanity.’ Those associated with it are to be shunned, albeit for the most part in those digital zones where such things seem to be an idle pastime of the malevolent and the desperate, rather than in the public sphere, where the Agambenian is more usually met by a kind of tacitly judgemental silence, a frostiness that often stops short of explicitly excluding a position, in the name of a token and insincere ‘academic freedom’ that functions in a more insidious way to stifle and exclude those adjudged deviant. One is indeed free, but that freedom is not to be abused by saying something that troubles the imagined ‘consensus.’ What we have here set ourselves to trace, under the influence of some of these dissenting voices which it has been our privilege to have witnessed, is the logic behind this exile, the transcendental conditions that have made it possible to construct unities to which no alternative may be adduced. Such a transcendental gesture, that refuses to accept the existence of such things as ‘self-evident’ facts, has its risks. Certain of those more scientifically minded, together with most of those on both the alternative Left and the Right, along with the unaligned who attempt to think without this opposition, so frequently have recourse to laying the blame for this upon a certain ‘postmodernism,’ which is said to have allowed notions of representation (of various ‘identities’) to trump truth and reason (or at least ‘fact’), and even to have encouraged the distortions masquerading as Truth which have caused such damage to the human socius over the last two and a half years and more. This constitutes a small part of the reason why the present work is demanded of the Philosopher: matters must be set right here. But, in contrast to those with whom we disagree solely on this point, and upon whom we urge this relatively minor correction in their perception of European Philosophy (which it has to be said, is too often merely a bastardised rendition of certain aspects of Judith Butler’s work, and a lazy rehashing of long-outdated stereotypes of a certain type of supposedly ‘linguistic’ philosophy from France of the 1960s), we must be courageous enough not hastily to flee to the opposite pole and wash our hands; we should take the notion of a certain relativism, the necessity for the interpretation of facts, and for the multiplicity of potential explanations or ‘narratives,’ to take it as far as we can without allowing it to slide into absolute relativism. At the very least, we cannot allow the natural sciences alone to adjudicate on what is to be done in an affair such as this, presuming itself to have the right to pronounce on the social and the human. To do that, we must first undo the silencing of the overwhelming majority of those in the human sciences who have attempted to think, speak, and act in a way that is worthy of the name ‘humanity,’ but also to give vent to those ‘dissenting’ figures within the natural sciences who

6

Introduction

have attempted to speak against the prevailing interpretation and deployment of natural scientific results, and who indeed, in the most advanced cases, have denounced the means by which this consensus has been manufactured. That the latter are sometimes moved to blame some of the very philosophers who have taught us how to think transcendentally about the decisions that suture a discourse is an irony that our book is designed to make vivid in the hope that such gestures will be made less blithely in the future. Scientific thinking, however open-minded, would in any case never have saved us in an affair such as this; it could only have ameliorated our misery. We are thus attempting to save the honour of philosophy, whilst at the same time risking the semblance that we are aligning ourselves with the relativism that would lie behind the very actions that we are attempting to criticise. We do this by breaking apart at each stage of our investigation an apparent unity such that a multiplicity is shown to lie within it. We also reveal the very fact of the latter’s concealment and the silencing mechanisms which are responsible for it. In other words, we attempt to show up decisions for what they are, by returning in thought to the moment immediately before they will have been made. These are the decisions which led to the formation of an impregnable monolithic totality and the elision of an alternative in each of the three moments that have gone to compose this entire affair: (1) ‘The Science’; (2) the ‘non-pharmaceutical’ measures imposed in response to it; and finally (3) the pharmaceutical remedies that were alone said to be capable of bringing these non-pharmaceutical measures to an end. The formation of discursive unities (totalities of speech and thought, word and concept), along with the question of what is thereby thrust into the margins, has long been a concern of philosophy; and yet when those who are philosophers by profession encountered such an occlusion ‘in the wild,’ they seem to have displayed their true colours. The security of an academic position ultimately proved more important to them than the truth to whose pursuit they were to have pledged themselves; either that or their cowardice overcame their better judgement. A dim awareness of fault perhaps lies behind the extraordinary aggression with which the saintly desire to be virtuous has been exhibited in these quarters, even if one might well be justified in detecting here the all too real existence of a frantic neurotic desire to be sure of a clear conscience and clean hands. It is just that they will not often have had the chance, in their closeted lives, to display this virtue theatrically, in public. The university was, and to some extent should be, an insulated space, immunised against the bustle and noise of civic life that flows around it, in order to maintain the distance necessary in order to think this life; but over the last two and a half years this immunisation against the mobility and life not just of the civilian but of the young—the very lifeblood of the university—assumed an extremely sinister and irrational form.4

Introduction

7

TWO GROUNDS FOR OPPOSITION: LIFE AND THE GOOD LIFE The situation we are thus obliged to put in question may be described as follows: 1.  Public discourse confronts us with but one logical and moral possibility—natural-scientific, state-centred, legally enforced, and involving the compulsory obedience to a single strategy, one that involves a non-pharmaceutical intervention of great extremity, presented as if it could and should involve everyone without exception. These measures are justified and made possible by the promise of a future that is indefinite but somehow implicitly taken to be certain in its arrival, and which will take the form of a pharmaceutic remedy of a narrowly constricted type; 2.  This possibility (thanks to the particular content it was given) is self-undermining or ‘auto-immune’ in the very strictest of senses: it harms the very thing that it presents itself as protecting: each of these measures is counterproductive in the sense that Ivan Illich gives to that term. The non-pharmaceutical and the pharmaceutical inflict damages that for a long time and perhaps forever will go unacknowledged. One could object to this situation on at least two distinct grounds: a.  One which valorises something beyond mere biological life, which we might term, following Aristotle, the ‘good life’ (eu zēn). This would invoke a properly human manner of existence, beyond mere survival, mere ‘life’; b.  In terms of the very values espoused by the advocates of the prevalent response, by demonstrating that this response has caused more harm to biological life than the disease it was presented as combatting, as it was predicted to in advance. We shall lay greater stress on the first, whilst not giving absolute credence to the rigour of the opposition that seems to separate the good life from mere survival, a fact which will allow us to move relatively freely between the two grounds for objection, according to a logic that will gradually become clearer as the book proceeds. Approaching the affair from both directions—the good life of bios and the mere life of zōē—can only bolster our argument against the dominant conception, rendering less easily navigable any route which might be taken in order to justify it.

8

Introduction

The fundamental gesture we are concerned with may be expressed in terms of pathology as a certain monomania—a one-track mind or one-dimensional thinking. How can it have been accepted as a simple fact that ‘lockdowns (and only lockdowns) work,’ with all the brutality of that stress which directly implies that ‘the ends justify the means’? How did it come to be understood that there never was, or after a certain point there was no longer any alternative? Perhaps, just possibly, interposing brick walls, or layers of plastic and fabric, or sheer space between human beings may hinder the passage of one particular pathogen for a certain length of time. But what effects does such a gesture have in the longer term (or indeed immediately, not least because of the human being’s capacity to project a future, which was immediately and radically altered with the imposition of such measures) and in respects other than that of this one single virus which has so monopolised our attention of late—or been thrust upon it? How are its advocates to judge how long this might go on before it starts to become counterproductive, in the sense that it gives rise to other diseases and disorders—or causes them to go undiagnosed and untreated—which cumulatively or individually outweigh in seriousness the disease which the counterproductive remedy was designed to palliate? Certainly, no serious thought was given to that at the beginning, and indeed it never seriously has been, in the mainstream at least, ever since. No serious weight was given to the idea of an alternative or to the counterproductivity that, at long last, in later 2022, did begin to receive some mediatic exposure as the economic, social, and psychological damage of lockdowns became so severe that even a war on the fringes of the European continent could not altogether crowd it out of the pages of the newspapers. Such suffering is perhaps beginning to be heard, and that of itself cries out with the demand for an alternative. Prior to that, and still in the greater part of the left-wing media in particular, one thing and one thing alone mattered: one type of death, one type of suffering. One model, and one reading of one set of statistics. What was needed here was contextualisation and variegation, a context entirely stripped away by the presentation of ‘the facts’ and ‘the Science’ on the part of the State and the mass media which took it upon themselves to become its lieutenant. It has now become clear that not all deaths from the virus are ‘equal’: hence the inanity of citing mortality figures for this one particular ‘cause’ (as if death were ever so simple a matter), and that every single day in every single newspaper, eliding information with regard to age and other fatal factors to do with the overall health and life expectancy of the type of individual in question, as if the death of a healthy eighteen-year-old were in any way akin to that of a ninety-year-old, already deathbound, along with the thousands of other deaths from other causes that take place every day, here and abroad, and which always have.

Introduction

9

Scientists can be said, in certain circumstances, to be broadly right about the disease in whose kind they have narrowly specialised, but in no possible sense does that imply that they should be listened to in the context of complex systems, natural and cultural, in which preventative measures of such an extraordinary kind have impacts which vastly exceed their rightful competence and power. With this elided from all discussion, doctors were free to be crowned king and medicine to become incontestably sovereign—in such a case, it became largely irrelevant whether the individuals in question had such power devolve involuntarily upon them or whether they were emboldened by the spotlight suddenly cast upon them to seize the sceptre. They proved themselves to be capable of envisaging only closure, quarantine, splitting apart, and in truth thereby the depoliticisation of the polis, its transformation into a scene that they would of course have been more familiar with than most, in the masked and aseptic atmosphere of the operating theatre. In such faceless anonymity, it became starkly apparent what the medical sovereign would demand of his subjects: that the social sphere be organised in such a way that a certain kind of hardly differentiated bare life was protected in the only way he knew. What they demanded was immunity at all costs; community be damned. What philosophers in particular are called upon to determine is how and why this one single disease was allowed to occupy centre stage so exclusively and for so long, or to be more or less deliberately ushered onto that stage, thus bestowing upon medicine this exceptional power to override our better judgement as human beings, with such deleterious and widely disseminated effects upon the human world and communal political life. AGAINST IMMUNITY? This one-dimensional thought that blinkers itself to anything but ‘the Science,’ the non-pharmaceutical, and the pharmaceutical, demands of anyone who stands in its way to confess that they are secretly in favour of universal contamination, untrammelled death—that they are for some obscure reason against immunity. Who could be truly against immunity, at least in a context such as this? When a pandemic is said to be ‘raging’ or ‘running riot,’ should we not be pursuing with all our might, and all of the State’s might, immunity from its contagion? It came to be said that if we do not ‘control’ the virus then we simply lose control of it, and that would be effectively to sacrifice the vital in the name of a Nature left to its own devices, something like ‘herd immunity,’ a notion that was taken to be a ‘strategy’ and which came to have its moral character almost irrecoverably blackened. We are at war, and to prescind from fighting is to concede everything to the enemy and to be a

10

Introduction

friend of the virus. One was therefore either in favour of a legally enforced form of immunisation, unprecedented in its character and extent, or one was effectively a murderer, a Spencerian or Malthusian, an advocate of ‘natural selection’ or ‘Social Darwinism.’5 In truth, if philosophy may be said to be ‘against immunity’ it is opposed only to the narrowly constricted forms by which, we are told, such immunity is to be achieved. For at least the last two decades, philosophers (from Jacques Derrida to Roberto Esposito and Peter Sloterdijk) have concerned themselves with the logic of immunity as such. Their consideration by no means privileges immunity in the sense of the defence mechanisms that belong to the body, but rather encompasses legal and diplomatic immunity, together with a more general (perhaps metaphoric) sense of being ‘immune’ to encroachment from others, as when one is ‘immune to criticism,’ immune to any Other or any thing that would challenge the integrity of one’s own identity. We have witnessed over the last two and a half years—if not for a much more protracted period—an attempt to conflate a certain kind of immunity against disease (in the dubious sense of simply not contracting it or succumbing to it) with a certain social and political gesture in which one is forcibly isolated from one’s fellow man, withdrawn from all relation in an enforced quarantine which was most often instituted on pain of legally sanctioned punishment. Such a gesture would bring into stark relief the most extreme use of the notion of immunity implied by Georges Bataille in the first half of the last century, in which immunising isolation is diametrically opposed to communal life. This would be a community that is itself conceived according to the model of a kind of contagion, an unlimited exposure to whatever might come to us from the Other (sex, death, violence, love, or friendship): a sacrifice of individual identity for the sake of a fusional relation with others. In this way, the notion that to socialise, to touch another human being, is to be guilty of spreading contagion can at least be reappropriated more positively, in a fashion that aims to ward off all moralising.6 At the very least, this should have encouraged the philosopher to put in question the absolute dominance of the sole interpretation of immunity that was put abroad in recent days. Once again, we find a monomaniacally pursued unity that on closer inspection may be seen to comprise numerous shards: immunity is not simply one thing, and cannot a priori be restricted to the hostility of mutual shunning and hermetic retreat that has been imposed on us over the last three years. And yet the view came to prevail that this was the only form of protection possible, and that this incarceration was to be alleviated only by another similarly monolithic form of immunity, this time pharmaceutically induced and situated just over the horizon as a messianic promise of liberation.

Introduction

11

However, as the renewed impositions of late 2021 and early 2022 testify, after the supposed arrival of the Messiah, it became possible to doubt whether this arrival might not in truth have been a mirage. Perhaps it was not even intended to save us after all, being rather a placeholder the mere promise of which would allow the repression (that is to say, the non-pharmaceutical retardation fastened upon as a strategy) to be carried out in the first place, and then to carry on taking place, as the keeping of the promise was deferred once again . . . each time to the benefit of the medical establishment, the power of central government, and the profits of the pharmaceutical companies with their constantly bolstered monopoly on remedies. Or else one might proffer a different though potentially related hypothesis, that this was the best way to usher in a certain form of identification (‘digital ID,’ ‘vaccine passports’), electronic and hence possessed of the essential capacity to be continually updated. This malleability, unavailable in the case of paper documents, would allow ever more conditions to be set for the free transit of citizens, and indeed for their simple (re)admission to their own society. In this way, one could imagine that for those with an interest in imposing such a system, the manifest inefficacy of the pharmaceutical intervention, which needs to be constantly repeated as whatever effect it engenders proves to be pitifully evanescent, would count not as a failure, but as a success, from the point of view of what they had hoped to achieve by singling this out as the only possible resolution of our predicament, the only pretext on which it would be ‘safe’ for them to allow the potentially infectious to quit their confinement. In the meantime, before the pharmaceutical had been invented, the ‘non-pharmaceutical’—it was said—had to take its place, and thus it was that any significant kind of social, cultural, and educational life was all of a sudden outlawed. Immunity could only be understood in the sense of the isolation of individuals (and for the supposedly lucky ones, individual ‘households’), the spurning of others, the distancing of one’s self, the somehow both voluntary and compulsory (moral and legal) transformation of one’s self into a pariah. This was ordered by an imperative received—and even asked for— virtuously, and at least as often as not with a certain measure of aggressive pride: as effective a way as any of warding off the sense of abject humiliation and of counteracting the effects of the immense deprivation which these measures entailed. Why was it forgotten that this obsessional sanitising of one’s own bodily surface and the enforced sanitation of others would ultimately mean a living amortisation that would relieve the human being of its natural and habitual capacity to maintain a proper relation with its (natural and social) environment, that some still have the temerity to persist in calling ‘immunity’ in a quite different sense?

12

Introduction

Philosophy is beholden to speak against the idea that to be immune from something involves abstractly negating our fellow man, cutting ourselves off, barring, ‘distancing,’ refusing, and excommunicating. At the very least, philosophy should have learned and insisted upon the lesson of autoimmunity, that Jacques Derrida will have taught us more than twenty years ago: an excess of immunity undermines immunity itself, and thus the very efficacity of immunisation at a certain point becomes lost, and along with it the very integrity of the individual identity that it was supposed to be protecting. Too strict a closure of borders deprives the nation of ‘essential supplies’ and it soon withers away; too many constrictions of the airways and the animal suffocates.7 Not that this notion of autoimmunity provides the only reason we might oppose the measures taken. As we have already intimated, there was at least one philosopher who did not disgrace himself in this affair: Giorgio Agamben, and our task here is to show that there is something in the gesture of his thought which allows us to go even further than Derrida in the direction of opposing an immunisation taken exclusively in the sense of a hostile policing of supposedly impermeable borders. Every single one of the immunising measures taken should have been subjected to the most rigorous interrogation before being accepted, let alone unilaterally imposed. And philosophy failed at that, with a failure more unforgivable and less intelligible than that of the State, for such matters were the philosopher’s daily bread. The revolutionaries among them, those mistrustful of the state in its current instantiation and even suspicious of the State as such, failed most abjectly of all, to the point of sidling right up against immunity, and clinging on to the apron-strings of the State, as if for dear life. THE INVERSION OF OUR RELATION TO INSTITUTIONS This curious alteration in the philosopher’s relation to the State was mirrored in a transformation of the relation that citizens were urged to take up with respect to the institutions of the State. Hospitals fill up every winter in the United Kingdom, but on this occasion it was inferred that we should therefore be legally prohibited from getting ill. It was not the task of institutions to protect citizens, but it was the duty of citizens to protect their institutions.8 To pre-empt the crime of becoming unwell and therefore burdensome to our healthcare institutions, these potential in-patients were placed under house arrest. According to the police response to the virus, everyone was a potential suspect, and indeed, quite contrary to the established legal principle,

Introduction

13

everyone was guilty until tested and proven to be innocent and thus (temporarily) free of taint. All humans now constitute potential burdens for the health and emergency services, if not for all servicing institutions, and this novel redescription renders those individuals readily susceptible to moralisation: it becomes a moral matter—and in a state of emergency, a legal matter—to live a certain lifestyle or indeed in extremis to bolt ourselves indoors so as to make sure that we do not need to call upon the service of doctors and nurses. And if we were secretly ill, or suspected that we might be, better to keep quiet about it. In addition to this, every single aspect of the affair would contribute to reducing our resistance to illnesses of every other kind: being locked indoors for months on end, inevitably impairing the immune system; being deprived of ordinary human contact and any stimulation beyond the endless jolts of ruthlessly administered fear and stress meted out by government and media; being cheated of any serious future, and aware at every moment of the mounting debt and the impoverishment that would be consequent upon a decimated economy; a yet more stupefied culture, with town centres already half-boarded up: being ‘locked down’ would by itself render us far more ill than we might otherwise have been. The future, in what was perhaps the ultimate absurdity, had been sacrificed to the present, the lives of the healthy to those of the sick, and those with a long race yet to run to those for whom there was almost nothing left to be done. All in order that the various national health services not lose face. That people never be seen to die. Perhaps never to die at all. So hysterical had the discourse become that it effectively committed itself to the idea that only the immortalisation of human beings was morally acceptable.9 No death was to be countenanced, and if such a case occurred then it was to be inferred that it must be due to some sin or flaw that could be imputed: someone must be found morally culpable. Responsibility was transferred from the institution to the individual, and it was thereby rendered moral. All of this holds good only on the most charitable interpretation of the whole affair, one that attributes good faith to those in power, from governments to ‘big Pharma.’ But this hermeneutic generosity can only be sustained so far. Once a reading discovers contradictions as flagrant as those just recounted, it is compelled to seek another desire lurking beneath the surface: so absurd is the gesture of legally prohibiting illness (and, indirectly, death) in order that the service which handles it not be placed under ‘intolerable’ strain, so prolonged, so persistent in its insistence, so auto-immune and counterproductive in its ultimate effects, that even the least sceptical should be moved to wonder if there were not some ulterior motive underlying it all, whether present at the beginning or opportunistically involving itself after the fact. The sheer disproportion between event and response, in terms of both

14

Introduction

the extent and the (in)effectiveness of the latter, implies an explanatory gap that needs filling. As a result we may allow ourselves to be led, even those among us who would never in the past have been tempted by such a route, to investigate the possibility that the incidence of the virus—and its numberless ‘variants’—was or became a pretext for something else, a likelihood which its potentially artificial provenance only bolsters.10 Still further, this immediate transition from ‘saving lives’ to ‘saving the NHS’ involved its advocates in a yet more disturbing reversal of values in regard to what an ethical treatment of our fellow man actually constitutes. From visibility, proximity, gathering, and touch, we were urged to embrace invisibility, distance, and warding off. Those that way inclined already were finally in their element. These were the ones most receptive to this legally imposed ‘transvaluation of values’: the obsessional neurotic, the desperate loner, the misanthrope, and indeed the tacitly fascist—a near exhaustive catalogue of contemporary English academics, which is why these vicious and yet supposedly virtuous gestures took such immediate and firm root in the universities, where they were clung to long after they ceased to be mandatory.11 In some cases, however, this enforced contortion of our ethical relations will have extorted such effort from those involved that this would go some way towards explaining the vitriol directed by those who had achieved this reversal in good faith against those who remained wilfully behind and so bore witness to the fact that this conversion was not a necessary one. Such ‘hesitancy’ reminded those in both good faith and bad of their betrayal. In any case, some explanation is required of the sheer violence of these explosions of ire at those who have remained permanently unconvinced. THE ETHICAL AND THE LEGAL: THE FREE SACRIFICE OF FREEDOM If the other cannot be trusted to impose misery upon themselves by such ethical exertions, then the law must be called in to help, and, ultimately, law enforcement: the police, if not the army. Once a set of actions becomes law, the legislator is effectively taking responsibility for the consequences of those actions (this is why those who are secretly morally unsure, in the act of pretending moral certainty, demanded that the actions they desired to carry out should be legally shored up). Then, in those unpredictable and uncertain periods during which our restraints are temporarily relaxed, the legislator returns responsibility to the people, apparently no longer sure of the effects of its actions, or perhaps indeed almost certain of the malignity of these effects. Obedience is the (morally) ‘responsible’ thing to do; and those who urge a certain critical and questioning hesitation may then be decried, in

Introduction

15

another remarkable reversal of the usual course of events, as ‘irresponsible.’ Hesitancy has become at each and every moment a priori unjustifiable—caution was to be thrown to the winds. As Agamben and Massimo Cacciari put it: ‘Is it possible to imagine a more legally and morally abnormal situation? How can the state accuse those who choose not to vaccinate of irresponsibility, when it is the same state that first formally declines all responsibility?’12 Thus the state issues the remarkable moral—and not strictly legal—imperative: ‘you are free to choose whether or not to do this: so, do the right thing and choose, freely, to do it!’ One is thus effectively called upon freely to accept the retraction of freedom itself. We shall describe this process as structurally ‘auto-immune,’ involving as it does the sacrifice of the self in order to save the self. And yet Agamben will ultimately have demonstrated that we may rightfully put questions to this very logic, which enjoins us, among other things, to sacrifice freedom in order to save freedom. This logic of immunity in the end involves not only the rigorous separation of bare life from a properly human life, the latter being sacrificed, supposedly temporarily, in order that the former be ‘saved,’ a salvation necessary even to the latter, since bare life is said to ‘ground’ human life along with every other form; but this distinction between two kinds of life has been imported from the strictly medical sphere into the social and political realm, of which the doctors who make such a distinction are thereby rendered sovereign. To accept even a temporary sacrifice of a properly human life is to be unthinkingly complicit with the sovereign form of power that Agamben identifies as responsible for making that separation wherever it arises. Thanks to the collapse of the ethical and the legal, which goes hand in hand with a dubious universalisation (‘let us all . . . ’), the involuntary quarantine and inoculation of the healthy (consequent upon the exercise of medical-sovereign power) can be presented as something in the nature of a ‘teambuilding’ exercise.13 There is no question here but that a spurious community is being built on the undecidably legal and ethical imperative to sacrifice freedom (and human contact, as well as every cultural and social activity in which such contact is demanded). The State, and whoever’s interest it represents, has the power to compel us, but perhaps because it is, in cases such as this, unable practically to enforce adherence to such apparently universal constrictions, given its pretensions to resemble a minimally democratic order even in democracy’s eclipse, it urges us to impose the imperative upon ourselves, thereby (morally) ‘shaming’ those who do not, as when by a universalising and totalising prosopopeia one says such things as ‘the Nation mourns,’ ‘braces itself,’ or indeed ‘pulls together.’ At the time of writing, the relevant English laws have been explicitly transformed into moral imperatives, and even the latter have more or less decayed, save inside

16

Introduction

certain medical establishments and the more paranoid sectors of the academy: what was once legally mandated was from a certain moment onwards only ‘recommended and expected,’ according to the ‘covid etiquette’ of a certain set of ‘guidelines’—their author was terminally unclear, which in fact only bolstered the effectiveness of the placard: an anonymous imperative is all the more intimidating since it could have been issued by anyone with any degree of power when it comes to punishing transgressors. A COMMUNITY OF FRIENDS BEYOND INSTITUTIONS? In light of our institutions turning against us in the ways we have described— particularly acute for an academic—one of the main reasons for writing a text such as this is to bring to light and set in stone some of the rudiments which might bind together a new community comprised of those who have held to the same path in spite of the hurricane that was besetting their every footstep.14 Without an incipient sense of the notions already held in common we might have been cast adrift from one another, sending out diffuse distress signals in an inarticulate groping which sought others to ameliorate our despairing isolation, scattered as we were to the very outer reaches of the circle of logos, on or beyond the margins of respectability. No doubt many will have drowned or suffocated, their deaths unannounced, their sufferings unrecognised.15 If we found anywhere to speak, some vaguely known territory in which to search for allies, it would often take the form of locales that we might once have found shady—disreputable or untrustworthy (and we have to live with the discomfort of still finding them so, of not agreeing with everything that is put abroad here, and with the uncertainty that must characterise every attempt to draw the line of respectability and truth). We had been forced to these reedy margins even by those once closest to us, unsheltered by the dubious consolation of the opposing side with its all too often reasserted and highly visible certainty of its own virtuousness. This we have renounced, not least because certainty as such is unbecoming in a philosopher. PHILOSOPHY AND THE EPIDEMIC In the lonely course of seeking to build a community, philosophy, practised under conditions of enforced isolation and disorientation, has been a consolation—in pursuing it, the author was himself desperately trying to cling on to the remnants of a culture that had so suddenly run aground and been pulverised into the most minute and barely recognisable fragments. Thinking

Introduction

17

as such was an idealising way of (practically) coping with the whole affair, perhaps even a way of feeling active in the face of the rude arrival of a certain physical ‘inactivity’ which followed upon our brutal eviction from public life. As the irrationality of what was being done became more manifest, reading the words of philosophers helped us to find our bearings on a sea in which all landmarks had been swept away.16 And yet we were told by some that this was no time for philosophy. Amongst professional thinkers, those more beholden to a minimal intellectual honesty might say, ‘there may well be things to be said, disputes to be had, critical questions to be asked; but now is not the time,’ the implication, difficult to voice for fear of revealing one’s own aristocratism, was that any muddying of the waters would risk compromising the preponderant obedience. The pragmatic postponement of critical thought could then be prolonged until such time as they felt able to say, ‘there was once a time for debate, but now that debate has been settled.’ Then our obligation is precisely not to think, but to bolster the consensus, largely irrespective of the truth of its position or the efficacy and counterproductivity of the advice given, thus to encourage ‘proper behaviour’ (as if the Law by itself were not enough, or not altogether the right means with which to ensure this).17 No philosopher should have to argue for argument itself, as if philosophy should only be carried out at dusk, when the race is run, and that there are times when it must voluntarily fold its wings and retire, since nuance may well mislead the populace into disobedience—do we not realise that the state has its citizens’ best interests at heart? (This being urged by those ‘critical’ philosophers who had spent a career urging the position that the state never does.) In some ways it is even difficult to argue the case precisely because our every thesis seems to us so true as to amount to a kind of spontaneous common sense—or, at least, common decency. But this very common sense has been cast in the mind of the public as thoroughly unspeakable. In the face of this, genuinely critical thought has been forced to seek disreputable outlets (the internet foremost among them) which only bolstered suspicions as to the respectability of what was broached there. Even Agamben himself, not much given to ‘blogs’ in the past, had more frequent recourse to the website of one of his smaller publishers, Quodlibet, in Macerata, to disseminate his extemporaneous thoughts on what the virus had been used to justify. As to the more uncharitable interpretations of the innumerable silences that we have been deafened by over the last three years, we shall generally have to remain agnostic, but they will emerge at various points in the following treatise, which is after all concerned to diagnose the elision of any alternative account of recent events. Once it becomes clear not just to us but to the instigators that the one strategy that was imposed worldwide was

18

Introduction

of minimal use and of an immensely harmful counterproductivity, a clarity that became more widespread with its abandonment in January and February of 2022 (in England and elsewhere in Europe), the question imposed itself: what was really being done to us during those dreadful two years? What was being incubated? What was the purpose of putting in abeyance all real economic, social, and cultural life? To what end were humans being held apart, or, in the case of the more unhappy households, forced into uncomfortably close quarters? What lay behind such barbaric mistreatment? An explanatory gap beckons. In what follows, I have tried to maintain a properly philosophical scepticism as far as possible, whilst nevertheless allowing myself to gesture beyond the limits of the phenomenal, in Immanuel Kant’s terms. This has been done partly in order to suggest ways in which certain explanatory gaps might be filled, and in full awareness of the risk of being decried as a ‘conspiracy theorist.’ This charge may be accepted with equanimity, not least because, as the anonymous authors of the Manifeste Conspirationniste have it, this is a position adopted out of the most eminent common sense, and, as the authors of this remarkable text have demonstrated with the utmost clarity, this accusation is used precisely in order to forbid any attempt to fill in those explanatory gaps and thus constitutes a demand not to think, not to deviate from the accepted account. Such a demand must have its reasons, and these generally come down to the fact that the accusers themselves are complicit in a conspiracy of their own. Only to conspirators, keen to keep their nefarious activities under concealment, are conspiracists in any way threatening, for they may well happen upon the truth.18 Furthermore, why not allow ourselves a little speculation?—The other side has convinced themselves that there is absolutely nothing going on behind the scenes, and every actor in the affair, from states and their secret committees to giant pharmaceutical companies, have operated in nothing but good faith throughout. Given how difficult such a certainty is to justify, and how unprecedented this good faith would be, particularly on the account given hitherto by the critical theorists, why not allow ourselves to suspect that this vigorously imposed certainty masks an attempt at concealment which should prompt an investigation? No philosopher has a right to certainty, and they should not be taken to task for not feeling it. In keeping with that principle, the present work remains provisional, even if the sceptics’ tone is forced on occasion into a near dogmatic stridency—it would take more strength than the present author commands, over a thousand days into this affair, to altogether avoid a certain bitterness. Who would ever have thought that to raise questions regarding the house arrest of innocent people one would have to speak behind closed doors, afraid to raise one’s voice above a tremulous whisper?

Introduction

19

LOGOS AND HUMANITY Philosophy is an activity in which logos is put into effect to the greatest possible extent. Logos in Greek means both ‘reason’ and ‘language,’ speech of the most articulate and human kind, which is contrasted with the squeaks and buzzes (the phōnē) of the lower animals, who are said to think and speak in a less refined way. In this respect, to philosophise is to express one’s humanity in the most unrestrained manner, and the fact that any philosophy at all will have been attempted amidst the barbarity of the last three years is a testament to the remnant humanity that some have retained; philosophy itself, if only in the fact that it was allowed here and there to happen, acts as a reminder of the humanity that perhaps half the global population so willingly surrendered in the year 2020. Our task is to understand that capitulation, with the aim of helping to ensure that it never happens again.

Chapter 1

The Invention of an Epidemic

Giorgio Agamben was one of the few philosophers courageous enough to speak against the response made to the virus and he was certainly among the very first to provide a properly philosophical account of it. The task we have set ourselves here is to outline the rudiments of a philosophical concept of the epidemic taken as a whole, and therefore we shall take his work as a point of orientation. Most of the texts composed by Agamben in response to what he most frequently calls the ‘epidemic’ were collected in a book entitled A che punto siamo? L’epidemia come politica.1 This was published in June of 2020, as— in England at any rate—the attempt at an indefinite quarantine of the healthy was reaching a point of exhaustion at which those placed in solitary confinement were beginning spontaneously to abandon it. A promised three weeks had turned into a three-month sentence that will have left nothing of human life untouched. The English translation of Agamben’s book was published much later, in February 2021, when there seemed to be a much more troubling reluctance, at least on the part of a certain sector of the population—the one whose views were overwhelmingly represented (or shaped) by the mass media—to abandon enforced hibernation. In December 2021 and January 2022, this seemingly endless dialectic between enclosure and ‘opening up’ was reiterated beyond its promised end, after the arrival of the Messiah: the end that had been promised from the beginning, in the form of the vaccine. ‘Face-covering’ had ceased to be legally compulsory in July 2021 but was introduced once again in December 2021, before finally being abandoned in February 2022 (albeit, as ever, with exceptions, in small print, and in the ghastly afterlife of laws in norms, guidelines and now ‘etiquette,’ in which their moralisation becomes even more facile, along with regularly reiterated calls for their reintroduction by doctors and scientists, bewildered by their apparent usurpation). Nevertheless, in the present lull, while the sheer extent of the economic, social, psychological, and even physiological damage done by the police-response to the virus is becoming evident even to some of its 21

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Chapter 1

most ardent advocates, we find ourselves at an auspicious moment for revisiting the origins of the affair, in which any number of decisions were made, and then forgotten. Practically speaking, the delay that necessarily affects the transition between languages allowed the first English edition to contain four more chapters than the Italian: State of Emergency and State of Exception The Face and the Mask What Is Fear? On the Time to Come All of these, save ‘The Face and the Mask’ were included in the expanded Italian edition that appeared in September 2021 with the addition of: Capitalismo comunista (Communist Capitalism) Gaia e Ctonia (Gaia and Cthonia) Filosofia del contatto (Philosophy of Contact) L’arbitrio e la necessità (Arbitrariness and Necessity) La guerra e la pace (War and Peace) La nuda vita e il vaccine (Bare life and the Vaccine) Il volto e la morte (The Face and Death) Cittadini di seconda classe (Second Class Citizens) Tessera verde (Green Pass) Uomini e lemmings (Men and Lemmings)2 As time passed, Agamben’s concerns came to encompass the character of a society that ostracises those who refuse to recognise the messiah that has arisen as the true one, if only because the termination that it promised risks acting as a retroactive justification for all of the ‘measures’ that had gone before (‘just until the vaccine arrives . . . ’ ‘to buy ourselves the time that will make its arrival possible’), not to speak of the shattering consequences of instituting such a moralising apartheid, that at the time of writing hovers between inexistence and a stalled but still threatening potential that in some parts of the world has already become an actuality.3 For at least two decades, Agamben has been acutely attuned to the methods by which a state institutes conditions of entry and residence, for some resulting in barred entry, exile, or inclusion in a degraded form, as a ‘second class citizen,’ all of this by way of an understanding of identity that reduces it to the biological character of the human being in question, an identity interpreted in terms of measurable quantities which as a result becomes digitisable and susceptible to registration upon a medium that can be constantly updated. As

The Invention of an Epidemic

23

a result, the conditions for whatever the ‘passport’ allows may be as volatile as the State wishes.4 The present work, in the name of constructing a concept of the event and the response made to it, attempts to provide a summa of the contributions that philosophy has made to an understanding of the matter, as well as a thorough analysis and defence of Agamben’s position, which has always been more or less precisely our own. One reason for incorporating the many texts composed by other philosophers, apart from their inherent interest— even if in some cases they can only be read as symptoms of a failure that seems endemic to an academia largely unable to envisage forms of life and sufferings other than its own—is to allow us to delineate the borders of the concept that Agamben presents us with in a more nuanced way, by proposing other moments that might have formed part of it and which often help to set it in starker relief. Only occasionally, as in the case of Elettra Stimilli and Donatella Di Cesare, for instance, can they genuinely be said to adumbrate a potential supplement.5 Our own experiences took place in a context that was overwhelmingly English, and as a result we shall expand on Agamben’s remarks most often by way of a sometimes implicit reference to that context, which was in any case, mutatis mutandis, mirrored almost everywhere—with some notable exceptions, such as Sweden and certain other African, Eastern European, and American states, which are all too often ignored. INVENTING AN EPIDEMIC: TWO DOGMAS Agamben’s Where are we now? opens by speaking of ‘the invention of an epidemic.’6 This is the title given to the first chapter of the book in every one of its editions. To ward off the misinterpretation that such a title nevertheless quite deliberately lends itself to, Agamben broadens the notion of ‘invention’ to encompass a confluence that is not plotted in advance, but which may well be opportunistically seized upon in the course of an affair’s development: ‘“Invention” in the political sphere should not be understood in a purely subjective sense. Historians know that there are, so to speak objective conspiracies that seem to function as such without being directed by an identifiable subject. As Foucault showed before me, governments that deploy the security paradigm do not necessarily produce the state of exception, but they exploit and direct it once it occurs.’7 The invention of the epidemic involved the manufacturing of consensus with respect to the three moments of ‘the Science’ regarding the essence of the virus itself, the non-pharmaceutical response called for by this essence, and the pharmaceutical advent the promise of which made the

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Chapter 1

non-pharmaceutical measures possible and whose eventual arrival was said to bring about their termination. This engineering has proved so successful that to many it has come to seem as if there simply never was an alternative: the invention has uprooted itself and taken on a life of its own, its genesis has been elided. It is as if it had always existed as a possibility, on hand should the situation demand it, and in this instance, it was put ever more vigorously into effect. The incarceration of the healthy members of entire national populations, along with the closing of national borders, was presented as necessary on the supposition that the more usual manner of treating diseases would not be sufficient in the present case. One single type of predictive model was used to justify these assertions and it took blithely for granted the notion that the human beings it took it upon itself to speak about would simply have forgotten certain basic elements of human behaviour in the context of a supposedly widespread contagion. Let us remind ourselves of them: when ill we isolate ourselves as far as possible by prescinding from work, we rest, visit a doctor if we do not spontaneously improve; if directed by them, we undergo a spell in hospital, and in some very extreme cases we have the good grace to die.8 ‘Lockdowns’ were, in the end, on the very most charitable of interpretations, a remedy for a health service that lacked capacity, but within a very particular set of political, economic, technological and mediatic circumstances, if not something more sinister (for hospitals, in England at any rate, have their incapacity exposed every winter and yet such remedies have never before been seriously mooted, and at the same time, they were quite simply never full9). That an entire population could undergo such enduring hardship for reasons such as this still fails to astonish us as much as it should. Perhaps because we have been habituated to the notion by lengthy advertising campaigns, which have taken various forms, but we are not altogether staggered to be informed that we have a moral duty and at times even a legal obligation to spare these institutions the necessity of having to protect us—protective institutions that are so corrupt they are said to stand in need of protection from us. The logic of this curious inversion, which is one among a number of affiliated reversals, will be our concern in what follows.10 So exceptional were the measures that it took no small effort to convince the majority (if indeed they were convinced) that the disease itself was sufficiently unprecedented to warrant them. As the Manifeste Conspirationniste has it: ‘This is probably the first deadly epidemic where people needed to be convinced of its very existence.’11 The consensus surrounding event and response was formed by means of an extraordinary complicity of media and government, including an astonishingly infantilising and violent campaign of advertisement instituted directly by the latter, ostensibly on behalf of the

The Invention of an Epidemic

25

national health service. As a citizen subjected to taxes one was effectively financing one’s own terrorisation.12 This campaign was carried out over the course of a very few months at the beginning of 2020, though its epigones continued to pollute public space for at least a year. With the passing of time, the recurrence of the measures taken in the autumn of 2020 and the winter of late 2021, together with the need to give some meaning to such repeated suffering in hindsight (‘this cannot all have been for nothing’), the consensus has hardened into a dogma, affirming that one and only one conception may be admitted. It is with this that any serious philosopher should have begun, asking precisely how such a dogma could have formed and thus—in Kantian terms—initiating a critique that, under the influence of scepticism, confines the dogmatic claims to certain knowledge within bounds and restrains Reason from assertions that it is not justified in making. The notion of an ‘epidemic’ must by definition include both the natural event of the virus and the social, cultural, and political circumstances within which the impact of the disease makes itself felt. An epidemic stands athwart the boundary that separates and joins nature and culture, biological life and politics.13 Given this, philosophy must, if it is to remain true to its own (post-Kantian) nature, ask after the processes and motivations that went into the ‘invention of an epidemic,’ since the question of whether a pathogen is considered capable of motivating any especial response depends not just on the character of the disease but upon the cultural systems that are in place to deal with the resultant disease and the very nature of the culture itself, its social arrangements and political system more generally, which in itself opens up different kinds of responses, some more appropriate and some less. The epidemic’s location at the border of nature and culture demands at the very least an equal contribution from scholars of both the natural sciences and the human sciences, and yet the particular way in which this conjuncture was conceived was almost exclusively the work of the natural scientists—a circumstance which itself stands in need of explanation. That the humanities were almost altogether drowned out or remained silent allowed the virus to be used at the very least as a pretext for an entirely unprecedented set of actions, whose unheard-of character demanded that other more accustomed remedies be ruled out in advance with an equally unfamiliar vigour. How did we reach a point at which to speak of any other response to illness became logically and morally unacceptable? Each of the dogmas we are faced with on the two sides of the epidemic posits a differentiated multiplicity as if it were an undifferentiated unity, a clamour as if it were unanimity. The first dogma—expressed in terms of ‘the Science’ and our ‘following’ of the same, which is to say, the former’s sovereign rule—affirms that the dissemination and peril of the virus are ‘total’: this is expressed by means of the very word

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‘pandemic’ itself. This term encompasses the ‘all’ (πᾶν) and at least subliminally conveys the message that disease is everywhere and (so) poses a threat to everyone. Every aspect of the way in which the affair was presented by government and media alike affirmed as much, at least once the need to justify harsh measures had come to urge itself upon those in power—from the initial messages which intoned sententiously that ‘anyone can die of it,’ right up to a later phase in which even those who did not have it and were unlikely to suffer even mildly if they did were instructed to act as if they had it. What mattered was not actuality, but potential. This alone should give us pause before invoking the word, ‘pandemic,’ which has come to act like so many such words coined or put into circulation in recent days as a hindrance to thought. Byung-Chul Han points out that the transformation we have witnessed over the last three years was in fact already in train: for several decades now, we have been treated by the state and other agencies, particularly in airports, where transit between nation-states for the most part takes place, as if we were criminals of a certain kind: ‘At airports everyone is treated like a potential terrorist. [. . .] The virus is a terror in the air. Everyone is suspected of being a potential carrier of the virus, and this leads to a quarantine society, which, in turn, will lead to a biopolitical surveillance regime.’14 The not insignificant difference between the two kinds of suspected criminality amounts to that fact that in the former case we know whether or not we are what they suspect us of being; in the present case we are told that the right thing to do is not simply to suspect everyone else of being a potential bearer of disease, but to suspect even ourselves. Naturally, one knows when one is ill, but in this case, the rumour was put abroad that there could be ‘asymptomatic spreaders.’ And this notion, now known to be largely insignificant to the real milieux in which the virus was most prone to disseminate itself,15 was essential in the state’s arrogation of the right to secure certification that would attest to this invisible and dangerous aspect of the passport’s bearer. The presumption of innocence is gone, and hence perhaps the desperate and near hopeless scrabbling for a clear conscience (clean hands) that we have witnessed in many quarters. We were possessed of an identity that was unbeknownst even to us and which for that reason had to be displayed all the more prominently, in a certain manner of behaving (distantiation, muffling, invisibility), and more broadly, in a way that could be registered digitally, in the form of a statistic, a status verified by a certain officially ratified form of ‘test’ (ideally one known simply by its initials, ‘PCR’). What mattered was the certain, visible, and recorded character of that identity. In such a situation, it is all the more important that one carry one’s identification papers (as primitive as a proof of testing, or vaccination, or of a recent contraction of the pathogen, right up to a fully integrated biometric passport).

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This identification would unambiguously tell us who we are, and this identity would take the form of our biological makeup. After the first dogma, which avers the total reach of the virus itself, the second dogma affirms the same with respect to the predominant response: the police strategy of ‘lockdown’—the prising apart by force of law of sociable human beings to the point of severance and ostracisation. This was presented, after a certain point, as the only adequate response to what the Science told us, that sovereign science which we, the government and the people, obediently followed, and it was presented as if it could be applied everywhere, to everyone, at all times. With respect to this dogma, philosophy is once again and always obliged to ask: how did such a state of affairs become possible? The very first questions that philosophy asks of any phenomenon fall under two headings: the ‘that’ (in Latin, quod) and the ‘what’ (quid): does such a thing exist, and if so, what is its nature? The answers to these two questions will determine the existence (existentia) and the essence (essentia) of the matter in hand. This makes it all the more surprising that most philosophers still appear to speak without blinking of a ‘pandemic,’ or in an even tone about ‘lockdowns,’ as if these were self-evident facts, mere givens about which no questions were to be asked; as if such things were to be scrutinised only by the illogical and the immoral, their queries emanating from the margins of respectable discourse—all the more reason for these hesitant ones to be confined to these desolate marches. PRINCIPLES AND PRAGMATISM If we allow that there is at least a question as to how one might respond to such an event as a virus, then there is at least one fundamental decision that must be brought to the fore in the very first instance: the question of the absoluteness of principles and values. It would be perfectly possible to affirm the absoluteness of a certain set of ‘values,’ the inalienability of ‘human rights’ guaranteeing freedoms of certain kinds, for instance, principles which ensure the maintenance of the very humanity of the human. These are the principles that would be violated by the particular non-pharmaceutical measures decreed by the state in 2020, and if they are indeed absolute then the measures should be rejected irrespective of the seriousness of the disease which they are said to be ameliorating. The alternative to the principled position, one which seems to have been adopted by the preponderance of philosophers, not to say politicians, adopts a pragmatic attitude which relativises the absoluteness of any principle whatsoever—or at best it interprets these ‘rights’ in such a way as to include some

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sort of protection of mere biological survival, an interpretation which then allows them to weigh one principle or right against another. In any case, some principles are taken to bend. That something like this actually happened, assuming that such principles were ever upheld in the first place, was repeatedly made manifest in the self-pitying and exculpatory language of ‘difficult decisions,’ or in the paternalistic diction of British politicians belonging to either sex, ‘tough’ decisions—‘I don’t want to punish you, but I have to . . . it is, indeed, for your own good (one which you yourselves, being as yet stubborn children, are unable to grasp).’ This effectively means that whatever principles or values one might hold dear are always (from now on) liable to be rescinded. Absolutely everything is from now on dispensable. One could imagine a better world in which a decision would be characterised as ‘difficult’ if it involved adhering to one’s principles in the face of a strong temptation to compromise. Principles, even from the pragmatist’s point of view, should be the very last things to bend, not the first. If we adopt the former, principled and absolutist position, then the actual ‘facts’ regarding the severity of the disease and the character of the virus that causes it, if such can ever be established and indeed if such there be, are irrelevant; if the latter, we are forced to accept that there is a certain threshold beyond which certain measures that contravene our principles could be countenanced, even though this would still leave open the question of whether one would be justified in legally enforcing this overriding, which would rule out any more local or individual process of decision, be it ethical or otherwise.16 What caused these malleable principles to bend was in fact merely a prediction, a prognostication of seriousness, or more precisely a certain way of seizing upon a ‘reasonable worst case scenario,’ later withdrawn or at least presented differently (the ‘Imperial model’), in tandem with the impossibility of proving a counterfactual account of what might have happened had these measures not been taken (assuming one could exclude those vexatious countries which attempted to preserve a certain form of social life: these would be subject to vicious campaigns of vilification to ensure that they were not viewed as serious practicable alternatives). We shall see that it might be said, even if not in the straightforward way one might expect, that Giorgio Agamben’s work falls on the side of the absolute principle, and his opponents’ on the side of pragmatism. We shall cast Roberto Esposito in the role of the most philosophically significant representative of the latter persuasion. He unambiguously considers the political response to the virus to be a matter of judgement and proportion, arguing that we should adjust the response to the particular exigencies of the event responded to. What he does not offer is a criterion by which this commensurability between stimulus and response could be established. But this is precisely what is required in order for the pragmatic position to be justified at

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all, and it turns out to be just what none of those who speak in favour of the authoritarian response have been able to provide. In truth, as we have suggested, what might have been construed as a pragmatic judgement of proportion in fact embodied a much more troubling and questionable absoluteness of principle in its turn, for it bestowed an absolute value upon biological life, and effectively endorsed the concomitant imperative, which was considered categorical, to ‘save lives.’ Before this slogan everything was forced to bow. In this way, a position that presents itself as advocating the ‘proportionate’ was in truth just as absolutising as its principled opponent. This is precisely the moment at which a rudimentary and general education in philosophy might have saved us. The humanities failed for the most part to make their voices heard in even the meekest of forms: only (natural) ‘science’ could save us here; only scientists are, it seems, fit to govern (if only by proxy) when politicians renege on their obligations. In truth, the scholars of the human sciences were rarely asked for their view, but this should not have prevented them from enunciating it. THE NATURE OF A PANDEMIC Let us, for the moment, give the benefit of the doubt to the pragmatic, ‘proportionalist’ position, and assume that the nature of the disease might be such as to justify the suspension—or even abandonment—of certain legal rights and moral obligations. If this were the case then we would need to make good on this lack of a carefully articulated criterion with which to make judgements. It would unquestionably be a matter of commensurability, and we would need to say something about the event and its nature. First of all we might ask, and here the human sciences would indeed come to our aid, whether the title ‘pandemic’ was warranted at all, and what effects followed from the very act of so naming it. Secondly, we would need to establish why this ‘pandemic,’ of the five or so that have been declared over the last thirty or forty years, was so exceptional as to warrant measures that were hardly mooted in any previous case. To determine whether we have indeed lived through a pandemic, and so to answer the question of the ‘that,’ we would need to say just what a ‘pandemic’ is, and then to determine whether the distribution of the particular crown-shaped virus that was first officially identified in late 2019 meets that description. Things are by no means straightforward here: the definition of ‘pandemic’ has a history and is therefore demonstrably mutable, for reasons which are not simply confined to the medical.17 The official definition of a ‘pandemic’

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was changed quite recently for the sake of a virus in a certain way quite similar to the one that has come to monopolise our attention of late. This alteration allowed a certain body (the World Health Organisation, effectively charged with supplying or authorising itself to provide the definition) to pronounce this particular incidence to be ‘pandemic’ (and recently to arrogate to itself the right to do so in the future whilst increasing its pre-eminence over national governments in its ability to impose measures of the kind we have seen in recent times, internationally, bypassing still more brazenly the sovereign decision-making powers of nation-states18). In the conventional, etymological understanding of the word, a ‘pan-demic’ encompasses all (πᾶν) of the people(s) (δήμος). This globality allows the authorising institution (by necessity supranational) to affirm that the measures taken in response must be equally global and undiscriminating, to be applied pervasively within cultures and across them: total and so utterly intolerant of ‘dissent.’ Such measures require observance; they must be ‘locked’ in place, by police and military force. Since the effects of this act of naming are precisely what we are attempting to understand, we have followed Agamben himself in frequently replacing the word ‘pandemic’ with the more cautious ‘epidemic’ (epidemia), thus transporting us back in speech and thought to a moment prior to this performative gesture and the decisions that led to it, whilst stressing that an epidemic is defined by a confluence of a certain natural entity and a social, cultural, and political situation.19 David Cayley, following in the footsteps of Ivan Illich, has emphasised the efficacy of the very designation, ‘pandemic.’ On his account, the word was crucial to the process whereby the non-pharmaceutical interventions proposed came to appear acceptable in democratic cultures: ‘the declaration by the World Health Organisation that a pandemic was now officially in progress didn’t change anyone’s health status but it dramatically changed the public atmosphere. It was the signal the media had been waiting for to introduce a regime in which nothing else but the virus could be discussed. [. . .] If you talk about nothing else, it will soon come to seem as if there is nothing else.’20 No other diseases, no other causes of death, nor any ‘side-effects,’ physical, psychical, social, or economic carried any weight (in wartime these are now spoken of as ‘collateral damage,’ or else are simply ignored as distractions from the one great fight now underway against a single unified enemy, insistence upon them being a sign of treachery or cowardice). They were shunted into invisibility or irrelevance, their reckoning deferred to the future. The sensationalistic media adopted with dubious enthusiasm a wartime mentality in which nothing else mattered apart from winning this ‘war’ in the name of which everything might be sacrificed.21 The announcement of a ‘pandemic’ on the part of a body that seemed to be taken as trustworthy, authoritative, and ‘objective,’ was partly responsible

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for bestowing upon this virus the extraordinarily exclusive visibility that it attained among all of the many and various diseases that were in circulation at the time. It was constituted as the pathogen of overriding importance to the government, the media, and even the health services themselves. THE RETROSPECTIVE POWER OF THE RESPONSE Once the naming of the event had supplied it with such absolute prominence, nothing could be ruled out in the extremity of the measures that were taken to counteract it. This response then had, almost immediately, the retroactive effect of magnifying the perceived gravity of the event to which it responded (the nature of which was to a great extent unknown22). As Cayley puts it: ‘What does seem clear, here in Canada, is that, with the exception of a few local sites of true emergency, the pervasive sense of panic and crisis is largely a result of the measures taken against the pandemic and not of the pandemic itself.’23 Hence it is pertinent to ask, ‘[h]ow much of an emergency would we feel ourselves to be in if this had never been called a pandemic and such stringent measures taken against it?’ Contextualising the seriousness of the event in question, one can demonstrate the presence of exaggeration: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remarked on March 25th that we are facing ‘the greatest health care crisis in our history.’ If he is understood to be referring to a health crisis, this seems to me a grotesque exaggeration. Think of the disastrous effect of smallpox on indigenous communities, or of a score of other catastrophic epidemics from cholera and yellow fever to diphtheria and polio. Can you then really say that a flu epidemic which appears mainly to kill the old or those made susceptible by some other condition is even comparable to the ravaging of whole peoples, let alone worse? And yet, unprecedented, like the Prime Minister’s ‘greatest ever,’ seems to be the word on everyone’s lips.24

Crucial to the formation of both the pandemic (‘the Science’) and the police-response was the question of visibility—what comes to the fore and what remains in the background in any particular situation. Why did it happen that every other cause of death, present and past, every other reason to become ill, every other social, economic, and political problem, was elided from mediatic presentation for the entire duration of the non-pharmaceutical interventions (save for those lighter moments when restrictions were temporarily suspended and one could finally breathe again; only then was it possible to shed light upon the sheer extent of the waiting lists, the deficits and losses of social, cultural and economic life, the neikotic scattering of former

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friends, cohabitees, and lovers)? No one can, in all good faith, pretend that we are or were dealing with the most deadly disease in our history, the urgency of ‘protection’ which it was said to dictate outweighing all of the devastation the measures taken were sure to wreak. And one can expand the context still further: as Alex Broadbent points out, from the point of view of the African continent, home to a population of vastly different demography, much younger, much less vulnerable to the effects of the coronavirus, malaria is of far greater concern, as is sepsis, among a number of other diseases that it is so easy for Westerners to forget.25 Why have these not received the same exposure?26 At least for the reason that they affect people who are themselves less visible than the more affluent Western city-dwellers whose deaths have been brought to the fore of late. If there is a concern that ‘our’ hospitals might overflow—forgetting for a second, or for as much as three years, that this occurs every winter and that doctors are compelled by their very vocation to make choices as to who is to be treated and when—it is in part because death would have acquired a tangible presence that is then available for (mostly sensationalistic, even gleeful) amplification by the media. Suddenly this perfectly quotidian occurrence of the old, fragile and unfortunate passing away in their thousands each day acquires an unaccustomed visibility, and thus, in a society governed by spectacle, an uncommon power. Cayley has attempted to demonstrate the conditions that have made this visibility possible together with the acceptance of the measures that followed this sudden irruption. They revolve around a perception of human political life that has come to be designated with the word ‘biopolitics.’ While neither Cayley nor Ivan Illich seem to be quite prepared to designate themselves as biopolitical theorists by profession, both provide a remarkably illuminating way in to this mode of thinking:27 The measures mandated by ‘the greatest health care crisis in our history’ have involved a remarkable curtailing of civil liberty. This has been done, it is said, to protect life and, by the same token, to avoid death. Death is not only to be averted but also kept hidden and unconsidered. Years ago I heard a story about a bemused listener at one of Illich’s lectures on Medical Nemesis who afterwards turned to his companion and asked, ‘What does he want, let people die?’ Perhaps some of my readers would like to ask me the same question. Well, I’m sure there are many other old people who would join me in saying that they don’t want to see young lives ruined in order that they can live a year or two longer. But, beyond that, ‘let people die’ is a very funny formulation because it implies that the power to determine who lives or dies is in the hands of the one to whom the question is addressed. The we who are imagined as having the power to ‘let die’ exist in an ideal world of perfect information and perfect technical mastery. In this world nothing occurs which has not been chosen. If someone dies, it will be

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because they have been ‘let . . . die.’ The state must, at all costs, foster, regulate and protect life—this is the essence of what Michel Foucault called biopolitics, the regime that now unquestionably rules us. Death must be kept out of sight and out of mind. It must be denied meaning. No one’s time ever comes—they are let go. The grim reaper may survive as a comic figure in New Yorker cartoons, but he has no place in public discussion. This makes it difficult even to talk about death as something other than someone’s negligence or, at the least, a final exhaustion of treatment options. To accept death is to accept defeat.28

JUDGEMENT AND THE POINT OF COUNTERPRODUCTIVITY: THE NATURAL AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES In the most general terms we are speaking of the way in which the medical establishment was crowned King and one particular natural scientific construal of events achieved such absolute sway. What such a sweeping universalisation rules out absolutely is the exercise of judgement, and it effectively expresses the absolute elision on the part of the dominant narrative of any attempt to establish a criterion by which the measures chosen might end up becoming counterproductive, which is to say the point at which the remedy becomes more harmful than the disease.29 This would mark the moment at which all of the elided alternatives are brought back into consideration, and at the very least it would act as a signal to the Humanities that the time has come for them to intervene. No doctor can by oath accept that at a certain point one has to overrule the notion that no death of any kind is acceptable. It is the absolute and unquestioned authority of the doctor’s discourse over the polis as a whole, and not just the hospital, that has allowed the rule of law to coincide with the remarkable categorical imperative to save all lives of any kind, always, and at any cost. Philosophy, from its own distinctive coign of vantage, sits prior to the distinction between the natural and the cultural, the natural scientific and the human scientific, and as a consequence is charged with the task of determining the point at which a judgement must be made as to when this imperative becomes damaging, and at what point deaths, of a certain kind and a certain number, must become ‘acceptable.’ The Hippocratic Oath has in recent years come to obscure all thinking of this kind in a way that has clearly become counterproductive.

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DID IT EXIST? HAS AN EVENT TAKEN PLACE? We have up to now been probing the nature of the declared ‘pandemic’— what it might mean and how this particular event could have come to be so designated. We are now in a better position to raise the other, and intimately related philosophical question as to whether a pandemic has in any significant sense actually taken place. From the question of essence we move on to that of existence. Apart from the question of definition, which demonstrates that an event can become something simply by way of a redefinition, and apart from the question of the decisions taken as to which of the many equally serious or trivial diseases are to become visible in such a glaring fashion, the existence of such an event as a ‘pandemic’ should be questionable in a quite uncontroversial way. This is at least partly due to the fact that measures were taken precisely in order to pre-empt the event’s complete unfurling. This means that no advocate of the efficacy of lockdowns can simply say that the event happened, completely, altogether—unless they were to accept that these measures were altogether ineffective. Assuming as ever a good faith that we find less and less reason to believe in, everything that has been done to us was done precisely in order to forestall the event’s consummation. One extremely striking fact about the response to the virus on the part of professional philosophers is just how few of them have shown the slightest interest in disputing its very existence. They have ceded everything in trust to the interpretation and good faith of the World Health Organisation,30 which seems remarkable given the philosopher’s natural affinity towards scepticism.31 If even natural scientific objects have a process of construction, which is to say, conditions for the possibility of their formation and recognition, when the existence of such a thing as a ‘pandemic’ is far more dependent upon human artifice (constructed historical definitions, historically established and mutable institutions caught up in relations of power and economics) and still more so when every single aspect of the disease is questionable, and not just its predicted and uncertain course, but when the very procedures for establishing the present actuality (in the form of reliable and varied methods and extents of testing) are dubious, nothing is more natural and pressing than to question the very existence of the object.

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‘DENYING’ (UN)QUESTIONABLE EVENTS: THE HOLOCAUST, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE VIRUS The question of the ‘that’ was so altogether prohibited by the governmentalmediatic machine that it came to be slurred in popular parlance by means of a word previously reserved for a certain scepticism with respect to the hegemonic account of the Shoah: ‘denialist.’ At this point the connection between the current affair and the more widely disseminated discursive strategy that has acquired the name ‘cancel culture’ becomes evident. The term ‘denialist’ reaches us most immediately from discussions of the holocaust, but by way of another matter in respect to which scientific dissent has been prohibited: climate change. A comparison between the onset of the latter and the advent of the coronavirus may be instructive, not least because a number of writers have contrasted the responses that have been made to the two events and because the lockdown strategy risks being taken as a model for State responses to future crises. The response to climate change is understood by these writers to be vastly less adequate than the police-response to the virus, while the event itself is equally if not more serious: the event of climate change may unfold at a much slower pace, but it will nevertheless degrade and destroy far more lives, both human and nonhuman, than the coronavirus of 2019. Events which blossom quickly are more readily noticeable than those which emerge only gradually. A comparison in terms of the eventual character of the event has been drawn between the viral incidence and the changing climate by Bruno Latour and Andreas Malm amongst others.32 Malm tries to make sense of the question, ‘why did the states of the global North act on corona [sic] but not on climate?’ This question demands consideration because, in Malm’s estimation, the latter is much the more fatal and dangerous, as well as being much more deserving of the belligerent metaphors that were so blithely and uniformly put about with regard to the epidemic.33 Dipesh Chakrabarty, inspired by an earlier conversation with Latour,34 takes the disproportion in collective life-spans between microbial life and human life to imply that even if we win the ‘battle’ again the virus, the latter will carry the day when it comes to the ‘war.’35 Chakrabarty thus situates the cultural, historical fact of globalisation within a ‘planetary’ continuum, alongside the natural history of viral and other forms of life, suggesting that while the struggle of microbes and humans has been exacerbated by recent developments in the history of technology, the natural prehistory of the virus’s nearly four billion years of life suggests that total eradication—‘winning the war,’ ‘zero covid’—is essentially beyond us. Both Latour and Malm have the good sense to recognise that there are situations more serious than the one which has been brought to the fore over the

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past three years, and as a result they recognise more or less explicitly that the only interesting question when it comes to the coronavirus is the one which Giorgio Agamben effectively set himself to answer: why respond to this event to this unheard-of extent?36 And more fearfully, what precedents have been set that might allow for an even more damaging response next time? Broadly speaking, Latour and Malm call for something like a commensurate action for the environment, and in this respect they should be very careful what they wish for: talk of ‘climate lockdowns’ entered the mediatic vocabulary with fearful rapidity.37 Once the precedent has been set that such actions are acceptable as ‘solutions’ in a ‘crisis,’ they are available to be used again. Beyond that, what we have learnt from the crushing of dissent in the case of the virus must cause us to reconsider what we are constantly and so shrilly told regarding the climate: we should introduce a note of scepticism even here, at least to make room for thought and nuance. In any case, once the state of emergency has been brought about and normalised so blatantly, one is led to question at least the presentation of any event that might elicit a similar set of responses. Climate change has been depicted as having a structure that is particularly amenable to the declaration of a state of emergency (‘Climate Emergency’38), which has no obviously definable end. Emergency will be ongoing, until the extinction of the race, if such a thing is even plausible. The possibility of treating what has been done in response to the virus as a precedent makes it all the more urgent to question the event and the response made to it in the present case, whilst also rendering the potential disproportion between the two more overtly manifest. There are clearly questions to be asked here, and the rhetorical strategy of foreclosing such questioning by means of the language of negation (‘denial’) is a wretchedly unphilosophical gesture that should only motivate us to question all the more.39 THE PIETY OF THE EVENT AND ‘PHILOSOPHICAL NARCISSISM’ How are we to explain the fact that any form of philosophical questioning in the case of the virus has lain itself open to the charge of ‘denial’? In questioning the full occurrence of the ‘event,’ we have had in mind something like the notion which Alain Badiou has made his own. If we consider the epidemic as a potential ‘event’ in this sense, the question as to whether or not the virus itself amounted to anything could only be decided after the fact, and on the basis of the consequences of the event: ‘Events produce transformations that prior to their taking place were not even possible. In fact, they only begin to be “after” the event has taken place. In short, an event is such because it generates “real” possibility.’40

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One of the ways in which events prove their eventual character is by refusing to fit into existing conceptual schemes: in this way, in order to be thought, they demand the invention of new concepts and perhaps even a new way of thinking (and in turn a new way of acting). One frequent response on the part of those who advocate harsh restrictions of communal life, in good faith or bad, has been to suggest that any philosopher who asserts that the epidemic can be made intelligible by already established modes of thinking is blindly refusing to accept the novelty of the event, and is somehow ‘in denial.’ This intelligibility may by itself be taken to imply that no exceptional measures are warranted in this particular case, and indeed it is implied that the desire not to accept these measures is the ultimate ground for the assertion of intelligibility. This is precisely a gesture that has been made in response to Agamben, who is thereby charged with appropriating such a novel event to a conceptual apparatus that would pre-exist it. It has even been transformed into an argument against philosophy itself (Agamben would merely stand here as its highest representative), as if philosophy could only be the application of a conceptual scheme already set in stone, rather than the constant and restless refusal to remain content with any one, or—as with Hegel—the spontaneous and presuppositionless generation of new categories or even a new form of sentence beyond the judgemental or propositional form which simply categorises a subject by means of a predicate. Alexei Penzin has spoken of a ‘philosophical narcissism’ in this sense.41 In this move to forestall philosophy, however, we risk drawing near to a kind of piety before an event so exorbitant that all rational thought as such blasphemes it—in this case by ‘not taking it seriously.’ Anything but a blind acceptance of a certain dominant narrative, based on the pronouncements of a certain group of scientists, and a certain set of politicians, together with a media which rarely strays beyond their most fundamental position, should be rejected as dangerous heresy. One should effectively stop thinking and obey, whilst presumably murmuring something about ‘saving lives’ or some other mantra which seems to function exclusively so as to prevent thought. When a philosopher stoops to this level, we are certainly witnessing a self-relinquishment on the part of thought. But in any case, what this pious stance lays itself open to is a subordination to State ideology. This piety of the event is perhaps what has allowed the analogy to be drawn between any serious form of critical thinking with regard to the virus and ‘denial.’ As the anonymous authors of the Manifeste Conspirationniste have it, ‘[l]ogic now seems to count as an offence [délits].’42

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NEITHER EVENT NOR NONEVENT We shall nevertheless make some progress if we consider a more nuanced version of the reproach of ‘narcissism’: Daniel J. Smith has urged us, in a cautious and significant piece, not to assert but to countenance the possibility that the event is exceptional. Smith opines that, by isolating the element of political power and control in the response to the virus, Agamben is—at least by narrowing his focus to this one element alone—eo ipso guilty of deciding against the eventual character of the virus: part of the frustration of those texts is their insistent focus on just one aspect of the crisis. Agamben is surely right to say that states will use all of the moves from the infernal playbook of biopolitical governance he has analysed so well in the past; they have already begun to do so, and it is just as deplorable as it ever was. But the problematic of the state of exception is just one component of a vastly more complex global situation; what’s more, it is one of its features that was already familiar to us before the pandemic.43

Familiar and hence thinkable—Agamben would be guilty of focussing solely on the more readily thinkable aspect of the current event and of neglecting the unthinkable and that which is yet to be thought. Smith infers from this that Agamben must be tacitly presupposing that there is no true ‘event’ here, but merely the continuation of a process (the application of sovereign power to bare life) that has been in motion for some time: If this is one’s diagnosis of the situation, then one is really saying that the viral event is no event at all, but instead a mere occasion for the continuation of processes that all existed before, and which we philosophers already understand perfectly well. [. . .] [S]ome recent texts are reminiscent of Rousseau’s approach to the Lisbon earthquake: the bare repetition of old critical tropes is just another way of protecting previous modes of thinking from having to change, while suggesting that the coronavirus does not pose any fundamental challenges to contemporary philosophy.44

But it is no more philosophical to presuppose that the affair is an event than to presuppose that it is not; and Agamben’s gesture, which indeed frequently admits its own limits and narrow focus (‘I am not a doctor . . . ’) at worst amounts to a decision of the same kind but in the opposite direction to Smith’s. And irrespective of the eventuality of the event, the event itself is not thereby rendered less worthy of thought: there is nothing new here—and that is precisely what needs to be thought and, first of all, pointed up. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that those who decry the philosopher’s narcissism are themselves guilty of a kind of ‘denial.’ In this case, they would refuse

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to countenance the very process of ‘invention’ that we are here attempting to uncover, so (dogmatically) certain are they that an event has taken place. But this is to assert, without argument, that we know in advance that the biomedical aspect of the affair will outweigh the political consequences, or much more bluntly and narrowly, that the virus will kill more people than the lockdown, and that all of the other consequences of such an action can be discounted, so serious is the virus taken to be. From our point of view, this is simply to adopt the State’s position uncritically, and to endorse the state of emergency and all that follows from it; it is to follow a sovereign, whose unity is in any case dubious. Perhaps the most philosophical response to what is putatively an event is a certain indifference to the very alternative of event and nonevent. Agamben is at times tempted to assume this standpoint, affirming that ‘it is irrelevant whether it [the event] is real or simulated.’45 But here we are intervening in a situation in which, to an overwhelming extent, a decision has already been made and it has been bolstered to an extraordinary degree by almost every serious organ of public discourse. And because those in power have decided, or have pretended to decide in favour of the eventual character of the virus, and because this decision has the advantage of allowing the State to accrue an unprecedented degree of control over its citizens’ public and private lives, we are obliged as philosophers to suspend that decision in thought and to examine the situation of indecision that precedes it. In this way, we may reveal something of the conditions which made the decision possible. This would be to act in a way captured beautifully by Heidegger in What is Called Thinking?: what is worthy of thought is the very fact that we are not yet thinking. The novelty of the political response can be determined only by an unwavering focus on the political and ethical ramifications (the epidemic as politics or as political, l’epidemia come politica), and the fact that what we are experiencing is continuous with a gesture that is already underway but also comprises a step beyond that, and in the wrong direction, one which refuses to think a new ‘politics to come’ and attempts to maintain the old in a kind of suspended animation, beyond its own natural life, like an engine running on empty. In truth, it even seems that Smith is unable to provide examples of novelty in his own description of what has taken place. He lists: online life for education and the arts, a disembodying of human relations in general, a decolonising of our accounts of history, the emergence of ‘new forms of surveillance and control,’ all of which may be construed as prolongations of already prevailing trends. Smith himself states in his account of one of the ‘major transformations’ wrought by the virus-response—the breakdown of trust in supranational bodies—that it was ‘already near breaking point.’ But if this

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were so then the response would already be capable of being thought, and not necessarily so ‘seismic’ an event as all that. Pace Ronchi and even Cayley, it is doubtful whether the eventual character of the event should be decided upon simply by examining what occurs in its wake, not least because a critical apprehension of these measures might well suggest that such measures demanded that the virus be presented as an event, retrospectively, in order that the measures themselves not seem disproportionate. The event itself was subject to a continually revised description by those in governmental and mediatic power in such a way as to justify the continuation of the particular response that had been elected at that time, to the point of rescuing it from the sheer absurdity and manifest failure that it became. The magnitude of the event is measured first in terms of deaths, then hospitalisations, then cases, then . . . just to be sure: in November 2021, in England, the promise of an irreversible rescinding of restrictions was broken simply in the name of non-knowledge. One simply did not know what this new variant was capable of—a variant baptised with the alien-sounding name, ‘omicron,’ alarming to those who lacked Greek and thus remained blissfully unaware of the fact that a much more ominous ‘o’ (an Ω or ω) was yet to come. Given this paucity of certainty, it was argued, one should lock people up ‘just to be on the safe side.’46 Agamben has insisted upon the fact that far worse epidemics have occurred in the past—and indeed we know that many more people die for other reasons every day—and no such response has ever been mounted: ‘More serious epidemics have happened in the past, but nobody ever dared declare for that reason a state of emergency which keeps us from moving’47 or ‘effectively prevents people from living.’48 Thus there is a disproportion between event and response, and this disproportion must be explained. It is completely elided if one simply assesses whether or not an event has taken place—and asks what its nature is—on the basis of the responses given, since this presupposes that there is a commensurability between the two, even if it is established only retroactively. This disproportion, once established, would imply that some other motivation lies behind the measures taken. It is to this explanation that Agamben devotes himself, an explanation which, given the (apparently) unexceptional character of the event, can indeed be ‘old’—and this would implicate the philosopher in no ‘narcissism’ at all. It might indeed be a sign of courage.49 The least that can be said of Agamben’s work prior to 2020 is that for thirty years at least he has investigated precisely the mechanisms that explain disparities such as this.

Chapter 2‌‌

Statistics and Their Vicissitudes

To demonstrate the discrepancy between stimulus and response in more depth, we need to establish that the stimulus itself is potentially less serious than it has been presented as being. One curious aspect of Agamben’s own efforts in this direction is that they have involved a recourse to statistics, and that means a resort to the question of (natural) science. The invocation of statistics is treacherous since it seems to open up the possibility that revealed in the numbers might be an event so serious that Agamben would be compelled to adopt a position akin to that of Roberto Esposito, which would allow that a sufficiently high number would demand a response equally extreme. In truth, Agamben is attempting to demonstrate the totalising closure of the official presentation of statistics, and that involves putting in question the unity of ‘the Science’ and consequently ruffling the tranquil notion that the non-pharmaceutical interventions chosen were the only ones possible. ‘The Science’ is the first great unity to be deconstructed in our charting of the elision of alternatives. BENVENUTO AND THE QUESTION OF STATISTICS Agamben was not alone in his sensitivity to the manipulation of statistics. Sergio Benvenuto, very early on in the debate, takes up the question and considers in particular the demographics of the disease, its severity and fatality in comparison to other diseases: we should all know that the median age of those who have died in Italy is 79 [now estimated as being in the 80s, above average life expectancy almost everywhere1] and that the younger you are the less likely you are to fall ill. It seems evident to me that Covid-19 is carrying out a geronticide. [. . .] [/] What disturbs many is the fact that during an epidemic what really counts are the statistics, and 41

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many detest statistics. Yet it’s the statistics that tell us how things really stand. Now, the most important piece of data to evaluate the impact of Covid-19 in the various regions aren’t absolute numbers, but the comparison with how many died as a consequence of the common flu in previous years—and this is the only statistic we cannot find. For example, some point out to me in terror that in Lazio (the region where I live) just over 100 people have so far died as a consequence of Covid-19. But as I try to explain, in order to make a real assessment we would need to compare this with the mortality rate in Lazio at around the same time last year. We might even discover that there has been only an insignificant increase this year. This line of reasoning, however, is immediately unpopular: I’m accused of underestimating the epidemic! I try to explain that only such statistical comparisons can give us the differential dimension, and hence the real extent, of the epidemic.2

To fill in the lacuna he indicates, Benvenuto informs the reader that some 80,000 people had been killed in the previous year (2019) ‘by’ flu (we may presume in Italy, or just in Lazio, although this goes unspecified), and when confronted with the closure of the real (as opposed to the virtual) economy in Europe, he confesses himself ‘more concerned about the economic backlash [. . .]. After all, poverty kills too.’3 As Massimo Cacciari puts it, ‘[c]oronavirus is lethal. But so is unemployment.’4 And indeed, one might add, they are lethal for precisely distinct groups of people: a lesson all too swiftly forgotten in the hysteria that was to follow, particularly come the Autumn, and the price paid for such an induced panic will be extremely high, as even the British government’s own minimal ‘cost-benefit’ analysis of the measures finally revealed, suggesting as they did that at least 200,000 deaths would result, while others suggested over half a million, and estimates continue to rise.5 Benvenuto goes on to recognise that what mattered in those early days was not actual numbers but predicted ones: the measures are implemented on the basis of a model that deals not in actuality but in potential (and here it is not clear whether he is ventriloquising official advice or speaking in his own name): ‘my relative disregard, though rationally based, is civically reprehensible: were I a good citizen I should behave as if I were panic-stricken. Because everything that’s being done in Italy [. . .] has a purely preventative function.’6 This is March 2020 and at the time—it is said—one simply did not know: ‘it could turn out to have been nothing more than an insidious influenza. But it could also turn into what the so-called “Spanish” flu became in 1918.’ In truth it will have been closer to the former, in terms of its lethal character, at any rate, pitifully though this evolving statistic has been reported, and maligned as the comparison has been.7 The question raised here is what spurs and what ought to spur action in cases such as this: non-knowledge or knowledge which is in any case by definition uncertain (since it pertains to a future as yet unrealised)?



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Stimulating panic by singling out the most extreme models for public consumption was a definite political choice, and according to Benvenuto the strategy of quarantine that it made possible ‘remains [. . .] the best strategy to suppress incurable epidemics.’8 Benvenuto is even receptive to the idea that such fearmongering can be the right thing to do: rhetoric, the activity of politicians, does after all involve the stirring of pathos: ‘In some cases, spreading terror can be wiser than taking things “philosophically.”’9 At the same time, Benvenuto also falls to thinking that the political actions taken were met with so little in the way of manifest resistance because ‘public opinion’ would not have accepted the 400,000 deaths that ‘would have’ resulted (on the estimation of a 2% fatality rate, now known to be altogether exaggerated). On this account, ‘the precautionary measures [. . .] are a lesser evil.’ This allows Benvenuto to resist what is taken to be Agamben’s notion that the measures are ‘the result of the despotic instinct of the ruling classes,’ which he describes as ‘conspiratorial’ or ‘paranoiac.’ PUBLIC OPINION On the question as to the criterion for judging the point at which immunity should be preferred to community, Benvenuto’s answer is effectively ‘public opinion.’ In the end, one could see such a populist impulse motivating the explicit pronouncements of the English Prime Minister: ‘the public will not accept . . . ’—always oscillating undecidably between a constative and a performative statement, which effectively tells the public what they ought not to accept . . . (and if one does accept it, well then, eo ipso one is not part of that ‘public,’ that ‘Nation,’ and hence an outsider, on the (lunatic) ‘fringes’). In the end, power was ceded to the medical men who know only immunity, and only one kind of immunity, even when they try to think politically (leading them to endorse the hostility and border-policing of separation and distance), partly on the basis of a kind of informal plebiscite.10 But the public’s opinion was and could only be asked after they had been swayed absolutely by an explicit and more or less avowed campaign of fearmongering on the part of the very government that then posed the question to them. A concrete example of the biosecurity strategy that Agamben identifies and upon which Esposito has written (in the past): conjure up a threat, or its semblance, magnify one which might plausibly be said to exist in some form already; and then offer a salve to the fear that is evoked by this threat. A classic ideological trick: we (secretly) create the problem, before we (openly) offer the solution; or, more likely, we institute a certain protection and then provide a new and yet more serious threat, demanding still more intrusive protective action on the part of the State. This is the role of the mediatic

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deployment of ‘new variants’ even after the ‘cure’ for the original disease has been presented as having been discovered. They render the potential for new ‘cures’ open-ended. Every serious scholar of the humanities knew about the non-natural, non-given nature of human needs and desires before March 2020, and when it came to it, they abandoned their theory at the very first opportunity, just when it had become most urgently requisite. CAYLEY AND ILLICH: STATISTICAL RISKS Before we can fruitfully say any more about statistics, we need to address the very foundations of the statistical manner of thinking, for let it not be forgotten that we are here thinking about ourselves. We are these statistics and our lives these graphs. How did we become capable of thinking about ourselves in this way, as a population of numbers? How did such a thing as ‘public health’ become possible? David Cayley allows us to demonstrate the connection between the treatment of health, life, and death in terms of statistics, and the biopolitical treatment of human beings as bare life. This connection is essential to an understanding of the way in which ‘the Science’ can have been used to motivate non-pharmaceutical (‘public health’) interventions which reduced populations to a state of mere survival and nothing more.11 Cayley is attempting to explain how it is that the rule of medicine (and, in particular, public health as an idea and as an institution) can have come to appear acceptable to us to such a remarkable extent over the last three years, and how the medical profession can assume a position of sovereignty with respect to the political sphere, particularly in a crisis: ‘[Ivan Illich’s] Medical Nemesis is a book about professional power—a point on which it’s worth dwelling for a moment in view of the extraordinary powers that are currently being asserted in the name of public health. According to Illich, contemporary medicine, at all times, exercises political power.’12 Cayley aligns this with Carl Schmitt’s notion of the sovereign legislator, capable of suspending the normal rule of law and then imposing new rules without oversight: this is ‘[t]he insistence of the physician on his exclusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises [which] moves him symbolically into the neighbourhood of the White House.’ One of the preconditions for the medical man’s becoming-sovereign is that we must first be led to understand ourselves in the way that we are presented within the discourses of natural science and medicine: not just in the third personal or impersonal form of a certain biological body, as an object, but in the form of a statistic—in other words, from the outside, and then from the



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synoptic perspective that intuits that objectified form as part of a plurality or a ‘population.’ This type of thinking occurs only once we have undergone the transition, that Illich locates within the twentieth century, between the ‘age of instrumentality’ and the ‘age of systems.’13 In the former, the user of tools remained distinct from his implements and their world, in a manner reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s notion of the ready-to-hand environment, in which elements do not signify outside of their relation to others and ultimately to the totality of things, coordinated by an ultimate purpose or ‘good’ belonging to the milieu in question. For Heidegger too, later on, an epoch of the history of technology closer to our own sees man swallowed up by a ‘system’ of resources. In a world deprived of any source of sense that transcends the immanence of the system, the highest good becomes ‘life’ and its preservation: ‘naturalised life, divorced from its source, is the new god. Health and safety are its adjutants.’14 It is in this context that Illich identified ‘an eclipse of persons by populations,’ an effectively disembodying experience of one’s own self and one’s own body as an ‘algorithm’ or ‘statistical construct.’ This transformation seems to have taken place in the name of averting (statistically probable) ‘risks.’15 As Cayley has it elsewhere, ‘systems discourse has merged model and reality.’16 In the realm of health, this ‘management of risk’ was manifested in the form of ‘patients’ becoming ‘vigilant and active against illnesses that someone like them might get. Individual cases were increasingly managed as general cases, as instances of a category or class, rather than as unique predicaments, and doctors were increasingly the servo-mechanisms of this cloud of probabilities rather than intimate advisors alert to specific differences and personal meanings. This was what Illich meant by “self-algorithmisation” or disembodiment.’17 Cayley outlines the conditions that have made it possible for individual human beings to adjust their behaviour or consent to having it adjusted on the basis of statistical models: ‘The bodies in which people lived and walked around had become synthetic constructs woven out of CAT-scans and risk curves. Life had become a quasi-religious idol, presiding over an “ontology of systems.” Death had become a meaningless obscenity rather than an intelligible companion.’18 In other words, if graphs and statistics were repeatedly used to motivate, if not ultimately to coerce action and obedience over the last few years, and if they were in some respects effective, then how are we to explain that fact? Such figures could be motivating only if human beings had already learnt to view themselves in this medicalised, ‘stochastic’ way, and only if they had been persuaded of an absolute value of ‘life’ in the sense of survival, one that altogether eclipsed the possibility and necessity of death (and suffering, including illness), which was to be elided altogether.

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This reduction of life to a quantifiable continuum of risks and probabilities of its own termination, or the denting of its vitality, is one possible way of reducing qualitative human life to bare life, life in terms of its sheer capacity to survive and life as something that can be subjected without question to medical interventions of a professional and institutional kind. When the population beyond the walls of the medical establishment stricto sensu comes to think of itself in this way, the power of the doctors is extended in tandem and we are in a biopolitical situation. Cayley demonstrates in this fashion that Illich’s thinking can be read alongside biopolitical theory. In a way that we shall see repeated throughout the present work, under biopolitical conditions, bare life is treated as a substrate for a properly human life, an ultimate foundation that must be protected merely for its own sake or in order to prepare for an eventual return of the good life once the crisis has subsided; but the perception of this bare biological life as a collection of data allows those who are expert in the production and manipulation of that data to assume a position of some power, and also to manage the very presentation of the event and thus its public perception. The virus is spectacularised in the form of impressive schema and numerically intimidating ‘headline’ figures (‘500,000 deaths!,’ ‘Thousands may die!’ as the Guardian screeched during a hot spell in 2022, having rather got into the swing of things by then). Apart from the terrifying pictures on the news and in adverts and on bus shelters, the mediatic transmission of the event was perhaps most efficacious in its deployment of statistics such as these. WHAT IS REAL? ON PROBABILITY AND PREDICTION BETWEEN THE NATURAL AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES But how precisely can mere statistics become politically mobilising? Agamben himself has broached this topic, in the context of an extended engagement with the natural sciences. The most immediate topic of the discourse in question is the statistical interpretation of quantum physics and it may be found in the book entitled, What is Real?19 It is devoted to a consideration of the way in which potentiality, perhaps the principal topic of Agamben’s thought as a whole, was transformed at a certain point into ‘probability.’ This transformation was consummated by a certain troubling interpretation of quantum mechanics, so troubling that it led the one who first envisioned its consequences, the physicist Ettore Majorana, to elope. What was so perturbing about it was first of all the way in which the real came to be construed in terms of probabilities and was hence lost, and secondly the way in which an analogy could then be drawn between the natural sciences and the social sciences, for, as Majorana pointed out, this ultimately means the art



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of government, and that would be a government by means of statistics—or one might say, ‘by numbers.’ At stake is something like another genealogy of the ‘population thinking’ that we have just outlined with the help of Cayley and Illich. Initially, Agamben’s remarkably condensed journey through the transition from classical physics to quantum mechanics, and the sequence of interpretations given to the latter, effectively demonstrates the relation between philosophy and (natural) science, coming close to providing a philosophy of science itself, one that alone could dispel certain contradictions that occur in the course of quantum physics’ development, which so perturbed Simone Weil, one of Agamben’s earliest inspirations. But most importantly for our purposes, Agamben’s text goes on to speak of the application of the statistical conception of reality to the social world (which was if anything the ‘explanation’ for Majorana’s undecidable disappearance in 1938, as he realised what was in store for the social world, which it might be inferred was even worse than the remarkable utilitarian calculus that was supposedly responsible for the events in Hiroshima. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that his intimations were so prescient that they could be said to encompass the events of 2020–2023). Agamben’s text is built around an article by Majorana from 1942 which ‘contains a reflection on the transformation of physics as a consequence of the abandonment of the determinism of classical mechanics in favour of a purely probabilistic conception of reality.’20 This amounts to something akin to a transition between an epistemological and an ontological conception of uncertainty, for in classical mechanics, any uncertainty in the results ‘derives, for practical reasons, from a voluntary refusal to investigate the initial conditions of physical systems in their most minute aspects,’21 a classical mechanics which therefore does not challenge the tenets of (ontological) determinism, but only our ability to know with certainty what will happen. On the other hand, quantum physics asserts that ‘“[t]here are no laws in nature that express an inevitable series of phenomena; even basic laws concerning elementary phenomena (atomic systems) have a statistical character. They only allow us to establish the probability that a measurement performed on a system prepared in a given way will give a certain result. This occurs independently of the means we have to determine the initial state of the system with the highest possible accuracy. These statistical laws indicate a real deficiency of determinism [. . .].”’22 As a result of this deficiency, a certain indeterminacy of outcome is introduced into the real, a gap which can only be filled by the intervention of the human experimenter within the experiment, which may be said quite literally to lead reality (or the real) to itself so as to assume its own nature. The experiment (and its agent) has an effect

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on the system under investigation that cannot be reduced even in principle.23 The real on its own is lacking (to itself) and thus there is no logical way to acquire knowledge of it prior to an experiment’s having been carried out, and that means prior to the advent of knowledge itself. The insight of Majorana’s that is ultimately of most interest to Agamben, and which explains the physicist’s troubled withdrawal from physics and socio-political life (some say he became a monk), relates to the analogy that may be drawn between the statistical character of reality in nature and the statistical character of reality in the social world (the first example that Agamben gives us of a statistical conception in the latter realm is, significantly enough, ‘the life-expectancy tables’24). The transition from classical to quantum mechanics does not, as some might suggest, rule out the analogy, but rather reinforces it. Agamben cites the words of Majorana, which may be seen retrospectively to have inspired the example of life expectancy in the social world since they are concerned with an analogous process in nature—radioactive decay: [o]rdinary laboratory devices are therefore sufficient to prepare a complex and conspicuous chain of phenomena that is commanded [sic] by the accidental disintegration of a single radioactive atom. From a strictly scientific point of view, nothing prevents us from considering it plausible that an equally simple, invisible, and unpredictable vital fact lies at the origins of human events [. . .].25

Therefore, the statistical laws of the social sciences enhance their function, which is not only that of empirically establishing the outcome of a great number of unknown causes [as the analogy with classical physics would suggest], but especially that of providing an immediate and concrete testimony of reality [in a way that is as yet obscure but which is intended to evoke the effect of the observer on society in analogy with the necessity of the observer to an incomplete reality in quantum mechanics]. The interpretation of this testimony requires a special art, which is not the least significant support of the art of government.26

Akin to a probabilistic event in the subatomic realm, which is here described as ‘real,’ there is a ‘testimony’ to this event, given by a human witness, a testament which the statistical laws of the social sciences are said to ‘give.’ In turn, the art of government, or Politics, is then said to ‘interpret’ the testimony of the real that the laws of the social sciences provide, in terms of sociological likelihoods or probabilities. Precisely because reality itself has an ontologically stochastic character, this licences a certain intervention on the part of the human—an intervention that, due to its practical and productive character constitutes the transmutation



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of a science into an art—which would take the form of ‘governing’ or ‘commanding’: ‘Majorana seems to suggest that it is precisely the exclusively probabilistic character of the phenomena at stake in quantum physics that authorises the investigator’s intervention, that is, [it] renders him capable of “commanding” the phenomenon itself to move in a certain direction.’27 This intervention is ‘inevitable.’ By analogy, the pure sciences of sociology and politics transform themselves spontaneously into an art of governing the socius and the polis. In the realm of the social sciences, we have known for a long time that any experiment carried out by human beings on their fellow man affects the behaviour of the latter, and the same is true in quantum physics on the probabilistic interpretation. Thus the analogy between the two types of science is bolstered and reconfigured here. In the social sciences, unlike classical physics, we could never have hoped to discover the unperturbed state of the system before the observer entered the scene and began his experiment (thus attaining the standpoint of Laplace’s ‘demon’), but we can be concerned to discover the probable state in which the system will end up upon being observed: in the natural sciences, ‘it is precisely the lack of classical physics’ determinism at the quantum level that enables, or rather forces, the investigator to “command” or “determine” the state of the system to an unheard-of degree’;28 and similarly in the social sciences: ‘the laws of social statistics do not aim at the knowledge of social phenomena but at their very “government,”’ which is to say an intervention of the human within the system which it could never rightfully have hoped ‘objectively’ to know.29 So the reason for Majorana’s disappearance is not (simply and certainly) the fact that he foresaw the belligerent consequences of fission, but what is certain is that ‘he clearly saw the implications of a mechanics that renounced every non-probabilistic conception of the real. Science no longer tried to know reality, but—like the statistics of social sciences—only intervene in it in order to govern it.’30 And that included all of the mastery and transformation that philosophy has elsewhere denounced in the sciences, and which does indeed include the transformation of nuclear energies into the explosive force of the atom bomb. AGAMBEN’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Agamben goes on to give an account of Simone Weil’s Science and Us,31 which expresses a concern with the probabilisation of the real similar to the one which led Majorana to absent himself from scientific and social life, if not life as such. She is led however in a different direction, to reaffirm the

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presence of determinacy within quantum mechanics: ‘The paradigm of necessity and of the cause-effect relation remains valid for quantum physics, and the superiority of classical physics is based precisely on this [for, we must assume, this determinacy is also present in the latter, but in a superior form].’32 The rest of Agamben’s text may be interpreted as showing how to reconcile the scientist and the philosopher along with their differing responses to a shared concern. It does this by demonstrating a failure on the part of both to think the nature of probability from out of the essence of potentiality or possibility: in other words, a want of genealogical thinking with respect to those notions which they would rather reject out of hand. Weil herself seems to have intimated the necessity for such a genealogy: ‘Weil wonders at this point why scientists did not choose to work on the very notion of probability in order to elaborate a model of calculation that is not founded on discontinuity but on continuity [one may presume the latter to imply determinism, the unbroken—and so “continuous”—character of the causal chain or fabric]—instead of changing the theory of physics from top to bottom.’33 Agamben goes on to list the other scientists who resisted the probabilistic interpretation that Majorana accepted but could not ultimately countenance, including Louis de Broglie and Albert Einstein, the latter with some vacillation.34 The problem which leads certain scientists to doubt the efficacy of the probabilistic interpretation or to adopt it and be led at least half-blindly into contradiction is the following: as was suggested by Simone Weil, the paradoxes in question in quantum mechanics derive from the unconditional assumption of probabilistic conceptions, which are not matched by an adequate reflection on the very nature of the notion of probability. For both the supporters of the orthodox theory [which seems to refer to the probabilistic interpretation of quantum physics] and their critics, the state of the system before and after observation is not a real but a probabilistic state; however, they seem to produce a representation of this state and argue as if probability were a very special kind of reality, which one can think only in a paradoxical way (for example, as if a particle were at the same time in both state A and state B [Schrödinger’s cat both alive and dead at once]). But is it correct to represent the probable as if it were something that exists? In other words, what is as stake is a problem concerning the ontology of the probable—or the possible, since probability is nothing other than a possibility qualified in a certain way.35

Thus Agamben moves on to what is effectively the second part of What is Real? (beginning with its seventh paragraph), which lays out a genealogy of this very transformation of possibility into probability, from Gerolamo Cardano to Pascal and beyond.



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FROM POSSIBILITY TO PROBABILITY: A GENEALOGY OF MODERN STATISTICS On Agamben’s account, modern statistics constitutes the end point of this genealogy, and what statistics has taught us is precisely not to make the mistake that seems to bedevil quantum physics and a certain kind of philosophy, which is to think of the probable (qua the possible) as overlapping with the real, as a part of reality, and hence as subordinated to that reality in some sense: ‘Modern statistics takes for granted the idea that probability is independent of its empirical verification. The recurrent tendency ingenuously to consider the distribution of frequencies of a given value as an objective property of the system under examination is therefore stigmatised as a “naturalistic fallacy.”’36 Statistics is well aware that it cannot provide a wholly ‘objective’ knowledge; it is rather a science that helps us decide how to act: ‘Statistics is not a science that aims at an experimental knowledge of the real; rather, it is the science that enables us to take decisions in uncertain conditions.’37 Or, said differently: ‘frequency is used not to infer a supposedly real property of the system, but—precisely as happens in quantum mechanics—to corroborate or refute a previous conjecture (which is altogether comparable to a wager [of the Pascalian kind, for instance, and hence related to betting or dicing, in which context the science of probability itself originated]).’38 Agamben attempts to represent this gesture of modern statistics philosophically in the following way, in relation to the possible and the real: a probabilistic world is ‘a world whose reality is suspended in order for us to be able to govern it and take decisions about it.’39 He immediately continues: ‘[w]hat we call “case” is the fiction according to which the probable and the possible “fall” into reality, while the opposite is true; when considered in a certain way, it is the real that suspends its reality and can thus fall into itself as merely probable.’40 We have described this above in terms of the real’s lacking an identity prior to the intervention of the observer who leads reality to itself in the form of a probability that gives the likelihood of its being in one state or another. The details of Agamben’s genealogy cannot detain us now, so we shall pass on directly to the foundation: this we find in the work of Aristotle. As he very often does when dwelling upon the true nature of potentiality, Agamben reverts to the Stagirite. The notion of possibility that the history of philosophy has inherited was established there, but at the same time, another potential reading of possibility that went unrealised in the predominant strand of the tradition is held in reserve in exactly the same place. It is to this latter that Agamben directs his own hermeneutic efforts.

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Contrary to the interpretation of the probable that prevails in quantum physics, in which the probable is thought according to the model of the real and thus as ‘subordinated’ to it, ‘[t]he idea that potency or possibility (dynamis) should be considered as a way of being along with [sic; better: alongside and distinct from] actuality (energeia) dates back to Aristotle.’41 Here Agamben develops a point within the text of Aristotle to which he has often had recourse and which is certainly ambiguous: potentiality must be capable of holding itself back from its own realisation if it is to count as potentiality at all, and not to fall together absolutely with reality. It must be able not to pass into the act, to resist the passage into actuality, and thus to suspend itself short of actualisation. This is the broad thrust of Agamben’s reading of the adynamis in Aristotle’s definition (which is taken by Agamben to mean ‘impotential’ or something like ‘the potential not to . . . ’). What changes between antiquity and modernity? For Aristotle, there was no ‘science of the accidental’ or the contingent, of what might or might not happen. This was Aristotle’s way of speaking about what would later become known as the ‘probable’: he spoke of the accidental cause of events, accidents, chance (automaton and tychē), for ‘Aristotle was not acquainted with the concept of probability.’42 And yet this notion is devised in the context of a conceptual scheme which precisely allows the contingent in the sense of the probable to be known scientifically: and this is precisely what the modern science of Statistics has devised. Statistics, by attempting to elaborate a science of the possible, albeit in the particular guise of probability, thus provides Agamben with an occasion for bringing his own alternative reading of Aristotle to the fore, as if it emerges in a distorted form in this very science, which concerns itself to know the possible in contrast to the real. This can only occur if we read the science of probability against the background of the genealogy by means of which Agamben will have charted the translation of possibility into probability, and thus it comes to light only if this science is set in relation to philosophy. This is because the science allows us to speak of probability in the context of the ‘minor’ reading of Aristotle that Agamben provides, a notion unavailable to Aristotle himself. And thanks to statistics’ resistance to the overlapping of potential and real and indeed the subordination of the former to the latter, we can use the science of statistics to assist in the task that Agamben’s philosophy sets for itself: to think possibility in such a way as to liberate it from the model provided by its actualisation: ‘If we try to define probability in Aristotle’s terms, we may say that it is a potency emancipated from its hierarchical subjection to the act.’ And something like this occurs on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum physics: ‘What happened in modern statistics and quantum physics is that the writing tablet—pure possibility—replaced [i.e., it came to occupy the position formerly occupied by] reality, and



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knowledge now knows only knowledge itself [which is to say, the observer’s intervention in reality in the form of the experiment].’43 Agamben goes on: ‘Insofar as it [the potency that is probability] has secured an existence that is independent of its actual realisation, such a possibility tends to replace reality and thus to become the object of a science of the accidental—unthinkable for Aristotle—that considers possibility as such, not as a means of knowing the real, but as a way of intervening in it in order to govern it.’44 Majorana’s own disappearance is said to ‘contain in itself [. . .] a decisive objection to the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics,’45 in the sense that he withdrew from the science of the accidental so as to restore a sense of the ungovernable, of that which cannot be known and hence intervened in, or controlled. Only by disappearing, by repeating the gesture of occlusion that probabilistic science brought about, and thereby manifesting that very gesture, can the real show itself as that which has been erased by the probable. ‘[A]s Simone Weil sensed a few years later, Majorana immediately realised that, as soon as we assume that the real state of a system is in itself unknowable, statistical models become essential and cannot but replace reality,’46 and in order to escape the government by numbers that this threatened in the social realm, Majorana had no other recourse but a certain suicide or abscondment into the ungovernable. The only alternative to such a vanishing is to provide a proper philosophy of science of the kind that Weil calls for and Agamben himself pursues. Agamben concludes his text with the following passage: The hypothesis I intend to put forward is that, if quantum mechanics relies on the convention that reality must be eclipsed by probability, then disappearance is the only way in which the real can peremptorily be affirmed as such and avoid the grasp of calculation. Majorana turned his very person into the exemplary cipher of the status of the real in the probabilistic universe of contemporary physics, and produced in this way an event that is at the same time absolutely real and absolutely improbable. When, that evening in March 1938, Majorana decided to vanish into thin air and render ambiguous every experimentally detectable trace of his disappearance, he asked science the question that still awaits its unrequestable and yet ineluctable answer: What is real?47

The answer ‘cannot be requested’ of science, but we might conjecture that it can be demanded of philosophy. The real disappears beneath the statistical, and human beings with it: they thus become subject to a kind of government which casts them in the role of (biopolitical) populations, and it is to uncover strategies which might resist this subjection, or at least to emphasise this loss, and to adumbrate something ungovernable, that Agamben devotes the entirety of his political philosophy.

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PREDICTIONS AND MODELS It is indubitably the case that probability and predictive models took the place of reality between 2020 and 2022, and indeed to such an extent that not only has the social sphere been ‘governed’ in the name of such probabilities, but entire populations have been cast into all kinds of ruin. David Cayley has stressed another crucial point concerning this strategy of governance by means of a statistical understanding of populations, so obvious that it always risks being obscured: the non-pharmaceutical interventions were justified not by actual data regarding a current state of affairs, but by a prediction. Laws were imposed to restrict our behaviour in the name of a potentiality which had not yet and might never become actual—a prediction of a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ in which a certain number of human beings were predicted to die. This number was taken, for reasons that were not and probably could not be specified, to cross a threshold of acceptability (which again was not explicitly stated and probably could not be—what was that golden number?). As Cayley points out, the moment measures are put in place on this basis, they become self-justifying and their warrant unverifiable: At the heart of the coronavirus response has been the claim that we must act prospectively to prevent what has not yet occurred [. . .]. (It’s worth pointing out, in passing, that this is an unverifiable idea: if we succeed, and what we fear does not take place, then we will be able to say that our actions prevented it, but we will never actually know whether this was the case.)48

This is the logic of the ‘rain dance’ that had stirred such merriment in Ivan Illich: if a certain measure correlates with its desired outcome, it works; if it doesn’t work, we just need to dance harder—or in this case, we needed to have ‘locked down’ harder and faster, even earlier and without dithering (another enemy in the endless ‘wars’ apparently being fought these days: a war on hesitancy, and thus, implicitly, a war waged upon thought itself).49 If it fails, it is not because the strategy is flawed but because the repression was not violent or swift enough—as if the less we know, the more faith is required and the more fanatical its observance has to be; the more wretched and unsalvageable its infidels. In this way, success or failure on the part of this one kind of measure are both counted as success. The transcendental-historical conditions which make it possible for such a fallacy to be given credit were discovered by Illich himself: to act like this requires experience in living in a hypothetical space where prevention outranks cure, and this is exactly what Illich describes when he speaks



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of risk as ‘the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.’ An expression like ‘flattening the curve’ can become overnight common sense only in a society practised in ‘staying ahead of the curve’ and in thinking in terms of population dynamics rather than actual cases.50

We have been subjected to an epochal transformation in our relation to the State in democratic countries thanks to an eminently unverifiable model that charted a number of possible futures across a statistical distribution, only the worst of which was fastened upon, a supposed risk which, however unlikely, needed to be warded off: During this pandemic, risk society has come of age. This is evident, for example, in the tremendous authority that has been accorded to models—even when everyone knows that they are informed by little more than what one hopes are educated guesses. Another illustration is the familiarity with which people speak of ‘flattening the curve,’ as if this were an everyday object [. . .]. When it becomes an object of public policy to operate on a purely imaginary, mathematical object, like a risk curve, it is certain that risk society has taken a great leap forward. This, I think, is what Illich meant about disembodiment—the impalpable become palpable, the hypothetical becomes actual, and the realm of everyday experience becomes indistinguishable from its representation in newsrooms, laboratories and statistical models.51

Crucial here is the notion that the statistical reduction, and its orientation towards the future in the form of probabilities, allows prediction and modelling to be understood in terms of averting risks—not actual dangers, but potential ones, in the mathematical form of probabilities: ‘just because we are citizens of risk society, and therefore participants by definition, in an uncontrolled science experiment, we have become—paradoxically or not—preoccupied with controlling risk.’52 If the social body is understood in stochastic terms, this allows for a new type of social control to be imposed, precisely because there is a science of probabilities: society can be governed in such a way as to secure it against future risks that might or might not occur. The greater the projected threat, the more repressive, total, and prolonged the State’s actions can become. Perhaps the most easily quantifiable threat, the most impressive and so susceptible of being presented in the most anxiogenic way, is death. Either a supposedly large number (albeit large only when taken out of context, with respect to other causes of death, quotidian death rates, and life expectancy), or even just one single death, which can be made to seem unacceptable and to demand ‘action’ on the part of the State, precisely so as to ‘control’ the cause of this death: the more isolatable the better, since then a single remedy can be proffered, which will again be controlled by a curious combination of State

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and private interests, which can profit greatly from their role as gatekeepers to this unique exit from perdition. If the minimisation of a risk such as death is taken to its (absurd) logical conclusion, then we witness the tabooing of all death, and its converse, the infinite sacralisation of life. As Cayley has it, we have over the last few years, if not over the course of a much longer period, experienced ‘the idolisation of life, and aversion from its obscene other, death.’53 Lucidly conveying the consequences of this, Cayley writes: That we must at all costs ‘save lives’ is not questioned. This makes it very easy to start a stampede. Making an entire country ‘go home and stay home,’ as our prime minister [Justin Trudeau] said not long ago, has immense and incalculable costs. No one knows how many businesses will fail, how many jobs will be lost, how many will sicken from loneliness, how many will resume addictions or beat each other up in their isolation. But these costs seem bearable as soon as the spectre of lives lost is brought on the scene. Again, we have been practising counting lives for a long time. The obsession with the ‘death toll’ from the latest catastrophe is simply the other side of the coin. Life becomes an abstraction—a number without a story.54

Life is, in Illich’s words, ‘amortalised.’55 SEEING THE FUTURE: PREDICTIONS The responses to the virus were justified not on the basis of what was happening, and could barely be justified by what did happen; they were presented as being justified on the basis of what might happen. They were grounded not on something actual but on something possible, which was laid out in the form of a prediction that was based on a very particular model, inherently contestable and vigorously contested, even if the latter was altogether elided from governmental and mediatic presentation.56 The model chosen as the basis for action predicted a future that was so far beyond the scope of what could be addressed by conventional means—and indeed by pre-existing plans for dealing with pandemics—that it was taken to justify the actions which were to follow.57 The predictions had to be acted on in order to prevent the prophesised apocalypse from coming to pass. This ambiguous, forestalled status of the event, far from leading to questions regarding the justice and proportionality of lockdowns, the certainty of their rectitude and inevitability, led, after a moment’s uncertainty, to an ever more convinced faith in their efficacy: it seemed to be implicitly believed that in the absence of certain knowledge,



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what was needed was not a critical appraisal of those predictions which took the place of this knowledge, but a simple and obedient belief in the correctness of one particular predictive model. Despite their very prolongation demonstrating these measures to be ineffective in terms of what they were said to achieve (a logic that would later be seen to characterise the pharmaceutical measures that were to have brought the non-pharmaceutical sentence to an end, in the form of regular ‘boosting’ as efficacy waned), the fact that these measures were taken and the predictions failed to materialise was understood, implicitly or explicitly, as a testimony to the exactness of those very predictions and the justness of the actions they urged. As Kant should have taught us, at the limits of reason and knowledge stands faith: predictions came to play the role of prophecy, and scientists that of prophets. With faith come endless commandments to obey, promised ends in the form of messianic advents, and the ostracising and sacrifice of heretics. This, together with the role given to ‘the Science’ in political decisions, at least in part explains why Agamben speaks of ‘Science as religion.’58 CONSTRUCTING ‘THE SCIENCE’ The scientific account of any present phenomenon is inherently falsifiable; but when it comes to scientific accounts of the future, dissenting opinions are rife and even more significant than usual. The sciences that predict risks are not unanimous. In cases such as this there is still less such a thing as ‘the Science.’ We are beginning to see more and more clearly that there has rarely been a statement so utterly unphilosophical as the one which affirms that ‘we are following the Science.’59 The truth of such a phrase reveals itself once we stress the notion of ‘following,’ which by definition must entail a certain leadership, and that on the part of science. We are tasked with the discovery of the process whereby a science must be constituted so as to function as a leader or sovereign power. First of all, given that science is inherently fractured, it must take on the appearance of unity. In this respect, Bruno Latour has come into his own.60 It has never been more readily apparent that ‘the Science’ is frequently if not always a political construction.61 On Monday 8th June 2020, the Health Secretary of the United Kingdom, Matthew Hancock, under interrogation, expanded upon the question of what it might mean to speak of ‘the Science,’ which he came to define as ‘the balance of [. . .] opinion,’ and that is to say, the majority of those consulted, whilst admitting that ‘other scientists made different arguments.’ Other opinions were in existence, whether they were represented in that particular context or not.62 This was said at a moment when, at least economically, it

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was deemed necessary or desirable to alleviate the restrictions. Previously, it had been thought expedient to aver that lockdown was the only viable option and science something stronger than merely the ‘balance of opinion.’ As Agamben has it, ‘every state embraces different modalities as it employs the pandemic data for its own ends, manipulating it to suit its specific needs.’63 And these needs change over time. The construction of ‘the Science’ in the context of recent events reveals at least two moments which may be identified as ‘political’: first, we might consider a panel such as the United Kingdom’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE, a non-accidental abbreviation, already implicitly licensing the attribution of power to this ‘wise’ group—such are the inane wiles of rhetoric). A panel implies a multitude of voices: those in power must decide which views to give prominence to, which to represent, and which to act upon—this, as so often, is a question of what becomes visible and what does not. Even if the decision simply amounts to a choice to abide by the vote of the ‘majority,’ this very choice is itself political or meta-political in the sense that it involves a decision regarding how politics as such should be conducted and thus what politics itself is (in this instance, to bow under the sway of the majority). It might fruitfully be compared to the—also eminently (meta-)political—decision to decide upon policy by means of a referendum.64 Secondly, one can identify an even earlier political decision, and one more likely to recede into a still deeper obscurity as a result of its very priority: decisions had to be made as to the very constitution of the panel itself, thus determining the range of options from which the later decision would select.65 Let it be said that the humanities was almost altogether excluded from this particular panel and this procedure in this particular case, which, optimistically, one might imagine to be in part responsible for how rapidly dehumanisation was seized upon as a solution, and non-pharmaceutical measures effectively chosen by those for whom the pharmaceutical and the natural-scientific realm of the inhuman should have marked the absolutely binding limits of their professed competence. As we have stressed, an epidemic is essentially political, and its conceptualisation can be achieved only by way of both the natural sciences and the social sciences, coordinated by a discipline such as philosophy that would remain aloof from both. We cannot rely on the more broad-minded natural scientists, those who ‘read a bit,’ to allow synopses of half-understood thinkers from the humanities to slip in now and again. Some voices are heard whilst some are denied a hearing. In the first case, they speak and are then silenced, while in the second they are never allowed to speak at all. In either case we witness a decision which is taken and then elided, a decision which casts certain voices to the margins of logos and acts upon others. As a result of the decision to erase multiplicity, the government



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and media can then present a very particular semblance of unity: ‘scientific consensus.’66 This is not to say that science as an idea does not pursue a single truth and a unique form, but at least in this case the idea that there was ‘a Science’ or ‘consensus’ was manufactured and presented for political reasons and to political ends; the choices that were implicitly made at the two levels we have indicated were indubitably political. Such was the import of the apparent ability to change the meaning of the definite article which the Secretary of State for Health arrogated to himself, together with the function and significance of a select group like SAGE with its composition more or less absent figures concerned with the ‘humanities.’67 AGAMBEN ON STATISTICAL PRESENTATION Statistics, as they have functioned in the recent debacle, are no more neutral, and no less political. We were learning all along, whilst others were uncritically accepting the official version of events, that the manner in which statistics were presented was decided upon precisely in order to bolster a certain political course of action. Agamben himself was alert from the very beginning to the selective and interested deployment of statistics. He insists on the fact that the discrepancy between the unimpressive data regarding the effects of the virus in relation to other diseases and causes of death (not to speak of the dangers of the proffered solutions, non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical), and the political mobilisation that followed is so vast as to warrant serious theoretical investigation.68 Thus Agamben does indeed incline towards a sceptical gesture, and often on the basis of statistics which were often not at all presented by those in power, or were so only obscurely; figures which dispel the aura of exceptional gravity that has come to surround the event. Such a presentation of data could in any case be justified simply in the name of completeness, given their omission from the official narrative and the consequent stifling of debate, along with the all too swift elision of the question of interpretation which the Humanities and Social Sciences at any other time would insist upon in the reception of any scientific ‘facts.’69 It may be that it is precisely to insist on the concealed disunity of science that Agamben himself has recourse to statistics. Speaking later in the summer of 2020, of a jurist who pronounces a ‘health emergency’ with ‘no medical authority,’ he affirms that, ‘it is possible to submit many opposing judgements that are certainly more reliable—all the more so since, as he [the unnamed jurist in question] admits, “conflicting voices are coming from the scientific community.”’70 One of the most disturbing aspects of the last two

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years, which should have been among the most troubling for the scientists themselves, is the way in which these alternative voices emanating from the natural sciences, the medical profession, and the pharmaceutical industry, were not only excluded from serious consideration, but deliberately translated for the public imagination so as to assume the distorted form of ‘conspiracy theories’ or ‘fringe’ science. To avoid complicity in such vicious things, and to locate themselves on the side of the virtuous, most media simply ignored them, save occasionally so as to make an example of them.71 There are two aspects to Agamben’s presentation of the statistics: one is the notion that the statistics have been presented by government and media in a way that is either vague or misleading (in part because they are presented as non-vague): ‘The risk of contagion, in the name of which freedoms are limited, has never been specifically stated: the numbers communicated are intentionally vague, without any analysis in relation to the annual death rate or the definite causes of death—as would be essential if what was truly at stake was scientific.’72 The second aspect is to stress the elision of alternative scientific assessments: ‘We must also question the ways in which the epidemic’s death toll and rates of infection are being communicated’—there are alternative statistics which are not being presented, and this in some cases points to alternative interpretations of the gravity of the event itself.73 Thus if Agamben presents data of his own, he is not contradicting his own scepticism with respect to the very deployment of data as such, nor suggesting that a certain statistically measurable aspect of the affair might have but did not justify the political measures taken; rather, he is demonstrating, by contrast, the undecided and interpretative nature of the particular facts which have been presented for the most part, mediatically. On the question of proportion, Agamben has the following to say (although given that this is in the context of a newspaper interview, we should perhaps read it as simply being diplomatic): ‘we need to ask ourselves, without underplaying the importance of the epidemic, if it can justify measures that limit our freedoms to an extent never before enforced in the history of this country, not even during two world wars.’74 Agamben begins his very first published intervention on the virus with a reference to the unifying elision that has characterised the presentation of statistics.75 Even merely to signal the existence of alternative statistics and interpretations immediately explodes the semblance of unity that has been bestowed upon the Science and thus opens up questions as to its sovereignty and the possibility of a resistance to the measures introduced in its name: ‘there is no consensus among scientists—even if the media are keeping quiet about this.’76



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It is not simply the presentation of predicted fatalities that concerned Agamben, but also a misleading absence of appeal to internal differentiations among the fatalities in particular—one could cite their age and current health, the place in which they were residing when they contracted the virus and so on, just as one could have provided a comparison to other diseases and causes of death, illness, and injury beyond this one. In ‘New Reflections,’ Agamben goes into some detail with regard to the elided data. He gives the overall mortality rates from the previous year (1,772 each day in Italy, under ‘normal’ circumstances, which would amount to over half a million people each year, the figures being much the same in the United Kingdom) and he places the viral data alongside those from a previous year for cardiovascular disease, cancer, and respiratory diseases in general: ‘The real texture of the epidemic can only be ascertained by comparing, in each instance, the communicated data with statistics (categorised by disease) concerning the annual mortality rate.’77 Figures presented in isolation, often in the form of slogans and images, have more of rhetoric than of truth about them. The quite blatant instilling of fear that is involved in presenting a daily tally of deaths from a single cause, to which almost every media outlet fell for at least a year, will stand eternally to their discredit. It seems to have been essential to elide the other data that would have contextualised and thus bestowed a less fearful aspect upon this number, an elision designed to motivate compliance with the repressive actions imposed on this pretext.78 In addition to this essential contextualisation and comparison, one has every reason to question the reliability of whatever methods and tests were used to generate the ultimate number of ‘cases’ (another word, formerly used only for symptomatic manifestations of actual illness, conflated for reasons presumably ideological with ‘infections’ which are, terminologically speaking, often asymptomatic79). But one can prolong the questions regarding these deaths still further: do sciences of mortality and morbidity even, rightfully, speak so bluntly of such a thing as ‘a death’ equal with respect to all of the others? Do they not take into account the number of years expected to remain for that type of life, the time lost to death’s ‘prematurity’ (if such it was, when the average age of death ‘from’ the virus stands higher than eighty years, and there can be prematurity of death in general only across an entire population viewed as such)?80 Perhaps most importantly, what could justify the complete elision—from a certain point onwards—of differential susceptibilities among the ‘demographic,’ particularly in relation to the age of those who succumb? Only a wretched absolutism that seems implicitly to depend on a tacitly presumed sacrality of life as such, of whatever kind and at whatever stage, could assume that the death of a person of ninety years of age was akin to

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one of nine, and deem death of any kind ‘unacceptable.’81 But questions were not, it seems, to be asked, for—if one trusts to the good faith of those instigating these measures and those supporting them—to do so would be to introduce uncertainty and ‘hesitation’ to the point of disobedience, and thus a ‘loss of control.’ All of this ideological exclusion goes to create an impression of unified truth that would constitute ‘the Science.’ Given the unequivocal character of what it presents, the directives that may be derived from it will be similarly unambiguous. One will therefore, in all good conscience, be able to present one’s policy as ‘following the Science.’ Once this vision of ‘the Science’ is invoked by those who authorise themselves to enunciate it, the media can then present the ‘scientific consensus’ to the public. THE UNITY OF A SOVEREIGN SCIENCE That science achieve and be seen to achieve this unity is a prerequisite for its attaining sovereignty: Another related feature of the current landscape is government-by-science and its necessary complement—the abdication of political leadership resting on any other grounds. This too is a field long-tilled and prepared for planting. Illich wrote nearly fifty years ago in Tools for Conviviality that contemporary society is ‘stunned by a delusion about science’ [82]. This delusion takes many forms, but its essence is to construct out of the messy, contingent practices of a myriad of sciences a single golden calf before which all must bow. It is this giant mirage that is usually invoked when we are instructed to ‘listen to the science’ or told what ‘studies show’ or ‘science says.’83

If the philosophy of science, particularly in its continental forms (from Gaston Bachelard to Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault), has taught us anything, it is to look at the conditions that make the production of knowledge and its objects possible, and to remain alert to their contingencies and historical variability, particularly in the construction of the very object of science itself, as well as in the very nature of scientificity as such: the discourses which count, at different times and in different forms, as science are themselves historically mutable. As Cayley and Illich point out, an ideological elision of this process of production becomes most dangerous when it enters the sphere of political governance: ‘When “science” is abstracted from all the vicissitudes and shadows of knowledge production, and elevated into an omniscient oracle whose priests can be identified by their outfits, their solemn postures and their impressive



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credentials, what suffers, in Illich’s view, is political judgement.’84 One is even led to omit the fact that any judgement or decision is being made at all; one is rather simply ‘following’ a leader who is utterly at one with himself, and who speaks with one voice, and points us in one single direction. As Cayley demonstrates, the very act of attributing such authority to ‘the Science’ may itself be a political decision, even if the decision is one of effectively abdicating power in favour of the scientists: Epidemiologists may say frankly, as many have, that, in the present case, there is very little sturdy evidence to go on, but this has not prevented politicians from acting as if they were merely the executive arm of Science. In my opinion, the adoption of a policy of semi-quarantining those who are not sick—a policy apt to have disastrous consequences down the road in lost jobs, failed businesses, distressed people, and debt-suffocated governments—is a political decision and ought to be discussed as such. But, at the moment, the ample skirts of Science shelter all politicians from view. Nor does anyone speak of impending moral decisions. Science will decide.85

One could, in other words, not have transferred decision-making powers to the doctors and the natural scientists; one might even have listened to the humanities; but above all one had to take responsibility for a judgement that would ultimately be one’s own.86 In any case, this did not happen, and once Science had been endowed with the semblance of unity, it could adopt or have bestowed upon it by those in power the role of sovereign leader. Power then devolved upon Medicine and the various branches of the natural sciences in the form of the capacity to make binding decisions with respect to society and politics. The doctors had been released from their confinement in the infirmary, and let loose on civil society. ŽIŽEK ON STATISTICS AND THE APORIA FOR THE LEFT Almost all of these points have been entirely elided not just from the mediatic presentation of the event but also from the philosophical response to it. We shall in concluding this chapter demonstrate what happens when a leftist philosopher is forced to confront the problem, and in this we are fortunate in being able to call upon the example of Slavoj Žižek. Žižek begins a text entitled ‘The Virus of Ideology’ with the pertinent question: ‘even for a non-expert in statistics like me [. . .]: where does data end and ideology begin?’ before going on to say barely a single word about data for the entire duration of the text.87 Only at three largely parenthetical points

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does Žižek express the slightest scepticism as to the official statistics: ‘(if one trusts official statistics).’88 The only place where he might be taken to consider the topic seriously is postponed until the very last pages of Pan(dem)ic! Žižek here suggests that the comparison with far worse plagues of the past should not lead us to question the strategies of power that have exploited this affair; rather, the panic felt today testifies in his eyes to a ‘kind of ethical progress’ which implies that ‘we are no longer ready to accept plagues as our fate.’89 We note in passing that this way of phrasing the matter elides the difference between the ethical and the legal in simply assuming that the laws passed coincide absolutely with our own autonomously arrived at ethical imperative. This legal and political matter is reduced to the level of a purely fictitious ‘personal (ethical) choice,’ the author somehow forgetting that populations were interned by force of law. In a single sentence, therefore, the entire problematic of biopolitics is bypassed, and the biopolitical status quo tacitly endorsed. More confusion is introduced when Žižek then concedes virtually everything to the position he has just opposed. He does this by opening up precisely the kinds of ambiguity within the interpretation of epidemiological data that Agamben has stressed: ‘Different epidemiologists arrive at varying conclusions, offering different proposals about what to do. Even what is presented as data is obviously filtered by horizons of pre-understanding. How, for instance, can one determine if an old, weak person really died of the virus?’ And yet, after a promising opening, Žižek continues without explanation and without drawing the consequences that would follow from this: ‘The fact that many more people are still dying from other diseases than from [sic] coronavirus should not be misused to alleviate [sic; rather, to impugn the seriousness, to cause us to treat with levity] the crisis.’ Why, he does not say; that, after all, is precisely the effect that it should have. He simply goes on, as if conceding something to his opponents which should in truth change everything: ‘but it is true that the strict focus of our healthcare system on coronavirus has led to the postponement of the treatment of diseases considered nonurgent [or, for some reason, less urgent] [. . .], so that our focus on corona [sic] may cause more damage in the long term than the direct impact of the virus itself. And then, of course, there are the dire economic consequences [. . .].’90 This is absolutely right, and could have led somewhere promising. But it leads nowhere, and the book soon closes. That said, in the sequel to his first collection on the pandemic, Žižek returns precisely to this critical suggestion and seems implicitly to realise that many of these untreated diseases are indeed as urgent as they come: ‘horrible as these numbers are, does our exclusive focus on them not make us ignore a much greater number of people dying of other causes like cancer or a heart attack? [. . .] Perhaps it would be better to look at death rates comparatively.’91



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This in a book with the promising dedication, ‘To all those whose daily lives are so miserable that they ignore Covid-19, regarding it as a comparatively minor threat.’ And yet, as so often in Žižek’s presentation—and this seems characteristic of the Left in general—on the most generous interpretation of what they intend, the situation is presented as aporetic, and not as a reason to ameliorate the stringency of the measures: both the disease and its (one, sole) remedy are equally bad and equally unquestionable. The virus is both as serious as it is said to be and it is causing us to fail to treat diseases which are (still) much more serious in certain respects, and in general the remedy is causing untold suffering. They will not accept that a genuine choice, and a real question of proportion (or principle) is anything other than an aporia or a dilemma. This stems at least in part from the infinite need for ‘clean hands’ which has possessed them, if not an implicit assumption of the sacrality of all life. They have come to assume that there is a kind of universal vulnerability abroad, whether of those whom identity politics sets itself to protect or on the part of the working class for which the more communistic elements of the Left presume themselves to be capable of speaking. We shall return to this strange confluence and to the notion of a projected vulnerability that has disabled the Left in particular, but in general all public discourse and political action in recent times. To Žižek’s minimal credit, he is prepared, in his second book on the virus, once the worst of it has passed and the damage of lockdowns rendered more glaring, to look more deeply into these other statistics, and he finds them alarming enough—although he will still speak of ‘those who disavow the Real of the pandemic’ without even imagining that there is any need to prove or discuss the nature of this ‘real’ character92—and this is perhaps the trope that crops up most frequently in his analysis of the ‘weird resistance’ that some demonstrate towards the restrictive measures: that it is a manifestation of ‘a will not-to-know.’93 He does not seem to see that from the opposite point of view, his dismissal of this alternative perspective could just as easily be described in the same way. He has, let it be noted, just supported the idea of totalitarian control by the state, almost unambiguously speaking of ‘a state that totally controls the actions and movements of its citizens.’ He goes on to say that ‘such control is not only easily accomplished thanks to the digitalisation of our societies but, as the pandemic has shown, [it] is sometimes necessary. So, why not courageously rehabilitate the entire lineage of anti-liberal thinkers of the “closed” society [. . .]?’94 Courageous indeed, and once again absolutely metonymic of the Left in general, to align oneself with such an apparent majority, to State ideology and propaganda, and to bow to fascism at the first serious opportunity to do so.

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But by now we should be used to these dizzying reversals in moral values. It has been said, unjustly, of Agamben that his texts on the virus have become caricatures of his own earlier work,95 but when it comes to a fondness for reversals for their own sake, which altogether shed their potential dialectical richness, the same may much more justly be said of Žižek’s. One instance of such an apparently uncontrolled reversal may be found in the shift that is made from a criticism of the sceptics’ ‘will not-to-know’ to the defence of another kind of ignorance, an argument which Žižek has made elsewhere in Kantian terms, by saying that ‘[p]eople “ignore” the full truth of the pandemic not because of some epistemological limitation or animalistic will not-to-know, but because of a deep existential anxiety: are we still human when we are forced to act like this?’96 Thus, at the very end of Pan(dem)ic! 2 (save for the unnecessary indulgence, once again, of an appendix), Žižek at least presents us with a ‘choice,’ even though he clearly veers towards and gives the last word to the extremely sinister option which is ‘that we behave “unnaturally” and construct a new normality.’97 One reason that he gives for this is the following: ‘[t]o demand a return to normality today [an end of full lockdowns] implies a psychotic foreclosure of the Real of the virus,’98 having just stated that the lockdown itself involves us in psychosis: ‘Lacan called the space of common customs the “big Other,” the symbolic substance of our lives, and psychotic breakdown looms when this big Other begins to disintegrate.’99 Another reversal? Another aporia (psychosis either way . . . )? Or just a failure to make up one’s mind, and a vacillation? The idea of aporia can simply disguise a state of paralysis before a ‘difficult’ decision, and this has proved a common attitude among leftists—and others—caught in a desperate attempt to throw no-one under the ‘trolley-bus’ and thus to retain the clearest of consciences: or else it has resulted in an attempt to choose the lesser of two evils, which leads simply to the endorsement of house arrest and a wringing of hands with regard to what is seen as a sacrificial impalement on the other horn of the dilemma but by no means an entirely unacceptable one. Most charitably, we can read the contradictory movements of the text as reflections, not always untroubled, of a false choice to which we are condemned if we do not move beyond the system in which we are currently confined and which forces these choices upon us. This is as much as the Left, in its mainstream forms, has offered us. Žižek had concluded his first book, in a chapter that broached the strategy of using various methods to reach herd immunity within a population before rubbishing it by associating it essentially with Trumpism, with the following rendition of the dilemma:



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Is the only choice really the one between Chinese-style near-total top-down control, and the more lax ‘herd immunity’ approach? Hard decisions are to be made here which cannot be grounded just in scientific knowledge. It is easy to warn that state power is using the epidemic as an excuse to impose a permanent state of emergency [more precisely, from Agamben’s point of view, it has been established already, and this is what has allowed such disproportionate measures to be both proposed and accepted this time around, whilst raising them to a new level of intensity], but what alternative arrangements do those who sound such warnings propose?100

(A strange question given that he has just named ‘herd immunity’ as the alternative arrangement proposed by one side.) But this is precisely to suppose that some action is urged by the one and only true interpretation of data that we have, and indeed that something out of the ordinary is happening and happening in such a way that exceptional political action is demanded. And yet, what Žižek goes on to propose ends up being strikingly close to Agamben’s position. He even affirms elsewhere that ‘there are things that matter more than bare life.’101 Žižek concludes by affirming that, ‘[t]he real struggle will be over what social form will replace the liberal-capitalist New World Order.’102 Žižek presents his proposal after reneging on everything he has just said about the critical interpretation of epidemiological data by simply asserting of the panic felt in response to the epidemic that it is ‘a genuine and well-grounded alarm.’103 And yet he is unable to quell the other voice that immediately pipes up within him: But the almost exclusive focus on the coronavirus in our media is not based on neutral facts, it clearly rests on an ideological choice. Maybe here one can perhaps allow oneself a modest conspiracy theory. What if the representatives of the existing global capitalist order are somehow aware [. . .] that the system as we know it is in deep crisis, that it cannot go on in its existing liberal-permissive form. What if these representatives are ruthlessly exploiting the epidemic in order to impose a new form of governance?104

He has just stated his own inability to find any reason for capitalism to suspend the functioning of the economy in the way that it has—‘why would big capital risk a mega-crisis of this sort?’105 Fabio Vighi has provided an answer to this question, and precisely from an anti-capitalist perspective. Agamben himself, whose relation to Marxism is not easy to determine, reads such a suspension of normality in legal terms, as the prolongation into a new ‘normality’ of the ‘state of exception.’ But to reach any clarity here, we shall

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need to examine the non-pharmaceutical measures themselves, and the very presumption of their inevitability and unicity as a response to the virus, whose natural-scientific conceptualisation we have just submitted to examination.

Chapter 3‌‌

The Unity of the Non-pharmaceutical Response

THE DISUNITY OF LOCKDOWNS: GESTELL We have now examined the formation of the natural scientific interpretation of the virus that constituted what came to be invoked as ‘the Science’ in all its unity. This unification allowed the natural and medical sciences to assume a sovereign position and thus made it possible for the loyal to ‘follow’ them. The notion of ‘the Science’ epitomises the numerous unities that have been manufactured in order to justify its rule, including the decontextualised presentation of a single type of statistic, which we traced back to its roots in the statisticalisation of man that provides the basis for ‘public health’ as a form of governance (biopolitics); we have also shown how philosophy, represented here by Agamben, is obliged to put in question each of these unities, along with the very statisticalisation itself in the name of a disunity or differentiated multiplicity many strands of which must be marginalised in order for the ideological impression of unity to be created. But to speak of the event of the virus in isolation in this way, by means of the hegemonising processes that take place within the natural sciences alone, itself amounts to an ideological restriction of the discourses that determine the nature of the epidemic, for as we have already stressed, an epidemic is by definition an entity which stands at the boundary of nature and culture. Thus we need to expand our purview so as to consider not the supposed event itself in the sense of a quasi-biological entity, but the political and medical responses that were made to it. Here again we find at least two major unities that are artificially produced. The gesture that we have identified at the heart of the orthodox presentation of the virus—the formation of a single approach and the elision of 69

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alternatives—may be seen all the more vividly not in the case of the virus and its contagion but in their supposedly unique remedies, first non-pharmaceutical and then pharmaceutical; thus we are speaking no longer of the ‘event,’ but of the ‘response.’ Here the impression of unity is all the more significant, and indeed it is essential to the very functioning of the cure: an order to ‘stay at home’ cannot but present itself as total, and yet it can never be so complete; nevertheless, the appearance of totality by itself can have significant effects. Any serious philosophical response to the mass enclosure of human beings has to begin from the fact that it is not what it is presented as being: and that is to say, universal, as if the command, speaking this time in American, to ‘shelter in place,’ could possibly be heeded by everyone. This phrase constitutes an even greater offence, this time to language itself, which is not at all a meagre fault: our inability to speak with any nuance or precision, nor with a sense of the weight and effect of words has cost more than a few lives over the last few years and will put paid to more. A ‘lockdown’ is possible only if it excludes some, and perhaps more than half the population: most patently of all, it must exclude those who maintain ‘our’ ‘essential services’—which is to say, those who allow us merely to survive.1 This is in large part the working class, to whom the message was never addressed and upon whom the potential for virtue and its all too public performance (‘virtue signalling’) could never have been bestowed.2 The functioning of a single procedure that is applied everywhere in an undifferentiated way amounts to what Heidegger calls a ‘Gestell’—a framework or template that produces multiple instances of the Same from out of a heterogeneous material, oblivious to the potential singularity of the entities upon which the frame is imposed. This ‘en-framing’ constitutes the essence of modern machine-powered technology, for Heidegger, and it may in some respects be taken to characterise the tele-technology without which it is difficult to imagine the recent enclosures could even have been envisaged.3 This global framework, something which does indeed ‘lock down’ human beings and cultures in spite of their differences, has introduced desperately deleterious—and differential—effects on human culture, even on the very physical health that it was supposed to be protecting.4 These effects have, like so much else, been thrust into invisibility, or to the relative (in)visibility of a margin where they and their exponents may persist as useful objects of ridicule and contempt, or as reminders of the nobility of the sacrifice made in the name of something higher (‘life,’ always and in every case to be ‘saved’), and thus they help to shore up the exclusivity of a single narrative. The essence of a lockdown is that of something which cannot be total: the confinement of the working class and the suspension of ‘essential’ services would render mere life impossible to sustain. And yet lockdowns have the paradoxical characteristic that they must present themselves as total, for any



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acknowledgement of incompleteness and hence inexistence would lend credence to the notion that some sort of alternative strategy might be possible, and indeed, in effect, it might tacitly be in place already. This in turn risks undermining the observance of the quarantine by those who currently see fit to observe it. In this sense we can say that the lockdown did exist, still does exist, and yet never could. It sustains itself in spite of its own impossibility. THE TIME OF LOCKDOWNS: THE PROMISE OF AN END The apparent (spatial or quasi-spatial, and in any case extensive) ubiquity of lockdowns has a temporal aspect that will help us to approach the very heart of the curious logic of lockdowns as such. The single non-pharmaceutical measure fastened upon to the exclusion of all others (legally mandated quarantine of the healthy) could be embarked upon only if an implicit promise was made that it would eventually come to an end. This end would be the moment at which non-pharmaceutical interventions could give way to the pharmaceutical: the arrival of the Vaccine. And as must happen when such a role is assigned to an advent, the apparent arrival of the Messiah in actuality has introduced problems of its own, since the question must arise as to whether this messiah is true or false, effective or not, lasting in its effects or only fleeting, more or less dangerous than the disease it palliates, and for which types of people? All were grappled with by different governments in different ways, which makes the absolute taboo that has been placed on raising such questions anew seem all the more odd.5 We shall come to deal with this pharmaceutical moment later on, but it must be broached now since it forms part of the very conditions for the possibility (the acceptability) of the non-pharmaceutical. We can examine its function in this regard irrespective of its actual quality and effects, its ‘safety and efficacy.’ Its political function is first of all to bring with it the promised end of the restrictions that had been placed upon civic life. But this end was much more sinister than one could have imagined at the time, for when liberation was finally brought about, for whatever reason, the vaccine’s arrival did not allow normal life to be resumed for all; it acted instead as another divisive binary machine that cleared the way for some but blocked it for others, prolonging the restrictions or even banning permanently those who did not comply. And we have since witnessed the ungodly spectacle of this experimental serum being urged—and even forced—upon adult and child alike, with a tireless coercive aggression, and with a mediatic campaign that has still more brutally hewn people apart, and along different

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lines yet again (as some sceptics of lockdowns enthusiastically or wearily embraced the promise of the end and ‘consented’ to the injection). Whilst polarising society yet again, the purveyors of the medication allowed themselves to imagine that they could present a united front, a totality, once again—with all the necessary and disavowed exemptions and exclusions that we have already begun to see.6 The vaccines in their political function are in this sense by no means a purely medical matter: they embody the price that must be paid if one is to re-enter human community following its closure, as did the concealment of the face and all that entails.7 Their function was therefore not simply—perhaps not even primarily—to eradicate the disease, but, even at the level of official discourse (or perhaps only at this level) to restore normality, or at least to reiterate its deferred promise more concretely (even as it infinitely recedes), and so to coax the frightened back into social life and to restore a functioning economy.8 In truth, what we have witnessed here is a precedent being set according to which certain of our biological characteristics (and our obedience in yielding them up to scrutiny and manipulation) become unambiguously relevant to the question of whether we shall be allowed to participate in our own society, to work, to travel, and to settle in other countries, and for others to do the same here. First, the passport granting access to social life involved a concealment of identity by means of the covering of the face (one’s identity was thereby visibly reduced to the anonymity of simply being a potential bearer of germs); then it was the vaccine (it was said, falsely, that this would then make one safe to re-enter society, virtually incapable of ‘transmission’). One would in either case no longer constitute such a biohazard: when this proved to be demonstrably untrue, a certain political and medico-institutional urging for the mandation of the latter at least died down, but the fanaticism with which vaccination was pursued remained undeterred by the fact that the potion flagged almost as soon as it entered the body, to the point of even rendering its recipient more vulnerable for a certain period of time. One had to be constantly scrubbed clean before one could be allowed in. The hand-dispensers one still sees around, and that will perhaps remain when all else has been cast into oblivion, serve something like the same function, rather like ‘clocking in.’ In November and December of 2021, the supposed inoculation demonstrated its inability to end what it was promised to, as the ‘recommendation’ or ‘requirement’ of masks made its return, and now, even in what seems to the optimistic like it might be the end of all novel conditions for re-entry, we have the potential for an interminable set of further conditions, of which we have no reason to believe that endless ‘boosters’ will constitute the end (at the time of writing, September 2022, we are at the fourth, within the span of less than two years): and since a precedent has been set in the case of all



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these remedies, pharmaceutical and non-, an absolute end is strictly logically impossible. Once one establishes conditions in the eyes of the law that differentiate between citizens in any way, rendering them unequal in that context, one has a literal apartheid, even if it is not a racial divide (although it has been pointed out that given the extremely high levels of caution supposedly displayed by certain historically persecuted racial groups in relation to inoculation, ‘vaccine passports’ will effectively constitute that). Thus the use of this word in contexts such as this is by no means always metaphorical, and is in no case hyperbolic. Nor is the comparison with biofascist regimes such as National Socialism, to which Agamben at times adverts, along with the regime of Mussolini. Those who imagine that a biopolitical thinker such as Agamben could plausibly not have spoken out in light of such a state of affairs, display an attitude that is utterly mystifying, a blindness to what they once knew that is properly schizophrenic, or at least hypocritical. We had hopes that people we admired took what they were doing more seriously. THE RHETORIC OF CIVIL WAR Given their contradictory nature, their untested character, and the immense damage they were always certain to cause, how could lockdowns come to be accepted in such an apparently unanimous way? How could such a strange untotalisable entity have come to be accepted as if it were total? How was this false totality constituted? The strategies employed were made to flow through channels so manifold and with a single clamour so deafening as to warrant the title ‘totalitarian,’9 but one of the most pervasive tactics traversing all of these was the attempt to divide the population against itself, as if in some kind of implicit civil war. And indeed the rhetoric used by almost all political leaders who were so minded deployed exactly this language. It has been used effectively to quell dissent and to ostracise doubters, thus restoring the impression of totality and consensus to the most eminently incomplete and disputable of measures. The particular character of this discourse may indeed supply the clue that will lead us to the philosophical heart of the epidemic itself. The rhetoric of war has shown itself to be an effective way of inveigling people into a certain camp. We are dealing with yet another of the many binary machines that have blighted our times—a binary machine comprising thought or spoken actions which create binary oppositions and assign speakers and thinkers to one of two opposed groups, without any third position being made available to them.

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The language of war seems to have proliferated after the supposed ‘end of history,’ which marked the permanent ceasefire of overt international or ‘world’ wars, the last of which was a Cold War. This period, starting with the 1990s, marked the beginning of an era of ‘civil wars’ and internecine strife. In light of this, it became more natural for the language of war to be generalised and turned on the unity of the social body, so as to instigate a battle designed to exclude certain parts of it as (internal) ‘enemies.’10 We can now wage war on crime, on drugs, on terror,11 on certain social attitudes, certain uses of language, even on motorists, and finally on the virus12—and by extension those who appear to ‘us’ as its advocates, who would let it roam free rather than keeping it locked up and controlled, along with its potential bearers. Thus the body politic is purified of immanent disorder.13 At a time when binary oppositions between large groups seemed to be giving way to a more refined and multiple set of differences and likenesses, something in our logical, linguistic, and political lives seems insistently to restore the oppositional distinction of friend and enemy, in or out, for or against, testifying, it might be said, to the resilience of metaphysics itself, in the form of the sovereign power capable of installing such oppositions, as occurs in a more restricted way in the field of politics when it assumes a biopolitical form. Perhaps such a metaphysical scheme is comforting in its clarity and we harbour a secret desire to remain within the confines of its oppositional ways. One is even tempted to say that the insane proliferation of empty distinctions that identity politics puts abroad at a bewildering pace may well be partly responsible for this desire—‘at least some logic would be restored that way.’ As David Cayley points out, the language of war is an ideal tool with which to restore order in a situation that seems chaotic. It immediately affirms that we are undergoing a crisis, and that there are only two sides. Most importantly, it brings with it connotations of a moral (and, despite everything, patriotic) order: to be on the other side is a question not simply of falsity but of disloyalty and immorality. Dissent could well be grounded in something true, but to voice it would risk weakening the resolve of the protagonist forces and thus jeopardising victory. This has the supplementary effect of allowing those promulgating the official version to allow themselves a certain slackness of argumentation, if not to dispense with reason altogether. One must not pay heed to enemy propaganda: much better for morale to just turn on the radio and enjoy some patriotic ditties. This is not the time for philosophy, they say. In the belligerent discourse, there are simply friends and there are enemies, and one has to pick a side. That the third is excluded suggests once again a recourse to metaphysical conceptuality, since this abides by the ancient law of logical discourse, the tertium non datur, alongside the principles of identity and noncontradiction (one has to be one’s self, and this self may



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be defined by the negation of its opposite, which its identity must radically exclude). As Cayley puts it: ‘Few have yet dared to question the cost—and, when those few include Donald Trump, the prevailing complacency is only fortified—who would dare agree with him? In this respect insistent repetition of the metaphor of war has been influential—in a war no one counts costs or reckons who is actually paying them. First, we must win the war. Wars create social solidarity and discourage dissent—those not showing the flag are apt to be shown the equivalent of the white feather.’14 To be shown the white feather was to be seen to be on the side of the foreign enemy: no one ever said ‘internationalist’ in this context, or even ‘European’—it was national borders that were to be closed, as if to stress that this virus was itself to be understood as ‘foreign’ (to ‘our’ way of life) or of alien origin. In truth, this nationalist gesture was also a matter of reasserting the necessity for ‘control,’ from the standpoint of the nation which, when push came to shove, was still taken to be the locus of sovereignty, that autonomous agency capable of rigorously defining and policing its own identity, and thus its own boundaries. If one is not on the side of (sovereign) control, and the measures this entails—the harsher the better, the stricter the more patriotic—one is on the side of the virus, a friend of death and disorder. Once the language of ‘control’ takes charge so aggressively and so absolutely, to refuse to be on the side of the strictures is to be on the side of a descent back into chaos, in which the virus would run amok. THE LOGIC OF (AUTO)IMMUNITY A body can, therefore, be at war with itself, and sometimes—it is said—a certain part of it must be sacrificed in order for that body to survive. This would be to restore that body to full health by ‘immunising’ it, allowing the better part of its nature to defend itself against the worse. The efficacy of the language of war together with its pervasive character may in part be explained by the fact that it reflects something of the tacit logic of lockdowns themselves: they demand for their efficacy a belief in their uniqueness and totality. They need to be understood as the only possible response to the event in question, and as having a reach that is limitless. And yet in order to be constituted, this totality must ‘sacrifice’ a part of itself, a part which cannot be included in whatever it is that lockdowns are said to provide. We may understand this sacrifice that enables lockdown in two ways: first, as involving those who did not have the privilege or misfortune of being able to stay at home and observe the strictures; and, secondly, among those who could observe them, certain aspects of their human life had to be sacrificed precisely thereby, if they were ever to be enjoyed again—for, ‘however

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valuable,’ they menaced human survival. In both cases we have biological life and a concern to save it, separated off from a properly human life and its enjoyment. Those ‘essential workers’ who could not be locked indoors were charged with maintaining the life of those who stayed at home; and as for the latter, the properly human activities of politics, society, and culture were suspended in order to protect the mere biological life that underpins them. Crucially, the promised future in which these two divided halves of life were to be reunited and the sacrificial rituals brought to a halt was indefinite as to its ‘when’; but the promise still had to be made, at least implicitly, in order to ensure that the measures would appear temporary, for only on such a condition could they even be broached with an expectation of obedience. That said, one does wonder, at least in the case of the middle class, whether a life of this type, which we are about to designate as an absolute coincidence of community and immunity, immune community, would not have been acceptable to them as a permanent prospect. So they might have imagined in any case, until they realised that there was no way then for their bloodline to carry on, and their children’s social skills and happiness were withering away into a stupefied screen-stunned immiseration and generalised autism.15 In any case, the logic of these interventions demands that a certain portion of our humanity should be sacrificed, temporarily or in part, in order that our identity (as human) might be protected. This is a logic that Jacques Derrida was among the first to speak of by analogy not (merely) with sacrifice but with immunisation.16 If one is fighting against an enemy—a disease, for example—by these means, one does not reject it altogether; rather one introduces within oneself a milder form of that very same disease, in order to build up immunity with respect to any more acute version of the same pathogen that one might encounter in the wild. These immune-defences thus learn to impede the uncontrolled ingress of what might in extreme cases threaten the integrity of our identity. Generalising this logic, as Derrida does, any notion which attempts radically to exclude its opposite from its own identity, from the very outset, blockading its borders with military force and stringency, can only fail to be what it is. An excess of self amounts to a loss of self, full self-identity to a falling short of one’s self or an explosion of one’s own boundaries. As can readily be seen, this is a gesture which characterises the metaphysical logic that is governed by the axioms we have just enumerated in our account of the rhetoric of war: identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle. Thus the account of immunity is an account of metaphysical conceptuality and its self-deconstruction. To render this abstract logic more concrete, we might appeal, as Derrida does, to the concept of democracy: democracy can never be purely democratic if it is to be democratic. The moments that demonstrate this most



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clearly are those in which a non-democratic party seems likely to be democratically elected, having promised, if elected, to abolish the democratic process. In order to avert this greater of two evils, democracies must be prepared to halt elections, which is to say that democracy must be prepared to suspend democracy, albeit temporarily and solely in order to save it, but in any case one is required by the very nature of democracy to act anti­­-democratically.17 The strict opposition between democracy and non-democracy, which includes totalitarianism, cannot hold in all rigour. Immunity must by definition involve a measure of auto-immunity in the sense that identity must be prepared to sacrifice itself up to a limited point in order to save itself. We shall soon see that this sacrifice is always at risk of either not taking place at all, or being carried out too enthusiastically: in both cases, identity loses itself altogether. The analogy between this logic of (auto)immunity and non-pharmaceutical interventions may now more readily be perceived. The justification for the latter assumes that to reduce human life temporarily to a subhuman life of isolation, distance, and facelessness is an acceptable and necessary price to pay for the survival of that human life. Indeed this is the only way in which one could achieve an immunity that ‘we’ are presumed not yet to possess. Once again, everything hinges on a totalising manner of thinking: there can be absolutely no pre-existing immunity of any kind, for anybody, and there can be no one who is simply immune in the absolute sense of never having been in danger in the first place—which, given the frequency of our exposure, from the earliest age, to other coronaviruses, and the invulnerability of the overwhelming majority of the young, is at the very least somewhat implausible. Nor—and this is still more implausible—is there said to be any way of acquiring immunity other than by the artificial means of pharmaceutical inoculation that would eo ipso render non-pharmaceutical measures no longer necessary. Exposure to the real virus, whether or not it leads to the development of a case of the disease, is hardly deemed worthy of consideration, even though in all likelihood it provides an immunity more lasting than that of the artificial remedy. All other potential forms of immunity must give way to a single interpretation of the proper way in which to respond to the incidence of the virus, the non-pharmaceutical remedy and then the pharmaceutical that will bring an end to the former with the panacea of the Vaccine. The merest hint of such an alternative form of immunity was vigorously excluded from the narrative set down by those in power, rendering our only saviours both a supposedly absolute lockdown enduring indefinitely and the unique pharmaceutical saviour awaiting us as its promised end in the form of a needle, absolutely indiscriminately applied. Thus the message conveyed to the population was that we simply had to survive (in captivity), in order then, perhaps, later on, finally, to live in a way slightly more befitting of human

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beings once again, though it be amidst the wreckage of what had once been our civilisation: the doors to our cages might be left ever so slightly ajar. The recent work of Roberto Esposito may prove useful to our argument here insofar as he gives us, within the realm of biopolitical theory itself, a clear rendition of such a position, presented more or less explicitly as an alternative to Agamben’s: ‘Today—waiting for a vaccine, that is, induced immunity—immunisation by distancing is the only line of resistance behind which we can, and must, barricade ourselves [in]. At least until the threat subsides.’18 But, as we have said, even for Derrida himself, such an immunising, sacrificial procedure is not without its risks, in two respects: either one refuses to believe in the possibility of auto-immunity and eschews all sacrifice, repelling the outside so rigorously that one becomes too much one’s self and therefore insufficiently so—for, literally or medically speaking, too rigorous an exclusion of the outside denies one’s immune system the exposure to pathogens that it needs in order to develop its mechanisms of defence. Or one concedes so much to one’s enemy, exposing one’s self for so long (for example, by giving in to the antidemocratic temptation, or to an infinite prolongation of control and surveillance) that one ends up becoming the very thing that one had vowed to guard one’s self against. In both of these ways, immunity’s inescapable auto-immunity slips into an excess that threatens identity: one develops an incurable allergy to one’s self that threatens to undermine any barrier that might draw a line between the outside and the inside, and the integrity of the self is terminally compromised. One either refuses the adulterated poison altogether, or one quaffs it all too well and it fails to function as it ought. In this way, the measures taken to protect one’s identity end up destroying it: democracy tips over into tyranny, the temporary suspension of human life becomes permanent, the exception becomes the rule, or, as they were so quick to begin saying, we enter into a ‘new normal.’19 For Derrida, it seems, it is a question of ‘measure,’ perhaps even of ‘judgement,’ a faculty we have apparently lost over the last two years and more, possibly mistaking one form of ‘discrimination’ (taste) for another (exclusion), and thus losing ourselves in a relativism that refuses to make judgements or distinctions at all. But what we shall gradually come to see is that there is an alternative to this logic of auto-immunity that is more appropriate to the events in question in the present work, one which rules out the very first move into a hopefully temporary sacrifice that would amount to a minimal transmutation of immunity into auto-immunity: this alternative will be provided by Giorgio Agamben’s work. To lay the grounds for a reception of this idea, we must demonstrate how certain thinkers closer to his own discourse, biopolitics, as well as some of his



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critics, have effectively and often implicitly accepted Derrida’s logic, in one way or another, and consented to the restrictions in the name of a temporary suspension of community for the sake of the acquisition of immunity. Or they have in many cases allowed that we are still involved in a community despite the walls of brick, transparent plastic, and fabric that separate us one from the other: this would simply be a new type of community—an immune community.

Chapter 4

The Paradox of Immune Community, from Deconstruction to Biopolitics

Derrida was perhaps fortunate to have avoided living in a period during which an actual decision was called for, even on the aporetic construal of the situation most prevalent on the Left, in which harm in one way or another cannot be avoided and so one must choose the lesser of two evils. In truth, it will have picked the wrong option, and in many respects we seem to be experiencing a historical moment in which it is no longer possible simply to rest with a good conscience on the side of a majority, in this and a number of other debates.1 And yet, others close to Derrida, who operate under the sway of the same logic, took up the affair in his stead. This is especially so for Jean-Luc Nancy, who, just as immunity began to make itself heard in Derrida’s work, had come to consider the way in which a certain involution of immunity (as in the case of its artificial suppression, which allowed him to harbour an alien heart within him for many decades before his death) allows a novel type of community to exist and to be thought. This notion of a community that is not abstractly opposed to immunity but is rather related to it in something of the nature of a dialectic, was subsequently inherited by the Italian philosopher, Roberto Esposito. It is therefore not by chance that in the very early days of the recent epidemic, a debate sprang up between them, and it arose as part of an allergic reaction to a text by Agamben, which will in truth have implicitly challenged the very logic of immunity upon which Nancy and Esposito’s work was based. It had, therefore, to be put in question. Over three days, on the 26th, 27th and 28th of February 2020, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Roberto Esposito published texts on the question of the virus and the response that was being made to it.2 The debate eventually exceeded the pages of the journals in which it first took place, 81

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Antinomie and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis, assuming the form of a monograph in all three cases (Where Are We Now?, An All-Too-Human Virus, and Institution) each of which collected and, in Esposito’s case at least, developed the original texts. JEAN-LUC NANCY ON GENERALISED ‘VIRALITY’ In one of his earliest texts on the virus, published on 26th February 2020, Agamben compared the rate of fatality that characterised the new virus with seasonal influenza—a comparison that has ultimately proved in certain respects, right up to the point of fatality, to be by no means far from the mark, for all its ubiquitous ridicule.3 This is so even if, as Mark Woolhouse points out, their respective means of transmission are much more disparate than the comparison has led people to imagine, and for his purposes, it is important to resist this conflation since it helped forge a path to the non-pharmaceutical actions that would have been better suited to a flu epidemic (which the existing pandemic preparedness plans were designed around) than to the coronavirus. In any case, in terms of sheer seriousness, the present SARS virus (SARS-CoV2) certainly proved to be more akin to influenza than some of the initial estimates given by the World Health Organisation as well as certain influential epidemiological models assumed it to be.4 For Nancy, this comparison is, despite the data Agamben adduces to support his position, a bone of contention. When he writes in response the very next day, he seems to ignore the figures that Agamben provides, and indeed the very possibility of scientific dissensus, assigning as he does a much higher rate of fatality to Covid-19, and stressing that the present disease lacks a vaccine, which he describes as a ‘not insignificant difference’ with respect to the flu.5 Assuming ex hypothesi that this is now no longer true, and that the difference has been closed almost absolutely (at least in terms of severity)—perhaps there are other reasons besides the lack of courage and humility on the part of those who advocated them, for continuing to affirm that the measures taken actually work. Nancy here displays an unaccountable credulity towards official pronouncements and mainstream mediatic presentations. This credulousness would prove to be a feature common to almost every philosophical response to the virus apart from Agamben’s, and a few notable exceptions that populate the footnotes to the present work. In what is perhaps the most striking moment of Nancy’s text, he refers to a much earlier time in which Agamben was once again a lone voice speaking against a certain medical establishment: Agamben had recommended against Nancy’s heart transplant. ‘I mentioned that Giorgio is an old friend.

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And I apologise for bringing up a personal recollection, but I am not abandoning a register of general reflection by doing so. Almost thirty years ago doctors decided I needed a heart transplant. Giorgio was one of the very few who advised me not to listen to them. If I had followed his advice, I would have probably died soon enough. It is possible to make a mistake.’6 Nancy presumes that we shall immediately agree, given his presence here before us, that this was a misguided recommendation on Agamben’s part and one that bears analogies with the latter’s recent work. As Nancy suggests, he trusted the doctors, whilst Agamben—foolishly, it seems—did not. And yet, in the name of what besides a life—relatively bare, it has to be said—of a certain kind of survival could one pronounce Agamben’s advice a mistake? It kept Nancy alive when he probably would not be, but it could just as well have not, and even if it did, what quality of life will it have afforded him? In any case, it seems strange to use such an example to oppose a discourse that is attempting to argue against the overriding force of the value of mere survival.7 It is nevertheless telling, even if one raises the notion of transplant to a higher level of philosophical development and speaks of it in the terms we have briefly alluded to above, which go well beyond the medical, stricto sensu: the temporary suppression of immunity in order to allow a certain community to form even in the most inward core of one’s ‘own’ body. As we have begun to intimate, to be opposed to the production of bare life is on Agamben’s account indissoluble from an opposition to the logic of auto-immunity that Nancy relies upon, quite simply because the latter involves reducing life to the level of bare life, in the name of ‘saving life’ of whatever kind, bare or human. Nancy’s gesture is exemplary here: again and again, philosophers seem to recur as if spontaneously to a notion that has been so pervasively abroad that it has assumed the form of an unquestionable dogma: in the end saving life is the ultimate goal, biological survival the primary and overriding value against which everything else is to be judged, or at least an entirely unsurpassable value if only as a means to an end.8 The philosophers it seems are all too cosy with the doctors, and when doctors assume power or imagine themselves still to have it even when they have been deposed, what else could possibility have been expected to happen? By their very profession they know of and value little else. But in any case, Nancy’s first example was effectively private or at least confined within the walls of the infirmary. What troubles Agamben is a circumstance in which the power doctors wield is expanded to encompass extramural life. Nancy appears to at least implicitly endow the doctors with a power not just over the bodies of their patients, but over all who partake in civic life in a time of plague. Thus, he may be read as suggesting that it might be acceptable that when the choice between life and death appears to be stark, the power to make decisions—political decisions—should be ceded

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to the medical men, and the scientists, or to the automatisms of calculation and ‘data,’ at the expense of (political) judgement. VIRALITY IN THE BROADEST SENSE Nancy explicitly avows that the biopolitical perspective from which one could resist the sovereignty of the medico-scientific is not his own. He situates these medical and only supposedly biopolitical moments within a broader system and a much more capacious signification of ‘virality.’9 One of the most philosophically significant points for Nancy is that the word and the concept, ‘virus,’ had themselves already come to characterise the human world in a form that exceeds what we usually take to be the literal—it refers to the infinite speed at which notions, goods, capital, and human beings travel along the channels of a certain reticule that englobes the world. For Nancy, the biological or thanatological virus is itself only a symptom—and just one part—of a broader and quasi-metaphorical ‘virality,’ a metonym of that global transmission which will itself have made the pandemic character of the event possible. This gesture was to become relatively common among philosophical responses to the virus, particularly among the anti-capitalist: to draw attention to the way in which, in a hyper-communicative culture and indeed in a globalised world, information and goods can be transferred at ever increasing speeds, in a reticulated and ramifying manner that might well warrant the title ‘viral.’ The (corona)virus itself would be a literalisation of this metaphor, that gathers together and thus brings to a point of visibility any number of strands that make up the weave of the contemporary world. Thus what comes to light with the prominence that has accrued to this virus is the truth of our own global situation, formerly repressed. And perhaps it has emerged in the way that it has at least in part because the coronavirus metonymises the truth of our world. This viral truth would then have made possible its own literalisation: the coronavirus of 2019 would be an empirical manifestation of the transcendental, of its own transcendental conditions—the literal virus would stand as a symptom of the metaphorical virus that made it possible. This would lead us to expect more of such events in the future, so long as the system that made this literal virality possible remained in place. It also implies that we should have been expecting it.10 It is this globally virulent world that for Nancy obliges us to move beyond the more narrow biopolitical explanation of events. From Agamben’s point of view, however high the number of deaths, to use such statistics as a justification for ceding political power to scientists and doctors would still amount to

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a biopolitical form of government that used the pretext of saving bare lives in order to exert power. Or, more precisely, this manner of governance would exert power in the very act of ‘saving lives,’ by rendering biological health and survival the overriding task of political life—or affirming ceaselessly that this is the case. It is with this in mind that Nancy moves on to question the very idea that the state of exception is something declared by government (or by sovereign power in relation to life), and thus whether it is a matter of ‘biopolitics’ at all. In his eyes, acts of legislation, right up to the sovereign (and biopolitical) declaration of a ‘state of exception,’ in this case are merely a symptom of—or a response to—a deeper condition he describes as a ‘viral exception.’ ‘There is a sort of viral exception—biological, computer-scientific, cultural—which is pandemic.’11 And for this, ultimately, governments and their sovereigns, are not responsible: ‘Governments are nothing more than grim executioners, and taking it out on them seems more like a diversionary manoeuvre than a political reflection.’ This viral exception seems to refer to the transcendental conditions that we have just invoked—the ‘hitherto unknown intensity’ with which ‘technical interconnections of all kinds’ have come to characterise our world: ‘movement, transfers of every type, impregnation or spread of substances.’12 Elsewhere, Nancy will unhesitatingly describe this as ‘globalisation.’13 It is not entirely clear whether we should understand this entire system in the heightened state it has achieved today as the ‘exception’—a system that would be ‘in charge’ and would not perhaps be governed over in its entirety by anything like a ‘sovereign’; or, since this metaphorical virality is the norm, whether we should understand by ‘viral exception’ rather the way in which this very globalised system of transmission has itself been suspended (in certain respects, physical and local) with the advent of the metaphor’s translation into literal form with the coronavirus of 2019. But either way, one should not attribute the primary agency in this affair to those in power, to those sovereigns to whom Agamben’s biopolitical philosophy would impute the decision regarding the state of exception: ‘This is not some underhanded plot devised by an unknown sinister conspirator. Nor is it the result of abuses on the part of nations. The only thing at work is the general law of interconnections, whose mastery is the aim of techno-economic powers.’14 In a way not without obscurities, perhaps because of the condensed form in which it is recounted here, Nancy connects the world’s virality with a rise in the global population (perhaps due to the living standards that industrial capitalism has brought about in certain parts of the world and that might be said to be in some respects improved), which in turn increases the number of people who survive into old age, along with the chances for survival of those slightly younger but fragile enough for this particular virus to constitute a

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threat. A new world with unprecedented levels of ‘transmission’ is ultimately responsible for the seriousness of the literal virus since it brings to pass a general increase in longevity and survival more generally, and so an increasingly elderly and vulnerable demographic that would be more susceptible to fatality in this case: the exception becomes the rule in a world in which technological interconnections of all kinds (movements, transfers of all kinds, infusions or propagations of substances, etc.) reach a hitherto unknown level of intensity, one that increases along with the population. The growth of the latter in rich countries also involves longer life-spans and an increase in the number of elderly people and, in general, of people at risk.15

Confronted with such a situation, individual governments are for Nancy merely reactive, and their reaction is deemed proportionate. If anything, in the states of exception declared, governments are responsible for disrupting the viral network, an act Nancy considers laudable, and one that was in his eyes imposed upon them unambiguously, as if no alternative course of action were available. Hence there was no real sovereign decision of the kind that Agamben has identified, eo ipso aligning himself with the ‘conspiracy theorists.’16 The technologies of control appear to be secondary to that gesture, or epiphenomenal, and the more fundamental truth of the affair is the generally viral character of the globalised world whose truth manifests itself here, more vividly than normal, in the moment of its temporary abeyance. ROBERTO ESPOSITO: THE METONYM IS ITSELF BIOPOLITICAL The day after Nancy’s first composition, Roberto Esposito enters the fray and tries to demonstrate that despite its most explicit intentions, Nancy’s position may in fact be construed in terms of biopolitics. It is as if, without perhaps realising it, Nancy had opposed himself only to Agamben’s conception of the latter, and on a broader construal that opposition might be sublated so as to arrive at Esposito’s position; on Esposito’s terms, it was not to be excluded.17 ‘What interrupted our dialogue at one point [largely on the topic of ‘community,’ where Esposito relies heavily on Nancy, as he admits in ‘Cured to the Bitter End’ and elsewhere] was Nancy’s sharp opposition to the paradigm of biopolitics, to which he has always opposed, as in this text, the relevance of the technological apparatus.’18 Esposito suggests that the very metonymisation of the word ‘viral,’ which Nancy would attribute primarily to the global system of circulation and

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secondarily to the coronavirus, is itself ‘a biopolitical contamination.’ In other words, this asserted founding of the biopolitical discourse upon the technical is itself biopolitical. This is so because every discourse in question here (‘political, social, medical and technological’) would accord with the same logic that Esposito has for twenty years described as ‘immunitary’—the isolatory gesture of individuation that fails to see that (individual) identity depends upon the common obligation to others that characterises the ‘communitary’—or more precisely that a mistaken conception of immunity holds sway if we think these two notions (immunity and community) to be opposed to one another, as indeed they have become over the last few decades, with an unprecedented exacerbation of the immunitary in the form of securitisation and the projection of new, often imaginary threats that the public may then be secured against. As we have indicated above, a great many of the fundaments of this conception were inherited from Nancy himself, and so indirectly from Derrida as well. Thus, Esposito’s work in this regard may be said to demonstrate how the work of deconstruction can be construed ‘biopolitically.’ What we find in his debate with Nancy would then merely amount to a further insistence upon that point in one very specific context. Given the enduring stress laid by Esposito on the importance of thinking immunity and community together, it is curious that the only way in which Esposito will be able to justify his support for the extraordinary, legally enforced isolation of the last three years, at least in the first half of 2020, will be by implying that this immunising quarantine of the healthy is itself to be understood as ‘communal’ and in general as a positive form of the coincidence of opposites.19 In implicit response to Agamben, who goes unnamed and is spoken of only by way of his friend, Nancy, Esposito invokes Michel Foucault, to whom Nancy is said to be ‘allergic.’ Esposito insists on a historical differentiation to which Agamben is accused elsewhere of not being sensitive enough: ‘I would personally avoid making any sort of comparison between maximum security prisons and a two-week quarantine in the Po Lowlands.’20 That said, Esposito concedes to Agamben that in this case an emergency decree ‘is not absolutely necessary,’ and that this practice of installing states of emergency ‘may in the long run undermine the balance of power in favour of the executive branch.’21 At the time these words were set down we were not yet in such a ‘long run’ as we are now, two or three years later, having been promised two or three weeks. Esposito, in these early days, attempts to hove a more moderate path than he sees Agamben as taking: for him, the decision as to the non-pharmaceutical response to be made is a question of ‘proportion’ and hence judgement. One should accept a certain sacrifice, for that which it promises to restore is

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waiting for us in the near future. But just how this balance is to be decided upon, and just what the principle of this judgement is, remains unclear. That one is needed is demonstrated by Esposito’s admission that this situation must be temporary, and so the chronological limit beyond which it becomes intolerable must be adjudged: ‘we should not ignore the limit, beyond which this mechanism cannot work without producing irreparable failures. Not just on the economic level. But also, on the anthropological one. [. . .] Of course, also in this case it is a question of proportions. Everything is about respecting the delicate balance between community and immunity.’22 This is as much as to say that while this form of insularity might amount to a certain coincidence of community and immunity, it cannot be the ultimate and enduring one, or perhaps—and this is not made altogether clear by Esposito—it amounts to a suspension of community for the sake of immunity: both positions can be attributed to Esposito at different points in his early interventions.23 In Esposito’s first intervention, he simply says of Agamben’s belief that the threshold was crossed from the moment a state of emergency was declared in Italy, and that means from the moment it was decided in a sovereign manner that bare life should be separated from properly human life and rendered governable, it is hyperbolic: ‘to talk of risks to democracy in this case seems to me an exaggeration to say the least.’24 And yet, by November of 2020, with this state of emergency having endured for rather longer than two or three weeks, the question of balance and judgement was becoming rather more pressing, not to say troubling: ‘Beware—this threshold may not be far away. [. . .] The same immunity, which serves to save life, could drain the sense out of it.’25 In the very next paragraph, Esposito almost goes so far as to accept that the threshold has been crossed: ‘The balance between communitas and immunitas seems to be broken [sic; rather, “upset,” “disturbed”] in favour of the latter. The limit appears to have been overcome, with the consequence of minimising life in common.’26 One wonders if, two or three years later, with his country still in a state of emergency, the remnant ambiguity would have been relinquished altogether and whether Esposito would have drawn even closer to Agamben’s position. In the book that effectively both founds and consummates his interventions on the virus, Institution, Esposito concedes more to Agamben than he will anywhere else. Here, in the calmness of reflective hindsight, Esposito makes a harsh assessment of the institutional response to the virus: Certainly, negative aspects abound in the efforts that regional, national, and international institutions made to contain the damage; so much so that the negative can even be said to have prevailed at times over the positive. It is impossible to forget the inadequacies, shortages, and delays of the early interventions, which sometimes caused irreparable social harms and, especially in some areas,

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health harms as well. This lack of decisiveness was sometimes accompanied by excess intrusion into individual lifestyles, even when not strictly required, adding substantial political, economic, and social costs. The shifting of boundaries between legislative and executive powers in favour of the latter, caused by the use of emergency declarations that were not always necessary and [which were] sometimes arbitrary, went so far as to threaten the democratic endurance of political systems. These appeared to be struggling in the inevitably failed attempt to pursue and match the effectiveness of the more drastic procedures implemented by authoritarian regimes.27

These words were written in late 2020 and perhaps early 2021, Esposito speaking of ‘the second wave of the pandemic, still in progress at the time of writing.’28 And yet fundamentally he will not accept that there was malignity and a desire to control the uncontrollable at the root of this institutional reaction: ‘Most importantly, it [this response] was provoked not by a sovereign will to extend control over our lives but, rather, by a mix of necessity and contingency that was completely unforeseeable [this we know to be false, cf. the preparations made for just such a pandemic] and quite different from a project aimed at subjugating the population.’29 Apparently oblivious to the likely origin of the virus, he speaks with credulity of ‘an event whose beginnings and effects have very little of the voluntary or planned about them.’30 Esposito even resists the very idea that sovereign power is in play here for reasons not altogether distinct from Nancy’s depiction of an acephalic global network: the biopolitical system is not centred around a sovereign instance since ‘centralised decision-making has long since exploded into countless fragments, largely autonomous from national governments and located even in a transnational space.’31 How this suggests plurality is unclear, since we still inhabit a global world in which sovereignty may be seen to belong to just those transnational bodies, which in 2020 acted in a unified manner and with a unified purpose. Earlier on, Esposito had also bestowed upon medicine what seemed to be a sovereign power in the current state of affairs: he insists on distinguishing between, on the one hand, the longer term ‘medicalisation of politics’ that we have witnessed over the last three centuries or more, in which political power devotes itself to saving citizens from threats and risks that the state itself has created or at the very least ‘emphasised’; and on the other hand, the ‘politicisation of medicine,’ which seems to be what is at stake in the current event.32 Medicine is here placed in a position of power, ‘invested with tasks of social control that do not belong to it,’ and Esposito even goes so far as to say that the different interpretations of the severity of the virus given by orthodox and dissenting scientists are in themselves political in this sense, and so this difference would not be a strictly intra-scientific matter. It is as if the difference

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in interpretation here could only be political (we have witnessed just such a politicisation of the medics in their shrill urging of the police response, in part by means of the manufacturing of predicted scenarios that seem to leave open no other option). For Esposito, this explains ‘the extremely heterogeneous assessments virologists are making of the nature and gravity of the coronavirus.’33 The politicisation of medicine was precisely not a matter for concern in Nancy’s text.34 And yet, what does this distinction between a medicalisation and a politicisation achieve for Esposito, given that doctors were given such a political role, and assumed it in a politicised way in the worst and most predominant of cases? We would have witnessed already both the medicalisation of politics and the politicisation of medicine at once. This assumption of sovereign power by the natural scientist and the doctors would align Esposito even more closely with Agamben’s position. Perhaps Esposito is acknowledging as much when he concludes his text, ‘Cured to the Bitter End,’ by condescending to accept that Agamben’s concerns are ‘legitimate,’ a gesture that he will reiterate much later, in Institution; and yet he sees in their very extremity an ‘exaggeration,’ a defect of just that ‘proportion’ and judgement Esposito will have advocated all along: ‘once again, with regard to absolutely legitimate concerns, it is necessary not to lose our sense of proportion.’ His last words in this piece simply state, ‘what is happening in Italy today, with the chaotic and rather grotesque overlapping of national and regional prerogatives, has more the character of a breakdown of public authorities than that of a dramatic totalitarian grip.’35 But then again, when it comes to exaggeration, we should reread the final words of Esposito’s ‘Vitam instituere,’ which dare to invoke the potential extinction of humanity at the hands of the virus, a situation no scientist at any point took the liberty of forecasting: ‘In times of pandemic, human beings are united by a common distance. Yet also this is a way—at present a necessary one—of establishing life, of defending it from the blind force that threatens to devour it.’36 (In Institution, he speaks of our being ‘engulfed’ were it not for the protection afforded us by institutions, whatever their faults.)37 INSTITUTED LIFE What matters for Esposito, ultimately—and here he rejoins Nancy and the philosophers—is to save lives, for whatever else life may be, it depends primarily and absolutely on the survival of a certain substrate of mere biological aliveness. Fully aware that this sets him resolutely against Agamben, Esposito states: ‘I personally believe that the defence of life is a value superior to any

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other—if only because it is presupposed by them [these other values and forms of life]: in order to be free or to communicate with others, one must first be alive.’38 But here we must nuance Esposito’s position, for there are other facets to his discourse upon life, which have become more prominent over the last decade, and here he comes close to renouncing the idea of a life that would be bare. This is a significant qualification: we need to preserve life, but even that type of life that grounds the more properly human forms of life is not entirely without qualities, or the potential to be qualified. This is significant not least because it seems to allow Esposito to endorse aggressive measures for protecting this fundamental form of life whilst neutralising Agamben’s critique, since these measures do not entail the reduction of human life to the inhuman level of bare anonymous life. On the most charitable reading, Esposito may perhaps be taken as saying that the state-enforced immunisation of quarantine should not be understood as a state of bare life, but one that remains in a certain sense communal. Terminologically speaking, however, in place of a communal life he has come to speak of an instituting life, expressive of a certain meaning. In his earlier texts on the virus, the communal character of immunised life seemed simply to express the fact that this isolation was itself a response to a certain communitarian imperative (‘save others’), and indeed, more dubiously, the fact that ‘we are all doing it’ and so come to participate in a community of the isolated. As if to clarify the political character of the struggle for survival and its acceptability, Esposito composes another text entitled ‘Vitam instituere,’ ‘Instituting Life,’ in the dual sense of a life that institutes (meaning) and a life instituted in institutions (which are themselves plastic, but at least less fleeting than an individual life). Under certain of its descriptions, instituted life seems to be near identical to what Agamben speaks of as ‘form-of-life’ (a syntagm that Esposito allows himself to employ in this text and elsewhere, without the hyphenation that Agamben employs to signify a type of life that might overcome the opposition between bare and human life). By means of this notion, Esposito also attempts to slacken the opposition between unqualified life and qualified human life that he implicitly takes Agamben to assert.39 For Esposito, human life cannot be reduced to bare life, for life is ‘this continuous “establishment” [or “instituting”], the capacity to create ever new meanings,’ and this implies that the separation of life from bare life can never come about under any circumstance: ‘The space of logos, and then of nomos [. . .] has never become separate from that of bios.’40 In Institution, the book that grew out of this short text, Esposito expands upon this point: ‘In the expression institutio vitae [. . .], life is both the subject and the object of institution: it is instituent and instituted at the same time. [. . .] The very fact that bios—and not zoe, not pure living matter—is spoken of means that human life has always and in all cases been instituted, that is,

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inscribed in a historical and symbolic fabric from which it cannot be separated.’41 Thus we are speaking of ‘[t]he need to institute life [. . .]: to vitalise institutions and to restore to life those instituent traits that propel it beyond mere biological matter.’42 In the following text, written extemporaneously and thus with Agamben’s thoughts on the virus at the forefront of his mind, Esposito demonstrates how this conception of life allows us to resist his fellow countryman’s interpretation of the virus and of the biopolitical twentieth century more generally: human life cannot be reduced to simple survival—to ‘bare life,’ we may say, quoting Benjamin [as so often, from either academic tact or disdain, Agamben is to be spoken of only by way of an intermediary]. Having been established from the very beginning, our life never coincides with mere biological matter—even when it is crushed against it [sic43]. And also in this case, perhaps especially in this case, life as such reveals a way of being that, however deformed, violated, trampled on, remains such—a form of life. What gives it this formal character— something other than mere biology—is its belonging to a historical context, constituted by social, political and symbolic relations. What establishes us from the beginning, what we ourselves continually establish, is this symbolic pattern within which everything we do acquires meaning and significance for us and for others.44

In the more considered monographic version of the same text, Esposito tells us that the expression ‘bare life’ (blosse Leben) should not be understood as something real, or simply possible, but [it should rather be understood as] a logical point necessary to identify the ‘qualified life’; [. . .] there has never been a life that is completely stripped of its formal characteristics—not even in the extreme situation of the extermination camps. Even when reduced to its lowest level and [whilst] facing imminent death, until it is extinguished, life remains a form of life.45

The notion of life as instituting adds a new strand to Esposito’s definition of life and by means of it he attempts to remove himself from Agamben’s problematic and thus to adopt a more conciliatory relation with the restrictions imposed on the population in response to the virus, along with the institutions which brought them about. And yet, as if being forced to see some truth in Agamben’s position despite everything, as if, in spite of his criticism of ‘exaggeration,’ he sees something more serious, more akin to the reduction of life to bare life in the present response to the virus than was witnessed even, by his own testimony, in Auschwitz, Esposito seems to accept that in 2020 this impossibility somehow became possible: ‘It is precisely this pattern of

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common relations that the coronavirus threatens to break.’46 And still further, in Institution, he avers, [t]he fact that the pandemic is situated on a biopolitical horizon is plain for all to see. Never have the paths of politics and life intertwined as during this crisis, with highly problematic and still uncertain results [. . .]. It goes without saying that there have been other things at stake too: community, freedom, and the economy. [. . .] Indeed, it can be said that never as in these circumstances has the immunological core of contemporary biopolitics been revealed.47

Perhaps it is by reason of this extremity that Esposito recurs again and again in his writings on the virus to the separation of bare life and qualified life, altogether immunised non-communal life on the one hand, and communal human life on the other. The retention of such a foundational schema is what allows Esposito to reaffirm that in order for communal human relations to carry on existing, our first imperative must be to survive: in order to express itself, the latter [social life in common] requires us to be alive. The term ‘survival’ bears no reductive connotation. On the contrary, the problem of conservatio vitae is at the heart of classical and modern culture. It resonates in the Christian conception of sacred life, as in the great political philosophical tradition inaugurated by Hobbes. The first task this wretched virus entrusts us with, in its deadly challenge, is to stay alive. What is more, by defending this first life, we must also defend the second life, established life, which is, for this reason, the one able to establish and create new meaning.48

Esposito immediately goes on to speak of this communal ‘second life’ as being (temporarily, although he does not say that here) ‘rightly and logically, forbidden.’ Indeed he goes as far as he ever will in the direction of an explicitly (and no longer mild) polemical affirmation: To consider this sacrifice as unbearable, when there are those who are risking their lives in hospitals to save ours [a strange pronoun, given that ‘we’ are at home and not there, and given that it was already clear that ‘we’—the overwhelming majority, assuming as well that it is important in this context to differentiate this ‘we’ demographically—were at no more risk from the virus than we were menaced by a hundred other things], is not only offensive, it is ridiculous. In no way does this diminish established life.49

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HOSTILE OR HOSPITABLE IMMUNISATION? THE NECESSITY FOR INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR RETHINKING Throughout his writings on the virus, Esposito seems to adopt a position tellingly different with respect to his own earlier account of the dialectic that runs between community and immunity (in the trilogy devoted to life, from Communitas, to Immunitas, to Bios, composed twenty years ago), which insists on the hospitable form of immunity that exposes itself to otherness, rather than the hostile policing of rigorously impermeable borders that he sees as being invoked by State action in the process of (bio-)securitisation.50 In Institution, Esposito writes, as if nothing had changed in the intervening two decades: ‘The problem our political systems always face is that of finding a sustainable equilibrium between community and immunity.’51 And yet in 2020 he seems not to understand the isolation of quarantine as an exacerbation of the hostile immunitary paradigm, rather allowing himself to suggest that an entirely immune position—understood in terms of hostility and not hospitality—can itself be communal. Thus he speaks of ‘[g]iving a common sense to this aloneness. It is, in fact, precisely that which today connects us to others. To all others—at present half of humanity, perhaps in a month’s time it will be the whole of humanity.’52 But if this seems to involve a departure from his earlier position, it might nevertheless be read more charitably as a development in his thought, and one which the notion of an instituted and instituting life will have made possible. This notion of life could then be said to have allowed Esposito to sublate the opposition between community and the hostile kind of immunity. To shed light on the question of whether this can indeed be understood as a chronological development rather than a self-contradiction, we should read a little further in his most recent text on the notion of instituted life. Speaking of the criticism of institutions during the epidemic that denounces them for both ‘doing too much and [. . .] not doing enough,’53 Esposito concedes to these criticisms that ‘both [. . .] seem well-founded,’ and yet he goes on to ask rhetorically: ‘How would we have withstood the virus’s onslaught without institutions? [. . .] [I]f there had been no institutional framework to guide our behaviour?’54 For all their apparently contingent mistakes and failings in this particular case, institutions are salvific; we should not trust to unaided human judgement. To present his own theory of institutions, Esposito attempts dialectically to reconcile the opposition between institution and movement in the sense of mobility in general but also of those protest groups which would ordinarily consider themselves to be anti-institutional and anti-State, even anarchistic.

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Esposito speaks of this opposition in terms of the political and the social, respectively. To resist the distribution of Right and Left across these two distinct possibilities and to develop a new form of politics, he suggests that we need to conceive of an institution that would itself be capable of movement.55 This rethinking of institutions is crucial if one is to avoid what he takes to be Agamben’s response to them, which is precisely anti-institutional and which for that reason Esposito describes as ‘neo-anarchism.’ Such a position takes institutions to be opposed to freedom, a freedom which can only be achieved in the absence of institutions or in their ‘destitution’: ‘the neoanarchist myth of a society simplified into a stark alternative between repressive institutions and no institutions.’56 Esposito’s alternative is to rethink the notion of the institution in such a way that it need no longer be understood as infinitely stable and hence to stand in opposition to anti-institutional ‘movements,’ for only in this way can we properly conceive the relation between institutions and biopolitics in the context of the recent epidemic: ‘How do the paradigms of institution and biopolitics relate to one another—and prior to that, are they compatible? [. . .] [I]t is not only possible but necessary to work at their point of intersection. The current pandemic, which forms the inevitable backdrop for these reflections, serves as a reminder of the need for this dual approach.’57 Later on, he resumes this idea in the following way: Ever since the concept of biopolitics first appeared, it has been tied to the fall of institutional mediations in favour of a direct implication between politics and life. But this definition presupposed, on the one hand, the static character of institutions, viewed as incapable of incorporating vital processes; and, on the other, a notion of ‘life’ conceived as resistant to recognising its dual character: instituent and instituted.58

Thus the title of the book (Institution/Instituting) encompasses both the institutions where life is housed and protected, and which are vivified by the mobile character of life, and the spontaneous construction of institutions that this life itself carries out. Thus would a simple opposition between a bare, impotent, unproductive life and a creative potent form-of-life be undermined. THE BARENESS OF LIFE AND ‘DIFFERENTIAL VULNERABILITY’ But this is not the only way in which such an undermining might be carried out: Esposito is not alone in expressing doubts as to the bareness of ‘bare life.’ Certain other thinkers, relatively close to Agamben and largely of a

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certain biopolitical filiation, have suggested that the situation analysed by Agamben in terms of the sovereign separation of bare life is not so parlous as he imagines: in short, bare life is, even now, not so bare as all that—life is not so indiscriminately naked, not so unqualified and lacking in stratification as Agamben’s work might be taken to suggest. If this were true it would have repercussions for the way in which we critically appraise the current state of affairs and it might even cause us to reconsider the attribution of responsibility to a thoroughly malign sovereign power bent on social control. One line of approach to Agamben’s discourse in this context asks whether he does not risk presupposing a ‘mystified’ notion of bare life, as Antonio Negri was the first to suggest, in another context.59 For the latter, according to the logic of ideology, a certain variety within bare life is elided, along with the very process—which is construed from a Marxist point of view as being tightly bound up with historical and cultural differences in labour relations— by which that supposedly non-variegated bare life arises. We might resume this line of thought in the following way: bare life is assumed on Agamben’s account to signify a life that is everywhere equally susceptible to a death blow issued from elsewhere (and hence ‘vulnerable’ in the strict sense). But to what extent are we all equal before death? At the level that is most relevant here, the answer is: hardly at all. Indeed, this is one of the most significant elisions that we have witnessed in our account of the statistical presentation of the event. It was necessary to equalise this difference in order to justify the measures—or to ensure their observance—put in place by no means for the sake of all, but only for that of a tiny minority, if we assume the powers that be to have spoken in good faith (and this naivety seems, remarkably, to be the spontaneous recourse of the overwhelming majority of philosophers and Leftists). ‘Vulnerability,’ given its sentimentalising and moralising usage in the propaganda of recent times, is probably a word that has outlived its usefulness and become defaced coinage. And yet it embodies an ambiguity that may help us to make a significant intervention: for some, this notion is employed as an argument for sacrifice on the part of the healthy, and hence for the totalising approach that adopts just one type of non-pharmaceutical intervention and applies it to entire populations; but for others, this differential vulnerability can be used precisely as an argument against such a totalising approach in favour of a more ‘focussed’ form of ‘protection.’ This could be an approach to ‘care’ that does not necessarily originate at the level of law and the sovereign power that speaks through it, and it would at the very least give more weight to the freedom, rights, and humanity of those who would otherwise be forced, legally or otherwise, to sacrifice something essential to them.60 Daniele Lorenzini, writing from the standpoint of Foucault and his conception of biopolitics, broaches the question of inequality, which Agamben’s

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thought seems generally to be taken to circumvent.61 Lorenzini demonstrates why he considers Foucault’s own reading of the biopolitical situation to be more useful in the current context than Agamben’s, although he seems not to realise that Agamben’s thought is perhaps traduced here for the simple reason that it has never claimed to be a straightforward reading of Foucault, but rather a development of his work amongst a number of others: ‘The differential exposure of human beings to health and social risks is, according to Foucault, a salient feature of biopolitical governmentality’; and this is not specific to the last few years but has been in place since the very (modern) inception of biopolitics: ‘biopolitics is always a politics of differential vulnerability.’ This means that, in the eyes of those in power, some lives are more worthy of being lived than others, and since life has been taken into the political sphere, the decision upon this worthiness is taken by whoever or whatever holds power in this domain—the sovereign, or some other more multifarious means of channelling power.62 For Lorenzini, biopolitics teaches a different lesson to the one he implicitly takes Agamben to be drawing; Foucault considers biopower to operate precisely under non-exceptional conditions: ‘I always think about how astonishing it is for me, on the contrary, that so many of us are [obeying the strictures], even when the risk of sanctions, in most situations, is quite low.’63 It is certainly true that this level of acquiescence is what stands in need of explanation, but Lorenzini here takes the Foucauldian point to be that we have long given this kind of obedience, while he understands Agamben to be suggesting that we have given it, or have given it in an exceptional form, solely in response to the epidemic and the police response that was made to it: ‘However, if we just insist on coercive measures, on being confined, controlled, and “trapped” at home during these extraordinary times, we risk overlooking the fact that disciplinary and biopolitical power mainly functions in an automatic, invisible, and perfectly ordinary way—and that it is most dangerous precisely when we do not notice it.’ Thus he continues, ‘[i]nstead of worrying about the increase of surveillance mechanisms and indiscriminate control under a new “state of exception,” I therefore tend to worry about the fact that we already are docile, obedient biopolitical subjects.’64 An altogether just—and in its context, quite brave—statement, but it is also one of Agamben’s own points: what he determines as standing in need of explanation is precisely how such violent measures could so easily have been accepted and even assimilated by perhaps half the populace.65 What preconditions had to be in place? At the same time, this ‘non-exceptional’ time that Lorenzini alludes to is for Agamben rather a time in which the exceptional and the non-exceptional have coalesced, as have sovereign Law and other supposedly infra-sovereign forms in which power is wielded, as for instance

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in the case of norms and ‘guidelines.’ Thus Agamben’s concerns coincide with what Lorenzini sees as being the exclusive province of Foucault. It would seem that for Agamben even beginning to think about such things as vulnerability in this sense is already to separate off a purely biological substrate from its cultural superstructure or ‘form of life.’ We have already begun to suspect that for Agamben, no distribution of vulnerabilities could justify the actions taken over the last three years. At the level of bare life, in contrast to that of forms-of-life, all differences of potential are elided altogether in the name of just one: the possibility of being killed at the behest of another, whether that be the sovereign medic or the sovereign virus. That said, the fact that a difference in vulnerability at the biological level has been for the most part strikingly eclipsed from public discourse suggests that it might yet prove to be a valuable tool with which to resist the actions that were taken in its name. The fact that the average age of death exceeds that of average life expectancy (with all of the cautions that must still be exercised around this notion with respect to co-morbidities, the vagaries of death certifications, the unreliability of testing procedures, the quality of the life remaining, and the comparison to be made with deaths from other causes) seemed to be little known for a long time, and indeed it still appears to be in some quarters, or at least its significance has gone largely unnoticed amidst the hysteria: can it even make logical sense to protect a life that has exceeded its expected expiry without implicitly positing immortality as the ultimate aim of the intervention? A more honest calculation of what has been ‘lost,’ if anything, thanks to this particular virus—while it would still speak in a biopolitical register—would calculate the expected number of years remaining that have been elided, and take into account what sort of life was in any case to have been lived, rather than assuming, implicitly or explicitly, the absolute value of the survival of any kind of life whatsoever: in short, the absolute value and sanctity of bare life.66 To argue either that life deserves, as a matter of biological survival, to be lived interminably, or that some lives are unworthy of being lived, is to speak biopolitically in the malign sense that each one involves separating the substrate of biological life from its form. In truth, this becomes more interesting from the point of view of the political or disciplinary consequences of the virus-response. The mass incarceration of the healthy took place under the auspices of a forgetting of differentiations in vulnerability and infectious power. Agamben identifies a kind of artificial equalisation, not on the part of the theorist, but on the part of the sovereign powers themselves: despite an inequality at the level of susceptibility (passivity), although this was emphatically not the message sent out at the beginning of the affair, we are falsely equalised at the level of infectivity (activity). Whether or not we are actually ill, we are instructed to act ‘as if’ we are;

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everyone is a potential spreader of the plague, an ‘anointer.’67 What matters more than the actuality of our situation is its potential. On these grounds in particular, whatever our passive vulnerability, we are told that it is right to shun our neighbour, however vulnerable indeed they are supposed to be. THE (RELATIONAL) LIFE OF THE HOME AND THE POLITICAL REALM: ELETTRA STIMILLI We might approach the question of bare life and its ‘vulnerability’ from another direction, one that is taken, in a manner more sympathetic to Agamben’s work in general, by Elettra Stimilli. From a point of view that might ultimately be traced back to Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas, she suggests that bare life should indeed be understood in a certain respect as vulnerable, and as passive in an undifferentiated way. For this reason, all lives are owed ethical duties.68 This is to lay stress on the fact that even the barest life is a relational one and therefore partakes of a certain commonality or community: ‘Is vulnerable life bare? Are the bare lives of the inhabitants of this planet in turmoil? [/] We live our bodies as objects of anguish, stripped bare when confronted by their exceptional significance. Bodies are not only vectors of epidemics, but also the means of transmitting what we are, means of communication.’69 Therefore, ‘[i]t is pointless to hypothesise forms of life without relations, to theorise life without relationships.’70 Even isolated life is communal in this minimal sense. This in turn makes it at least possible to think that the restrictions we have been legally compelled to abide by in recent years might in fact be ethically acceptable in a way that they certainly are not for Agamben. Life is relational as a result of the fact that it is by definition unable to fend for itself in its earliest years and so immediately opens onto a relation with others who must care for it if it is to survive: vulnerable lives are ‘reproduced and taken care of.’71 And in fact, this care and this relation remain necessary from the very first months of life until the very last. Stimilli avers, albeit a little hastily, that ‘[t]his reproductive and care work, always adjacent to survival, is completely negated [totalmente annientato] by Agamben’s theory [more literally, from the perspective that his theory adopts: nella prospettiva di Agamben].’72 This leads Stimilli to a locution which might be employed to express the ‘paradox’ that we are preparing ourselves to consider, in which community and immunity (in the sense of isolation) are understood to coincide: ‘being in common [but] at a distance.’ Thus we here encounter an attempt—among the most thoughtful and hence powerful—to assert the compatibility of immunity

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and community that Agamben’s account has set itself against in the name of a critique of sovereign power. As Arendt was among the first to insist, in an attempt to distance herself from Heidegger (who is here taken implicitly to be the predominant influence upon Agamben) and from the supposed foundation of community in a mutually isolating death, the reproduction of and caring for helpless life is both the origin of the political community and an activity that takes place in the home, traditionally carried out by women: in other words, it spans the oikos and the polis, which Aristotle was said to have kept distinct. For Stimilli, we can learn something of this domestic form of life from our recent confinement and even transform our politics on the basis of it. This is all thanks to the conditions of quarantine in which we are told that, whilst house-bound, we are nevertheless entwined with others in a novel way, in a (perhaps virtual) space that is meant to be communal—and therefore, we might risk saying, political. One of the things we seem to learn from the life of the home is that bare life—thanks to the ‘vulnerability’ of this life—is precisely what first involves human beings in a primitive community: simply in order to survive, individual life must be implicated in commonality. We might also say that therefore immunity itself cannot be simply biological; it must also be social. The domestic life of the home seems implicitly to be identified by Stimilli with what Agamben calls ‘bare life,’ and so bare life, in this new sense, may be deemed the foundation of both private and public life, implying as it does a community of a certain kind that may be said to characterise both family life and political life. The immunity that allows survival is not distinct from the political relations in which the individual life must be bound up—provided, that is, we base our understanding of the political space on the caring relations that originate from the oikos. What is not clear on Stimilli’s allusive account is how the recent and absolute prohibition of physical proximity can be reconciled with the demand that we take care of vulnerable life, particularly at the beginning, with the young so traduced and mistreated throughout the entire affair, being deprived as they were of education and society; but also at the end of a life, among the elderly, who—in our culture—no longer tend to share a household with those who might have seen to their needs. In England at least we were legally compelled to abandon the elderly, the confused, those in need of personal and physical assistance, and those who were simply alone, whatever their age. The last rites of those who simply withered away were unilaterally cancelled, and whatever final resolutions and redemptions might have consoled them were retracted. How are we to reconcile these prohibitions with the literal sense of ‘care’ that involves tending to the needs of the hilflos child, or forming a political bond that extends beyond the immediate nuclear family or whoever (if anyone) constitutes our ‘household’ with us?

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Stimilli offers some suggestions, albeit ones that remain undeveloped in the texts currently under consideration. We have already seen her suggest that being confined to the home—some of us; never all, never possibly all—we can learn something of what has always taken place there and apply these lessons to the political realm. Not least among these is a new sense for the language in which we might describe our current predicament. We have seen that the rhetoric of civil war has shaped public discourse over the last three years,73 but Stimilli considers Agamben’s own language of a legal state of emergency to remain all too proximate to this discourse; she proposes in its place that we should attempt to learn a new and non-bellicose language derived from the life that dwells in the oikos. For her, we must invent a lexicon other than that of the state of exception which cannot but involve us in the rhetoric of global civil war. We must strive for ‘new words’: Being in common at a distance is the practice that makes it possible to invent new words, new positions, new horizons. It instils something that is already occurring. But it is a practice which requires much patience. [/] A practice that countless women have experienced on their skin over the centuries, in their homes. [/] We will rediscover the centrality of the domestic condition. We have the opportunity finally to uncover the neglected political potentiality of a private sphere.74

On Stimilli’s account, a renovated vocabulary of the domestic should be transferred from the private to the political. At this stage we might pause to note that, as with the shared ancestry in Arendt’s work on the topic of reproductive life, this gesture is not foreign to Agamben’s own political thought. For him as well, the problem with the current situation lies on the threshold between home and city, or between the legitimate places of care (which have come to be understood as medical institutions, but which also include the private realm of the ‘home’) and an illegitimate form of its transgression on the part of biopower. Political life and bare life have become indistinguishable, and Agamben’s task is not to re-establish the separation but to conceive of this indistinguishability in a new way, and so to generate a new understanding of the same transgression. In light of this we might ask whether Stimilli’s Arendtian suggestion might not appeal to Agamben. The problem seems to be that her philosophy risks naturalising bare life, even as it considers it to open onto the non-natural realm of culture. It seems to conceive of this life as a ‘natural kind’ with naturally occurring characteristics (infantile helplessness, vulnerability, together with its differentiality or otherwise); not as a retroactive and retrospective creation on the part of sovereign power, but as a given. Then, in her attempt to rethink the political

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life of man, it simply assumes the features of domestic reproductive life and applies them to the political realm without mediation. Pace Stimilli, bare life is not a natural or naturalisable notion; rather, for Agamben, bare life is formed through an eminently political gesture of inclusive exclusion in a state of exception that really does resemble war. There is then no ‘home’ distinct from the sovereign gesture that excludes the domestic space from the civil realm, nowhere that power will not seek us out and force something upon us. The transition from private to public needs to be mediated so as to avert the risk that Stimilli runs of simply transplanting the (gendered) life of the home into the political sphere—a move that allows her to think a certain fully immunised community in the public realm, as if the institutions of public health could be considered ‘maternal’ in their intent. It is this transplantation of the life of the home into the political sphere that prevents Stimilli from resisting as fiercely as she might the (bio)political acts that Agamben will show to be complicit with sovereign power. We have seen that the target of Stimilli’s criticism is a conception of bare life that takes it to be non-relational, but this risks embodying a conflation of bare life with zōē common in readings of Agamben, which bypasses the distortions that take place in the seizure of life by political power. In Agamben’s thought, bare life is indeed relational, but only in the sense that it is inextricably related from its very inception to the sovereign instance itself, which institutes that relation of inclusive exclusion that forever binds the political realm to bare or naked life. And indeed, at the most extreme point, to which we have been pushed in recent years, if not for the whole of the last century, we are all such ‘homines sacri,’ and this is not a meaningful form of political relation but an altogether immunised severing of relation that we have been compelled to undertake by the impending sword of the Leviathan.75 ANALYTIC ORTHODOXIES ON THE VIRUS In the foregoing we have seen a number of ways in which Esposito’s notion of an instituted biological life might be developed, and at the same time we have begun to suggest ways in which Agamben might resist these critical gestures that attempt to refute his conception of bare life. It is nevertheless important to address one more objection to his work before moving on to the precise mechanisms thanks to which Agamben’s thought is most fundamentally resistant to these attempts. Most philosophers have not exerted themselves so as to achieve the level of subtlety in their considerations of Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ that we have witnessed in the work of Esposito, Lorenzini, and Stimilli. To demonstrate that vulgarised versions of Esposito’s position were explicitly pitted against Agamben from the very beginning, and thus to show

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that the former’s stance may be taken as an example of the most generally held conception of both ‘life’ and the non-pharmaceutical interventions themselves, we are fortunate in being able to draw upon the example of a text by Anastasia Berg, which might also stand as a representative for the contributions made to the debate by analytic philosophy, giving us reason enough to elide them here, at least by metonymy.76 The title of the latter’s text, which one can only hope was supplied by the editor rather than the author, reads: ‘Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness.’ Worse has been said in his home country. As to the tract itself, its level of respect is matched only by the comprehension of continental philosophy it displays. Ultimately, however, the systematic necessity for texts such as Berg’s is to beat back into obscurity any attempt at questioning, which is taken to mean ‘dissent,’ and to cleanse philosophy, one’s own discipline, of taint. Despite its rather painfully patent lack of understanding, what remains of interest in the content of the piece is that, despite its author’s being manifestly bereft of a profound knowledge of the figure she takes it upon herself to criticise, it arrives at a position remarkably similar to Esposito’s. Not that the sense of the objection is easy to make out: in its way, the article concedes a great deal to Agamben’s more easily comprehensible claims, but then falls down when it tries to gain critical leverage: ‘Agamben is right that a life dedicated solely to our own biological survival is a human life in name only, and that to voluntarily choose [sic] such a life is not merely a personal sacrifice but a form of societywide [sic] moral self-harm [sic]. [. . .] But is this really what we are doing?’77 There is a curious oscillation in the following passage that tells us something important about the way in which the notion of ‘sacrifice’ has functioned in the whole affair, a notion to which we shall return in the sequel. Berg’s text seems to indicate that what is being done to us in terms of isolation is effectively a voluntary sacrifice and not just something that is legally compelled from us; and yet at the same time, it is an imposition the author wishes to have been more violently and swiftly imposed by force of law on others (at the expense of their free choice to ‘morally self-harm’).78 Consenting to be imposed upon legally is deemed a noble sacrifice in one’s own case, but it is also—and this is much less explicitly avowed but it is implied by the text and the position it here represents—a sacrifice necessarily imposed on others, as if somehow these wretched ants might not voluntarily martyr themselves in the way we have done and we have every right to solicit this sacrifice from them. But is a sacrifice legally imposed truly a sacrifice?79 In any case, in England at least, this is how the notion of sacrifice has functioned: voluntarily assumed by the middle class and the middle aged, but legally imposed (still qua sacrifice) on those others who lack our sense of morality (and here every

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sort of repressed class hatred found an unsublimated outlet). And yet the legal mandation is secretly essential to the apparently voluntary assumption, since it allows responsibility for the obvious harms done by such a sacrifice, and often to others, to be disburdened upon the sovereign law-making power. This gesture of a universally imposed yet (at least in part) voluntarily assumed sacrifice is both revealed and yet artfully concealed by the transformation of pronouns that we have witnessed in this bitter affair. What would once have been a second person imperative, ‘thou shalt’ is replaced by the first person plural imperative, ‘let us’: a docile flock accepting their master’s instructions, and anyone not willing to do so is either forcibly inducted by legal compulsion (secretly named in that imperative) or expelled violently from the herd—from the ‘we’ as such. There is an extraordinary masochism in these remarks, as in so much of what has been ‘embraced’ of late; but with its also being imposed on others, Michel Houellebecq’s description of Leftists as ‘spiteful masochists’ unveils its painful truth: those of us who have, with heavy hearts, embraced the restrictions on our freedoms, are not merely aiming at our own biological survival. We have welcomed the various institutional limitations on our lives (in fact sometimes hoped our governments would introduce these sooner), and we have urged our friends and family (especially our stubborn parents! [moral self-harmers too? Or people who know full well the risks and, even in their supposed indigence, valorise something different to you?]) to do the same, not to ward off ‘the danger of getting sick,’ not for the sake of our bare life, and indeed not for the sake of the bare life of others, but out of an ethical imperative: to exercise the tremendous powers of society [what on earth could these be if not violent and legally enforced repressions?] to protect the vulnerable, be they our loved ones or someone else’s.80

As so often in this affair, we witness here, in unedifying prose, an insidious confusion of the legal and the ethical, and indeed, still more insidiously, the desire to relieve one’s self of ethical choice and responsibility by way of a legislated instruction: one voluntarily chooses sacrifice, but one (or rather ‘the Other’: Society) also (somehow) wields ‘tremendous powers’ to enforce the sacrifice on those who do not choose it. But what does ‘protect the vulnerable’ or the ‘fragile’ mean if not to protect their bare life? What is a ‘vulnerable’ life—literally speaking—if not one that is already wounded and at risk of a second blow that might finish it off? In a remarkable syntagm, Berg writes of ‘[m]y partner’s high-risk father [sic]’: such obscene misuses of language are not incidental to this affair, for they represent an unambiguously biopolitical reduction of the human being to a biological determination. The absolute failure of language that we have

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witnessed over the last three years bears a large measure of responsibility for the way in which our fellow human being has been conceived, often as some kind of vile germ factory to be sanitised (one doesn’t speak of ‘washing’ any more), suffocated, and held at arm’s length.81 This makes it all the more strange that Berg should say that ‘[n]othing could be further from our minds than the maintenance of their “bare life”: we care about these people because they are our kin, our friends, and the members of our community.’82 The question is not why we care for them, or why we obey this supposed ethical imperative, but what we are being enjoined to protect, and it hardly seems possible that their survival is the very last thing on our minds here ( . . . ‘safely’ . . . ‘without endangering his health’ . . . ). How long does the author imagine such a situation can last: ‘if we ever make it back to London [one is tempted to say, given the spite demonstrated by the author at a number of levels, ‘it had to be London . . . ’]. With any luck. . . . ’83 It is telling that the author should so blithely repeat the syntagm ‘with any luck,’ acknowledging the fact that no future has been promised us in the way of a genuine community, as if indeed it would be perfectly possible simply never to see one’s fellow man again. The separation of bare life from communal human life would then be rendered permanent: the possibility at least is envisaged here. One wonders if in truth the reason why one can countenance such a possibility in so unruffled a manner is because the reunion with one’s family is in the end not uppermost in one’s mind. After all, we have our immediate nuclear family around us (that much is quite transparent in this case merely from the fact that such a text was written at all; those who live alone and had all human contact legally withheld from them in the most literal sense possible generally have another ‘perspective’). It is worth at this point noting that this Oedipal family is so often taken as a tacit paradigm of the ‘household,’ very common among the complacent academic, as in this case. For them it is as if isolation really meant a return to the oikos and the warmth of its hearth, before which, in spite of the hurricane its inhabitants imagine to be raging about the rafters and just beyond the threshold, a loving glow was nevertheless waiting to suffuse us, even if such things were outlawed only a few metres away. Not that the nuclear family is itself necessarily idyllic, outside these cloistered academic circles, as the vertiginous and largely ignored rise in domestic violence between 2020 and 2021 attested:84 none of this mattered to them; the sacrifice still had to be imposed though the heavens fall. As to such sacrifices, one may ask the following: what is the signification of the following choice lines of rhapsody? ‘But we are not making sacrifices for the sake of anyone’s mere survival. We sacrifice because sharing our joys and pains, efforts and leisure, with our loved ones—young and old, sick and healthy—is the very substance of these so-called “normal conditions of

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life.”’85 The implicit thrust of this passage seems to be that survival is not valorised in itself but is taken as a precondition for those other more human forms of life that are ultimately the most valuable, and which constitute the final determinants of our action in the present case. But alongside the acknowledgement that this type of life may no longer be possible (if we are out of luck), can the idea that one is doing anything other than valorising survival over this more human life be sustained? One is certainly postponing, perhaps indefinitely, this human life in order to save mere life. It is simply that this particular salvation is said not to be the ultimate goal (and yet it is acknowledged that it might have to be, if the promise of liberation is never made good). If a deferral that lasts forever has been envisaged, thereby opening the vista of a life reduced to an interminable ‘survival,’ then it is unambiguously the case that bare life has been rigorously separated from a properly human life, and given priority over it as its very ontological foundation. Berg continues: ‘“What is a society,” Agamben asks, “that has no value other than survival?” Under certain circumstances, this is a good question; under these circumstances, it is a blind one.’ But what is not clear is what those ‘certain circumstances’ might be in which this question is a good one; if they are not constituted by a global and legally imposed quarantine of the healthy then one wonders what they could possibly be. Berg’s point seems to be simply that the preservation of life, which is indeed and must be the immediate goal of the measures that have adjusted civil life to the conditions of the operating theatre and the panopticon, is not the ulterior goal. Implicit in this gesture is precisely the separation and order of foundation that Agamben’s work addresses: bare life is a substrate that is separate from the qualified human form of life (‘bios’) it grounds. As soon as one accepts that, one is already caught up in the machine that Agamben’s work is devoted to stopping. One cannot have a good life without that life being something other than the bare substrate that even Berg’s readings of the ‘measures’ reduce it to. If Agamben insists that one should never accept or be asked to sacrifice freedom (human life) in order to save freedom, then it is partly because this gesture implies the (temporary or permanent) separation of human life from that which is less than human, or is neither animal nor human, and that is bare life, mere survival. Thus any such gesture which implies a sacrifice of ‘liberties’ of whatever duration in order in the long run to preserve them, partakes of the very machine that makes such a separation, and that is a sovereign machine which thereby allows itself to extend its power so as to encompass that very ‘bare life’ (more strictly, prior to its political capture, ‘zōē’), which would formerly have lain beyond its remit. In other words, both Esposito and Berg accept this temporary sacrifice, and in at least the latter case seem

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willing to accept the risk that it might be permanent. We shall return to this logic in more depth later on. What ultimately tempts philosophers such as Esposito and Berg, in their opposition to Agamben, is a gesture that must remain present if only in the background of the thought of any philosopher who endorses measures so extraordinary as ‘social distancing.’ This gesture is that of assuming that ‘sociality’ and ‘distance,’ community and (hostile, policed) immunity, are not incompatible. This was to be the ‘paradox’ that so mesmerised philosophers. AN IMMUNE COMMUNITY: A PARADOX FOR PHILOSOPHERS An extraordinary number of philosophers have allowed themselves to endorse the police response to the virus on the presumption that this restriction of human community does not go so far as to become what Derrida identifies as a destruction of identity in the passage to its opposite. Either this extreme phase of auto-immunity has not been reached and we remain in a temporary moment during which a community comprised of individuals subjected to a measure of immunity and auto-immunity can be sustained; or these thinkers seem to go so far as to rule out destructive auto-immune excess (excess of immunity or excess of exposure, it comes to the same) even as a possibility, as if human community can endure whatever is done to it; finally, and perhaps as a consequence of the latter, they may even risk accepting what the dominant narrative, particularly the outright medical, sometimes dares to suggest: that this state is in fact to be infinitely prolonged, and that the entire future of human community must take a hostile immune form: contact replaced by distance, visibility by concealment, protection taken to involve a passing on the other side, love to assume the form of spurning the other: a ‘tele-’ life.86 This is to assume that such a thing as ‘social distancing’ is logically possible. Esposito speaks of the opposition between communitas and immunitas, the poles of which even he seems to imagine in this context to be capable of coinciding without either one losing its identity. In other words, he does not insist—as he has elsewhere—upon the necessity of rethinking the latter in a hospitable way according to the telling analogy of the suppressed immune relation that allows a mother to bear a child.87 Among the other philosophers who have allowed themselves to be bewitched by the idea of a communal form of nevertheless hostile immunity, Jean-Luc Nancy and Slavoj Žižek may be taken as representatives: both may be seen to approve early on of this ‘paradoxical’ notion.88 Jean-Luc Nancy seems to be one of the first in a long line to affirm this kind of coincidence of opposites (immunitary isolation and community)

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whilst also considering it to be something like an instance of his own theory of community, even though he can hardly have had a situation like this in mind when it was first mooted. Thinking of the word ‘communovirus,’ which replaces the monarchistic and sovereign ‘corona-virus’ by decapitating it and thus superseding sovereignty in Agamben’s sense, Nancy states, ‘[i]n fact, the virus actually does communise us. It essentially puts us on a basis of equality, bringing us together in the need to make a common stand. That this has to involve the isolation of each of us is simply a paradoxical way of experiencing our community.’89 Žižek, as is his wont, will speak not of community but of ‘solidarity’: ‘not to shake hands and [to] isolate when needed IS [sic] today’s form of solidarity.’90 In a later text, which at least begins in a manner that evinces a more critical stance with respect to State power, Žižek affirms that ‘to maintain a corporeal distance is to show respect to the other since I also may be a virus bearer.’91 The Introduction to the book that binds together Žižek’s texts from the first half of 2020 reiterates this opposition to touch under the heading of ‘noli me tangere’ and in pathetic terms: ‘a deep look into the other’s eyes can disclose more than an intimate touch [. . .]. No coronavirus can take this from us [people under house arrest without a functioning internet may well be forced to disagree, as may those forced into close quarters with another who has a quite different look in their eye]. So there is a hope that corporeal distancing will even strengthen the intensity of our link with others.’92 That said, elsewhere in the book, Žižek does describe the prolongation of this involuntary or voluntary quarantine as ‘a dystopia’ that ‘will not do the job,’ at least not by itself.93 As this is precisely what ended up happening, Žižek’s later book on the topic is rather more clear-sighted and demonstrates a greater concern with the counterproductivity of the measures, including damage to psychological health to the point of psychosis and suicide.94 Not to speak of the costs in terms of broken and damaged relationships. But for the most part, nothing of what Žižek says escapes the fundamental presupposition that action is most basically justified by the pursuit of survival: his proposal of a communistic gesture in response to the epidemic is indeed described as ‘a Communism imposed by the necessities of bare survival.’95 It is in any case a striking trait of philosophers that the best they can do here is to reduce the enforced confinement and isolation of human beings to the logical level of a ‘paradox,’ and indeed not one which is an enemy of thought or irredeemable as a social experiment. The material effects of such isolation, even on those who are dying or demented, seem not to touch the philosopher, this despite the fact that a number of them, including Nancy and those who follow in his wake, have increasingly been struck by the importance of a certain kind of ‘touching’—in light of the supposed primacy of sight in the

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philosophical metaphorology and the exclusive opposition posited to it, from Heidegger onwards, in the form of hearing.96 From the first, these effects struck Giorgio Agamben as abhorrent and barbarous. We have returned to a situation in which the senses of smell and touch have become altogether elided from human ‘contact’—we encounter one another only through ‘screens,’ of many and various kinds, if we encounter one another at all. TRANSVALUATION OF VALUES The paradoxical formulation of the nature of our new political life, as expounded from February 2020 to at least July 2021, was the result of an astonishing reversal in ethical and political values, and this has not gone unnoticed by philosophers, despite everything. Dany Nobus wonders, with some scepticism, whether the virus will lead us to a ‘revaluation of values’ in something homologous to Nietzsche’s sense, though he seems not to characterise the reversal that has already been imposed upon us as a malign version of the same.97 Gabriel Martin cites Hannah Arendt98 on this kind of sudden reversal in the context of twentieth-century totalitarianism: ‘“How easy it was for the totalitarian rulers to reverse the basic commandments of Western morality—‘Thou shalt not kill’ in the case of Hitler’s Germany, ‘Thou shalt not bear false testimony against thy neighbour’ in the case of Stalin’s Russia.” [/] Our ability to undergo a revolution in values nearly overnight only proves that we are good at subscribing to values, it does not prove that we are thinking in the kind of unremitting, insatiable way that is inimical to evil.’99 Arendt herself puts the point very succinctly in the case of Eichmann: ‘He functioned in the role of prominent war criminal as well as he had under the Nazi regime; he had not the slightest difficulty in accepting an entirely different set of rules. He knew that what he had once considered his duty was now called a crime.’100 Not that this necessarily implies that Martin is an advocate of ‘scepticism’ but at the very least he recognises that ‘[t]he political dangers confronting us in the moment are no less serious than that of the virus itself,’ and he goes further in that direction by suggesting that protecting what has been lost politically will be the more challenging task: ‘It is impossible to predict now how many lives may be lost by restricting freedom of movement, how many of the jobs that have been lost will not come back, or what impact months or years of staying out of public spaces could have on society. But knowing how to oppose these dangers is even more difficult than knowing how to confront the pandemic.’

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Let it be said in passing that philosophers feeling impotent in such a twoor three-year-long mistake might take comfort from Arendt’s closing thought in the piece we have been reading: ‘When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action.’101 One is tempted to say, only encouraged by the fact that Agamben is himself accused on occasion of diminishing the supposedly unique significance of the Holocaust by using certain elements of its execution as a paradigm to make intelligible a broader constellation of events, that our new ethical imperative, a paraphrase of Arendt, is to do everything we can to ensure that healthy and innocent people are never placed under house arrest again, for any reason, let alone to shore up an underdeveloped health service. This should never have happened, and at the very least, thought must work so as to ensure that it never happens again. Matthew Ratcliffe and Iain Kidd have written in phenomenological terms of the experience and effects of the very suddenness that characterised the inversion in values State power asked its citizens to embrace in 2020, and the way in which this helped to create a certain stunned acceptance of the ‘covidworld’ in which one had to make one’s way from that point on, and of which one had to attempt to make sense.102 In March 2020, the master signifier governing our symbolic order was suddenly deposed and replaced by a single almighty Virus. The authors deploy this bewildering abruptness to explain why other diseases and health risks were altogether eclipsed, overnight, and thus became unavailable for the type of statistical comparison that we urged in a preceding chapter. The entirety of the mediatic apparatus and all public discourse were quilted around the strange capitalised letters and digits of ‘COVID-19.’ We are now obliged to uncover something of the more fundamental mechanisms by which this reversal became possible and thus in turn to render the ‘paradox’ of immunised community intelligible to thought. We shall begin by examining the work of a number of philosophers who were not so convinced of the possibility of the official fantasy as Nancy and Žižek appeared to be.

Chapter 5

Exposure and the Question of Sacrifice

We have demonstrated that the police response to the virus may be construed more philosophically as a hostile interpretation of immunity. Philosophers in turn, with their apparent dialectical cunning, have allowed themselves to entertain the paradox that this type of immunity was not incompatible with a certain community. But not everyone allowed themselves to be so mesmerised by the paradox that they came to accept the idea that community could take the form of a near uniform hostility to one’s fellow man. This was largely the result of their deeper insight into the nature of both immunity and community, which calls into question their compatibility. We shall see that Agamben’s thought is the crowning example of this type of gesture. Thus the present chapter may be understood to devote itself to pointing the way beyond the philosopher’s paradox and towards a properly philosophical critique of the non-pharmaceutical measures taken. SLOTERDIJK’S CO-IMMUNISM One philosopher who did not immediately and without question accept the orthodox position on hostile immunity is Peter Sloterdijk. This may partly be explained by the fact that his own philosophy had been promoting a very different conception of immunity for many years, of a type that might warrant the scientific name of herd immunity: Immunity, however, is not limited to an individual organism—and this is exactly what one has to learn with all its radical consequences. The security of groups depends on the faculty of its members to provide each other with the advantages of individual and collective immunity combined. So what we call ‘herd immunity’—a term occurring quite often these days—is a form of deep mutualism that means a state of protection that can only be reached collectively. That is why 111

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I have coined the term co-immunism. It is part of a moral-political reflection leading to a new definition of togetherness.1

And yet at times Sloterdijk risks falling back into the assumption that no-one has or might acquire immunity in this particular case naturally and without the assistance of the pharmaceutical remedy-to-come, the inventors of which he expresses some admiration for: The coronavirus pandemic is an emergency strongly hinting that the co-immunism imperative has arrived. In this crisis, one can already see that there is no real private property of immunity advantages [sic; presumably signifying that immunity is not an individually owned affair]. The virus ignores national borders, fences and walls. Now, the moment has come to share the means of protection even with the most distant members of the family of man/woman. There is something sublime in the worldwide colloquium that has been going on among physicians sharing their best ideas to confront the new menace.2

He goes on: ‘Global immunitary reason would create such a response; it is a step higher than the philosophical idealism or religious monotheism of the past. In this sense, what I call “general immunology” is the organic successor of metaphysics and of religion. All previous divisions between one’s own and the other, between humans and nature, collapse.’3 In light of that collapse it is perhaps curious to demonstrate such appreciation for the human race and its inventiveness, and even more so to depreciate the human being’s natural capacity to immunise itself, in favour of its artificial capacity to generate immunising remedies. But it is perhaps because he begins from such a position that his critical attitude towards the lockdown measures was gradually ameliorated. Nevertheless, his work constitutes the first tentative step beyond the paradox of the immune community since it embraces ‘co-immunism’ only in the form of a hospitable immunity. The next step will be to demonstrate a genuine incompatibility between community and immunity, even of the hospitable kind. To approach this point, let us note that one of the features of the hostile immunising response that strikes those who have been troubled by it is that the war on the virus allowed anything that in any way resembled the latter to be caught in the crossfire. In the cases of Oxana Timofeeva, Byung-Chul Han, and Catherine Malabou, at least in her later interventions, a crucial—and insidious—facet of the enforcement of lockdowns is revealed to us: the virus shares many traits with those who have suffered the most in Western countries, if not everywhere—the young, the healthy, and the mobile: those who, in other words, ‘mix.’ Their community has been morally condemned and legally prohibited, as if it promised only a malign contagion.

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At the same time, as we shall see, in fighting the virus’s ‘evil’ and all that resembles it, we have become a little evil ourselves, a little ‘viroid.’ By exploring these other responses to what has happened to community in recent days, we shall witness the dawning awareness—in little pockets here and there—of the fact that the hostile immunising response was always destined to be counterproductive, and indeed to reduce humanity to the level of that which it was said to bear. MALABOU AND ISOLATION Catherine Malabou proposes her own way to conceive of the enforced quarantine, and indeed what might be read as a certain liberation from its enforced character. She does so in such a way as to allow us to inch ever so slightly further away from the notion that community and immunity may overlap. Her strategy involves distancing herself and her own isolation from the collective of those in quarantine as a result of the virus (or rather the command to quarantine one’s self). She considers this particular form of isolation as bracketing the social in such a way as to allow us to examine it, in phenomenological fashion, and at the same time it opens up a relation to those who stand beyond this collective and one’s own immediate circle of friends— those who might compose a cosmopolitan social order and a different form of solidarity.4 Malabou insists upon the notion that distancing one’s self from others amounts to a kind of solidarity (and thus far she might remain close to the position of Žižek and Nancy), but not—it seems—with those who might be near us, those whom we are told are always susceptible to infection on our part (and who, it is also implied, secretly, pose a reciprocal threat to us). Rather, isolation from them and their hostility, along with the hostility we are instructed to display towards them, places us in another kind of contact with those who would for some other reason be ‘isolated’ and whom we do not yet know. Hence already we have a decision to conceive of isolation in a nonbiological, non-epidemiological manner, and as endorsed for reasons other than the ones the law gave itself so as to authorise the enforcement of this quarantine. In a later text, Malabou develops this distance from the biological into a certain active desire for (biological, and other forms of) contamination, in part from the perspective of Georges Bataille and his alignment of community and contagion, to which we shall soon return.5 Malabou situates her own thought here in the wake of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and draws inspiration from his description of a sojourn in quarantine in Genoa in 1743 during a certain plague at Messina in which he was faced with the choice of, on the one hand, remaining on board his ship so as to experience the quarantine with his fellow passengers, and, on the other

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hand, rambling around alone in a hospital reserved for those afflicted with other contagious diseases (a ‘lazaretto’: named after Lazarus, the biblical beggar, presumed to be leprous, whose name gave us ‘lazar,’ an archaic word for ‘leper’). Malabou speaks of the inclination she shared with Rousseau ‘to isolate [herself] from collective isolation,’ and thus install a kind of quarantine with respect to the collective quarantine—to be isolated, but in a different way, apart from the crowd who were immunising themselves in a certain way, and yet in communion with other isolated individuals: ‘solitude is, in reality, what makes confinement bearable.’ This particular kind of isolation made a certain communication or ‘community’ possible: it ‘at the same time was the condition for my exchanges with others.’6 Malabou concludes by affirming that this kind of ‘bracketing’ in the phenomenological sense puts us in touch with the very essence of the social, an essence the active participation in mass gatherings and physical proximity may have obscured: ‘Personally, at the moment, I am on the contrary trying to be an “individual.” This, once again, is not out of any individualism but because I think on the contrary that an epochè, a suspension, a bracketing of sociality, is sometimes the only access to alterity, a way to feel close to all the isolated people on Earth. Such is the reason why I am trying to be as solitary as possible in my loneliness.’7 Despite the well-meaning character of this gesture, there is little in the way of the revolutionary about it, and one can only imagine what she would do were she in one of the innumerable domestic relationships that are ‘abusive’ (about which she has elsewhere demonstrated concern) or with a dysfunctional family, without a garden in which to experience the sun and the rain, and all those aspects of the academic’s privileged life that make such experiences more or less bearable: these seem not to enter the picture. And yet nevertheless we have a new sense of isolation here, one which does not altogether accord with the intentions of the sovereign law that imposes another kind of solitude upon us. Already we see opening up here the distant possibility of what Malabou will later embrace, which involves a more overt resistance to this prohibition, one that embraces contagion itself as an essential part of human community. CARE FOR YOUTH AND THE INVISIBLY CONTAGIOUS And yet even if we adopt Malabou’s early stance, might we not try to specify more precisely with whom we are called to identify in our isolation? We need only consider the affair from the standpoint of those who suffer the most from the measures taken, the ones upon whom the legal burden of sacrifice has been laid most heavily and intolerably: the young and the most alive.

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Sinéad Murphy’s prescient text ‘Stay Safe: The Abuse and Neglect of Care’8 is pre-eminent among her many contributions that have shed a stark light upon the immense harm done to the young in particular and the State’s barbaric indifference to it.9 She identifies, in terms closely related to Ivan Illich’s, an exchange of ‘care’ for ‘safety,’ the professional and institutional guarding against all kinds of (calculable) risk and the pre-emptive control of ‘hazards.’ What is at stake here is the way in which (nonprofessional, non‘certified’) care has been ruled out by the measures taken against the virus. It is as if, for a ‘control society,’ care as such, in the unquantifiable way in which it diffuses itself amongst the mass of humanity, were the most insidious of viruses. This is one reason why the literal virus could be fastened upon so as to instil measures that have not been seen before to this extent and for this duration: the virus itself shares its most salient characteristics with the very elements of human behaviour that the current regime has decided it is desirable to control or eradicate: everything that freely moves between points and is impossible to identify as a stable entity, particularly the young and the unattached, the multiple, the crowds. All of these share certain characteristics with the virus itself: by presenting the strategy of controlling these masses as exclusively geared towards controlling the virus they so uncannily resemble, and whose most spontaneous behaviour the virus is said to thrive upon, those in power succeeded in generating the grateful receipt of measures that repressively controlled this behaviour. Often, we tend to think that this was a poor choice of virus around which to build a pandemic, given how innocuous it clearly was from the beginning for such a huge proportion of the population, particularly those charged with radically modifying their most spontaneous activity so as to contain it; but its particular infectiousness—or at least the image presented of it—proved useful rather more because of the analogies it bore to those things upon which the powerful found it beneficial to clamp down: its supposed asymptomaticity allowed every living and moving thing to be designated as a ‘threat,’ a ‘potential spreader’—a terrorist, in fact, witting or unwitting. WE, VIRUS Oxana Timofeeva has broached the possibility that, in quarantine, we should identify not with our (pure, isolated, immunised) human others, as Malabou suggests, but with those infectious others, both human and nonhuman, that we are commanded to shun.10 If philosophers are to find a way in which to shrug off the dehumanising allergy they have displayed towards the young, the mobile, and the promiscuous, quite contrary to their professed allegiance in many cases, then this is just the kind of gesture that may spur them along.

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If humans as a whole, and not just the youthful ones, have for a long time, and perhaps since the very discovery of the bacillus and the virus, been associated with such a mindless—acephalic—expansion, colonisation, and destruction, why should we now reject this comparison and set up walls against one of our closest relatives? For Timofeeva, real solidarity and true community involve siding with those on the other side of the fence [. . .]. Not with the healthy ones, not with the survivors, but with those whom the responsible humanity found it necessary to leave out, having calculated its own and others’ chances of survival; with those who did not get a ventilator, who were not admitted to the hospitals without insurance, who were beaten for coughing on the bus; with pangolins and bats. [/] Solidarity requires an intensive work of imagination—you ought to put yourself in the place of the one who is excluded in the fear of infection. To defeat a virus, you must become one.11

It is as if, rather than ‘dehumanising’ the other, one must first dehumanise one’s self, not in order to confine one’s self by acting ‘as if we have got it’ but to enter into a fusional community with those infectious others and precisely to refuse to isolate them.12 Thus, by antithesis, Timofeeva shows us what a true community looks like, in contrast to the false immune community that was imposed upon us for so long. In general, the logic we may read into a text such as this is that ‘solidarity’ can easily bleed over into a certain coercion, which inveigles others into the confines of a totality, and at the borders of this whole permits a violence that either includes by force or excludes by casting outsiders into the wilderness—without discriminating among the reasons why one might not wish to belong to this consensus (Žižek being a paradigm example of the inability truly to distinguish here). If the Left are more naturally inclined towards such a formation of totality, whether is constitutes an equality of sameness (class politics) or an equality of differences (identity politics), this goes some way towards explaining their historical complicity with totalitarianism and violence, and—in the current situation—a dogmatic form of uniformly urged obedience. In the first of several later texts, Timofeeva reads the incidence of the virus in the perspective of Georges Bataille’s notion of the ‘general economy’ (or ‘solar economy’ in which the (Platonic) sun’s energy is understood to be for the most part wasted in its light, heat, and intelligibility, with only a miniscule proportion turned to some utilitarian end and employed for illumination, growth, and understanding) as opposed to the ‘restricted economy’ in terms of which slavish human beings consider the world, involving as it does exchange, return, and revenge. The preponderant response to the epidemic

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has conceived the virus in so many respects in the context of a restricted human economy (nature’s revenge on its exploiter, man, his comeuppance, the price of hubris), and not from the perspective of nature itself in the sense of a general economy: ‘It is no wonder that governments react by introducing more and more restrictive measures: closing borders, closing cities, etc., which is ridiculous because the virus travels freely and easily across the borders of national states. But the rulers only know the language of restrictive economies with which they are trying to talk to the virus: no, you cannot enter, my country is closed!’13 Demonstrating the theoretical foundations for her earlier, spontaneous inclination to become an animal or a virus, Timofeeva concludes: ‘the question should not be how to make nature speak the human language, but how to make ourselves speak its language; not to picture, say, nature as a revolutionary that sends a deadly virus to illegally migrate and cross the brittle frontiers of our national states, but how to make revolutionary violence virus-like, solar and sovereign.’14 How, in other words, to dislodge our thinking from the point of view of the closed finite totality (‘restricted economy’) and to conceive of our ‘community’ from the standpoint of a general economy of nature. In another essay, concerning the nature of philosophical and pedagogical life within an institution, Timofeeva affirms that it is not only nature that may be understood in Bataillean fashion as a flow of energy, but culture as well. In its ideal form, human culture should be modelled upon the solar economy of nature: That’s how I see an ideal institution: really far from sterility. Not only philosophy, but culture in general is corruption, or, as Hegel says about the Enlightenment in the Phenomenology of Spirit, contagion. The process of learning and teaching demands full bodily presence. An institution in a proper sense is this: an organisation of full collective bodily presence, with its internal modes of retaining dignity. We have to breathe the same air and share the same space, otherwise, believe me or not, the space will collapse. When your ‘zoom’ is over, and you realise that there is nobody around, you can see how it collapses already; for the space to exist, more than one body is needed. [/] [. . .] The pandemic outbreak reveals that externally imposed self-isolation is in principle anti-institutional: trying to preserve the bodies from contagion, it blocks their contacts, the necessary moment of corruption and life that is needed for the very space to exist.15

In short, true institutional life cannot but involve a certain contagion, the circulation of the young amongst the old (their teachers) and their intermingling with one another. Communal life must be viral.16 If we are ourselves viruses and the State decides upon a strategy of elimination, then our fate is already sealed. The State treats its enemies as it treats those mythical ‘covid ticks’ authorities claimed to find in the Field of Mars

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in St. Petersburg. If we are reduced to bare life by the excepting of the sovereign, what is left to distinguish us from viruses? This happens, for instance, in concentration camps, when prisoners are deprived of everything human, but also, as he [Agamben] suggests, during a pandemic, when we show our readiness to change everything human—like our traditional rituals of love, care, friendship, etc.—for mere survival. People do not bury their dead because they are afraid [they will] get infected: this is already, according to Agamben, a nonhuman, bare life.17

Thus it is the reduction to bare life that likens us to ticks and viruses: ‘a tick is a bare life, a virus is a bare life, and we, too, coming to the voting station in protective masks, potentially spreading infection, taken by the police, tortured, humiliated, maybe even eradicated like ticks, are anonymous bare life in front of a sovereign with an open, clean-shaved face [Vladimir Putin turning up to a vote].’18 Byung-Chul Han notes that it is not only the young that resemble the virus, but the collaborating citizens of a society already succumbed to the imperative to preserve bare life at all costs: ‘A society that is gripped by the mania for survival is a society of the undead. We are too alive to die, and too dead to live. Our overriding concern with survival we have in common with the virus, this undead being which only proliferates, that is, survives without actually living.’19 What is lost thereby is a type of life Agamben has long identified in Aristotle as having been contrasted with the common fact of merely being alive: ‘The fight for survival must be juxtaposed with an interest in the good life.’20 And this eu zēn is inseparable from the communal life of the polis. We are thus urged by both Timofeeva and Han to consider a community that remains at least up to a point indifferent to ‘immunity’ and that holds contagion of a certain kind to be essential to a properly human life. In this vein, Timofeeva takes certain plague-spreaders, in this case, rats, not just as emblems of our captivity and reduction to the level of an infectious swarm, but as representatives of the possibility for escape: they are literal and metaphorical symbols of the necessity for tunnels that plot a way out of the disciplinary society of quarantine, and the anaesthetised, sanitised, and therefore delibidinised world of collective obsessional neurosis that is exemplified by Freud’s ‘Rat Man’ and reflected in the rituals that we have today been instructed to impose on ourselves.21

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THE QUESTION OF SACRIFICE In more mundane terms this urging of the necessity of exposure in the name of a properly human community went by the ultimately besmirched title of ‘herd immunity.’ This was taken by its opponents to be a ‘strategy’ in response to the epidemic and involved a ‘sacrifice’ that was deemed intolerable. One of the more conciliatory answers to the question of whether we are not simply exposing others or being exposed to contagion in an excessive way by advocating such a community would be to say that, in fact, such a community need not be incompatible with immunity when the latter is given a different sense—the one that Esposito recognised all along but then became wary of at just the moment in which it might have saved us: no longer the separation of isolation, but an immunity acquired by way of exposure, a (perhaps) regulated openness as opposed to an absolute closure. This is one aspect of what has gone by the name of ‘natural immunity’ or ‘naturally acquired immunity.’22 Such immunity renders the threshold for herd immunity more readily attainable and also allows it to incur less of the ‘sacrificial’ than it is often taken to involve; it also helps to relieve large parts of the population of the supposed necessity to flee exposure. But this alternative approach, along with any other, became almost immediately swallowed up in an opposition that was defined in terms of ‘control.’ ‘Herd immunity’ itself became one of the most vilified terms of the early debate for it was said that if we do not ‘control’ the virus then we simply lose control of it, and that would be effectively to sacrifice the vital in the name of the immunity of the flock or the group, a gesture that came to have its moral character almost irrecoverably blackened (as a certain ‘letting die’). That was until the advent of the vaccines, which immunised in a way that was said to avoid exposure to danger (whilst in fact introducing a number of new and still incalculable dangers of their own), while opening a path at the end of which the law of large numbers could be used to ensure that the greater part of an entire population could be subjected to the surveillance allowed by digital certificates of immunity. One would finally have no further hiding place; what and who one is would be readily available on demand, for any ersatz or real police-force that wished to see it. The one kind of control (that of the virus) immediately allows the other to take root (the control of the population). It was said that herd immunity could not provide the former kind of control. But to even stage the debate in such terms allows one to imagine that its failure to provide the latter may also have been a significant factor in deciding its fate. And yet the opposition is a false one: to describe the refusal of (global) State action to control the virus and the population as a ‘loss of control’ is to elide another conception of ‘care’ and

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the pursuit of health, which we associate with the name of Ivan Illich and to which we shall return. But what sense can the accusation of ‘doing nothing’ make here? At what point if any does such an affair become ‘our responsibility’? In the present case, the definitive point that should, as a matter of strategy, be deployed again and again when confronted with one’s opponents, is simply this: the only plausible reason for confining people to their homes as a palliative strategy, if we assume that this was done in good faith, is to prevent hospitals from filling up: 1) in England, at least, this occurs nearly every winter; so what made this occasion any different? 2) were they full in any exceptional way? In truth it seems that they were not full at all.23 And one should advert to the example of the so-called ‘Nightingale’ Hospitals, erected to much fanfare, but dismantled almost immediately to none. All of this demonstrates that such an antidemocratic gesture as house-arrest or quarantine of the healthy was not obviously justified on medical grounds; but beyond that, what ought we to do? Nothing?—But this nothing is itself remarkably variegated in its consistency. There is nothing obviously false in the assertion that this ‘nothing’ could involve just paying such contributions as are commensurate to fund a professional health service and simply leaving it to the doctors to treat whatever they are able to. But this is not the only option, and here we are approaching a cleft in the notion of the ‘pharmaceutical,’ or one of those potential multiplicities that have been subjected to an extraordinarily fierce narrowing down over the last two years and more. We cannot do justice to such a topic here, but we are compelled at this moment to broach some of the ways in which an alternative to professional health care, to pharmaceutics, might be indicated. There is in any case no sense in which we should take at face value such tendentious syntagms as ‘doing nothing’ and ‘losing control.’ We are still pondering the question of the naturally acquired immunity that comes with exposure, and the possibility of reaching a threshold of herd immunity: why have we been told that it is better to deprive the immune system of the experience that it needs in order to learn how to defend itself against viral incidence? And even further, why should that control take place at the level of national legislation and a pharmaceutical industry that is intimately involved with the State, rather than at the level of some other form of ‘care’ that would be administered without the framework of the institutions of medicine?—Far worse: why has the latter been literally outlawed and infinitely demeaned? To what end?

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THE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE INSTITUTIONS OF HEALTHCARE: IVAN ILLICH It was among the many merits of Ivan Illich’s work to have pointed out the history behind this elision, and thereby to have opened up the possibility of making that distinction once again. So absolutely crushed have these alternative conceptions of ‘health’ been that their advocacy now seems to be enough to result in social ostracisation and even physical danger. The thrust of Illich’s thought was to undermine the assumption that global and institutional approaches to health were the only possible form ‘care’ could assume. The ‘counterproductivity’24 of the instituted form of professional medical care was Illich’s concern in Limits to Medicine, which demonstrates, quite contrary to the prevailing view, that the advances in medicine have not necessarily resulted in what they claim to have. Illich will assist us in at least two of the deconstructions that we have urged—demonstrating that what we have termed totalities or unities are in truth multiplicities or are at least possessed of an alternative. In the professional sphere that is his concern, Illich deems these totalities ‘monopolies.’ The monopolies that we have in mind are the non-pharmaceutical, and its correlative pharmaceutical intervention. It has been made extremely clear to us over the last three years that the remedies for illness can in no case derive from ordinary civilians, their habits, skills, and judgements, but must rather be imposed universally by the institutions of the State, supranational bodies, and the profession of medicine. No alternative is logically or morally respectable. Illich begins by giving the lie to the notion that any improvements in our health that might be posited to have taken place over the last century are the result of institutional medicine; if anything, the latter are responsible for an insidious decline: there is in fact no evidence of any direct relationship between this mutation of sickness [the eradication of certain diseases over the past century] and the so-called progress of medicine. The changes are dependent variables of political and technological transformations [. . .]. In addition, an expanding proportion of the new burden of disease of the last fifteen years [1960–1975] is itself the result of medical intervention in favour of people who are or might become sick. It is doctor-made, or iatrogenic.25

In particular, the merits of inoculation in this regard are shown to be doubtful: ‘nearly 90 percent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread

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immunisation. [. . .] [B]y far the most important factor was a higher hostresistance due to better nutrition.’26 That this fact has been obscured is the result of a ‘monopoly’ created, on Illich’s account, by university-trained elites, which has the counterproductive effect of depriving ordinary people of the skills necessary to cope with their own biological life and its vicissitudes. Under the specific heading of ‘cultural iatrogenesis,’ Illich identifies the way in which ‘health professions [. . .] destroy the potential of people to deal with their human weakness, vulnerability, and uniqueness in a personal and autonomous way [. . .] [,] the paralysis of healthy responses to suffering, impairment, and death.’27 The effect of the encroachment of the universities and the educational establishment in general is to conflate the notion of being ‘skilled’ with that of being ‘qualified’ or ‘certified,’ a certification only one type of ‘training’ can provide. Under the heading of ‘social iatrogenesis,’ Illich speaks of the way in which ‘health care is turned into a standardised item, a staple; [. . .] all suffering is “hospitalised” and homes become inhospitable to birth, sickness, and death; [. . .] the language in which people could experience their bodies is turned into bureaucratic gobbledegook; [. . .] suffering, mourning, and healing outside the patient role are labelled a form of deviance.’28 Any form of medication or care beyond that ratified by the institution becomes virtually or actually criminalised: ‘Radical monopolies’ of hospitals and the type of therapy they provide, are responsible for ‘reshaping the milieu and [. . .] “appropriating” those of its general characteristics which have enabled people so far to cope on their own. [. . .] The malignant spread of medicine has comparable results: it turns mutual care and self-medication into misdemeanours or felonies.’29 Illich clearly aligns the monopoly that professional medicine achieves with its assumption of a certain sovereignty with respect to society: ‘A radical monopoly feeds on itself. Iatrogenic medicine reinforces a morbid society in which social control of the population by the medical system turns into a principal economic activity.’30 And this not least as a result of the fact that all citizens have become (potential or actual) patients: ‘Society has become a clinic, and all citizens have become patients whose blood pressure is constantly being watched and regulated to fall “within” normal limits.’31 We thus witness the production of a biopolitical discourse avant la lettre. Illich’s solution is to reverse this trend towards ‘professionalisation.’ As he puts it, the counterproductive side-effects of the health profession ‘can be reversed only through a recovery of the will to self-care among the laity, and through the legal, political, and institutional recognition of the right to care, which imposes limits upon the professional monopoly of physicians.’32

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GADAMER: THE SELF-UNDERSTANDING OF THE PATIENT IN THE PROCESS OF MEDICAL CARE Although he is not as suspicious as he might be of pharmaceuticals or the institutions of health, one of the great merits of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work on health is his insistence that it ‘cannot be treated solely from the perspective of science.’33 In this respect and a number of others, he allows us to bolster the position suggested by Illich, and to nuance the alternative to the pharmaceutical that he proposes. Throughout his writings on health and elsewhere, Gadamer insists on the fact that the nature of the human being must be described not just from the perspective of the natural sciences but also and above all from that of the human sciences: ‘the application of [natural] scientific understanding to areas where what is called today the self-understanding of man is at stake not only often leads to conflict but also necessarily invokes extra-scientific considerations which defend a right of their own.’34 We are creatures whose lives are always subjected to interpretation, by ourselves and others.35 Interpretation is the activity pursued by the science (or the art) of hermeneutics, the characteristic method of the human sciences: ‘The concern with things which are not understood, the attempt to grasp the unpredictable character of the spiritual and mental life of human beings, is the task of the art of understanding which we call hermeneutics.’36 Crucially, ‘understanding’ or ‘Verstehen’ is an activity that cannot be exhausted by the mechanical process of mere ‘calculation’: ‘Understanding plays a role wherever rules cannot simply be applied, and this includes the entire sphere of human life.’37 Gadamer’s name for the act in which this understanding is deployed is ‘phronēsis’ or ‘judgement,’ the skilful consideration of the singularity of a particular moment or entity. In the diagnosis of illness and the recommendation of remedies, such judgement is crucial. One of the reasons why this is the case, and why the act of interpretation is so central to a consideration of health, is that illness is a subjective experience in which a bodily dysfunction leads some aspect of our own body to become an ‘object’ to us; by contrast, in a beautiful passage, Gadamer describes health as a kind of oblivion with respect to our own body, which is effectively entirely subjectivised, its objectality forgotten: ‘Health is not something that is revealed through investigation but rather something that manifests itself precisely by virtue of escaping our attention. [. . .] [I]t belongs to that miraculous capacity we have to forget ourselves.’38 As a consequence of this, the purpose of medicine, unlike every other art, is not to produce something artificial, but rather it ‘has as its task the restoration of something natural.’39 Despite this objectivisation of the body in illness, the art of medicine does

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not remain at the level of objectivity. Medical science, and the art that corresponds to it, the art of healing, involves an application of knowledge to a human being already involved in interpretive activity with respect to itself, and as a result, [i]t is clearly a misrepresentation of the phenomenon to look at the concept of illness solely through the eyes of the doctor and from the standpoint of scientific medicine, and to think that medical knowledge is the same thing as the patient’s own self-understanding. As a phenomenon of lived experience, insight into one’s own illness is clearly not simply insight in the sense of knowledge of a true state of affairs.40

The doctor needs to enter into a dialogue with the patient understood not as an inanimate object (a Körper) but as a living human being, with their own lived experience of themselves (a Leib, a living and lived body): ‘the paradox remains that the doctor still has to ask the patient in what way he or she feels unwell.’41 The doctor’s own judgement is an interpretation of both the objective body and the patient’s subjective understanding of what ails that body. The principal tool of any attempt to apply or to consider applying general medico-scientific knowledge is thus the art of hermeneutical judgement: ‘It is the task of the power of judgement [. . .] to recognise in a given situation the applicability of a general rule. This task exists wherever knowledge in general is to be applied,’42 and ‘[o]nce science has provided doctors with the general laws, causal mechanisms and principles, they must still discover what is the right thing to do in each particular case,’ the details of which are reported to them by the patient on the basis of a subjective experience and interpretation of their own body.43 Diagnosis, in its attempt to determine whether the patient’s particular symptoms may be subsumed under the general definition of a certain illness, is a prime example of the art of judgement.44 At the very least we can infer from this that medical practice (not to speak of non-pharmaceutical interventions) should not lose sight of the necessity to remain sensitive to the singular nature and self-interpretation of the human beings within its care. As Illich points out, it is just this loss that takes place when medicine is professionalised, and other more personalised forms of care are relegated to the background. The art of judgement is manifestly abandoned when a single form of intervention is applied globally and without discrimination; indeed it is a necessary condition for the elision of that brand of ‘care’ Ivan Illich was attempting to revive.

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THE NON-PHARMACEUTICAL FORM OF MEDICINE But even if the monopoly of professional healthcare were accepted, there is no need to accept the absolute sway within it of what Robert F. Kennedy describes as the ‘pharmaceutical paradigm.’ This is the moment at which state healthcare enters into a fatal embrace with large pharmaceutical companies, and the profit motive suffuses the realm of healthcare. We have witnessed a truly fanatical campaign to dismiss any other remedy to the virus than the promised vaccines, which arrived so quickly as to require an ‘emergency use authorisation’ that bypassed the usual process of trialling. As with so much of what we have seen in the present work, quite apart from the reasons for these exclusionary gestures on the part of those in power, from the standpoint of the consumers of healthcare it has turned out that no-one really took seriously the respect they were told to show for what has come to be known, by contrast with the pharmaceutical paradigm, as ‘complementary’ or (most explicitly) ‘alternative’ medicine. But this category has become remarkably capacious in recent days, when any other potential remedy for the disease besides the vaccine was immediately subsumed beneath this umbrella and dismissed as quackery. The most extraordinary campaign waged against the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquin, to pick a prominent example, demonstrates by its very violence what must be at stake. All forms of early treatment, which could often be administered at home (to the ‘ambulatory’ patient, as American English puts it), without hospitalisation, were violently smeared, and doctors subjected to remarkable measures to prevent their administering such potions, before the remedies themselves were largely withheld.45 We witness here the most extreme elision of alternatives, at the level of the pharmaceutical itself. This exclusion has been the most violent, with any potential amelioration of suffering and death beyond the measures sanctioned by the State ruled abhorrent, and anything besides the celebration and welcoming of the vaccine taken to be a matter for the most aggressive excommunication that the present author has ever witnessed. This took its most delirious and repugnant form in the degrading and dehumanising epithetic, ‘Unvaccinated’ (not to speak of ‘Anti-vax,’ a word whose generalising subsumption of any number of differently motivated resistances—to a number of different things, and more particularly in a way that elides the significant difference between the novel mRNA technology and all previous vaccines— literally evacuates it of sense, whilst at the same time implying that its invocation is part of a rhetorical strategy). There have been all too many lepers and Jews created over the last three years. This group was, however, the most despised, if only as a consequence of the fact that, prior to the arrival of the

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Messiah, the Cure, everyone was told that they were potentially but unfreely a danger to public health; by refusing the one sole cure, the ‘hesitant’ voluntarily rendered themselves a biohazard. THE UNITY OF ‘HERD IMMUNITY’ In the way that the calculations predicting the course of the epidemic were made, media and government seemed intent on suggesting that the population was pervaded by an absolute and universal vulnerability, impossible to diminish by any alternative strategies. For their own strategy to make a modicum of sense, a total absence of pre-existing immunity and any sort of protective strategy or coping mechanism beyond lockdowns and vaccines needed to be posited. Once the total control of police measures had been decided upon, it was as if the elision of any other possibility—any differentiality or multiplicity within the social body—were necessary in order to ensure compliance on the part of those not at risk. We have only seen this gesture of totalisation redoubled in its vigour with the availability of inoculations, utterly bizarrely and wholly irresponsibly (if we may temporarily deploy a moral jargon, so as to turn it against those who would preach to us) offered to the very youngest of children, who have nothing to do with any of this, either in terms of dissemination or susceptibility.46 The rhetoric of war and the necessity for unanimity demand that any traitorous desertion to the opposite side, even its very countenancing in the form of rational discussion, be deemed entirely unthinkable and morally unacceptable. The alternative strategies grouped under the deceptive heading of ‘herd immunity,’ even in that more cautious form did not advocate an undifferentiated exposure but described its position in terms of ‘focussed protection,’47 adopted in light of the astonishing discrepancies in the relative vulnerabilities of different demographics, had to be eradicated from respectable debate altogether. On the most charitable interpretation, this decision was taken so as to ensure compliance with the much more unheard-of police response, almost impossible to justify if a less repressive alternative were considered admissible, just as a certain type of pharmaceutical remedy could not be authorised so as to bypass the usual safety procedures if any other remedy of any efficacy were available.48 The excommunication of those seen to be promoting anything other than violent repressive action on the part of the state was facilitated by subsuming all of these possible alternatives, to both the non-pharmaceutical and its complementary pharmaceutical remedy, under the single heading of a ‘herd immunity’ ‘strategy.’ Thus any number of distinctions and possible

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approaches within a community that would not be micropolitically and biopolitically controlled by State law were elided, and the obviousness of the police response as the only possible one made all the more glaring. That ‘herd immunity’ is not a strategy but simply a natural fact, an epidemiological threshold that a population reaches or does not reach, was brought home to us when, in one of the breathtaking reversals that we have witnessed over the past three years, an analogous logic was resuscitated for the sake of a campaign that urged vaccination on less and less vulnerable sections of the population, so—it was said—to ensure a sufficiently high level of immunity (and still more implausibly, and in fact quite falsely as has since been quietly admitted, a diminished capacity to ‘transmit’ the virus49) across a population. Thus herd immunity was revived in its proper sense as an epidemiological threshold beyond which the virus struggles to disseminate itself beyond its current pool (the infamous ‘R number’). What seems to matter is that in this case it had to be put abroad that this level of herd immunity among the population could be achieved only synthetically. Any other way of acquiring immunity beyond the artificial was ruled inadmissible. Any solution beyond the pharmaceutical and indeed beyond one small subset of the pharmaceutical was elided. And such would have been necessary in order to garner sufficient support for the twofold strategy of non-pharmaceutical State intervention and its essential complement, the promised pharmaceutical remedy, the injection that would restore normality to the course of communal life, bringing to an end the state of exception. HERD IMMUNITY AND THE QUESTION OF SACRIFICE Let us now consider how the question of ‘herd immunity’ has functioned in the work of the philosophers. This will allow us to find our way into Agamben’s work insofar as it epitomises those approaches to the epidemic that refuse a hostile and belligerent attitude to the virus and its bearers and that have been aligned with just such a ‘strategy.’ We have already seen that the hegemonic view among both philosophers and non-philosophers is that any strategy that does not control and confine human beings and viruses amounts to a loss of control that will lead to the ‘sacrifice’ of other lives. What is not acknowledged by these accounts is precisely the fact that the police remedy they advocate may also be conceived as a type of sacrifice. And what we shall see is that Agamben’s approach may be said to attempt to move beyond the very notion of ‘sacrifice’ altogether. It is to Slavoj Žižek’s credit that he has drawn attention to the fact that a sacrifice is involved not just in the so-called herd immunity strategy but in lockdowns themselves, even if we shall later find it necessary to suggest that

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he underestimates the sacrifice involved in the latter by focussing more or less exclusively on the working class. One of the main strategies by which the alternative, herd immunity approach to the incursion of the virus has been marginalised, at least among leftist intellectuals, has been simply to align it with neoliberal capitalism (another ‘enemy’). This amounts to the accusation that the approach allows the same liberty to the virus as the politico-economic doctrine allows to the market. Such a strategy is thus aligned with the political Right, in the sense of a non-interventionist understanding of the State that lets the inherently truthful or rational forces of the market and—in this case—the virus (or perhaps ‘Nature’) unfold spontaneously according to their own logic. They are both ‘let rip,’ so as to ‘run riot’ or ‘rampage,’ and we lose ‘control’ (yet another example of how degraded our language has become, and also how damaging this degradation is to our ability to conceptualise the things that we are trying to speak about). In spite of his other merits, Žižek is one of the writers most prone to simply eliding the possibility that the strategy of pursuing herd immunity—by whatever means, although he assumes it to be laissez-faire rather than a combination of that and some sort of natural immunity—could function outside of a Rightist discourse. He is not on other occasions at all guilty of the Leftist trait of failing to learn from one’s opponents, and yet in this case his work falls back into oppositional thinking. Žižek naturally adverts to America (because to advert to certain other cases, like Sweden, would not support his case), and persistently reduces any strategy other than the police response to a policy whose sole purpose is that of maintaining a functioning economy. This is what he makes of ‘herd immunity.’ He also is helpfully direct in describing it as akin to simply ‘letting die.’ In the American context he denounces this as ‘barbarism’ and akin to Ceaușescu’s Romania, in which on his account the old were refused entry to hospitals.50 ‘The message in such pronouncements is clear: the choice is between a substantial, if incalculable, number of human lives and the American (i.e. Capitalist) “way of life.” In this choice, human lives lose.’51 At this stage in his discourse, the only sacrifice countenanced is one which sacrifices bare life, and that sacrifice is made only by the so-called laissez-faire strategy. And yet the non-rigorous character of this opposition soon becomes visible even to the one who wished to posit it: ‘Of course an entire country or even the world cannot indefinitely stay in a lockdown,’52 and Žižek even admits that ‘euthanasia’ might in a certain sense be necessary.53 The strategy of herd immunity is developed at greater length only once, and in an extremely confusing way that deploys the metaphor of the meeting with Death at Samara, and quite clearly conflates a general epidemiological strategy (or more precisely, a threshold), with the very particular version of

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it that is said to have been proposed implicitly by the president of the United States of America.54 In general, for Žižek, the strategy involves the following: ‘act as if we don’t know, i.e., if we ignore the threat, the actual damage might be smaller than if we act knowingly.’ This is what we have seen him refer to elsewhere as the ‘psychotic foreclosure of the Real of the virus.’ From here, Žižek immediately jumps to ‘conservative populists’ as if these were the only ones who could advocate such a strategy (he has just been quoting the Guardian55) and relates it immediately to the threat of ‘economic collapse and poverty,’ which he goes on to say is not neutral since it has been—he avers— created by the conservative populists themselves: ‘he [Trump] addresses ordinary, poorly paid people for whom the pandemic is also an economic catastrophe.’56 Not just for them, let it be said. The sheer number of jumps and unannounced restrictions in this passage render it virtually worthless as a consideration of a strategy that has on the face of it nothing essentially to do with this determinate form of politics—and when it does, this politics can just as easily be of the leftist or non-aligned kind Agamben pursues. Nevertheless, this gesture of associating such a strategy with Right-wing thought has been extremely effective rhetorically, and guilt by association has caused much unwarranted damage to such strategies—wittingly or not. As David Cayley has pointed out, Trump’s advocacy is perceived as being by itself enough to render the strategy unacceptable in certain quarters; and this is one of the reasons why in this context one cannot simply affirm that a certain set of arguments belongs to the Left and others to the Right, and—for some unimaginable reason—everything that someone of a different political persuasion enunciates must eo ipso be wrong, a point also very astutely recognised by Cayley, in the name of Ivan Illich. Žižek’s later text, Pan(dem)ic! 2 is at least more explicit about the leap being made from Agamben to a certain group who share his opposition to lockdowns: ‘The problem with the stance is that, today, the main proponents of abolishing lockdowns are to be found in the populist new Right’57—as concrete an example of guilt by association as one could imagine; and fewer than twenty pages earlier, he had noted that in fact both left and right had opposed the measures, opening up the possibility for a discussion, before closing it down or simply forgetting to have it.58 Žižek goes on to say that the response to this should be to point out that abolishing lockdowns would mean that workers ‘must go out into the unsafe world and risk contamination,’ when as he himself repeatedly recognises this is exactly what happens during lockdowns. As he often, and admirably, notes, lockdowns cannot be universal; they almost never apply to the working class in any case. But this means that to use the exposure of the working class in the absence of lockdowns as an argument in favour of them is altogether ineffective.

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Žižek is pushed in this direction by a notion which has returned perpetually over the last three years, that lockdowns ‘save lives.’59 Where this idea has come from, that philosophers, who supposedly know a thing or two about counterproductivity, epiphenomena, freedom and oppression, not to say epistemology, and for whom a certain scepticism in the face of State pronouncements and mediatic messages is second nature, should invoke it so blithely, remains enigmatic. Why they were unable to look beyond the shortest of terms and the narrowest of visions, so as to see the long term and broader consequences of what they were advocating is similarly difficult to conceive. Žižek suggests in the end, and perhaps this is the most charitable reading that we can give of his text, that the opposition he has relied upon throughout is in fact one that is imposed upon us by the prevailing capitalistic order; and that we need a ‘new economic order that will allow us to avoid the debilitating choice between economic revival and saving lives.’60 But this very opposition is precisely what a critical vision of the virus allows one to avoid: there is no sense in which opposing lockdown amounts to sacrificing the working class, and no reason to align a less restrictive approach with an ‘American way of life’ economism. As Žižek himself admits in his better moments, it is lockdown itself that may be said to carry out this sacrifice—if we can even say that interacting with one’s fellow humans as healthy people of working age does seriously endanger anything any more than a thousand other activities, and if we have to think of this encounter in biological, epidemiological terms—which we do not. By the logic of the lockdown, on Žižek’s own account, working-class lives are sacrificed and only middle-class lives are saved. ESPOSITO ON SACRIFICE Roberto Esposito deploys the notion of ‘sacrifice’ in a similar vein to Žižek, so as to disown the notion of ‘herd immunity’ as a strategy: this choice [for herd immunity] is, honestly, a form of eugenics, and in some ways even thanatopolitical, because it entails the deaths of a considerable number of people who would otherwise live. For herd immunity to develop, many of the weakest people are destined to die, as Boris Johnson also admitted. [. . .] Let’s say that my assessment of herd immunity is a rather negative one: it acts as a form of autoimmune disease, that is, it tries to protect life through the death of a part of the population. The only non-negative population-wide form of immunity—i.e., one not based on the sacrifice of innocent victims—depends on the discovery of a vaccine. That is, if we ever get one.61

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Esposito seems not to realise that the ‘exposure’ here will not to any significant degree occur among those vulnerable to death or serious disease, nor does he recognise that one way to avoid this in any case would be to rely on spontaneous changes in human behaviour, rather than falling immediately to a brutal legal mandation (or at least, if one has any decency, one ought to, certainly if one claims to be a democrat). Above all, he does not seem to realise that effecting a lockdown itself amounts to another and somewhat symmetrical form of ‘sacrifice,’ as we have learned from Žižek. Does this explain why he is not prepared to speak of what he perceives as the risk in which others are placing their own lives by continuing to work without the supposed protection of the home as a ‘sacrifice’ for our sakes—those of us who in another sense are making a ‘sacrifice’ by consenting to remain confined: at a time when we are doing all that is in our power to stay alive, as is understandable, we cannot renounce the second life—life with others, for others, through others. This is not, however, allowed, in fact it is, rightly and logically, forbidden. [/] To consider this sacrifice as unbearable, when there are those who are risking their lives in hospitals to save ours, is not only offensive, it is ridiculous.62

It seems indeed that in this situation everything, on all sides, is being sacrificed, in the worst of all possible worlds. And yet, if one reads the severity of the epidemic and the dangerousness of the disease differently, and if one demonstrates a certain trust in spontaneous alterations of behaviour without professional or institutional oversight, in truth this particular non-pharmaceutical intervention will prove to have been unnecessary, and human community and culture will have been done away with to no end. Unless the end involves an unprecedented exacerbation of the society of control. PROPORTION: SACRIFICE ON BOTH SIDES As we have shown, few things can have been more maligned than the idea of an alternative approach to the epidemic, but it cannot be denied that even for advocates of the police response, the question is one of thresholds: nothing like the strategy chosen in 2020 has ever seriously been attempted on a national scale for any previous virus; the British government’s ‘pandemic plan’ and indeed the WHO’s own guidelines recommended nothing like it, but these were silently jettisoned early on. At what point and for what reasons, good or bad, is an approach which at least minimally respects constitutional and legal rights deposed?

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Was it simply that one strategy seemed to entail sacrifices (of life, as opposed to economic livelihood and the good life), while—miraculously— the other could be made to seem as if it did not? We have seen that even serious philosophers interpreted the strategy of ‘herd immunity’ as involving ‘sacrifice,’ and so powerful had the biopolitical valorisation of ‘life’ become that even so much as a single life lost seemed to be unacceptable to them. And yet the implicit logic of their favoured response was precisely a sacrificial one, in which a part of one’s life, or, more accurately, certain parts of the social body (including education and culture) are suspended, degraded, or otherwise destroyed, in order for the body to save itself in some other more ‘streamlined’ form. How has one strategy come to be seen as entirely devoid of sacrifice whilst the other has been condemned for the very fact that it implies it? Once it has been established that there is sacrifice on both sides, we would perhaps, at last, be in a position to answer the question of ‘proportion.’ At the very least, as with all decisions regarding policy, one would have to know something of the effects of the measures, in order to determine their proportionality—to ensure that another supplementary disproportion would not be introduced in the event that the remedy proved more deadly than the poison. This would be one criterion by which the judgement could be made. And yet it seems that nothing like an assessment of the effects of lockdown was made (and when it was it barely had any impact, and certainly did not deflect the train of events. Nothing has). Far worse is that philosophers and scholars of the human sciences themselves barely attempted such an assessment. This would have been in any case much more challenging, given that the effects are not merely ones that can be measured in easily quantifiable units of life and death (although that can be done too, and the results are already putting in question the original decisions). One would have to have considered not merely psychic health—notoriously difficult to quantify, and indeed not obviously quantifiable at all in some respects—but also even more intangible and yet more fundamental things to do with the fabric of society, culture, and the essence of humanity, all of which were stretched beyond breaking point by the measures. That almost all continental philosophers were for the most part utterly unable to question such a fundamental affront as the legally compulsory covering of the face, when they had laid such stress for so long on the ethical presentation of the singularity and humanity of the human being by that very means; that they could not convey this point with a force sufficient to have made reasonable individuals see that this concealment, quite apart from the deleterious long term and short term effects of being forced into a society of ‘masked men,’63 particularly for the young, was in principle unethical and dehumanising, leaves one breathless in a more metaphorical sense; all the

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more so given how hegemonic such a discourse on the compulsion of the veil was in the sententious moralising that the West had long delivered to the Islamic world. BEYOND SACRIFICE Beyond reasserting a certain semblance of balance, and demonstrating the presence of sacrifice on both sides, one can go even further and ask whether at least some of the many alternatives that have been grouped together under the heading of ‘herd immunity’ presuppose any sacrifice at all. If one accepts differential vulnerability, which among the very young rises to a near total invulnerability, no sacrificial element at all is involved in their exposure. And if indeed a certain number of people die in the process, or in the meantime, honesty would perhaps entail admitting that ‘sacrifice,’ if it simply means ‘people dying,’ will happen whatever strategy one chooses and has never been avoidable. One of the great lessons of philosophy, not to say biology, is that death is inherent in finite entities, or at the very least in sexuated ones (just as viruses and any number of contagions are ineradicable companions of organic life).64 The sanitising behaviour which has come to pervade our culture scrubs the surface of the organism so clean and discourages contact with other organisms so hysterically that it seems possessed of such an ignorance of the actual functioning of immune systems as to be in the grip of a certain kind of death-wish itself, the wish of the neurotic to amortise themselves absolutely. Such was even recognised by the British government as a risk for the winter of 2021–2022, with the absence of exposure to (other) pathogens in the quarantines of 2020–2021 resulting in a diminished ability to resist even relatively mild diseases like influenza (although we saw in the long anticipation of the winter of 2022–2023 that this is largely an opportunity for a fearmongering that simply will not let up, and that has only obedience in mind—an indefinitely prolonged opportunity at that, which will no doubt continue to be exploited every winter until we can engineer a sea-change in public discourse and the conceptual schemes available to it). This hostile-immunising response seems to embody the belief that dying as such (not to speak of becoming ill) could or should ideally not happen at all. This positing is at least something that is risked by the extreme character of the taboo on death in our culture. The absolute aversion to the public visibility of death and infirmity is a significant factor in at least the efficacy of the media strategy in bolstering the repressive ‘solution’ to this epidemic. By rendering it as visible as possible in all manner of tendentious and alarming images, one breaks the taboo and unleashes every sort of anxiousness and aversive behaviour—hysterics in search of a master: in this case the Law

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promulgated ultimately by the medico-scientific sovereign, and endless, endless varieties of ‘clean hands.’65 Such a repression of death has allowed it to return in an altogether distorted, confused, and confusing form, diffused everywhere and over everyone as a generic and supposedly indiscriminate threat. But the impression of such a threat is entirely manufactured: the only question we have to ask is which conclusion to draw from the differential vulnerability that is displayed with respect to this particular disease: 1) given that this susceptibility is virtually nonexistent in anyone healthy and of working age, quite possibly absolutely nonexistent in infants and the very young, measures that disproportionately damage the latter’s development are near impossible to justify, particularly given the absolutely minimal role in dissemination that children play (quite contrary to what teachers seem to have been led to believe, often by their own unions)—that their natural and essential propensity for mingling should have been taken to be in large part responsible for the distribution of the disease itself is also unforgivable: some things simply cannot be sacrificed—one of the very most dispiriting features of the last three years is the number of people for whom, we have learned, simply nothing is indispensable; 2) but this is precisely what allows those who manage to discern some moral gesture in the restrictions to construe their actions as absolutely altruistic, a ‘sacrifice’ (if altruism and sacrifice can or should ever be imposed on anyone, let alone those deemed too young or too impaired to decide for themselves: they will be seen to ‘do their bit’ even if unwillingly)—if the action did benefit the actor, it would not have the same value in terms of the accretion of self-worth. Hence we find so many appeals to a kind of sentimental altruism (even one that is being coercively imposed upon those too young to understand it), which likes to tell itself that it is acting for the sake of the others, the ‘vulnerable,’ the helpless, when really it is acting out its own disavowed and projected fear.

Chapter 6‌‌

Giorgio Agamben Against Sacrifice and the Logic of Auto-immunity

Only the repression of the necessity of death will have allowed those advocating for the non-pharmaceutical methods that became exclusive to fail to see that a great many sacrifices of any number of essential aspects of human life were taking place in their name. The question then confronts us: what if these sacrifices were considered to be absolutely unacceptable? Agamben’s response to the measures may be explained by the absolute refusal of sacrifice that his thought urges upon him. In particular, even the most minimal sacrifice of communal life is not acceptable to him. Or, to speak in the terms of immunity and community that we have also deployed: hostile forms of immunity are radically incompatible with human community. This Agamben has stated in the starkest manner imaginable. It is our task in the concluding pages of the present work to establish what allows him to do this. We must therefore bring to light the most profound philosophical grounds for Agamben’s resistance to the logic of non-pharmaceutical intervention. It could be expressed, even if Agamben himself does not put it in quite this way, as a reservation with regard to the very logic of (auto)immunity itself, one which simply does not allow it to take precedence in such a way as to insist that community must (freely) place itself in abeyance in order to save itself. Such a conception of community is, as we shall see, one that remains under the sway of sovereign power and a sovereign way of thinking. For Agamben, the very idea that this hostile and repulsive kind of immunity, the kind that barricades and distances, that interposes transparent plastic, fabric, and brick walls between human beings, and regulates their private interactions down to the minutest degree, might be compatible with any form of human community is anathema. 135

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For Agamben, once one immunises one’s self—in hostile fashion—against one’s neighbour, the other is being treated first and foremost as an (enemy) agent, and that is to say an agent of infection, before they are encountered as a human being. Agamben repeatedly describes this situation as one in which the ‘neighbour’—the human being who stays ‘near-by,’ with whom we share a vicinity, a local community yet to be defined—ceases to exist.1 The ‘neighbour’ as such is abstractly negated: ‘Others, whoever they are—even loved ones—must not be approached or touched. Instead, we should establish between them and ourselves a distance [. . .]. Our neighbour has been abolished.’2 We have come to consider those nearest to us as ‘potential sources of contagion’3: ‘our neighbour has become a potential [possibile] source of contagion,’4 and as a result, ‘[o]ur neighbour has been cancelled,’5 ‘[o]ur neighbour no longer exists.’6 Agamben is therefore led to ask: ‘What does it mean to live in the emergency situation in which we have found ourselves? [. . .] [R]emembering that our neighbour is not just an anointer and a possible agent of contagion, but first of all our fellow to whom we owe our love and support.’7 For the Christian, as St. Francis and the martyrs taught, ‘we must be willing to sacrifice life rather than faith, and [. . .] renouncing one’s neighbour means renouncing faith.’8 Most crucially, this relation to the other has not been freely chosen and cannot be reduced to a subjective alteration in one’s perception that would be the result of an individual pathology; rather, this manner of treatment is legally ordained—an ‘ordinance’ that is about to become a ‘law’: ‘the new element is that health is becoming a juridical obligation.’9 The obligation to cancel the neighbour is not ethical but legal: ‘the recent orders [. . .] transform, in effect, every individual into a potential plague-spreader.’10 An immunising relation with the other cannot constitute anything like a human community, and in fact contributes to its mortification and destruction. Like Nancy and Žižek, Agamben also speaks of the situation we are presented with as a ‘paradox,’ but here the word takes on a quite different tone—this immune community is a dreadful subhuman fantasy put about by those in power for their own ends: ‘as soon as a threat to health is declared, people unresistingly consent to limitations on their freedom that they would never have accepted in the past. We are facing a paradox: the end of all social relations and political activity is presented as the exemplary form of civic participation.’11 Following Patrick Zylberman, Agamben speaks of the already existing apparatus for governance proposed by the WHO during a 2005 bird flu epidemic, which States were then not ready to adopt, in the following way: ‘the total organisation of the body of citizens so as fully to reinforce adhesion to governmental institutions, producing a sort of superlative civicism [sense of ‘civic responsibility’] wherein the imposed obligations are presented as



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proofs of altruism, and where the citizen no longer has a right to health (“health safety”) but is instead forced by law to be healthy (“biosecurity”).’12 Agamben thus unambiguously attributes the transvaluation of values (from a valorised ‘contact’ to ‘contact as contagion’13) that issues in this paradox of an immunised community, albeit at the level of politics rather than ethics, to the regime of biosecurity. Only if the protection of life had asserted itself as the dominant value in the political realm could we imagine these measures constituting anything like a just and democratic political gesture: ‘biosecurity has proven capable of presenting the absolute cessation of all political activity and social relationships as the highest form of civic participation.’14 And this is how Agamben explains the way in which the Left has renounced its traditional task of upholding constitutional guarantees—another ‘paradox’: ‘we have thus been able to witness the paradox of leftist organisations, traditionally accustomed to asserting rights and denouncing constitutional violations, unreservedly accepting limitations on freedom that were determined—and this is something that even Fascism did not dare to impose—through legally invalid ministerial decrees.’15 DI CESARE AGAINST IMMUNE COMMUNITY It will help us to find our way into the most profound logic of Agamben’s thought here if we examine Donatella Di Cesare’s Immunodemocracy: Capitalist Asphyxia, which on this point, among a number of others, remains close to Agamben. But the former demonstrates much more explicitly that the position he adopts may be understood as a response to the dialectic between immunity and community that Esposito will have rendered so salient as to be virtually unavoidable in the present context. She seems to realise the exclusive nature of hostile immunity and community more clearly than Esposito, and is more determined to maintain an opposition between the two. In terms of what she deems the ‘immunitary’ character of modern democracy (its tendency towards national exclusions in particular, which have been the object of her concern elsewhere), ‘[w]here immunity prevails, community declines.’16 ‘To be part of a community means to be linked, bound to each other, constantly exposed, ever-vulnerable,’17 and we are today living out a fantasy that we have entertained for quite some time now—a nontraumatic, entirely hygienic (non-)encounter with the other. That said, on this conception, there is still something like a balance to be struck between no exposure at all (hostile immunity) and absolute exposure with no remainder (the community about which Georges Bataille from time to time allowed himself to dream): one must balance community with a resistance to a certain type of fusion with the other: ‘The citizen is subjected to

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those who guarantee her protection. But she is on her guard against exposure to the other, and careful to avoid the risk of contact. The other is infection, contamination, contagion.’18 As Di Cesare herself points out, this gesture has gradually been exacerbated over the last century, and we have come to dwell in an increasingly immune society, but one which also reacts against its own immunity as it becomes excessive, in autoimmunity: ‘the devastating effects of immunisation, including a large number of autoimmune diseases, hit citizens themselves. And perhaps only in this epochal crisis are these effects becoming clearly apparent.’19 As she puts it, the citizen of today ‘cannot but look on, worried, at the autoimmune reaction getting the upper hand.’20 This process has culminated in a historical impasse in which we have all become—or have been legally compelled to be—patients, each quarantined from the other: ‘The citizen of an immunitarian democracy, precluded from sharing in the experience of the other, resigns herself to following all the rules of health and hygiene. Indeed, she has no difficulty in recognising herself as a patient.’21 As if to reinforce a certain solidarity with Agamben on this topic, whose work she had earlier praised in large measure,22 and to make clear the alignment of these two vocabularies, despite her warning against comparing the events of the twenty-first century with those of the twentieth,23 Di Cesare affirms that, when ‘[p]olitical action tends to take on a medical modality, while medical practice becomes politicised [. . .], Nazism provided the model.’24 Later on, echoing Agamben very distinctly, she writes: ‘The health crisis must not be the pretext for the opening of an authoritarian laboratory,’ and ‘[t]he epidemic cannot be allowed to introduce an era of generalised suspicion in which each person appears to the other as a potential spreader, a permanent threat.’25 This was written rather early on in 2020, and indeed since that time this dehumanisation has reached what one can only hope was its climax. Even in the Spring of 2020, Di Cesare adjudged our culture to have attained an extreme point: ‘This is only the climax of a political process that had been underway already beforehand. The other is now abolished by decree, in exchange for security and immunity.’26 Thus, far from constituting a new form of immune community, ‘“social distancing” applies the seal of immunitarian politics.’27 AGAINST THE LOGIC OF IMMUNITY Thus we have established the rudiments of a certain conceptual analogy between, on the one hand, the language of immunity, stemming as it does from Esposito by way of Derrida and Nancy, and on the other hand, the language employed by Agamben. We can now demonstrate the reasons for



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his opposition to the topic of immunisation, which we have also described as ‘sacrifice.’ Let us recapitulate the progress we have made so far with this question. The position that has swiftly been rendered hegemonic with respect to the epidemic is that there is no alternative to the police response (law + its enforcement), which in turn necessitates one particular type of pharmaceutical response (a vaccine) as the only passport out of lockdown. The risk run by those critical of this position is that a simple opposition will be set up, which nevertheless, in dialectical fashion, will demonstrate that the defect perceived in one’s opposite is in fact a reflection of one’s own nature: in other words, one risks stopping short at the point of recognising that the police response also involves immense sacrifices, as does the vaccine itself—in both cases, this sacrifice is then violently disavowed, to the point that, in the case of the latter, the slightest question as to its ‘safety and efficacy’ is aggressively censored. We are then in a situation in which both sides are at least accused of sacrificing something, whilst trying to rid themselves of such a stain: for Esposito and the opponents of herd immunity, anyone who refuses to constrict human community in the ‘normal’ sense is guilty of sacrificing life; while for those of any other persuasion, the restrictions made are sacrificing all of life, health, and something still more valuable: the very essence of the human. Agamben tends to accept, in his own way, Aristotle’s enduring definition of the human being as the linguistic, rational animal, or the animal with logos (zōon logon echon), and as the political animal (zōon politikon). The measures that separate human beings from one another—by means of physical walls, screens, distance, and invisibility—have, on his account, stifled the very conditions for linguistic and political life, and thus for humanity itself.28 But the position is not so symmetrical as this dialectical reversal suggests. The ‘exposure’ of the young, healthy, and mobile should not be read as a sacrifice, in the way that their locking down, from Agamben’s perspective, certainly seems to be.29 Agamben has insisted upon something like an auto-immune or self-sacrificing loss of identity on the part of the political life of man: the scandal of churches closing their doors to the new lepers whom St. Francis embraced, the cancellation of funerals and marriage, the closure of educational establishments, the devastation of most institutions of human culture, and the prohibition of love and friendship, not to speak of movement, gathering, and speech, however enshrined in constitutional laws. And yet, we have asked, is this really a sacrifice in the strict sense? Does it truly abide by an auto-immune logic that would necessitate a relinquishment of our humanity in order for that humanity to endure? Let us recall that many of these measures have been either legally compulsory or (later on) normatively

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‘expected.’ Can a sacrifice that is demanded of another by a sovereign power rightly be deemed a sacrifice? ‘SACRIFICING’ FREEDOM Why is Agamben unwilling to accept even the most meagre suspension of our humanity, even according to the logic of proportion and judgement outlined by Esposito, and thus no matter what the seriousness of the disease? The answer to this question begins to become apparent in the context of a related question regarding whether or not it is acceptable to suspend freedom temporarily in order to protect it in the long term: ‘The false logic is always the same: just as it was asserted in the face of terrorism[30] that freedom should be abolished in order to defend freedom, now we are told that life has to be suspended in order to protect life.’31 Thus, the way out of the question of proportion is to argue that, if a sacrifice is to be made, not only are freedom and the good life to be weighed just as much as bare life, but the very sacrifice of freedom to any degree is in no case to be justified. The difference between Agamben and Esposito at this moment appears to be that no degree of severity in the conditions that reign at the level of the health, life, and death of a population would justify any actions that curtail the freedom of this same population. These actions are to be absolutely ruled out for Agamben. For Esposito, on the other hand, they are potentially admissible, if ‘proportionate.’ One might specify the point that emerges from the passage cited in the following way: the sacrifice of freedom for the sake of freedom is inadmissible at least in the cases where this sacrifice is urged upon others—by law and by force of law, or by norm, requirement and expectation that extend the reach of this law’s power beyond its usual domain in exceptional circumstances—and if this is done for the sake of bare life. And yet one could read Agamben’s statements more generically, in an unqualified sense. This reading is bolstered indirectly by the following passage: No doubt someone will retort that the sacrifice, serious as it is, has been made in the name of moral principles [which would be that of ‘saving life’ or ‘saving lives,’ presumably]. I would remind them that Eichmann never failed to reiterate—apparently in good faith—that he did what he did according to his conscience, in order to obey what he believed were the precepts of Kantian morals. A norm which affirms that we must renounce the good to save the good is as false and contradictory as that which, in order to protect freedom, imposes the renunciation of freedom.32



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The refusal of the logic of sacrifice and (auto-)immunity is here extended beyond freedom, to include the Good. The passage implies that however temporary, however mild the restrictions, stricture as such is reprehensible, at least if it is put in place in order to save the very thing that is being constricted. This implies that the logic of (auto-)immunity and sacrifice is itself inherently flawed. Agamben thus takes a stance against the whole logic of inoculation, at least as applied to the political realm.33 Human community ought never to be reduced to the immunity of a hostile and atomised isolation, for then any suspicion of a community will already be lost. At the root of the falsity of the auto-immune logic is a certain conception of foundation that Agamben deals with most extensively in his biopolitical thought. Advocates of lockdowns may be shown tacitly to presuppose that the human form of life can be set apart from the unqualified, unformed life upon which it would be founded. As we have seen in our consideration of Anastasia Berg’s criticism of Agamben, this presupposition must be made by any argument that advocates the temporary reduction of a full human life to sheer survival—in other words, any gesture which abides by the logic we have just delineated, that would constrain the Same for the sake of the Same. This straitened life to which they would reduce us will in some contexts be described by Agamben as ‘bare life’ (nuda vita), a life denuded of any form or potential that might once have been recognised as fit to participate in civic life, in an age when that public life was rigorously distinguished from the private life of the home. The sole potential of such a life, barely clinging on to itself, is that of dying, and even then that terminal decision lies in the hands of whoever wields power in that particular setting: the ‘sovereign,’ whether that be a single figure, as in monarchy, autocracy, or tyranny, a group of people, as in oligarchy and aristocracy, or the whole civilian body, as in a certain kind of democracy. It can even be a doctor, or a scientist; or Medicine or ‘Science’ as such. BIOPOLITICS The manner in which the protection of life and health became not just a ‘good’ or a right but also a political and legal obligation is the subject of the metapolitical philosophy of biopolitics.34 This is the doctrine according to which matters of life and death have become—or have always been—the concern of (political) power, rather than simply being private matters of the home and the family, as they were said to be in Aristotle’s time. For Agamben, biopolitics is much older than Foucault considers it to be: far from emerging towards the end of the eighteenth century, with the birth of the ‘Modern Age,’ a certain sovereign power over life may be discerned from the very beginning of the

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history of the West. Life, in the sense of biological life, along with its various capacities, from nutrition to reproduction, was not governed by the laws instituted by the sovereign in the Ancient Greek world to govern the public life of the city (polis); life was instead fostered privately in the home (oikos). That much is true, but Agamben demonstrates that this very fact of being excluded from the political sphere may be understood as an act of exclusion carried out by the sovereign ruler of the political sphere. Hence those confined to the home and to private physical life would have been consigned there, refused admission to full civic life, by sovereign power. Thus we can say that the very opposition between private and public life, home and city, and the distribution of different sets of living beings between the two realms, is effectively carried out by the sovereign itself. As a result, both of its poles, along with the division between them, may be said to be subject to law and the power that expresses itself through the law’s imposition and enforcement. The private biological life of the home and the politico-linguistic life of the city might—at least in hindsight—be identified with the Greek terms zōē and bios respectively.35 Everything that is most fundamental in Agamben’s work hinges on a correct understanding of this distinction, and the exact perspective from which the distinction is made. The act of separating bare life from a fuller kind of life presupposes that the one who makes the distinction wields a certain amount of power over both forms. This includes the life of the home and those associated with its upkeep, for those confined to the home were thereby forcibly excluded from civic life, which alone counted as properly human, according to a definition of man that Aristotle would later epitomise and which we have seen Agamben effectively to endorse. What the domestic animals of the home amounted to was effectively decided upon by the sovereign, even if the laws he made were effectively null and void once one crossed the threshold. For Agamben, what has changed in the Modern Age and even more so in the twentieth century is that this distinction has altogether collapsed—in terms that he came to use more frequently as time went on: the machine that had separated them in the first place and which had held them apart was running out of steam. The machine’s potential for wielding power was being depleted to the point of exhaustion; in order to stave off desuetude, the life that was in antiquity included within the purview of the sovereign’s power purely by means of exclusion had to become quite explicitly a part of its remit. Power would then devote the greater part of its strategising to the conquest of ‘mere life’—the health, life, and death of human beings understood in the statistical form of ‘populations’ or ‘demographics.’ What was once considered to be an external separation between two spheres (polis and oikos) and two distinct sets of human beings, has now become a division internal to each human being: one has (what might formerly have been described as) a properly



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human life, and distinct from that, one’s anonymous bare life, which would be naked in the sense of being deprived of any qualifying form and also in the sense of being lain open to an absolutely direct incursion of controlling power. Bare life would be the distortion of biological life or zōē that results from the direct application of this power. This extension of law into the private life of the home, the affairs of health, and the tending of the body can occur thanks to the sovereign power’s declaration of a state of exception that soon becomes the rule, in which law suspends itself but only so as to extend itself into those domains from which it formerly prescinded. It is only in such a situation that looking after our health could form part of our ‘civic duty.’ This is just what has occurred during the recent state of ‘(health) emergency.’ All of this is to say that the very separation between qualified human life and subhuman bare life is itself made by the sovereign or from a sovereign point of view. It occurs at a certain point in the history of power’s transformations, at a moment in which a state of exception has come to overlap entirely and indeed explicitly with the normal course of civil life. The separation itself is an incontrovertible sign that sovereign power is in play and is implementing this emergency—this could involve either manufacturing it from the ground up, or seizing upon a potentially spectacular threat and using it as a pretext for the declaration. In his writings on the virus, Agamben speaks very straightforwardly of a separation of life into ‘a purely biological entity on the one hand [in abstraction from everything else], and a social, cultural, and political existence on the other,’ and he suggests that, ‘[w]hat the virus has shown clearly is that people believe in this abstraction.’36 Their very behaviour and the speed with which the transvaluation of values implicit in an immune community has been embraced testify to that. And this belief is not without warrant: (medical) technology has indeed made such a separation effectively possible, with artificial respiration and other technologies capable of suspending those on the point of death in a kind of undead life, a life so denuded that even the existentialist freedom of suicide is beyond its reach. Such is the power of modern medicine and modern techno-science that they have created a new form of life: mere aliveness, sheer life—without any further determination. But what is crucial for Agamben in the present context is that this separation—and the sovereign power that accrues to the doctors and scientists who were able to install it and who will often decide upon the moment at which the life-support apparatus is to be switched off—be rigorously confined within the walls of the hospital and the surgery, and not be allowed to roam freely about the city beyond.37 And yet this is exactly what has happened over the last three years, with the result that this type of life, gripped and controlled by sovereign medico-scientific power, has become the model for a new form of social life: ‘this body, artificially suspended between life and death, has

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become the new political paradigm by which citizens must regulate their behaviours.’38 On Agamben’s account, any argument which appeals to this separation is effectively relying upon—and by extension accepting—both sovereign power and its attribution to medicine and science. Agamben’s entire political philosophy has devoted itself to finding a way in which to disable this type of power structure once and for all and to seek out a new communal bond, beyond sovereign power, its law, and the separation of public and private life—or more precisely, today, beyond the particular type of indistinction which prevails between the two, and which has issued in the production of bare life. Thus he is seeking a politics that would rule out two things: either the re-emergence of the distinction between two kinds of life within the human, and the type of indistinction between these two kinds that one finds in the current normalised state of emergency. He is seeking another kind of indistinction. All of this means that his philosophy is at the very least an attempt to rule out the separation of bare life from human life, however temporary that separation is promised to be. Thus, the vision of life he is pursuing simply does not abide by the logic of auto-immunity and does not display the selfprotective structure that Derrida and his descendants have identified. It is a life that will not even momentarily sacrifice itself. It can therefore be seen that Agamben’s critics misunderstand his potential reproach to them when they protest that they are not solely valorising the survival of bare life over human life but are rather merely protecting that bare life in order later to restore a fully human life, and that they are operating in the name of that life.39 This is why we should not presume—despite initial appearances—that Agamben himself is relying unequivocally upon the same separation that he accuses the current regime of insisting upon, and simply valorising the other side of it (qualified, supposedly fully human life). TOWARDS A NEW COMMUNITY This critique of the logic of auto-immunity may help to explain Agamben’s repeated assertion that the conditions imposed by isolation, distance, and invisibility cannot provide the model for a new community, as many of his fellow philosophers at least temporarily allowed themselves to believe (mesmerised by the living ‘paradox’ of an immune community, as if it were the miraginary shimmer of a future community just over the horizon): ‘I do not believe that a community based on “social distancing” is humanly and politically liveable.’40 Elsewhere Agamben describes such a ‘community’ as one that is held together only by that most renowned image of sovereign power, the Leviathan, to whom the people have surrendered the greater part of their



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liberty so as to be protected by him against some fearful threat—some plague abroad in the city: ‘only tyranny, only the monstrous Leviathan with his drawn sword, can be built upon the fear of losing one’s life.’41 As we have seen, this tradition of political philosophy is one Esposito had no difficulty in endorsing.42 These visions of an immune community, in which the members of a flock flee all contact with their fellow creatures and trust to the State’s good faith in ‘controlling’ the situation, are ultimately visions of a society under the sway of sovereign power. They allow us to remain entrapped within a theory and practice of political life that have long since passed their expiry date and thus hinder the conception of a new form of communal relation that would not reduce us to bare life and a desperate clamouring after its protection from a potentially infinitely extended series of ‘threats.’ They prolong the old in a distorted form that emphasises its most malign aspects, which show themselves to be becoming ever more inventive and cruel, whilst stifling the new.

Conclusion Beyond the Epidemic as Politics

The ultimate goal of Agamben’s political thought is to conceive of a community that would not be dependent upon a transcendent sovereign instance which separates our formed human lives from the bare fact of our living. Sovereign control of this latter kind of life has reached its most extraordinary exacerbation in what we have witnessed over the last three years. The conditions imposed by an immunitary isolation cannot provide a model for any sort of human community; indeed, sovereign power, by sealing society in such a state, altogether inhibits any attempt to think the new form of relation that Agamben’s political thought is ultimately dedicated to uncovering. The ‘paradox’ of an immune community, read by some philosophers desperate not to betray themselves whilst nevertheless doing so, as a new form of community, is shown by Agamben to constitute a curious type of ‘mass.’ This notion he borrows from Elias Canetti who describes a ‘crowd’ as ‘the thing upon which power is founded through the inversion of the fear of being touched.’1 Agamben concludes that, despite appearances, what we are experiencing today is not a form of individualism that would be the result of a renewed fear of this touch, but rather something like a sublation of the two cases, in which we arrive at a ‘mass’: ‘What social distancing measures and panic have created is surely a mass, but a mass that is, so to speak, inverted and composed of individuals who are keeping themselves at a distance at all costs [. . .]. It is still a mass, however, if, as Canetti specifies [. . .] it is defined by uniformity and passivity.’2 He goes on to affirm that ‘a community founded on social distancing would have nothing to do, as one might naively believe, with an individualism taken to excess. It would be, if anything, similar to the community we see around us: a rarefied mass founded on a prohibition [of touching] but, for that very reason, especially passive and dense.’3 This mass or crowd of huddled individuals, half voluntarily assuming the command to stay apart, is founded upon fear and describes the ultimate form 147

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of that community Hobbes describes as being lorded over by the sovereign Leviathan.4 What is needed in order to think beyond such a tremulous crowd is a theory of community that does not envisage its coordination by the power of such a sovereign, who transforms all considerations to do with biological life into the brutish terms of health, life and death, survival or extermination. What is needed instead is an immanent coordination that would allow biological life to be considered central to political life but in terms other than those of survival, death-rates, infection-rates, and all of the other population-statistics which speak of a community reduced precisely to a ‘uniform and passive’ mass, and ultimately to the point of passivity that characterises homo sacer, imagining that his life stands or falls with the medical sovereign’s devising a means to snatch him from the jaws of death. If we take seriously Agamben’s recently avowed admiration for Ivan Illich, we can imagine that this vision may lay stress upon local and culturally acquired skills that involve a thoroughgoing critique of institutions and the professionalisation of a centralised and institutionally certified ‘training,’ that depletes the habituation of skills which allowed preindustrial societies to manage.5 This calls upon us to resist the persistent legalisation of every human action and relation, whether this takes the form of State law or the rules and regulations drawn up by a professional institution. The Left that remains in hoc to trade-unionist thinking and particularly in its identitarian faction has found it especially difficult to resist the temptation to reduce human relations to their legalised form. It has given in to a ‘contractual’ understanding that effectively partakes of an isolating, buffering form of ‘immunity’ of the kind the Law is always prone to enforce. One will always be protected in one’s chosen ‘identity’—as if this identity were the most ‘vulnerable’ thing in the world—but this protection will be understood, as it nearly always is by the Law, as a form of cushioning or isolation of the individual from the Other understood as potentially evil or harmful, as that before which the State must erect barriers. In this way, identity politics was already a politics of social distancing and masks, which is one of the reasons why the Left, so terrified of this part of itself, found it so hard to speak against what was being done in 2020–2022. The trade unions demonstrate an absolute and constitutional incapacity to think beyond the Law, beyond legalisation and legislation, guidelines and their observance—beyond the professional monopoly. Such a gesture is currently crippling and discrediting the political Left, imagining, as it seems to, an infinitely and universally immune population, composed entirely of vulnerable minorities, who stand in need of protection against some imaginary aggressor: the way this is to be done is, naturally, by way of guidelines, or more implicit norms of speech, thought, and action, which adherents of

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that persuasion must then abide by. The State must legislate out of existence every form of speech, thought, and action that is considered even marginally ‘problematic.’ Law must regulate every aspect of human life, in order that the vulnerable, in the broadest imaginable sense, be given immunity. As the authors of the Manifeste Conspirationniste have it, the Left ‘has always been the party of biopolitics incarnate.’6 A deactivation of the Law can indeed be viewed as a kind of ‘liberation’ from this understanding of community, which Schopenhauer memorably described as akin to the relations of hedgehogs, but with none of this sweet animal’s charm. Law above all should not be what governs human relationships in the last instance. If Agamben considers Ivan Illich the greatest critic of modernity then it may in part be because of his conception of professional institutions and the way in which a certain globalising gesture, of which the law would be one especial form, robs individuals of a sub-legal, amateur skilfulness (‘amateur’ in the literal sense of one who does it for love). Such institutions are in the end forms of binary machine that certify some as successes and the overwhelming majority as failures. Power can be wielded in ways other than the Law, and we are not speaking simply about the ethical, save in the sense of ethos as dwelling; we are speaking about a kind of de-skilling that takes place by means of a gesture that presents itself as benevolently bestowing skill. We are speaking about the counterproductivity of (apparently well-meaning and beneficial) institutions. THE EXCEPTION TO BECOME THE RULE? Agamben leaves us in no doubt that something if not everything that has been opportunistically introduced over the last few years will remain in place, if only in the form of a sword (or some other sharp device) that impends over our heads and with which we shall be threatened at least every winter, and that indeed the idea that a community—inverted crowd or mass—of pure immunity is being planned as our future is no straw man (we are to be told each autumn to prepare for such a thing, and by a number of power-crazed doctors that ‘the age of hand-shaking is over,’ along with all that that symbolises and metonymises in human life). Esposito’s idea that the immunising relation to the other amounts to a temporary sacrifice that will make it possible one day to restore a properly human community may be pitted against Agamben’s insistence that the supposedly temporary situation will be chronically enduring: Doubtless someone will rush to respond that what I am describing is a temporally limited condition, after which things will go back to how they were before.

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It is remarkable that anyone could say this in good faith, given that the very authorities that have proclaimed the emergency are endlessly reminding us that we will have to go on observing the same directives when this is all over, and that ‘social distancing’ [. . .] will be society’s new organising principle.7

At the very least this is clearly true at the level of possibility. What was formerly unthinkable, impossible, at least in the supposedly democratic West, has now become not just a possibility, but one of the first recourses, if not the very first. The media ensures that any new ‘mutation’ and even whole new candidates around which another epidemic might be built or simulated remain at the forefront of the popular mind (from AIDS to ‘monkeypox,’ each more sinister in their connotations and implications than the last—at the time of writing, April 2023, bird-flu has become the currently favoured option). No logical end to this period seems in sight. Once is forever: the precedent has been set. THE PERPETUATION OF FEAR One of the most devious methods by which our ongoing predicament has been perpetuated is the dialectic of risk and protection—the instilling of fear followed by its temporary quelling, which both Agamben and Esposito have identified as a strategy that lies at the heart of biopolitical life.8 Agamben affirms that ‘wanting to be insecure’ is an inherent part of fear: The essential character of fear is a will to impotence [. . .]. Likewise, those who feel fear seek reassurance from those who are recognised as possessing some authority [. . .], but this does not in any way get rid of the feeling of insecurity that accompanies fear—which is an essential element of the will to insecurity, the wanting-to-be-insecure. The truth of this is evident from the fact that the very subjects whose responsibility it is to reassure are those who, instead, perpetuate insecurity. They tirelessly repeat, for the good of the frightened, that the object of their fear can never be defeated or eliminated.9

A virus that can always mutate, posing a new threat, real or imagined, is a particularly useful pretext for such a dialectic: there will always be only one remedy, and the State, together with the pharmaceutical institutions whose interests it represents, will have sole charge of it. Civil war, fought the world over, thus becomes perpetual, a background condition occasionally rearing its head whenever the capitalistic or technological system finds it useful for it to do so. In general, Agamben’s opuscule, ‘What is Fear?,’ from which the previous citation is taken, is concerned to resituate the fear that pervades a context

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dominated by reification (or as Heidegger would say, ‘the forgetting of Being,’ that allows entities to be understood in terms of presence and substance, ousia) within the originary openness of being-in-the-world that makes it possible. It is only from that level that ‘the ethical and political rules of my behaviour’ may be drawn, rather than the fear being perpetuated and used as the basis for the imposition of power and the Leviathanic rule of law.10 This helps us to understand Agamben’s resistance to the covering of the face since the latter is precisely the moment at which this specifically human openness is as such communicated. The face would of itself amount to the communication of a pure communicability, or perhaps more idiomatically, of the very ability to communicate, the potential that we might relate to one another in a human fashion, face to face, mouth to mouth, in ‘conspiration.’ This for Agamben is the most fundamental feature that human beings share in common, the root of both language and politics: to be together politically, in a community, human beings need to face one another and speak in a way that animals do not. In ‘Phase 2,’ Agamben suggests that it is at the very least the lack of physical proximity and gathering that makes political activity as such impossible: ‘there are still restrictions on the distances to be maintained and prohibitions on meeting, which means the exclusion of any possibility of real political activity [una vera attività politica].’11 Emmanuel Alloa, while by no means very close to Agamben in certain respects, allows us to broach one of the reasons why physical proximity might be so essential to politics, and that is the elision of contingency and encounter that the restrictions of recent years have brought. What is missing in the virtual reconstitution of real relationships, for Alloa, is the ‘chance encounter,’ the unexpected, the surprise meeting. Everything must be planned, booked ahead, organised or enframed in advance—in a word, controlled: ‘While perfecting the planning of our upcoming encounters, we are depriving ourselves of the opportunity to make real ones. By dint of meeting only those we already know (or those promised by dating sites, whose profiles are supposed to “match” ours), one wonders what room is left for something radically different—for what Stéphane Mallarmé calls the “immediate freshness of the encounter.”’12 Is the happening-upon of those unknown essential to the formation of political activity? Alloa at the very least considers the contingency of such crossed paths to be essential to democracy: Let us be careful not to sacrifice to this pandemic a fundamental value of all democratic life: its share of randomness, its contingency. It is because a democratic commons is not fixed once and for all, but fundamentally lacks any kind of necessity, that its members are able to step together [sic, rather ‘fall in step with one another’] and decide the shape they want to give to it. Let us therefore take care, in our generalised immunological responses, not to entomb ourselves

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even more in our certainties, but to accept that this contingency can also act as a powerful breach in our imaginaries.13

AGAMBEN, FREEDOM, AND THE LEFT In light of this connection, it is important to specify that protecting democracy from decline was never quite the issue for Agamben, even though the tone of his texts at times suggests that something precious is being lost. These then resemble the cries of a democrat protesting against a suspension of democracy, or a liberal protesting against a State that deprives its citizens of their civil liberties.14 Individual autonomy seems in such remarkably bad odour in the age of cancellation, blocking, and strictures of all the kinds that the Left has become so enamoured with, but we should not imagine that it will not form part of the politics that Agamben would urge; indeed he may help us to find a way in which to speak of such a thing, for which the Left, at least in Britain and America, has no discourse or conceptual scheme. This deficit has ensured that the main opposition parties in most Western countries have been even more shamefully complicit in the measures introduced, very often by the Right, than they might and ought otherwise to have been. A violent totalitarian politics of obedience and the sacrifice of others for a greater good thus rose like a spectre in the background of the Left once again, and this time by no means in the form of a violence urging revolutionary change, but rather an aggressive shoring up of the Same. The last few years have revealed a certain truth to the old slander that the Left is either essentially or accidentally aligned with a certain totalising or even totalitarian gesture that is very often violent in the way of excluding people from that totality. So much so that the recent viral event has allowed it to achieve what seemed previously to be quite impossible, and that is to unite both its identitarian and its more explicitly communist or anti-capitalist factions. But more importantly it has demonstrated that in fact, in the case of Left-wing philosophy, the recent slurs according to which ‘postmodernism’ prepares the way for ‘post-Truth’ are quite misguided, at least de facto, since most of these philosophers have joined forces with those who decry the plurality of ‘internet’ opinion precisely because it allows dissent from a prevailing narrative. This alignment, which one could charitably presume to have been made in good faith, to defend a certain truth from a multiplicity of falsehoods that bear some resemblance to the truth, in this case functions in totalitarian fashion to exclude alternative accounts and criticism. Thus the ‘postmodern’ thinkers are much more closely allied with their critics than the latter seem to imagine.

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In any case, this has meant that opposition to the restrictions of community has been identified predominantly as arising from the Right—which in itself is marginalised by most Leftist discourses, as if it were, again, not a position to be reckoned with but a mere symptom of pathology (a pathology afflicting, it seems, in many countries, as much as half the voting population). As many, from David Cayley to Toby Green have argued, this refusal of dialectic that relegates opposing discourses to the realm of the illogical and the immoral has shown its bankruptcy as a discursive strategy most blatantly over the last three years. In any case, deconstruction should long ago have taught us the self-defeating nature of the positing of oppositional others. Perhaps the best that may be said of the Left in recent times is that they have not mustered the forces latent within their own position that might have allowed them to resist the lesser side of their own nature. That said, while we cannot but be repelled by the Left’s behaviour in recent times, it does not automatically mean that we must endorse the Right; as Agamben puts it, ‘the degree of confusion into which the emergency situation has thrown the minds of those who ought to remain lucid, and the way in which the opposition between the Right and the Left has become devoid of any real political content, is very clear in this case. A truth remains such, whether it is expressed by the Left or enunciated by the Right.’15 And the same goes for falsehoods. As Agamben insists, it is crucial to distinguish a true idea from the potentially misleading ways in which such an idea can be put to use: ‘It is crucial [. . .] to examine the strategies by which an idea [opinione] that is correct in itself is deployed—without putting in question [non mettere in questione] that idea’s truth.’16 So we do not need to leave liberty in the hands of the Right. Perhaps this freedom would in any case most often be conceived as freedom the liberal democrat laments as having been lost and which takes the form of rights and constitutional guarantees; Agamben’s freedom will not be identical with what is being lost in the recently installed health tyranny. He is not a mournful democrat; rather, today we are living under a bourgeois democracy that is decaying and whose rescue is attempted precisely by those who would allow the system to remain in place during its very suspension or beyond its natural demise. Thus he speaks of ‘a growing tendency to trigger a state of exception’ in which the very nature of liberal democratic parliamentary governance (and the liberties and democratic checks associated with it) is hollowed out.17 A machine can preserve itself beyond its natural lifespan by arrogating to itself the right to operate even in periods and places where it has hitherto had no jurisdiction. This is why it remains a question as to whether we are living in a democracy disguised as totalitarianism, or vice versa: We need to conceptualise an alternative political configuration that could escape the eternal oscillation [. . .] between a democracy that degenerates into

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despotism and a totalitarianism that is shaped in an apparently democratic form. We already know, thanks to Tocqueville, that democracy has a tendency to deteriorate into despotism; for a careful observer it is difficult to decide whether we live today, in Europe, in a democracy that uses increasingly despotic forms of control, or in a totalitarian state disguised as a democracy. It is beyond both that a new, future politics will have to appear [configurarsi una politica a venire, a politics to come is taking shape].18

As Agamben makes clear in the Foreword to Where are we now?, ‘the dominant powers of today have decided pitilessly to abandon the paradigm of bourgeois democracy—with its rights, its parliaments, and its constitutions—and replace it with new apparatuses whose contours we can barely glimpse.’19 The new paradigm takes the name of ‘biosecurity.’20 Thus, by seeming to abolish liberal democracy, the politics taking its place in truth allows it to continue in another form, which makes the forging of an alternative even more difficult: it is this gesture of exclusive inclusion Agamben is protesting against and trying to find his way out of. In no sense is he hankering after the liberal democratic freedoms protecting forms of life with rights and conventions. This should be clear from the fact that Agamben speaks from the very first paragraph of a ‘transformation of political paradigms’: ‘those models were in progressive, unavoidable decline.’21 Only this decline could explain the need to invent or exploit the string of emergencies that have come to punctuate our political history: ‘For decades now, institutional powers have been suffering a gradual loss of legitimacy. These powers could mitigate this loss only through the constant evocation of states of emergency, and through the need for security and stability that this emergency creates.’22 The powers that be ‘would never have resorted to such extreme and inhuman apparatuses had they not been scared by the reality of their own erosion.’23 And so these systems resort to new measures in order to sustain themselves, measures forming an ‘exception,’ a democracy extending its reign in totalitarian form: ‘The defining feature, however, of this great transformation that they are attempting to impose is that the mechanism which renders it formally possible is not a new body of laws, but a state of exception.’24 And exceptions allow inclusions, inclusions that were hitherto impossible. Under the guise of ‘securing’ the most intimate elements of our biological life, and the behaviour which has some effect on the health, disease, and death of this life, as a State that cares for everyone equally, the most extreme and intrusive totalitarian influx of power is engineered. We must be careful to read this exceptionality correctly: a new paradigm is being prepared, but at present we have not left the old, which, though tottering, remains ensconced, kept alive by the frequent injections of adrenaline to which the continual irruptions of emergency give rise. The sovereign is

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surviving in the form of its own abeyance, as an apparently empty throne. This semblance of deposition allows it to extend its power to those areas in which it was formerly understood not to govern (the private nutritive or vegetative life of the oikos). This is the meaning of the ‘exception’ in Agamben’s thought: it allows a certain (sovereign) machine to remain in power even when it has run out of fuel, and thus to remain functional even as it has been altogether eviscerated. The current political system in this case has been suspended, but not ‘abolished.’25 The transformation is expressed here as follows: ‘What, in the tradition of bourgeois democracy, used to be the right to health became, seemingly without anyone noticing, a juridical-religious obligation’ in the state of exception. Thus we arrive at a biosecurity State, which legally mandates the protection of life.26 In this way, the sovereignty that expressed itself in democratic form can continue to operate even in the abeyance of democracy, or its destruction, and thus its death is an ambiguous one. Nevertheless, Agamben states unequivocally that the demise even of more apparently liberal forms of democracy does not deserve to be mourned: ‘What is happening today on a global scale is certainly the end of a world. [. . .] We do not regret the ending of this world.’27 In a crucial ‘neither/nor’ with respect to the future of politics, Agamben states: ‘The politics to come will not have the obsolete shape of bourgeois democracy, nor the form of the technological-sanitationist despotism that is replacing it,’ and replacing it in line with the dialectic of suspension and extension that we have just identified.28 ‘We do not regret the ending of this world. We have no nostalgia for the notions of the human and of the divine that the implacable waves of time are erasing from the shore of history. But we reject with equal conviction the mute and faceless bare life and the health religion that governments are proposing.’29 According to Agamben, both the powers that be and the people under their sway pursued and accepted the measures because they understood that the world could not continue as before—for some of the latter, this was due to the realisation that ‘it was too unjust and too inhumane’;30 whereas for the former it was because ‘governments are preparing an even more inhumane and unjust world.’ Agamben outlines his own positive resolution to the dilemma, which would exceed both poles of the dialectic, in the following way: ‘We are not awaiting either a new god or a new human being. We rather seek, here and now, among the ruins around us, a humbler, simpler form of life. We know that such a life is not a mirage, because we have memories and experiences of it.’31 Those of us who speak as one with him, and all of those so brutally deprived of a voice in recent days, are currently picking through the rubble of what they have lost, attempting with what little energy remains to them to sustain the hope that they will one day find some remnants of this life.

Postlude The Closure of the Logos

The present work has identified a number of respects in which a multiplicity of possibilities was at a certain point, perhaps long before March 2020, funnelled into a single monolithic notion of what certain entities or events concerning health and public health—or what we have called ‘biopolitics’— might be understood to be. First of all, what this virus was and what it could do were recounted to us in solemn and troubling tones by ‘the Science.’ The virus itself was said to be indiscriminate, a threat to one and all. There could not be any dissent in the ranks: to do otherwise would be to risk jeopardising compliance with what the scientists, elevated to the position of sovereign power, were about to recommend. Non-pharmaceutical interventions that restricted human rights and fundamental liberties more seriously than at any time in our history were regarded after a certain point as the only possible response. To do otherwise than to control the virus, in the most stringent and indeed totalitarian manner possible, would be to ‘lose control.’ Hence any of the alternative strategies, grouped together under the misleading heading of ‘herd immunity,’ were thrust beyond the bounds of respectability with an almost unprecedented violence—and success. When the non-pharmaceutical ceded its place to the promise that had made it possible in the first place, the arrival of a pharmaceutical substitute, this was the result of a similar type of restriction, this time in the realm of health and its maintenance. First of all, the care a human (and indeed an animal) community once had the skill and judgement to offer one another—beyond the professional institutionalisation of medicine—was replaced by a purely medical conception of ‘health-care’; secondly, within the medical itself, other forms of prophylaxis had to give way before the immense commercial juggernaut of the pharmaceutical companies, tightly bound up with the actuality 157

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of ‘public health’ institutions and the decisions made in their name. These constrictions led to the production and ratification of one remedy and one alone, the sole true Messiah that would see an end to these restrictions and permit a return to liberty and normality (with a few minor changes, in the form, for instance, of a digital ID). This solitary pharmaceutical remedy rounded off and solidified still further the supposed ‘consensus’ that was said to exist with regard to the other aspects of the affair: the remedy was for everyone, even those almost everyone secretly knew to be at no significant risk from the virus. It was a universally beneficent panacea since either the disease or its remedy was a risk to everyone, and the only way to conclude this endless dialectic between the virus and lockdown—between letting a virus run free and keeping human beings imprisoned—was to bow before the Messiah that would thereby be seen to have arrived. Faith, after all, was requisite in this respect, particularly given the sheer extent of that to which adherents of the measures had to blind themselves. No end to the restrictions was in sight even when the vaccine arrived, and the messiah, it seemed, was less than perfect. Indeed, and this is not said merely in hindsight, which in any case seems less than 20:20 for most who are influenced by the mass media, all of these unities, fiercely defending themselves against any alternative, from the Science, to the Non-Pharmaceutical to the Pharmaceutical, have every one been gradually, or in leaps and bounds, revealing their counterproductivity, the malign side-effects or epiphenomena of their imposition, despite every effort to stem the flow of information into the public realm (and that in the name of stopping ‘misinformation’). In each case—the Science, the Non-Pharmaceutical, and the Pharmaceutical—we have the semblance of a totality, a universality, something to which no exception can be brooked, a single hegemonic line, and anyone who disputes this hegemony is to be ostracised beyond the bounds of logos and into the margins of the disreputable. The elision of an alternative shows itself obliquely in the wounds caused by this immense self-harm on the part of logos, which are starting to weep. The fact that there might have been an alternative which could have spared us some of these counterproductive effects is slowly seeping into the public consciousness. But we are yet to be allowed by those in power to breathe a word of what that alternative might be (alternative interpretations of the virus and its dangers, alternative non-pharmaceutical remedies, and alternative forms of ‘care’ to and within the pharmaceutical). We have tried to demonstrate that the immunising self-enclosure of all three of these moments was always destined to become auto-immune and thus to reveal its own incompleteness. Philosophy’s task is to encourage these unravellings and so to force or allow entities to come into accord with

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the logic that is already inherent within them. It thus opens up the possibility of an alternative to each of the monoliths proposed for our solemn worship and faithful obedience. We have to this end indicated the moments at which tacit decisions were made and then covered over, as if there never had been a choice. In this way we have attempted to identify possibilities that have slipped into oblivion, or, as is more and more often the case, were silenced. A silencing, like a forgetting, is very often itself subjected to a further forgetting or silencing. Thus we set ourselves the preliminary task of indicating the silencing of a silencing, the ‘super-injunction’ placed (by Law) upon the notion that there ever was, at any one of these junctures, an alternative path. In its most general form, the closure of the logos is what we are witnessing around us in a number of areas, as ‘debate,’ ‘free speech,’ ‘free thought,’ and the question of judgement itself are all being lost in a desperate attempt to form watertight hegemonies and the pitiful rush of the virtuous to huddle under these umbrellas, safe from the storm. Perhaps what has revealed itself as most troubling in the events of the past few years is this more general exclusion of dissenting voices from rational discourse. It is as if the slightest criticism constitutes an irrational negation of the kind one finds in the Freudian conception of ‘denial’ (hence we are described not as ‘deniers’ but as ‘denialists’), or the ‘-phobias’ which these days are pinned upon anyone who dares to question a discourse that has become hegemonic (in however narrow a set of confines, usually academic or social-mediatic). The gatekeepers of the prevalent view, or the view which is taken to be prevalent, share the same goal: to silence their opponents in advance, in order that the discursive field is neither threatened nor called upon to defend itself (it is, like the identities it speaks of, apparently vulnerable and in need of protection). The threatening opponent, in ad hominem fashion, is then pathologised such that any negation they may propose with respect to the discourse in question is presented unambiguously as a nonrational negation. Ultimately it is perceived as a weapon, capable of inflicting (irrational) violence and ‘threatening’ the ‘safety’ of this insulated, isolated, or immunised ‘safe-space.’ In the case currently under consideration, we are speaking not of academic conventions but of a position backed up by the full weight of the law, and as a consequence the merest critical question—indeed a question of any kind— may be treated as a threat to law and order itself, a negation or a call to negate, and equally, as something easily crushed by that very law and the power expressing itself thereby. We hear already that the police have been knocking on the doors of those who have expressed critical views publicly, ‘online.’ But since when have philosophers felt obliged to submit their questions to the State beforehand? Or to its mediatic arm that aids it in coercing public opinion and consent? Logos itself, in whatever translation we might choose

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to give it today so as to render it intelligible in the stifling conditions to which public discourse has been subjected (‘rational debate,’ ‘discussion,’ ‘free thought,’ ‘free speech’ . . . ), is in peril if we allow this state of affairs to persist, and, although the discourse that prevails seems unable to countenance any value beyond ‘survival’ and ‘saving lives,’ perhaps one day, when a sufficient weight of discourse has built up in the wake of interventions like Giorgio Agamben’s, some cracks might begin to show, and the apparent unities will become frayed at the edges. Then, if there are people willing to prise open these cracks and worry away at these worn edges, even this incarnation of logos might be forced to become minimally amenable to the idea that once Reason itself is silenced, the risks are far more acute than those any virus could present.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. A shorter and earlier account of some of the themes contained in the present work appears in the Journal of Italian Philosophy, Volume 5 (2022), in the form of a review of Giorgio Agamben’s book, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, and in a form shorter still as ‘Against the Logic of Immunity: Philosophy and the Epidemic’ in a volume entitled Pandemic Response and the Cost of Lockdowns: Global Debates from the Humanities and Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2023). Many thanks are owed to the readers of those texts and this. 2. For one symptomatic case, we might consider one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a petition proposing an alternative to the police response about which we shall speak elsewhere, the truth of which was revealed with the opening of the ‘Twitter Files’ in late 2022: cf. Jay Bhattacharya, ‘What I Discovered at Twitter HQ,’ Unherd, 26th December 2022. But many other examples may be available: the unpicking of the act of censorship, distortion, and smearing is itself a difficult task: if it is successful it leaves no trace, or leaves its victim in such bad odour that one is discouraged from investigation; and at the same time, the strategies, which do include simply exiling but also ‘demonetisation,’ are nevertheless often more subtle and involved, and as a result the newspapers and state broadcasters, in their haste, and with other motives in mind, have too little space to go into it. For these reasons, one often finds this work of unknotting in the less time-constrained spaces of internet videos and podcast recordings (some of the better ones are listed in the bibliography). Barbara Stiegler, in a rare example of measure, puts the matter in the following way: ‘This concealment of the state of science will appear in retrospect to be the original sin of governments, which chose the repression of their citizens in place of education and prevention. Many experts have played a murky role as guarantors here. Instead of encouraging a free flow of knowledge, they have contributed to the construction of a binary world opposing the “populists,” accused of denying the virus, and the “progressives,” concerned to do “whatever it takes” with respect to life and health. In this simplistic world opposing two camps, any form of nuance and critical discussion of the measures taken has gradually died out, and with it the plurality of voices in the scholarly world. [. . .] [B]etween the murderous laissez-faire and the 161

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radical strategies of confinement, a whole myriad of measures of an entirely different nature could have been imposed,’ Barbara Stiegler, De la Démocratie en Pandémie: Santé, Recherche, Éducation (Paris: Gallimard, 2021), e-book, n.p. Thanks to Gerald Moore for alerting me to the existence of this text, among a number of others from the French scene, where debate seems to have been more vigorous than in the Anglophone world. 3. The official jargon makes it clear that our description of the non-pharmaceutical ‘interventions’ as forming part of a police response is not altogether lacking in objectivity. ‘Lockdown’ was a term blessedly unfamiliar to English audiences before March 2020, deriving as it does from the lexicon of American law enforcement (for an illuminating etymology of the vocabulary that characterises the management of biological life, cf. Sajay Samuel, ‘On Corona Days,’ International Journal of Illich Studies 7:1 [2020 (December 2020)]: 70–98). To underline the fact that our reading of this is not altogether idiosyncratic, we might note that Donatella Di Cesare speaks of ‘house arrests’ (arresti domiciliari), employing the term and its cognates without hesitation at least three times, first to reinforce the notion of ‘a mental health emergency [un’emergenza psichica] [. . .] a mental health implosion of the most unthinkable consequences’ (Di Cesare, Immunodemocracy: Capitalist Asphyxia. Trans. David Broder [Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2021], 84, cf. 89 & 90). The book originally went by the title, Virus sovrano? L’asfissia capitalistica (Turin: Boringhieri, 2020), e-book, n.p.; cf. Peter Sloterdijk, speaking of France’s ‘Hausarrestregeln’ (Sloterdijk, Der Staat streift seine Samthandschuhe ab: Ausgewählte Gespräche und Beiträge 2020–2021 [Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021], 20). Lambros Fatsis and Melayna Lamb devote a brave book—with an apposite title—to a critique of the very notion of ‘a law enforcement response which treated the public as the virus’ (Fatsis & Lamb, Policing the Pandemic: How Public Health Becomes Public Order [Bristol: Policy Press, 2022], 1). Mehdi Belhaj Kacem speaks of ‘the “health crisis,” which has transformed the whole world into an oppressive, repressive, neo-totalitarian house arrest [assignation à résidence]’ (Kacem, Colaricocovirus: D’un génocide non conventionnel [n.p.: Exuvie, 2022], 33). Adam Wagner, himself a human rights lawyer, does not hesitate to speak of ‘effective house arrest’ (Wagner, Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why It Matters [London: Bodley Head, 2022], 3) and of ‘what often resembled a police state’ (ibid., 1). As Wagner puts it, ‘[d]uring that period of over two years, ministers used the state of emergency to create laws which would control every element of our lives. Within a short period, the state of emergency became an Emergency State, showing aspects of an authoritarianism alien to our way of life and history which many, including myself, would have thought impossible before this crisis began’ (ibid., 6). Perhaps, by allowing words such as ‘lockdown’ to become a comfortable fixture in our vocabulary, such an extreme action is normalised, and the sense of democracy allowed to overlap a little more with the sphere of totalitarianism. On the authoritarian drift of Western democracy, cf. Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, trans. D. Steuer (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), ch. 15, ‘The End of Liberalism.’ One could multiply the references here to a certain revaluation of authoritarianism.

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Fabio Vighi identifies the movement towards authoritarianism as one part of what capitalism has always desired, and which it has made necessary for itself (cf. Vighi, ‘The Central Bankers’ Long Covid: An Incurable Condition,’ Philosophical Salon, 18th October 2021; et al.). A brave text, written by Carlo Caduff and made available (on academia.edu) very early on, in April 2020, traces the emergence of authoritarianism in the West in a partly sociological but nevertheless revealing way (Caduff, ‘What Went Wrong: Corona and the World after the Full Stop,’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly 34:4 [December 2020]). Here we find one of the earliest attempts to demonstrate how the West came to model its own response after the Chinese solution (only just beginning to crumble at the time of writing, in December 2022, almost three years after it was begun and in the face of popular unrest). That this was well understood by those in power was later revealed by one of the architects of the affair, Neil Ferguson, admitting his surprise, in good faith or bad, that anyone in the democratic West would accept such measures (cf. Mark Woolhouse, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir [Muir of Ord: Sandstone, 2022], 2). As if to demonstrate which side the majority of professional philosophers took, and as an unwitting testimony to the aristocratism that characterises the preponderance of academics in this respect (or at least those possessed of the most strident and amplified voices), cf. Fabienne Peter, ‘Can Authoritarianism ever be Justified?,’ New Statesman, 27th August 2021. Apparently, it can. Those who do not have such channels open to them, who indeed barely have a voice that would represent their views in the mainstream media, and who would never have turned themselves into mouthpieces for those in power, simply have no say in the matter. The children need to be made to behave. 4. A lecturer in politics, of all things, at the author’s own university, at an Open Day, as every stall but one took it upon itself to pretend to welcome the hoi polloi of prospective students by altogether refusing to breathe in their miasmic contagion, concealing their faces and muffling their voices with dentist’s masks, was overheard to remark, of an enthusiastic march passing by outside, presumed to be protesting against lockdowns and mandatory injections of an experimental serum, ‘I bet that’s a hotbed of covid.’ It is just this gesture of casual and exclusionary dehumanisation, most frequently deployed by the Left and encouraged by the walls of the university buildings and the fences encircling the campus, that we are here attempting to think: how is it possible for such an immoral gesture to adopt a moral sneer and such studied self-assurance? 5. For an example of such an accusation from a revealingly representative source, cf. Judith Butler, What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 103. 6. As we shall see, one finds versions of this gesture in the work of Oxana Timofeeva, Catherine Malabou, and Nina Power. 7. What are we to make of the fact that the first significant breach of lockdown on the part of the middle classes was in order to protest that, quite simply, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ in response to George Floyd being killed in May 2020 precisely by means of the deprivation of breath? It certainly resembled a coming up for air of which they

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had hitherto deprived themselves. (For a quite other reading of the Black Lives Matter protests, cf. Judith Butler, What World Is This?, esp. 101ff but cf. passim, and on the question of breath, cf. 109. It is telling that Butler seems to consider this to be the sole affair which factually and rightfully ‘is not itself subject to any lockdown’ [ibid., 102]. We return to this point in chapter 4 of the present work.) 8. As Agamben says of the institution of healthcare, ‘[l]egitimate doubts arise concerning Italy: there was, in spreading panic and isolating people in their homes, a decision to burden the citizenry with the grave responsibility governments bear for having dismantled our national healthcare system, and, later, for having made a series of equally serious mistakes when confronting the epidemic in Lombardy’ (Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, trans. Valeria Dani [London: Eris, 2021], 44). 9. As the Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, quite explicitly avowed (cf. Woolhouse, The Year the World Went Mad, 55–56). 10. Cf. among many others, Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (London: 4th Estate, 2021). 11. ‘While all other sectors of society struggled to return to normal life, many universities became over-zealous, indulging in a semi-confinement, of which the students—condemned half the time to consume videos on their smartphones—were the first victims’ (Barbara Stiegler, De la Démocratie en Pandémie, n.p.). Stiegler gives an excellent account of the experience of university life in general, with its persistent embrace of everything that was worst in the whole affair, from infantilising top-down micromanagement to the digitalisation, or at least hybridisation, of social life, and the scapegoating of the young: ‘At the same time as the youngest were systematically attacked, infantilisation reigned to the point of humiliation’ (ibid.). 12. Giorgio Agamben and Massimo Cacciari, ‘Vaccinazione: la responsabilità della scelta,’ 9th August 2021. 13. One of so many despicable and infantilising advertisements for vaccination that were put abroad during this affair, all the more sinister for its apparently extreme naivety, depicted a young footballer, blatantly endowed with the characteristics of a racial group among whom ‘hesitancy’ was said to be widespread, exclaiming with an actor’s inane enthusiasm, ‘I got vaccinated for the team!’ 14. ‘In these conditions, without laying down every possible instrument of immediate resistance, the dissidents need to think about creating something like a society within society, a community of friends and neighbours within the society of enmity and distance. The forms of this new clandestinity, which will have to become as autonomous as possible from institutions, will have to be meditated upon and experimented with in each case, but they alone can guarantee human survival in a world that has devoted itself to a more or less conscious self-destruction’ (Agamben, ‘Una comunità nella società,’ 17th September 2021). 15. The writing of a book is not purely an intellectual affair; the last two and a half years have involved us in the experience of a progressive redoubling of isolation: one was both physically isolated and at the same time intellectually and linguistically alone; this added cruelty has, as might have been expected, led to the breakdown of yet more communal ties, which itself discouraged a dialectic between opposing

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positions, and indeed when a breaching of such closure was attempted, this in itself damaged relations, for the responses that took the side of the hegemony were experienced as bullying, a coercing of those already in confinement back into an enclosed intellectual sphere which intensified once again their sense of being stifled. Perhaps, then, this is the place to acknowledge that the present work could not have attained even the minimally satisfactory form that it has achieved without the words and occasionally the company of Sinéad Murphy, German Primera, Patrick Levy, Adam Potts, Lars Iyer, Gabriel Martin, Stephen Overy, Danny Smith, Mark Devenney, Nina Power, Gerald Moore, Naomi Tanner, Victoria Coulson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Ian Kidd, David Herbert, Seb Thirlway, Fabio Vighi, Ross Clark, and Mark Sinclair, together with many of my undergraduates, masters and doctoral students, who were far more open to questioning than the majority of people who are actually paid to be in the university, and a number of others whom I no longer care to name, so closed did the debate end up seeming to them, to the point of rupturing a bond of friendship that had in some cases endured for decades. But there was useful talk at the beginning. The cruelty of the abuse of humanity that almost all of us witnessed with a shared horror and in an acute and unprecedented form of suffering was in the end so limitless in the damage it wrought that almost all of these relations proved unsustainable, so frangible had they and we become after so long swimming against the tide. 16. Naomi Wolf has given us a striking chronicle of the gradual loss of landmarks in a rising sea, whilst laying particular stress upon the exclusion of those who differed, herself among them, and the deleterious effects of the many and various closures upon civic life, economy, and young people in particular (Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human [Fort Lauderdale, FL: All Seasons, 2022]). 17. The same goes for the mediatic presentation of the event: one could cite numerous examples of newspapers and mainstream news channels refusing to report certain stories and to represent certain positions for precisely the same reason (those on the Left), or for fear of censure (all the rest). 18. Anon. Manifeste Conspirationniste (Paris: Seuil, 2022); Conspiracist Manifesto, trans. Robert Hurley (Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2023). As Agamben points out, at a certain point, if history itself does demonstrably involve conspiracies, plots, collusion, there is no way to distinguish between a genuine explanation of events and a ‘conspiracy theory’ (cf. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 11ff & infra). The absolute and universal dismissal of a certain discourse and gesture as ‘conspiracist’ can then be seen to function so as to disarm any attempt at revealing a genuine act of conspiring when it does occur.

CHAPTER 1 1. Giorgio Agamben, A che punto siamo? L’epidemia come politica (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2020); Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, trans. Valeria Dani (London: Eris, 2021). A che punto siamo? takes its title from a short text, commissioned by the Corriere della Sera and then rejected. That such a text should become

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the eponym of the book as a whole suggests that this is how Agamben sees the likely reception of all of these texts, and perhaps even of his work as a whole. In recent days, he has written of his sense of speaking to no-one at all (Agamben, ‘A chi si rivolge la parola?’ [To Whom is the Word Spoken?], 23rd August 2022). 2. Agamben, A che punto siamo? L’epidemia come politica. Nuova edizione accresciuta (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2021); Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics. Second Updated Edition, trans. Valeria Dani (London: Eris, 2021). This expanded version of the first English translation appeared in October 2021 and included some but not all of the pieces added to the expanded Italian edition (albeit in a slightly different order, from chapter 16 in the English, ‘Two Notorious Terms,’ onwards). The Italian includes ‘Capitalismo comunista’ and ‘L’arbitrio e la necessità,’ ‘Cittadini di seconda classe,’ ‘Tessera verde,’ and ‘Uomini e lemmings,’ which are absent from the second English edition. The English lacks ‘Il volto e la morte’ (The Face and Death) but retains from the first English edition ‘The Face and the Mask,’ which is absent from both of the Italian editions. Neither the Italian, in either edition, nor the English includes ‘Some Data,’ ‘Phase 2,’ ‘What Colour is the Night?,’ a number of very short pieces, sometimes comprised of citations or paraphrases of others (from Lichtenberg to César Vallejo) or the more substantial, ‘When the House is on Fire,’ which was eventually published in Quando la casa brucia. Dal dialetto del pensiero (Macerata: Giometti & Antonello, 2020); When the House Burns Down: From the Dialect of Thought, trans. Kevin Attell (London: Seagull, 2022), which includes other short works less obviously related to the virus that have not, to the best of our knowledge, been published on the website of Agamben’s publisher, Quodlibet: https:​//​www​.quodlibet​.it​/una​-voce​-giorgio​ -agamben, as were the other texts to which we have referred. By the time the final draft of the present work had been completed in September 2022, six months of fragile freedom from restriction, and even a certain normality had come to settle, in England at any rate, and Agamben has continued to write on the topic, albeit more sporadically, and often in a manner that is more indirect than before, as he reflects more generally on the devastation wrought, at times in a tone of unaccustomed sadness. 3. Agamben’s most recent interventions, sometimes made in collaboration with Massimo Cacciari, concern the certification of ‘vaccination’ and may be found here: https:​//​www​.iisf​.it​/index​.php​/progetti​/diario​-della​-crisi​/date​/2021​/8​.html​?catid​=35. The apostrophes to which we sometimes have recourse advert to the fact that it is not clear that this word is appropriate to the novel mRNA injections, which might best be described as ‘transfection agents,’ which do not function simply along the lines of the usual inoculation by means of an attenuated or ‘innocuous’ form of the pathogen against which the immune system is taught to defend itself. Nevertheless, we shall employ the more familiar term where we are obliged to for reasons of convenience if not euphony (for these words, once innocent, have acquired an unmistakeably sinister ring over the course of the last few years), and so as to intervene intelligibly and effectively in the predominant discourse which insists on the term, no doubt to ameliorate the rightful impression of novelty and experiment that characterises it.

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4. These quantifiable biological traits allow us to prove our identity as a ‘good citizen’: ‘For many years now, at first only occasionally and barely perceptibly, then increasingly more openly and persistently, there has been an attempt to accustom citizens to supposedly normal and humane procedures and practices that had always been considered to be exceptional and inhumane. [. . .] [T]here is one threshold in the control and manipulation of bodies, the transgression of which would signify a new global political condition. It would equal a next step towards what Foucault has referred to as the progressive animalisation of man through extremely refined techniques. The electronic registration of finger prints, the subcutaneous tattoo and other such practices must be located on that threshold. [/] [. . .] What we are witnessing is [. . .] the appropriation and registration of the most private and unsheltered element, that is the biological life of bodies’ (Agamben, ‘Bodies Without Words: Against the Biopolitical Tattoo,’ German Law Journal 5:2 [2004], 168–69). In a telling intimation of a phrase that was to be put about with sinister readiness in 2020, originating from who knows where, Agamben, in 2004, speaks of ‘this new “normal” biopolitical relationship between the citizen and the state’ (ibid., 169), whilst predicting that ‘[t]he biopolitical tattoo imposed upon us today when we want to travel into the United States is the baton of what we might accept tomorrow as the normal way of registering into [sic] the mechanism and the transmission of the state if we want to be identified as good citizens’ (ibid.). 5. I have also included, apparently indiscriminately, material from texts which are by no means philosophical, some of which may well appear prima facie quite disreputable, and will no doubt be subject to a priori rejection by some readers. But I have done this partly in order to demonstrate the error of such a rejection, which the present work sets itself to analyse. Our very task is to demonstrate why such texts are marginalised and dismissed out of hand—often these days by way of the disturbingly self-assured, sovereign assertion of their ‘misinformation’—and by including them we are demonstrating a judgement upon them that is at the very least consequent upon having troubled to read them. Doing so lent credence to the notion that, these days, truth is most likely to appear in such disreputable spots, on the margins of mainstream discourse, or quite simply under erasure. 6. Where Are We Now?, 11ff. Of the distinction between epidemic and pandemic, Agamben tells us this: ‘The epidemic—which always recalls a certain demos—is thus inscribed in a pandemic, where the demos is no longer a political body but, instead, a biopolitical population’ (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 68). Epidemics in the past were largely not susceptible to the kind of response to which the present pandemic has proved to be, since now the biopolitical situation is different, and the history of technology has rendered possible a new conception of human identity based upon digitisable biological properties, a conception which can then govern our status as political citizens. 7. Where Are We Now?, 27. We shall see later on that a more ‘subjective’ form of conspiracy is also entertained by Agamben as a possibility in the same book and elsewhere. 8. On the so-called ‘Imperial model’ and its flaws, cf. Toby Green, The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (London: Hurst, 2021), 55ff; and

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on how ideally it should have been read, cf. Woolhouse, The Year, 36ff; 44ff. Cf. also the comments made in the Manifeste Conspirationniste, 75. The original paper may be found here: https:​//​www​.imperial​.ac​.uk​/mrc​-global​ -infectious​-disease​-analysis​/covid​-19​/report​-9​-impact​-of​-npis ​-on​-covid​-19​/, 16th March 2020, under the title of ‘Report 9—Impact of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (Npis) to Reduce Covid-19 Mortality and Healthcare Demand.’ 9. ‘[I]t was disconcerting to discover some months later that bed occupancy during the first wave (65% overall between April and June) was well below the long-term average (almost 90%). It was the small number of hospitals at close to 100% that we saw nightly on the television news’ (Woolhouse, The Year the World Went Mad, 62). 10. As Agamben has it, health moves very suddenly from being a right to being an obligation, and thus begins the new reign of ‘biosecurity,’ the criminalisation of failing health: its direct failure, the failure to protect it, or the failure to protect those ‘services’ which protect it (Where Are We Now?, 56). One has become accustomed to witnessing a similar logic in the case of the other ‘emergency services’: in England, at least, one is often confronted with posters proclaiming, apparently in all seriousness, ‘You wouldn’t call the fire brigade to put out a candle.’ (Infantilisation encounters few obstacles in a culture such as ours and particularly in situations characterised by fearfulness and uncertainty, in which states we experience a childlike helplessness and dependence. The obligation of the infantilised adult is, of course, to wonder whether this fear is justified and indeed whether it has not been artificially induced.) Let us note in passing that this troubling confusion of legality and morality that has blighted social and political life over the last few years, and which is often touched upon at the earliest stages of a philosophical education in the form of an elementary fallacy, will be directly and indirectly our concern throughout the current work: it operates at the heart of biopolitics and the functioning of Law by means other than law as the juridical realm comes to encompass matters that would never formerly have been considered susceptible to legislation and related forms of power and control. 11. Manifeste Conspirationniste, 8. 12. The connection between government and media is addressed at least indirectly by the present author’s essay, ‘The Machine in Esposito and Agamben,’ Journal of Italian Philosophy 5 (2022), with particular reference to the latter’s Kingdom and the Glory. We still have some work to do if we are to understand the significance of the ‘spectacular’ and the related role of Guy Debord in Agamben’s work, a role whose centrality has become ever more apparent. Neither Debord nor Agamben’s understanding of spectacle seems to have been deployed in any serious philosophical attempt to make sense of the media’s role in the recent debacle. 13. ‘An epidemic, as is suggested by its etymological roots in the Greek term demos (which designates the people as a political body), is first and foremost a political concept. In Homer, polemos epidemios is the civil war. What we see today is that the epidemic is becoming the new terrain of politics, the battleground of a global civil war—because a civil war is a war against an internal enemy, one which lives inside of ourselves’ (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 59–60).

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14. Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society: Pain Today, trans. D. Steuer (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), 18. Cf. Nina Power, ‘Life and Humanity in Covid Times with Reference to Ivan Illich and Giorgio Agamben,’ 30th August 2021: ‘an epidemic makes potential bioterrorists of us all.’ The hysterical obsession with ‘testing’ amounts to the demand for a supposedly neutral third party, some sort of ‘master,’ to tell us who we are, since after all we have been ruthlessly harassed into a feeling of desperate insecurity in this respect. Only thus, it is said, might one’s true—and otherwise concealed—identity (as infectious or clean) be revealed: but in this case, the security procedure must diverge from a passport check or X-ray. That said, even this gap is steadily being closed as the question of one’s identity, of what one really is, is collapsed together with one’s ‘health status,’ one’s biological reality. This has become ever more clear as the question of certification (which integrates one’s potential infectiousness with a proof of identity already rife with biometric data) has come more and more to occupy the forefront of governmental attention—almost as if a complete digital identification (ID) were one of the ultimate goals of the affair from the very beginning (cf. Agamben, ‘Bodies Without Words’) or an opportunistic exploitation of it (cf. Corbishley, Scanned, 90ff on the organisation ID2020’s explicitly citing immunisation as a way in to the introduction of digital forms of identification at a global level). At the heart of everything that is taking place here—and Han is acutely attuned to this—is a destruction of the merest semblance of trust, belief or faith, in the name of an absolutely certain and all-pervasive Knowledge (gathered by the panopticon of all-intrusive surveillance and monitoring). Once again, no philosopher after Kant should have remained impervious to this distinction and its fate. 15. ‘[A]symptomatic transmission of COVID-19 is infinitesimally rare’ (Shaun Griffin, ‘Covid-19: Asymptomatic Cases May Not Be Infectious, Wuhan Study Indicates,’ British Medical Journal, 1st December 2020.) We return to this point later (Ch. 4, infra). 16. To provide the justification for legal enforcement, it was necessary to overestimate the seriousness of the affair in countless ways. After the most ludicrous exaggerations of the fatality of the virus from the World Health Organisation itself, in the early days, which were reiterated by many of the models used to justify the implementation of the ‘non-pharmaceutical response,’ we now know that for anyone who was not already deathbound or extremely unlucky, the risks of anything worse than a bad flu for anyone still active in the socio-politico-economic sphere were negligible. As was pointed out in the Daily Telegraph, using an example that was invoked on many occasions to indicate our wretched inability to judge relative risks, anyone of such an age was six times more likely to die in a car crash than they were to succumb to the disease provoked by the coronavirus of 2019, driving being an excellent example of a risk that is run for the sake of freedom and convenience (Mason Boycott-Owen, ‘More Under 60s Died on Roads Last Year Than Those with No Underlying Conditions from Coronavirus: Only Six Under 19s with No Underlying Conditions Died from Covid-19 in England,’ Daily Telegraph, 28th December 2020; cf. Spiegelhalter & Masters, Covid by Numbers: Making Sense of the Pandemic with Data [London: Pelican, 2021], 110 & 148ff; cf. Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom,

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Risk and Taking Back Control [London: Bodley Head, 2020] and the same author’s filmed interventions on recent events, largely considered under the heading of ‘safetyism’). As Bjorn Lomborg points out, the safest speed limit to set by law would be around three miles per hour, thus reducing cars to a walking pace, and no-one would dream of suggesting anything so contrary to the very purpose of motorised transport (Lomborg, False Alarm [New York: Basic, 2021], 7; 14; cf. Woolhouse, The Year, 56). Individual and popular judgements with respect to risk have gradually been outlawed over the course of the last century, with risk itself now effectively ruled out in the name of a universal securing on the part of the State that immunises an entire population against danger, whether or not they wish to be so protected. As Mark Woolhouse, one of those charged by his governments (the Scottish and the English) with controlling risk, and yet one possessed of a rare thoughtfulness, has pointed out, rhetoric takes a dangerous and irrational turn here when it is claimed—as the Scottish First Minister did—that not one single death from the coronavirus was ‘acceptable’ (ibid., 55–56). Behind such statements must lie an ulterior motive, otherwise they remain altogether unintelligible. 17. For a summary of this history, with particular reference to the defining authority of the World Health Organisation, cf. Toby Green, The Covid Consensus, 163–66. As soon as institutions of any kind are involved and acquire such authority, one loses any right simply to assume that what is involved in such definitions is an entirely unimpeachable ‘scientific objectivity.’ To some extent, this is the whole problem with the ‘pharmaceutical’ side of the debate: that a certain narrow construal of ‘care’ and medical care in particular has come to predominate so overwhelmingly that it is the sole recourse in circumstances such as this. It has come to be taken for granted, particularly in advanced Western countries, and especially America, that healthcare tout court must involve the intersection of medicine and (industrial) pharmaceuticals. To restore another interpretation of ‘care’ we shall later rely upon a sustained reading of Ivan Illich, and the work of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has devoted himself to prising apart the latter pairing, the collapse of which he largely imputes to Anthony Fauci and his ilk. 18. Cf. World Health Organisation, ‘World Health Assembly Agrees to Launch Process to Develop Historic Global Accord on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response,’ 1st December 2021, https:​//​www​.who​.int​/news​/item​/01​-12​-2021​ -world​-health​-assembly​-agrees​-to​-launch​-process-​ to​-develop​-historic​-global​-accord​ -on​-pandemic​-prevention​-preparedness​-and​-response. 19. The subtitle of Agamben’s book on the virus, ‘the epidemic as politics,’ gives voice to the fact that its task is to experience the virus and the response made to it on a political level, in political terms, and much more broadly than that, in terms of the logical and linguistic conditions which made it possible. The gesture of renaming an epidemic a ‘pandemic’ also marks a transition in the way that the human community is conceived: indeed it is thereby encouraged to conceive itself as a ‘population,’ rightfully subject to a form of thinking that might be described in terms of either ‘public health’ or the more general, ‘biopolitics’: ‘The epidemic—which always recalls a certain demos—is thus inscribed in a pandemic, where the demos is no longer a political body but, instead, a biopolitical population’

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(Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 68). And indeed the shift to a form of ‘population thinking’ among the very people targeted by the ‘messaging’ involved a change in addressee, from the first person, to the second, to the third, the third, which each of us was to become, as we were instructed to consider ourselves as anonymous parts of a larger population. In the wretched managerial language that is the ‘affirmative’ version of the minatory legalistic discourse—these two together comprising the only formal ways of speaking that seem to be available to us—we were to constitute a ‘team,’ all of the members of which were involved in an obscure game of protecting one another, but never themselves, such that no-one was in the end protecting anyone in particular, but one was simply keeping ‘levels’ of incidence among this population somehow acceptable, according to criteria that were frequently shifting and often uncertain. David Cayley was highly attuned to this shift thanks in part to his studies with Ivan Illich, according to whose work the human being comes to view himself as a ‘statistic’—a gesture essential to the very idea of ‘public health’ (cf. Manifeste Conspirationniste, 286ff). This shift to a third-personal mode of consideration was reflected in the form of the imperatives delivered to us, particularly in middle-class institutions. One could perform an analysis of the way in which the administration of power is reflected in the imperatives that the state promulgates: from (second person) ‘You must . . . ,’ spoken from a position of paternal authority, to (the first person plural) ‘Let’s all. . . . ’: the chummy, almost upper-middle-class edict, halfway between the language of the motivation coach and that of an insidious ‘boss’ pretending to be ‘one of us’ whilst also having his word be law, or even loosening the rigour of the law and allowing it to assume the guise of a guideline intended to become a norm, all the while cloaked in implicit legalistic language and threats. Or else the imperative disguises itself in a still more ameliorated form simply as ‘advice’ (that of course any sane healthy ‘responsible’ individual would be foolish not to spontaneously want to follow, a trammel which it is nevertheless possible to stray from, but it is not ‘recommended’ or [worse, because moralising] ‘expected’). Law speaks with a ‘You Must’ or ‘Thou Shalt,’ while guidelines give rise to the ‘Let Us.’ Or else the media simply affirms a generalising fait accompli: ‘the Nation Mourns,’ ‘The Nation Braces [itself]. . . . ’ 20. David Cayley, ‘Questions about the Current Pandemic from the Point Of View Of Ivan Illich,’ 8th April 2020. Reprinted in Conspiratio 1 (Autumn 2021). (Extensive quotations from this source are used with permission.) This is a text Agamben gave the near exclusive privilege of including among his own, in the Quodlibet series, ‘Una Voce.’ A similar and perhaps more fully elaborated version of Cayley’s response may be found in ‘The Prognosis: Looking the Consequences in the Eye,’ Literary Review of Canada, October 2020. From the other side of the debate, it is curious to read the account of Jeremy Farrar, a member of the United Kingdom’s SAGE committee (and having been Director of the Wellcome Trust, and a certain group promoting vaccines of all kinds, will soon also be the ‘Chief Scientist’ for the World Health Organisation), and to witness the rather vulgar urgency felt by those on his side for this naming to take place, and their frustration that it did not happen sooner. These advocates of the most extreme forms of police-response and a very narrowly constricted pharmaceutical remedy

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were clearly well aware of the truth of what Cayley states: the naming alone would be enough. 21. For a spirited insistence on how much else was forgotten or simply erased from mediatic presentation as a result of the ‘pan-,’ cf. Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Virus in the Age of Madness, trans. Steven B. Kennedy (New Haven: Yale University Press), 79ff. We shall analyse the function of the rhetoric of war elsewhere, but here let it be noted that, empirically speaking, the pandemic only subsided for the media when another more literal war arose, fought in the Ukraine, and one can easily imagine that the economic disaster that began to replace it on the front pages could be spoken of in terms of a ‘food crisis’ upon which ‘war’ had to be waged (this was only supplanted in the English press by reports of some equally patriotic behaviour in the face of death: that of Queen Elizabeth II, who ‘soldiered’ on despite contracting the disease; she would die only much later, and thereby once again prevent the virus from returning to the front pages). (Agamben has recognised the invocation of war in each case as indicating a common strategy: ‘It is no longer necessary, therefore, for governments to show themselves capable of governing problems and catastrophes: insecurity and emergency, which are now the sole basis of their legitimacy, can under no circumstances be eliminated, but—as we are seeing today with the substitution of the war between Russia and Ukraine for the war against the virus—only articulated in ways that converge, but are different each time. A government of this kind is essentially anarchic, in the sense that it has no principles to adhere to other than the emergency it produces and maintains’ [Agamben, ‘Libertà e insicurezza’ (Freedom and Insecurity), 8th December 2022].) So desperate has the level of linguistic and conceptual sophistication become in public discourse that the only thing considered legible for readers in the United Kingdom is ‘them and us’; the only colours, black and white. In light of this, the most fundamental task in social reform falls to philosophers, since they alone can determine and teach what it is to think, such that nothing in public discourse is ever figured as a ‘war’ again—even literal war, one is tempted to say, particularly having seen the ludicrous and disturbing spectacle of Russian artists prevented from practising their art, and indeed the tarring of an entire nation with one brush. In a more celebratory mood, but again in a certain sublimated form of international war, taking place before tightly packed audiences of many tens of thousands, the Association Football World Cup preoccupied the newspapers in the autumn and winter of 2022, whilst, remarkably, certain doctors and scientists still persisted in calling for a return of the ‘rule of six.’ 22. So it has often been assumed, although if the virus was produced, as seems likely, through ‘gain of function’ research funded in part by the United States of America itself, and pursued in Wuhan, if not elsewhere, then its seriousness was much more likely to be known. The consequences of this potential origin are yet to be unfurled, and we deal with them only tangentially, but they can only add credence to anything and everything that the inventors decry as ‘conspiracy theory.’ 23. Cayley, ‘Questions.’

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24. Ibid. 25. Matthew Ratcliffe and Ian Kidd thus rightly begin their first text on the affair with this important point: why has this disease (‘covid-19’) achieved prominence over these other and far more fatal ‘third world’ diseases and disorders? (All the while the notion that ‘black lives matter’ was brewing in the confused minds of those confined to their computer screens) (Ratcliffe & Kidd, ‘Welcome to Covidworld,’ The Critic, November 2020). 26. Alex Broadbent, ‘Lockdown is Wrong for Africa,’ Mail & Guardian, 8th April 2020. One of the principal merits of Toby Green’s Covid Consensus (ch. 3 esp.), in its strongest and most revelatory passages is to demonstrate not only the inappropriateness of ‘lockdown’ measures for the African form of life but more generally the way in which a single measure, devised elsewhere but repeated identically in an altogether different culture—such as Africa’s—can have effects so significantly different from those that follow from its implementation in Western countries that it becomes altogether inappropriate here (thus, let it be said, the argumentative strategy of Green’s book, however powerful, risks suggesting that these measures were potentially appropriate in their native territory, which is contrary to the author’s intention). This gesture of a ‘blanket’ imposition recalls the conception of technology envisaged by Martin Heidegger: as a framework (Gestell) implemented globally, identical everywhere, without concern for how differently each local part will have to contort itself in order to fit. Mark Woolhouse, in a largely creditable book, composed by an epidemiologist but a rightfully self-critical one, even though he will have spent the majority of the book arguing that lockdowns do more harm than good (‘My hope—and my main motivation for writing this book—is that lockdown scepticism will become the mainstream view’ [Woolhouse, The Year, 238]), admits that while these measures might at least be debated when it comes to Western Europe, ‘[f]or every country in sub-Saharan Africa—with the possible exception of South Africa—there can be little question that the cure will turn out to be far worse than [the] disease’ (ibid., 220, cf. 215–20). 27. On an explicit affinity between Illich and Agamben cf. David Cayley, ‘Echoes, Affinities, Resonances: Ivan Illich in Contemporary Thought,’ 16th January 2019 and a forthcoming text by Cayley in the Journal of Italian Philosophy 8 (2024), devoted to the relation between the two thinkers. Byung-Chul Han occupies a similar position, and recognises the biopolitical character of the present moment without obviously being a theorist of biopolitics himself: ‘The virus is a mirror. It shows what society we live in. We live in a survival society that is ultimately based on fear of death. Today survival is absolute, as if we were in a permanent state of war. All the forces of life are being used to prolong life. A society of survival loses all sense of the good life. Enjoyment is also sacrificed for health, which, in turn, is raised to an end in itself. [. . .] The more life is one of survival, the more fear you have of death. The pandemic makes death, which we have carefully suppressed and outsourced, visible again. The constant presence of death in the mass media makes people nervous. [/] The hysteria of survival makes society so inhumane. Your neighbour is a potential virus carrier, someone to stay away from.

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Older people have to die alone in their nursing homes because nobody is allowed to visit them because of the risk of infection. Is prolonging life by a few months better than dying alone? In our hysteria of survival, we completely forget what a good life is. For survival, we willingly sacrifice everything that makes life worth living: sociability, community and proximity. In view of the pandemic, the radical restriction of fundamental rights is uncritically accepted’ (Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, 120). ‘Saint Francis hugged lepers. [. . .] The fear and panic of the virus are exaggerated. The average age of those who died of COVID-19 in Germany is 80 or 81. The average life expectancy in Germany is 80.5. Our panicked reaction to the virus shows that something is wrong with our society’ (Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, 121). The last paragraph of Han’s Palliative Society associates the attempted elision of pain from human life with the oblivion of death: ‘The pain-free life of permanent happiness is not a human life. Life which tracks down and drives out its own negativity cancels itself out. Death and pain belong together. In pain, death is anticipated. If you seek to remove all pain, you will have also to abolish death. But life without death and pain is not human life; it is undead life. In order to survive, humans are abolishing themselves. They may succeed in becoming immortal, but only at the expense of life itself’ (Han, The Palliative Society: Pain Today, 60). On pain as something that is no longer to be assumed by subjects and rendered meaningful by the cultural rituals of an ‘art of suffering’ but as expropriated and managed by an institution, cf. Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (London: Marion Boyars, 1976), 133ff. 28. Cayley, ‘Questions.’ Shall we also be asked: Do we not care about death? About old people dying? Are we indifferent to their suffering? To which we might respond: Should we care, what does ‘care’ mean, and should this care be given at absolutely any cost? Taking ‘care’ in the appallingly limited sense it has been given of late, in which it signifies simply ensuring survival and nothing more, one could, perhaps, in some ideal world, care infinitely about and for every living (and even every inanimate) thing, but in a context such as this, a context which envelops finitudes of every kind, decisions and judgements are called for (cf. Cayley’s discussion with Illich on the topic of care in Ivan Illich in Conversation [Toronto: House of Anansi, 1992], 215ff et al.). This is certainly so in a context in which a decision has already been made, and made resolutely in favour of the old and the fragile, against the young and the healthy, whose youth and health have been considered if not dispensable then at least resilient enough to weather the blow. So do we care that the old died? Certainly it would have been in everyone’s interest if people had not been ejected from hospitals into care homes where their chances of dying were greater, for then, even the perhaps inflated fatality figures would hardly have been impressive enough to provide so much as a fig leaf of a justification for such totalitarian action to be taken against the healthy majority, but they would likely be dead by now in any case.

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Do we care, then? We certainly do not care enough to think that the deaths— very slightly premature, if at all—of those already dying (if it is true that those who died here were already labouring under at least four or five—and most likely more—‘co-morbidities’ on average) are enough to justify the human damage they have elsewhere wrought. But our interlocutor, speaking with the voice of the State, persists: And what of the young who died, for we are told that there were some? Perhaps, but their number and significance were grossly magnified by media interests (cf. Woolhouse, The Year, 108). And what is the statistical likelihood of these deaths, when the old and older are factored out? Are there really no other risks, no causes of death far more numerous and serious that one not only hears nothing about, but about which information has actively been silenced, despite their having been worsened by the monomaniacal fixation on this one single disease and the regulatory or simply fearful warding off from hospitals and surgeries of those who might otherwise have been diagnosed with and treated for these disorders: the cancers, heart disease, and above all—since we are speaking of the young—the suicides (and one can kill one’s self over a number of years, and indeed one can begin dying very young—in September of 2022, these suicides among the young were just beginning to be reported [cf. Gabriella Swerling, ‘Suicide rates of women under 24 surge to sharpest rise on record,’ Daily Telegraph, 6th September 2022]). One day these will surely be shown to have increased alongside the exponential increase—in truth so overwhelming that the mass media could not disavow it and indeed after the event, in the spring and summer of 2022, have started to wring their hands over the consequences of the very actions which they themselves enthusiastically endorsed—in psychic suffering, particularly on the part of those whose lives take on meaning largely through mass gatherings and random interactions outside of the stultifying and (in various ways) often abusive family home: the young, once again, or the isolated: anyone in other words whose ‘household’ does not comprise a standard nuclear family, no doubt in a house with a garden. Whatever measures we have taken with respect to these other causes of death and disorder pale into embarrassed insignificance when compared with the response to the virus. There are always risks, and we are generally allowed, albeit less and less so, to calculate them. Why in this case has risk and its adjudgement been so fanatically prohibited?—Once again, a huge explanatory gap looms. Should we then simply ‘do nothing’ in the face of disease? our accuser retorts in frustration. But what precisely are ‘we’ doing about any of the other diseases and disorders which blight our culture? In general, they would be forced to answer that we simply devolve responsibility to those qualified to treat them: the doctors and nurses—and indeed, we ‘do nothing,’ and rightly so. Furthermore, if ‘saving lives’ were really your concern, you would not have been complicit in turning a blind eye to the ‘excess deaths’ (precisely not from Covid-19), which are at the time of writing especially numerous in the countries which most enthusiastically embraced confinement as a strategy, unambiguously impugning the latter as a remedy. This ‘mortality’ has become so glaring in the winter of 2022–2023 that questions have been raised in parliament (cf. Dr. John Campbell, ‘Excess deaths, parliament questions,’ https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=nG43CFvAq3Q​&ab​

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_channel​=Dr​.JohnCampbell [accessed 1st April 2023]). Nor would you have done little more than murmur disapproval when faced with those who lend a voice to the human beings who were damaged, often terminally so, by the remedies settled upon. 29. In the economic terms that spring so readily to the lips of politicians, this is the ‘cost-benefit analysis’ that was so manifestly not done. 30. And to the perspective of (the Foundation of) Bill Gates, ‘from whom the WHO, in reality, emanates’ (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 68, cf. 77 where Gates is referred to as ‘the WHO’s main financier’). Endless documentation on this point is provided by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (New York: Skyhorse, 2021). This colossal work provides an exhaustive account of the relation between American institutions of public health and the pharmaceutical industry, along with Anthony Fauci’s role within this, ultimately as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The tendency of the text, which is an essential prolegomena to, if not a conclusive argument (virtually or literally forensic) for an alternative to the route taken during the last three years, is to demonstrate that the handling of the epidemic formed a continuum with the insistence over many decades on one particular way of dealing with health and illness (AIDS and its treatment forming the central and very highly developed example, whilst also constituting a precedent for the response to the current affair). The one single route proposed is shown to have developed in a close complicity with the pharmaceutical industry (‘the Pharma paradigm’ [xxiii]), and—although this would have to be greatly developed with reference to the History and Philosophy of Science, that we are as yet not in a position to engage with as we would need to—it has involved the absolutely exclusive endorsement of ‘germ theory’ as opposed to the more holistic ‘miasma theory,’ attacking illness not in an environmental or holistic manner, but in terms of individual remedies for individuated conditions: in a word, pharmaceutics, usually vaccines that target individual viruses, even when these prove remarkably hard to isolate or to identify as sole causes of a certain disease: the HIV virus being violently asserted as the sole cause of AIDS is a case in point. Once this has been asserted, all funding, the control of which seems largely to lie within the power of Fauci and his Institutes, can then be directed towards finding a pharmaceutical remedy which targets that virus alone, whilst more general questions of lifestyle, nutrition, and environment can go to hell, as indeed they have. More philosophically speaking (and it is just this translation into philosophical terms that the Philosophy of Science is called upon to make here), Kennedy’s book depicts a narrowing down of the understanding of ‘medicine’ or, more broadly, ‘care’ itself, to a single chemical and pharmaceutical ‘paradigm,’ which by itself leads to immense financial rewards being bestowed by the state upon the inventors of these pharmaka. All the more so if one can render the production of these drugs a monopoly, and especially if the disorder may be said to be widespread. This monopoly is at least partly responsible for the extraordinary aggression with which dissenting voices within medicine in particular are hounded: it is by now well known that Emergency Use Authorisations cannot legally be given if any other remedy of any other kind is available.

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(Barbara Stiegler remains one of the very few philosophers who broached an alternative to the pharmaceutical or ‘biotechnological’ paradigm, in terms of ‘an environmental approach to health issues,’ Barbara Stiegler, De la Démocratie en Pandémie, n.p.) For one usually attuned to such things, it comes as some surprise that Slavoj Žižek takes the World Health Organisation as a model for the organ of global coordination that he proposes for the future: ‘the World Health Organisation from which we are not getting the usual bureaucratic gibberish but precise warnings proclaimed without panic. Such organisations should be given more executive power’ (Žižek, Pan(dem)ic! Covid-19 Shakes the World [Cambridge: Polity, 2020], 41). There are already signs that his wish might well be granted. Mark Woolhouse, far better placed to speak of such things, affirms that ‘the World Health Organisation got the biggest calls completely wrong in 2020,’ including ‘the promotion of lockdowns long after it became clear that in many places they were causing more harm than the novel coronavirus itself’ (Woolhouse, The Year, 220). What he never asks is precisely why that might have been, too afraid perhaps of the accusation of ‘conspiracist’ to even attempt an explanation, but as the authors of the Manifeste Conspirationniste so relentlessly demonstrate, the best strategy for real conspirators is to accuse those who might identify them as such of being ‘conspiracy theorists.’ To fill the explanatory gap we are called to resist such a labelling. We have every reason to think that Agamben would concur with this view: ‘In the 1980s, those who spoke of conspiracies were accused of Oldthink. Nowadays, it is the president of the republic himself who publicly denounces the state secret services before the whole country as having conspired, and as continuing to conspire, against the constitution and public order. This accusation is imprecise only with regard to one detail: as someone had already pointedly observed, all conspiracies in our time are actually in favour of the constituted order. [. . .] [/] [. . .] During the terminal phase of the evolution of the state-form, each state organ and service is engaged in a ruthless as well as an uncontrollable conspiracy against itself and against every other organ and service’ (Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino  [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000], 127–28/98–99, translation slightly modified). Woolhouse remains constantly perplexed by the way in which lockdowns seemed to be rendered acceptable precisely on the—for him, unjustifiable—assumption of the Vaccine’s arriving before the lockdown’s inherent unsustainability had become overwhelming (whatever that might mean and however we might argue that it did not become unbearable the moment at which it ceased to have a promised end, irrevocably and absolutely set in advance). One is tempted to follow Kennedy and others in thinking that the vaccine was always predestined to arrive, and indeed that very fact was precisely the reason for choosing a policy that necessitated its rapid invention in the first place. If that explanation proves to be false then another is demanded, and a number shall be broached in the course of the present work (from the need to avert a financial disaster that was impending in 2019, to the exacerbation of an existing biopolitical power structure involving an ever more expansive form of social control).

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Let us note in passing that in our debate with Žižek, which forms a persistent undercurrent to the present work and which will occasionally bubble up to the surface, we are forging a still hazy identification of a trifurcation of the Left which is also implicitly at the heart of what we are attempting here: (1) the communistic left, which endorses internationalist solutions in which individuals and local cultures are to be ruthlessly swallowed in the name of a common good; (2) the identitarian Left, which has violently rejected that model and along with it any concern for working class forms of life; and finally, (3) the position gradually emerging in clearer outline, which seems to be endorsed by Agamben along with all of those whom we are here taking as our guide: a sublation of the two positions, which rejects the notion of governance, and particularly the technocratic kind (which is why it is often, when it takes a more obviously Leftist form, aligned with anarchism [cf. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Colaricocovirus, on the notion of anarchism in relation to the totalitarianism that is deemed to have manifested itself in response to the recent ‘health crisis’]), whilst at the same time attempting to respect individual liberty and the skills and forms of life (the ‘identities’) embedded within local cultures (this is the Illichian tendency). 31. As an example of the philosopher’s lack of scepticism in the face of the event and a consequent rejection of the very possibility of ‘invention,’ we are fortunate in being able to adduce the case of Prof. Slavoj Žižek: ‘Both Alt-Right and fake Left [sic] refuse to accept the full reality of the epidemic, each watering it down in an exercise of social-constructivist reduction, i.e., denouncing it [n.b. the virus itself—or the epidemic—is not what is denounced, but rather the responses made to it] on behalf of [sic—rather, ‘for’ or ‘in the guise of’] its social meaning’ (Žižek, ‘Monitor and Punish? Yes, please!,’ Philosophical Salon, 16th March 2020, reprinted with minor alterations and in truncated form in Žižek, Pan(dem)ic!, cf. 76). 32. Cf. Bruno Latour, ‘Is This a Dress Rehearsal?,’ Critical Inquiry, 26th March 2020, and Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2020), 3. 33. Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, 12. 34. Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘When the Global Reveals the Planetary: Bruno Latour Interviews Dipesh Chakrabarty,’ in Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, ed. Latour and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe: Centre for Art and Media/Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2020 [actually published c. 2022]), 24–31. 35. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘An Era of Pandemics? What is Global and What Is Planetary about COVID-19,’ Critical Inquiry, 16th October 2020. 36. Curiously enough, the incidence of the epidemic has provided the occasion for one of Agamben’s own extremely rare excursions into the question of environmental damage (Agamben, ‘Gaia and Chthonia,’ 28th December 2020, reprinted in the second edition of A che punto siamo?). 37. Unsurprisingly, the Guardian, in less than a year, was averring that periodic lockdowns might well be the solution to the problem of the emissions that are often blamed for climate change (Fiona Harvey, ‘Equivalent of Covid Emissions Drop Needed Every Two Years—Study,’ Guardian, 3rd March 2021), and of late we hear news of Oxford City Council’s banning certain forms of travel within the city for ‘environmental’ reasons.

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One should consult Bjorn Lomborg’s work for a rebuttal of the very idea that the restrictions imposed really did have the impact claimed, a critique of the carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction goals themselves and the cost of achieving them, together with an honest acknowledgement of the way in which the financial ‘catastrophe’ (Lomborg’s word) denting growth in these years is certain to make progress with respect to climate change, primarily to be pursued on his account under the heading of technological ‘adaptation,’ more difficult to achieve (Lomborg, False Alarm, 223ff). 38. The author’s own university took it upon itself to unilaterally declare such an emergency, without perhaps imagining that this would have any real effect, perhaps not even for their reputation, whilst at the same time posters were being erected in many of its classrooms instructing its occupants to leave the windows open (for ventilation) whilst the heating was on full blast, and this in the north of England. 39. Out of respect for the particular singularity of the Shoah, Agamben insists that this language of ‘denialism’ should be banished from philosophical discourse altogether (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, ch. 16, ‘Two Notorious Terms’). Just plausibly, Agamben is responding to Donatella Di Cesare, who, in a brave text that remains close to Agamben’s theses, to the point of reading at times like a systematisation of them avant la lettre, falls to speaking, albeit cautiously, of ‘conspiracy theories’ (the other of Agamben’s ‘notorious’ or ‘infamous’ words) and ‘denialism’ (negazionismo) (Di Cesare, Immunodemocracy, 65–73). And she is not unaware of the significance of the term, having recently devoted an entire book to the subject: Di Cesare, If Auschwitz is Nothing: Against Denialism, trans. David Broder (Cambridge: Polity, 2023). On the very first page she compares the denial of the Holocaust with that of ‘the pandemic’ and ‘the climate emergency’ (ibid., 1): a troubling comparison indeed, given how differently ‘the official narrative’ has functioned in each of those cases; how powerful, as well, is the comparison of any theory of conspiracy to that of a ‘Jewish plot,’ a gesture which helps to ensure that any attempt to unveil an actual conspiracy when it occurs is dismissed out of hand. Di Cesare’s later description of denialism, that it is ‘the suppression of the conditions for engaging in dialogue’ (ibid., 59), could in the context of the present work be applied to her very critique of ‘denialism,’ of which she says that ‘[its] logic is that of all or nothing. Denialism is the totalitarianism of thought’ (ibid., 63). Our own work may be construed as a generalisation of Agamben’s caution with respect to the language of ‘denial’ which puts in question the many other abstract negations that have come to characterise contemporary life, and academic life in particular, in the form of ‘zero tolerance,’ ‘cancellations,’ ‘no-platforming,’ ‘unfriending,’ ‘blocking,’ and so on. In each case, we find a negation that always attempts to exclude the opponent from Reason itself on the grounds of a self-authorising assertion to the effect that the other person is negating something in a nonrational way, presumably under the influence of dubious ulterior and perhaps unconscious motives (which are somehow quite manifest to the accuser and render the accused morally culpable in an obscure fashion). This, pace Di Cesare, strikes us as a ‘totalitarianism of thought.’ 40. Rocco Ronchi, ‘The Virtues of the Virus,’ European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 14th March 2020. Ronchi we are taking as a representative of Badiou’s position in this respect.

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41. Penzin, ‘Pandemic Suspension,’ Radical Philosophy 2.08 (Autumn 2020). A similar notion may be discerned in Benjamin Bratton’s The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (London: Verso, 2021), cf. 14, 38ff, 63 (for a particularly intemperate list of what, for Bratton, amount to ‘fictions’), et al. The text seems to rely on an opposition between what the author deems ‘materialism’ or ‘realism,’ and every other position, which would simply amount to ‘social constructivism’—the latter notion proving to be extraordinarily capacious. It risks resembling a return to a Galilean or Cartesian modernism, as if nothing of philosophy from Kant onwards were to be retained: indeed, certain strands of the ‘New Realism’ or ‘Speculative Materialism’ do suggest as much. Sergio Benvenuto, in an otherwise useful piece that dares to consider early on the question of comparative statistics, avers that, ‘this is not the time for philosophy’: ‘[i]n some cases, spreading terror can be wiser than taking things “philosophically”’ (Benvenuto, ‘Benvenuto in clausura,’ Antinomie, 5th March 2020. Trans. anon., ‘Welcome to Seclusion’ (or ‘[Sergio] Benvenuto [himself] in Seclusion’), European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 3rd [sic] March 2020). He even comes close to identifying the very notion of a philosophy of history with the ‘conspiratorial’ or ‘paranoiac.’ Agamben himself also risks proposing such an identification, but in quite another tone and with quite different intentions, whilst the Manifeste Conspirationniste traces the very history of the enunciative position from which the accusation of ‘conspiracy theory’ stems, one which is itself often involved in a plot that is soon revealed as conspiratorial. Thus the argument between supposed conspiracists and their accusers is in truth carried out within conspiracism itself, between two forms of conspiracy: one that temporarily disavows that status and one which has that label bestowed upon it so as to defuse it: ‘We are conspiracists [conspirationnistes], like all sensible people nowadays’ (Manifeste, 7); ‘The debate is not between conspiracy and anti-conspiracy [conspirationnisme et anticonspirationnisme], but within conspiracy [conspirationnisme]’ (ibid., 10). 42. Manifeste Conspirationniste, 102. 43. Daniel J. Smith, ‘On the Viral Event,’ European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 25th June 2020. 44. Ibid. 45. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 7 46. In truth, omicron was so pitiful, and virtually ‘uncontrollable,’ that it brought an end to all restrictions in a number of places, including England, from January 2022 onwards, and did seem temporarily to embarrass the advocates of extreme measures and to vindicate those who had opposed them. And yet somehow this moment failed to last, as if a recantation after so long simply could not be made, the reckoning never had. (This in spite of the fact that, at the time of writing, in January 2023, even the most fascist of European regimes were rescinding their ‘vaccine mandates,’ at least for now.) 47. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 18 48. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 28. Curiously, Alain Badiou draws the opposite conclusion from what he also deems the ‘non-exceptional’ character of the virus: complete obedience to measures which

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are anything but non-exceptional: ‘From the start, I thought that the current situation, characterised by a viral pandemic, was not particularly exceptional. So, I didn’t think there was anything to be done other than try, like everyone else [sic], to isolate myself at home, and nothing to be said other than to encourage everyone else to do the same’ (Badiou, ‘On the Epidemic Situation,’ trans. A. Toscano, 23rd March 2020; cf. Alain Badiou, Sur la situation épidémique (Paris: Gallimard, 2020) [27th (sic) March 2020]). State power is not even to be criticised for implementing such exceptional measures, for these seem to Badiou quite natural as well: ‘the powers that be [. . .] are in fact simply doing what they are compelled to by the nature of the phenomenon’ (ibid.). This is a curious obedience insofar as Badiou admits that the response of the State, whilst temporarily elevating the general interest and returning to certain gestures of nationalisation and broadly leftist State intervention is nevertheless ‘strategically preserving, in the future, the primacy of the class interests of which this state represents the general form’: the bourgeoisie. He also accepts at this level the comparison between epidemic and wartime: ‘We’ve known for a long time that in the event of a war between countries, the state must impose, not only on the popular masses, as is to be expected, but on the bourgeoisie itself, considerable constraints, all in order to save local capitalism.’ The only explanation for going along with an essentially conservative strategy that (according in fact to an immunitary or inoculatory logic) accepts a temporary cessation of free market activity only in order to save such a market in the long term, is Badiou’s contention that in truth the epidemic ‘will not have, qua epidemic, any noteworthy political consequences in a country like France,’ and even: ‘[t]his kind of situation (world war or world epidemic) is especially “neutral” at the political level.’ All we (viz. middle-class intellectuals) can do is use the hiatus, if such it be, simply to think about ‘new figures of politics’ and even to engage in ‘a stringent critique of every perspective according to which phenomena like epidemics can work by themselves in the direction of something that is politically innovative,’ since this will presumably hold back the former effort. And in truth, there is nothing ‘easy’ about this life, nothing like a newfound paradise of leisure. Only effectively retired academics who do not seriously teach or have any duties of pastoral care or supervision—or indeed any care for the young, for students—could imagine that (the contemplative) life is somehow ‘easier’ under conditions of enforced quarantine and the digitalisation of human contact. 49. Byung-Chul Han is another figure who has refused to bend the trajectory of his thought in the face of the pressures of the moment. Peter Sloterdijk displayed some initially promising signs before giving in to the compromises documented in Der Staat streift seine Samthandschuhe ab: Ausgewählte Gespräche und Beiträge 2020–2021 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021), although he remains in general unhindered by orthodoxy and almost always sheds a new light upon whatever he considers, from an angle that one would not have expected. Certain largely female figures, from Timofeeva, to Power, Barbara Stiegler, Malabou, and Murphy, together with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, the magnificent Invisible Committee and the Illichians remain exemplary for us: as do all of the nonphilosophical ‘dissidents’ who keep us company.

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CHAPTER 2 1. Speaking of England and Wales, David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters take care to specify both that 83 years of age gives the median and that this refers to those ‘[d]ying with Covid-19 on their death certificate.’ This is one year older than the median for all those dying without such a certification (Spiegelhalter & Masters, Covid by Numbers, 6, cf. 5ff). The book was actually published in 2022 and apparently finished in May 2021 (cf. 218) with final revisions incorporated in June 2021 (cf. 23). Even by that time, the Greek alphabet had been recited only so far as δ (ibid., 38). For all its pungent clarity and care, it is therefore already dated, and perhaps its authors would later have been forced to think twice about certain of their pronouncements. The book remains relatively firmly committed to the bizarre idea that it is acceptable to say (before a democratic audience of adults) that ‘lockdowns work,’ even though they do have the decency to summarise their appalling psychological and economic consequences—they aver a number of times that, ‘[a]s in wars, the young will pay the price of [sic—for?] protecting those who are more vulnerable’ (254), a line which can be heard in a very different tone (‘they will pay the price . . . ’) to the one that was presumably intended, but without seeming to doubt their epidemiological effectiveness or allowing that this suffering might be anything other than ‘collateral damage.’ They simply leave open the question of whether ‘less restrictive’ measures might also have been effective: ‘We can be confident that lockdowns have had an impact, but arguments will continue about whether less restrictive measures could be appropriate in a future pandemic’ (167). Despite its merits, the text never relinquishes the standpoint of the positivist scientist and above all never raises the question of the ‘ought.’ Efficacy reigns supreme. Quantifiable deaths always matter more than the unquantifiable ruination of lives. Principles do not exist. 2. Benvenuto, ‘The Virus and the Unconscious. My Diary,’ European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 29th March 2020. 3. Benvenuto, ‘Welcome to Seclusion.’ 4. Cacciari, ‘Our Homes are Hell,’ European Journal of Psychoanalysis, trans. Emma Gainsforth, undated (c. 2020). A year later, Cacciari would begin working together with Agamben on questions relating to the obligatory demand for certification of inoculation. 5. ‘Lockdown may cost 200,000 lives, government report shows,’ Daily Telegraph, 19th July 2020. For the inefficacy of lockdown as a strategy and its counterproductivity, cf. Laura Dodsworth, A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear during the Covid-19 Pandemic (London: Pinter & Martin, 2021), 270ff, but above all the references given in Fabio Vighi, ‘Slavoj Žižek, Emergency Capitalism, and the Capitulation of the Left,’ Philosophical Salon, 24th May 2021. An awareness of the harm done has gradually become inescapable over the course of 2022, and even advocates of prolonged repressive measures such as the Guardian are beginning to acknowledge what was known long ago, in all bad faith. Other newspapers, more often associated with the Right and the Centre have been more

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forthright: cf. ‘Covid Lockdown “Prevented only 0.2pc of Deaths in First Wave,”’ Daily Telegraph, 2nd February 2022. And this has to be weighed against the lives not saved but lost thanks to these interventions: ‘Lockdown Will Claim the Equivalent of 560,000 Lives Because of the Health Impact of the “Deep and Prolonged Recession It Will Cause,” Expert Warns,’ Daily Mail, 8th November 2020. When this manuscript was first completed, in September 2022, we were just beginning to see the financial impacts, or rather they were becoming so glaring that even the mainstream press could not ignore them, even though in general they allowed themselves to report on these matters by blaming them on other factors, other crises, ‘out of our hands,’ from Britain’s exit from the European Union to a war in the Ukraine and associated sanctions. Somehow, these economic, food, ‘cost of living,’ and energy crises had nothing to do with a two-year shutting down of large parts of the economy. And yet, in a fascinating reversal of this reading of the financial aspect of the last three years, Fabio Vighi has argued that the lockdowns were in fact a strategy on the part of global finance to avert financial catastrophe, or at least to delay it, by preventing liquidity from entering real commerce on the ‘high street’ and thus to limit inflation and the rise in interest rates: ‘The acceleration of the “emergency paradigm” since 2020 has a simple yet widely disavowed purpose: to conceal socioeconomic collapse. In today’s metaverse, things are the opposite of what they seem. Inaugurating Davos 2022, IMF director Kristalina Georgieva blamed [. . .] the pandemic and Putin for the “confluence of calamities” that the world economy is now facing [. . .]. [T]he opposite is true: the tanking economy is the cause of these “misfortunes”’ (Vighi, ‘Pause For Thought: Money Without Value in a Rapidly Disintegrating World,’ Philosophical Salon, 30th May 2022); ‘under the pretext of biosecurity, we are giving our approval to a capitalist coup that will condemn most of us to immiseration and (voluntary) servitude’ (Vighi, ‘Slavoj Žižek, Emergency Capitalism, and the Capitulation of the Left,’ Philosophical Salon, 24th May 2021; cf. ‘Homo Pandemicus: COVID Ideology and Panic Consumption,’ Crisis and Critique 7:3 [November 2020]; ‘A Self-fulfilling Prophecy: Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation,’ Philosophical Salon, 16th August 2021; ‘The Central Bankers’ Long Covid: An Incurable Condition,’ Philosophical Salon, 18th October 2021; ‘Tyranny by Health Emergency, or the Dystopian Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism,’ Left Lockdown Sceptics, 5th November 2021; ‘Red Pill or Blue Pill? Variants, Inflation, and the Controlled Demolition of Society,’ Philosophical Salon, 3rd January 2022). In any case, what was predicted is coming to pass, now that, for whatever reason, in 2022, lockdowns seem to have overrun their natural limit. In other words, the dikes that stemmed the flood have now finally been breached. If this interpretation were true, it would mean that the usual attempt by Leftists to identify an opposition to lockdowns with a laissez-faire neoliberal attitude gets things quite the wrong way around: only lockdowns themselves and similar emergency measures will allow capitalism to limp onwards. We are left with a choice: do we believe—as most seem to—that capitalism voluntarily suspended itself in March of 2020 and came to inflict untold economic damage upon itself out of the goodness of its heart (whilst, it is true, immense profits were

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created for the already wealthy in the virtual economy); or that it did so in immunising fashion precisely in order to save itself, as Vighi contends? 6. Benvenuto, ‘Welcome to Seclusion.’ 7. With all due caveats with regard to the endless ways in which such a statistic can be generated, let us at least allow that less fearful numbers can be produced. John Ioannidis in particular has long been producing figures of this kind, and in December 2022 calculated the Infection Fatality Rate prior to any vaccination, among non-elderly populations, as follows: ‘the IFRs had a median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013–0.056%) for the 0–59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036–0.119%) for the 0–69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years’ (Angelo Maria Pezzullo, Cathrine Axfors, Despina G. Contopoulos-Ioannidis, Alexandre Apostolatos, and John P. A. Ioannidis, ‘Age-Stratified Infection Fatality Rate of Covid-19 in the Non-elderly Population,’ Environmental Research 216:3, 1st January 2023 [available online 28th October 2022]). 8. Benvenuto, ‘Welcome.’ 9. Ibid. 10. According to one such spurious poll from April 2021, 83% of the public energetically threw their weight behind the fascist response (cf. Spiegelhalter & Masters, Covid by Numbers, 194, where the authors express an altogether uncritical belief in the truth of this number: ‘There has been extraordinarily widespread support for the anti-virus measures’). 11. For ‘public health’ we might read, metonymically, ‘biopolitics’: if not an influence on Agamben, Ivan Illich is at least recognised by the former as a kindred spirit, ‘Ivan Illich, perhaps the most acute critic of modernity [. . .]’ (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 63). Agamben has in recent years played a significant role in the edition of Illich’s works in a systematic form in Italian (cf. Journal of Italian Philosophy 8 [2024] for a collection devoted to their kinship). Although, as Cayley points out elsewhere, Illich did not obviously return the favour to either Agamben (who perhaps came slightly too late, and who is to the best of our knowledge never mentioned by Illich) or the biopolitical philosophers more generally: ‘The second omission in Illich’s brief writings on life is any mention of the prominence of this theme in contemporary political philosophy. For me, the most notable authors in this respect are Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’ (Cayley, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021], 346; cf. Cayley, ‘Echoes, Affinities, Resonances: Ivan Illich in Contemporary Thought,’ 16th January 2019, for certain sections on Agamben that were omitted from the published text. Pace Cayley, Foucault’s texts are a relatively frequent reference for Illich, particularly in Limits to Medicine. That said, in Ivan Illich in Conversation (245f), Illich provides a curious reference, which affirms that, more than Foucault himself, one of his predecessors in the French Philosophy of Science, Gaston Bachelard, is to be numbered among Illich’s most significant forebears. 12. Cayley, ‘Questions.’

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13. Cf. The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2005), 201ff, and the notion of the system as developed by Nicola Labanca in ‘Systems unexpectedness, flatness and counterproductivity,’ Conspiratio 2 (Spring 2022), 164–88. 14. Cayley, ‘Questions.’ 15. Inspired by some of the same figures as Cayley, Byung-Chul Han describes the suffering of others being transmuted into the ‘numbers of cases.’ As one becomes a statistic, one is immersed in the homogeneous body of a ‘population’: the distinction between Same and Other collapses and hence it becomes relatively easy for such absurd edicts as ‘social distancing’ to be accepted (Han, Palliative Society, 52, cf. Han, The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today, trans. W. Hoban [Cambridge: Polity, 2018]). 16. Cayley, Ivan Illich, 348. 17. Cayley, ‘Questions.’ 18. Ibid. 19. Giorgio Agamben, What Is Real?,  trans. L. Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). Che cos’è reale? La scomparsa di Majorana (Majorana’s Disappearance) (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2016). 20. Agamben, What Is Real?, 9. 21. What Is Real?, 10. 22. Majorana, cited in What Is Real?, 9–10. 23. What Is Real?, 10. 24. What Is Real?, 11. 25. Majorana, cited in What Is Real?, 12. 26. Ibid. 27. What Is Real?, 13. 28. What Is Real?, 13. 29. What Is Real?, 14. 30. What Is Real?, 14. 31. In English translation, Simone Weil, ‘Classical Science and After’ in On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, ed. and trans. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 3ff. 32. What Is Real?, 22. 33. What Is Real?, 23. 34. What Is Real?, 23ff. 35. What Is Real?, 27–28. 36. What Is Real?, 36–37. 37. What Is Real?, 37. 38. What Is Real?, 37. 39. What Is Real?, 32–33. 40. What Is Real?, 33. 41. What Is Real?, 37. 42. What Is Real?, 39. 43. What Is Real?, 40. 44. What Is Real?, 40.

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45. What Is Real?, 42. 46. What Is Real?, 42. 47. What Is Real?, 42–43. 48. Cayley, ‘Questions.’ 49. Cf. Ivan Illich in Conversation, 281f. 50. Cayley, ‘Questions.’ Cf. ‘By equating statistical man with biologically unique men, an insatiable demand for finite resources is created. The individual is subordinated to the greater “needs” of the whole, preventive procedures become compulsory, and the right of the patient to withhold consent to his own treatment vanishes [. . .] since society cannot afford the burden of curative procedures’ (Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine, 97). 51. Cayley, ‘Questions.’ 52. Ibid. 53. Cf. Olivier Rey’s pamphlet in the brave series from Gallimard, Tracts, which has devoted itself to critical responses to the epidemic. Rey’s text takes the title ‘L’idolâtrie de la vie’ (Paris: Gallimard, 2020). 54. Cayley, ‘Questions.’ 55. Ivan Illich in Conversation, 273f; cf. Illich, Limits to Medicine, 174ff. Hans-Georg Gadamer also devotes a chapter to the question of the ‘gradual disappearance of the representation of death in modern society’ (Gadamer, The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, trans. Jason Gaiger and Nicholas Walker [Cambridge: Polity, 1996], 61ff). Julia Kristeva will also have emphasised the loneliness and the repression of death: ‘mortality is absent from common, popular, mediatic discourse. We prefer to forget about it. We might take care of the elderly, but we do not confront the fact that death is within us, in apoptosis, which is the continuous process of death and regeneration of the cells, even in this very moment as I am speaking to you. This new virus makes us face the fact that death plays an integral part in the process of life’ (Kristeva, ‘Humanity Is Rediscovering Existential Solitude, the Meaning of Limits, and Mortality,’ Journal of European Psychoanalysis; reprinting ‘This New Virus Makes Us Face the Fact That Death Plays an Integral Part in the Process of Life’: Interview with Julia Kristeva for Corriere della Sera, 29th March 2020). And yet, the virus-response has precisely expressed the most extreme suppression of death and the greatest aversion to it that could possibly have been imagined. Agamben himself recognises this repression, alongside that of another kind of death, a certain ecological destruction, in the context of two distinct ‘earths,’ Gaia and Cthonia (Agamben, ‘Gaia and Cthonia,’ 28th December 2020). The quotidian invisibility of mass death in the most ordinary of circumstances was long ago invoked by Agamben in a statement according to which, ‘[w]hat confronts us today is a life that as such is exposed to a violence without precedent precisely in the most profane and banal ways. Our age is one in which a holiday weekend produces more victims on Europe’s highways than a war campaign’ (Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998], 114). In this context, the point is in part that the opposition which used to hold between war and peace, between a global war that can be

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declared and brought to a close and a civil war that is permanent, has collapsed. War and death become so pervasive that they cease to be contrasted with anything like a background or a hope of perpetual peace, and as a result they recede into invisibility. Such an obscurity then shows itself to allow for an extreme moment of visibility— a spectacle—(which in light of the situation described one would hesitate to call an ‘event’), as we have seen with the very sudden, interested, and wilful visibility bestowed upon the dead and dying over the last three years, with a view to altering the behaviour of the consumers of these presentations. The passage from invisibility to visibility in the form of death (indeed as it passes from a faraway continent to the West and the middle classes themselves) will recur in many of the responses to the affair that are broadly aligned with Agamben’s view—and even some that are not. 56. And indeed, this famous number of around 500,000 deaths was not even a ‘prediction’ even though it was effectively presented and taken as such, but rather a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’: ‘The reasonable worst case is not a prediction’ (Woolhouse, The Year, 35; cf. 44f on the Imperial group’s defence of their proposal in Nature, and some of the criticisms directed at it; cf. Spiegelhalter & Masters, Covid by Numbers, 246ff). 57. It should by now be difficult for even the most fanatical supporters of lockdowns to argue for their efficacy, either in respect of the one particular virus that monopolised their attention or, still more so, in relation to their ‘collateral’ effects: ‘Covid lockdown “prevented only 0.2pc of deaths in first wave,”’ Daily Telegraph, 2nd February 2022; cf. the front page headline from the Daily Telegraph on Friday 19th August 2022, when the predictions made by some, who had been endlessly vilified at the beginning, were displaying unmistakeable signs of being proved right, or coming true to such a glaring extent that it would be difficult even for the left-wing press and official governmental position to fail to register them. On the question of the long preparation for this pandemic and others, cf. the Manifeste Conspirationniste. 58. Agamben speaks of the religions of both science and medicine (Where Are We Now?, 45, ch. 12 passim, inter alia), and even ‘health-religion’ (ibid., 97, a notion beloved of Ivan Illich, cf. Limits to Medicine, 205 et al.), although he does not explicitly compare prediction with prophecy. The syntagm also involves a reference to Walter Benjamin’s idea of capitalism as religion (cf. Agamben, Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism, trans. Adam Kotsko [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019]). 59. Gadamer was among those philosophers most attuned to this point without being in the least bit indifferent to the claims of the natural sciences themselves: ‘The incompleteness of all experimental science thus means that it not only raises a legitimate claim of universality, by virtue of its readiness to process new experience, but also is not wholly able to make good [on] this claim. [. . .] [W]hat we know from “science” is incomplete and, therefore, can no longer be called a “doctrine.” It consists of nothing other than the current state of “research”’ (Gadamer, Enigma of Health, 4). 60. Jonathan Watts, interview, ‘Bruno Latour: This Is a Global Catastrophe That Has Come from Within,’ Guardian, 6th June 2020.

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61. Jana Bacevic pointed this out very early on: ‘There’s no such thing as just “following the science”—coronavirus advice is political,’ Guardian, 28th April 2020. Thanks to Gabriel Martin for this reference and for much fruitful discussion in the spring and summer of 2020. Let it be noted as a counterbalance and as another example of what the Left has shown itself capable of in recent days, that Bacevic is the author of a revealing article, demonstrating how a grotesque misuse of language can redouble malign effects already in operation: it speaks of ‘the Free Nose Guy Problem,’ a gesture at the level of what some might call ‘theory’ which reflects the practical dehumanisation and ‘othering’ of those—not us, of course; never the respectable academics—who attempt to breathe under a truly stifling (and anonymising) imposition. Analytic ethics is clearly as far away from the Levinassian as one could imagine. It seems to be devoted to the question of how one can rid the Other of their face without being seen to be doing so violently. For Levinas, the face alone may be looked at in encountering the Other since it is the one part of the body that is not automatically objectivised thereby. It is precisely the apparition of the ineffaceable subjectivity of the Other; with the face masked, the last shred of humanity is stripped from the human body. We should long since have learned where this leads (in this respect, it is interesting to compare the paean to masks delivered by one Benjamin Bratton, who urges on us a ‘deliberate and ethical self-objectification’ (Bratton, Revenge of the Real, 106, cf. chs. 14 & 15 passim). Quite apart from the dubious efficacy of masks in their professed intention, the fact that the prevailing discourse lacked the merest words to express the damage done at this ‘phenomenal’ level by the covering up of the face demonstrates the utter failure of the theoretical humanities to have had any fundamental impact upon political and public speech. (On the ineffectiveness of any kind of readily available mask, cf. Tom Jefferson et al., ‘Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses,’ Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858. CD006207.pub6 [accessed 26th March 2023]. Astonishingly, after publication, this review was slandered by its own editor [cf. Thorsteinn Siglaugsson, ‘The Flawed Fact-Check Being Used to Discredit the Damning Cochrane Review on Masking,’ 13th March 2023, https:​//​dailysceptic​.org​/2023​/03​/13​/a​-clear​-and​-present​ -danger​-to​-science​/​?highlight​=withdrawal​%20of​%20article​%20inappropriate​%20in​ %20current​%20context (accessed 1st April 2023)], for what we might presume are the same reasons that, earlier on, towards the very beginning of the whole affair, an historical article on the same topic was withdrawn from circulation, not because it had proved untrue, but because it was deemed ‘inappropriate in the current context’; in other words, it might not be conducive to obedient behaviour. That newspapers should be following this pragmatic criterion in their reporting is one thing, but when scientific journals follow suit and start to filter out truths which might potentially incite disobedience, civil or otherwise, we are in danger of condoning the eclipse of a certain notion of truth that it is above all things crucial to preserve.) 62. ‘The health secretary, Matt Hancock, disputed Edmunds’ assessment [Prof. John Edmunds, “epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine”

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and member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)—on Jeremy Farrar’s gently worded but revealing account, an extraordinarily aggressive individual much given to profanity (Farrar, Spike, 102)] that the lockdown should have been imposed sooner and defended the government’s decision to reopen shops and schools. [/] He told the same programme: “I think we took the right decisions at the right time. There’s a broad range on Sage [sic] of scientific opinion and we were guided by the science, which means guided by the balance of that opinion as expressed to ministers through the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser. That’s the right way for it to have been done.” [/] Hancock said other scientists made different arguments’ (Rowena Mason, ‘UK Failure to Lock Down Earlier Cost Many Lives, Top Scientist Says,’ Guardian, 7th June 2020). Hancock was, a year later, forced to resign for putting this difference of opinion into effect and breaching ‘social distancing guidelines’ in the form of a tryst at work. This was the reason given, in any case. SAGE members and their advisors themselves, including Neil Ferguson, committed similar infractions. We discuss the necessity for such gestures elsewhere, infra. Hancock has since published his ‘Pandemic Diaries,’ unusual for a personal journal in having been ghost-written by someone else (but, more interestingly, by someone genuinely critical of lockdowns); cf. Isabel Oakeshott, ‘The Truth about Matt Hancock,’ Spectator, 10th December 2022, and later, ‘The Lockdown Files,’ published in the Daily Telegraph, which gave unprecedented insight into Hancock’s communications during the epidemic (Claire Newell et al., ‘The Lockdown Files,’ Daily Telegraph, https:​//​www​.telegraph​.co​.uk​/news​/lockdown​-files​/ [accessed 19th March 2023]). 63. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 44. 64. The virus response and the European Union referendum are not entirely without relation, certainly at the level of their functioning as divisive binary machines that refuse to make their division according to the usual opposition between Right and Left and thus find novel ways of dividing the populace into opposed camps. Given the already riven context of a country in which an ill thought-out, highly politicised referendum had recently been engineered, and in particular one split according to age (also mimicked yet again in a number of elections subsequent to the referendum, which ensured a conservative and Conservative majority, whether slender or crushing), one might be tempted to wonder whether this latter did not play a large part in the truly—for the most part in hindsight, staggering—general repression of the fact, certainly early on, that the plague was, as Sergio Benvenuto put it, a ‘geronticide’ and little else (Benvenuto, ‘The Virus and the Unconscious. My Diary’). 65. As Mark Woolhouse, an advisor to the SAGE committee itself, puts it, among a number of errors marring the political approach to the event, ‘[t]he third error was to manage this public health emergency as if it were only a public health emergency [. . .]. It wasn’t. The pandemic had huge ramifications for health care provision beyond Covid-19, for mental health, for education, for the economy and for the well-being of society. [. . .] [/] Part of the fault lay with the makeup of the scientific advisory committees. The advisory system was dominated by clinicians and public health specialists who weren’t looking at the bigger picture—they weren’t asked to do

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so and weren’t competent to do so if they had been. Which is why they kept recommending lockdowns’ (Woolhouse, The Year, 256). The best they had was a doctor who might pass for an ‘ethicist’ (and hence, nominally, a philosopher), a bioethicist, of course: https:​//​www​.ndph​.ox​.ac​.uk​/team​/ michael​-parker. Rightly, Woolhouse is surprised at the general silence of ‘ethicists.’ Philosophers disgraced themselves, when they, like all students of the humanities, should have come into their own. The present author’s own faith in academia has been rattled to the point of disintegration. With a self-critical awareness rare among his fellow advisors, Woolhouse gives an account of his openly affirming to those in power: ‘epidemiologists are having too much say in this. And I’m an epidemiologist!’ 66. As if to testify to the disunity and unification of Science, we are fortunate enough to now have two distinctly opposed memoirs from members of the SAGE committee and related subcommittees (SPI-M [Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling] in the case of the latter), one by Jeremy Farrar (with Anjana Ahuja, Spike: The Virus vs. The People. The Inside Story [London: Profile, 2021/2022 (second edition)]), and the other by Mark Woolhouse (The Year the World Went Mad [Muir of Ord: Sandstone, 2022]). Even the respective publishers are telling in relation to the current ideological situation. Farrar’s is a journalistic memoir, destined for the bestsellers lists, and all the more insidious for that, constituting as it does something like a manifesto for the hegemonic position, and in truth it displays little of any serious kind of pluralism; in fact it partakes of a very malign gesture in presenting a semblance of that (for instance, with respect to the hypothesis of the artificial origin of the virus), thus demonstrating a supposedly ‘open mind,’ before closing it down absolutely, not to say unconvincingly (the refutation seems ultimately to rest on the assumption that ‘scientists are lazy’ [71]). Although worthless as a literary document (with an altogether mysterious title), the text is useful as a piece of sociological evidence for a number of the traits that we identify in the present work, as well as being a testimony to the type of personalities who fit the structures that we are discussing. (The ‘Lockdown Files’ provide a similar testimony in the case of Matt Hancock and others.) Farrar’s real view of plurality is expressed in the following way: at one point, he suggests that the only merit of scientific dissent is that it gives ‘ideological prejudices’ something to fasten upon (Farrar, Spike, 183). Everything hinges upon the model of his friend ‘Neil’ (described, with a remarkable disregard for logic, as both ‘bending’ and ‘violating’ the rules), without the slightest hint that this might be one rather obvious topic for scientific dissent, and not just natural-scientific (one would imagine that, for this author, the entirety of the Humanities would simply amount to ‘ideological prejudices’ of one kind or another). And indeed, he gives us a perfect example of how scientific dissent is to be crushed, by describing the views of some of those who designed the Great Barrington Declaration as ‘nonsense’ and affirming ‘I cannot even call it science’ (181ff). It would therefore be infra dignitatem for science itself to take it so seriously as actually to refute it. Farrar is effectively speaking of ‘herd immunity’ (or ‘population immunity’ as he prefers to call it, seeming thereby to open up a difference between a disreputable and a respectable incarnation of the same thing), which

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he decries as unscientific, and yet in other parts of the text gives a perfectly scientific account of it (94f; 104ff). A much clearer account of herd immunity as a simple epidemiological fact is given by Woolhouse, as well as an actual engagement with the Great Barrington position (The Year the World Went Mad, 29ff). This renders it apparent that asking whether or not one ‘believes’ in herd immunity is like asking whether one believes in the tides of the sea (ibid., 32). The discrepancy in Farrar’s account might in part be explained by his suggestion that given the ‘novelty’ of the particular coronavirus in question there is—and he is very insistent on this, particularly in the earlier parts of the book—no natural immunity to the virus (or no way for us to achieve the herd immunity threshold by natural means alone, 94; cf. 106), and indeed (although these words may well have been composed very early on), he writes of his approach in early 2020 as one which did not allow itself to assume that even infection by the virus led to immunity: ‘it could not be assumed that people would acquire immunity if infected’ (95). In the latter case, at least in the chapter added as a supplement to the book’s second edition, some time around February 2022, he effectively relies on just that (238), and in the former allows himself to lapse for a moment so as to suggest that the reason children may be relatively unaffected by the disease is that they will have been exposed to other types of coronavirus in the past (230). A very dangerous example of a certain type of plausible, rather overconfident public schoolboy, with no real sense of being obliged by so trifling an affair as consistency, he speaks throughout of the remit of the SAGE committee and its merely advisory role, whilst making it absolutely clear that ‘science is the only way out’ and that science is his, and it certainly does speak with one voice: in favour of swift and decisive mass confinement, and eventually vaccines (with respect to which he makes a remarkable ‘disclaimer’ or ‘declaration of interest’ [163]), and that right quick! A short sharp shock is the way to administer medicine in Farrar’s eyes. We can guarantee that if, as indeed is urged by some of the endorsements adorning the book’s covers, we ‘learn our lesson’ from this text, there will be tanks patrolling residential streets the next time a plague befalls us. Indeed, Farrar confesses himself an adherent of the model presented by the Australian response (245; cf. 229). He laments that there are still those people who ‘sincerely’ believe that ‘lockdowns do not work,’ as if this belief were symptomatic of a disease for which his ilk—with its near innate benevolence towards the wretched and the foreign—has the cure, or the well-meaning urge to seek it out. A curious symptom of the many repressions at work in the text are the numerous asides where the author speaks in passing of the type of vitriolic correspondence, up to the point of what has come to be called ‘hate-mail,’ he and his fellow committee members were receiving, without giving the slightest hint as to what might have spurred such messages. Nor does he give any sense of how it can be consistent to dismiss libertarianism as a ‘bias’ whilst avowing that lockdowns ‘can and should be avoided’ (with the natural belief—common among his class—in some unexplained validity that would elevate his own opinions above the rank and file) (244; cf. 183).

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Elsewhere, he makes the remarkable statement, ‘I wish that ethical considerations had been built into the UK’s coronavirus response right from the beginning’ (229). Once again, one can only wish that philosophy had more of a voice in public life, and on committees such as these, which testify to the propensity towards a kind of dull-witted and spontaneous recourse to fascism. The author of the present work made so bold as to urge this necessity upon an open-minded scientific advisor at Churchill College in the autumn of 2022. Let it be said in conclusion that Farrar’s book, whilst making a brief reference to blood clots in the wake of injections (only to decry their prominence in the media, as if the mass media had not done everything in their power to crush every imaginable concern with respect to the safety [and efficacy] of the pharmaceutical remedy imposed upon the population) and the travails of the Oxford-Astra-Zeneca vaccine in receiving the proper certification, and its being withheld from those under the age of forty (in ambiguous fashion), he betrays not the slightest hint of the consequences of the mRNA vaccine; he merely recounts his friend, ‘Stéphane,’ the head of Moderna with whom he is conversing at Davos, at the World Economic Forum (WEF), as the curtain is raised upon his tome, heavy with emotion at the news of the vaccine’s development: to paraphrase his words, ‘now all this misery can be over.’ The global approach, statisticalising humanity, is shown up for what it is here: this whole approach to healthcare is desperate, for the reasons Illich points out, and indeed it allows people of Farrar’s breed to pronounce of the scientific sovereign’s subjects that ‘they should be locked down’ (the absence of the slightest critical appraisal of the work of the SPI-B [Behavioural Control] subcommittee of SAGE is telling here too, although to his discredit Woolhouse also fails on that count). This explains why there is something deeply symptomatic in cases such as Hancock and Ferguson, who fail to abide by the measures they have advocated for others: it is the epidemiological curse of seeing others simply as ‘populations,’ the elementary biopolitical transformation. Thus, even if we do not propose a herd immunity approach, a philosophical deconstruction of the process whereby a unity like ‘The Science’ is produced obliges us to urge the possibility of an alternative science, whether of the same or a different kind, and this will in turn put in question the entire approach to epidemics adopted by the global institutions of public health. Accounts such as these, along with Naomi Wolf’s (The Bodies of Others) provide a valuable insight into the personalities that are best suited to institutions and positions like these. Ours is an age in which governance is seen as the management of situations and their ‘risks’: the populace are, in this context, viewed, inevitably, as part of the problem, their judgement not to be trusted on any account. The epitome of this attitude manifests itself in the act of placing this population under house arrest to prevent them from engaging—it is said—in any ‘risky’ activity whatsoever. As a counterweight to Farrar’s attitude in a number of respects, we have Woolhouse’s remarkable memoir, of an altogether more serious kind, which, although not garlanded with the imprimaturs of celebrities and media figures, is a model of clarity and nuance. We return to it elsewhere and have relied on it throughout. 67. Let it be noted that Donatella Di Cesare has devoted an important chapter to the topic of ‘Government by Experts: Science and Politics’ (cf. Di Cesare,

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Immunodemocracy, 50ff), which is more than can be said for Anglophone philosophers of science, who should at precisely this moment, like Latour, have come into their own and raised critical questions for both The Science itself and the way in which it was represented and used by government and media. It seems as if nothing like this occurred; they chose silence and no doubt professional respectability, but also ignominy. Whilst the likes of Jean-Pierre Dupuy were keeping the likes of David Cayley in check by reaffirming official state ideology (and even an extremely uncritical, altogether decontextualised version of the statistics) and struggling over the rightful inheritance of Ivan Illich (cf. Depuy, ‘Ivan Illich’s True Legacy: On the so-called “Sacralisation of Life,”’ Conspiratio 1 [Fall 2021] and Cayley’s patient response in the same volume, together with a longer version of the latter which may be found at https:​//​www​.davidcayley​.com​/blog​/2021​/6​/11​/concerning​-life​-1), an honourable exception among continental philosophers of science is Babette Babich, whose interventions at the early stages of the affair, centred around a careful and sympathetic reading of Agamben’s early texts, are summarised in ‘Retrieving Agamben’s Questions’ (available at https:​//​www​.academia​.edu​/43189908​/Retrieving​_Agambens​ _Questions) and her remarkable essay, which by no means follows the others in their betrayal of what they already knew, devoted to the question of ‘the Science,’ what is decried as ‘pseudo-science,’ and the question of ‘invention’ (Babich, ‘Pseudo-Science and “Fake” News: “Inventing” Epidemics and the Police State’ in Irene Strasser and Martin Dege [eds.], The Psychology of Global Crises and Crisis Politics: Intervention, Resistance, Decolonization [Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2021], 241–72). 68. Cf. Agamben, ‘Alcuni dati’ (‘Some Data’), 30th October 2020. This text was not reprinted in the monographic versions of Agamben’s writings on the virus, presumably because of the moveable character of the data in question. 69. As Gadamer, whose philosophy of health is among the most clear-sighted, has it, ‘for such scientists what exists are facts! This sounds impressive and intimidating. However, as philosophers we must ask what facts are and reflect, for instance, on the example of statistics, which teaches us the ambiguity of all claims concerning the existence of facts’ (Gadamer, The Enigma of Health, 158). 70. Where Are We Now?, 83. 71. For the first year of the affair, until the arrival of the vaccines and the winter of 2020–2021, the organisation behind the website, Unherd took the extremely admirable approach of lending prominence to these distorted voices: https:​//​unherd​ .com​/. After that, particularly with respect to those who were attempting to make the side-effects of the injections more widely known, they took to doing so partly in order to discredit them (cf. the interview with Brett Weinstein, and the editorialising from the host, Freddie Sayers at the very end: https:​//​unherd​.com​/thepost​/bret​-weinstein​ -i​-will​-be​/ [accessed 28th September 2022]). That said, at the time of writing, they have, belatedly, allowed themselves to become persuaded of the wisdom of the views they once decried, whilst remaining cautious when it comes to any hint of conspiracy: it seems as if those who intervene in this affair, and particularly those who march under the banner of ‘Science,’ always manage to single out some position (even if this changes over time and is rarely acknowledged as having done so) that they assume

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(violently) to be beyond the pale—beyond the boundaries of Reason in the eyes of anyone with reason. In effect, this strategy of a near universal exclusion, sometimes known metaphorically as ‘scapegoating’ or simply ‘sacrifice,’ is what we are analysing here, with a view to determining whether or not it is possible to move beyond it. 72. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 40. 73. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 43. 74. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 44. 75. Agamben, ‘The Invention of an Epidemic,’ 26th February 2020; Where Are We Now?, 11. 76. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 45. 77. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 44; cf. 47 &, briefly, 18. 78. ‘[T]he demeanour of the media during these two years will remain as one of the most shameful pages in the history of our country. When one day historians investigate what happened, the media will figure prominently among the accomplices in political crimes whose full extent can perhaps only then be measured. The responsibility of journalists, without any possible excuse, will then become apparent, the journalists who, as was the case in the twenty-year Fascist period, knew and yet obeyed their editors’ orders without question’ (Agamben,‘Una buona notizia’ [Good News], 12th September 2022). 79. Cf. Karina Reiss and Sucharit Bhakdi, Corona False Alarm? Facts and Figures (London: Chelsea Green, 2020), 15f. One could multiply almost without limit the statistical concerns here: these ‘cases’ will include ‘false positives’ as a result of remnant RNA from earlier encounters with the same and related viruses (cf. Kennedy, The Real Anthony Fauci, 5, for Fauci’s own explicitly avowed awareness of the limitations of the PCR test run at a ‘cycle threshold’ of 35 and above, together with a number of accounts of Kary Mullis, the inventor of the test, describing its misuse in these kinds of cases; cf. the measured account which distinguishes between cycle thresholds but also demonstrates an important difference between times when the virus is rife and times when its prevalence is low, from Spiegelhalter and Masters, Covid by Numbers, 41–47). In the summer of 2022, in England, mass-testing ceased to be freely available and statistics with regard to ‘cases’ were forced explicitly to present themselves for what they were: statistical extrapolations from surveys of a relatively miniscule fragment of the population. And one should not forget the once well-known affair of the certification of deaths—coroners’ inquests rarely carried out, comorbidities dismissed as irrelevant, deaths often simply presumed to be ‘of Covid,’ particularly if a positive test result has been returned within a certain period of time prior to death (cf. Kennedy, The Real Anthony Fauci, 5; and an honest account of differing criteria for ‘covid deaths’ in Spiegelhalter & Masters, Covid by Numbers, 95ff). Even the Guardian is now retrospectively revising its facts, and mentions that its figures from 2020, recorded as if they were deaths from Covid, in fact gave only the deaths of those who had been tested positive within four weeks of their death: in general, cf. https:​//​www​ .theguardian​.com​/world​/2022​/jun​/01​/covid​-19​-uk​-cases​-deaths​-vaccinations​-latest​ -numbers​-coronavirus​-national​-data, and note the weasel words of ‘Covid-19 was

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involved in the deaths of 37 people in England and Wales on 08 Jul 2022’ (emphasis added). One might even be forgiven for wondering why 37 deaths was considered in any way ‘national news,’ and whether its reporting showed the least respect for the one and a half thousand others who could be presumed to have also died that day. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in America even admit that in over 75% of cases (from a sample of those who had been injected at least once) in the United States of America there were at least four comorbidities on average (https:​//​www​.cdc​.gov​/mmwr​/volumes​/71​/wr​/mm7101a4​.htm​?s​_cid​=mm7101a4​ _w [accessed 6th August 2022]) (cf. Kennedy, The Real Anthony Fauci, 4, which gives ‘only 6 percent of COVID deaths occurred in entirely healthy individuals. The remaining 94 percent suffered from an average of 3.8 potentially fatal comorbidities,’ citing an earlier report from the same source from 6th October, 2021, ibid. 96n.24). All such statistics, when insufficiently internally differentiated, so often ignored the fact that a patient was admitted to hospital for some other cause, potentially terminal, but, this being one of the prime sites of contagion, contracted Covid-19 after admission (these are the so-called ‘nosocomial’ transmissions) (cf. Spiegelhalter & Masters, Covid by Numbers, 83f, which is conservative and cautious, but fluctuates around the idea that among those cases serious enough to involve an admission to hospital, one in seven [or around 14%] tested positive for the disease for the first time after their arrival). This is not even to speak of the other principal site of contractions which led to fatality, nursing or care homes, about which so much could be said. We now know that powerful incentives were being offered for a death to be marked as related to the virus (cf. The Real Anthony Fauci, 5). And as ever, any attempt at nuance here could easily be taken as ameliorating the (presumed) ‘seriousness’ of the affair. Which is, it seems, taboo. Once these fearsome figures had been established, they were then presented not just in isolation from every other cause of death, but with little attention paid to longitudinal trends and innumerable other factors, including the apparently crucial ones of comorbidity and age: stripped of these, decontextualised to an extent that almost necessitates the accusation of dishonesty, such figures can be and were used to justify actions of an unprecedented nature. So many decisions that could have gone otherwise; the fact that they did not in so many cases suggests a motivation beyond the merely ‘scientific.’ Mark Woolhouse gives a reasonable, measured account, from a conservative, epidemiological, but still self-critical perspective, particularly in relation to the way in which the ‘reasonable worst-case’ scenario of the Imperial Model was presented as if it were in any way likely to become actual (Woolhouse, The Year the World Went Mad, 22ff, esp. 35–37). 80. Cf. Woolhouse on ‘Quality adjusted life years (QUALYs)’ (The Year the World Went Mad, 67f). 81. As the First Minister of Scotland did (cf. Woolhouse, The Year, 55–56). We have already insisted upon this point, but the extreme stances of the nations that surround England were a crucial part of the way in which the whole affair was experienced by the present author, and as we have learned from the Health Secretary’s recent memoir, a vying for righteous severity with the Scottish government, along with an apparent and obscure desire to keep the Kingdom united, were motivating factors in such

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serious and unforgivable measures as the forced masking of children, an idea that apparently originated in Scotland (Hancock, Pandemic Diaries, 260 et al.). 82. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973), 100. 83. Cayley, ‘Questions’; cf. Green, Covid Consensus, 15. In an impressive later contribution, Cayley provides a list of examples of scientific dissent and an account of why they had little or no impact: ‘The myth of Science on the other hand is utterly corrosive of politics insofar as it supposes a body of immaculate and comprehensive knowledge that renders politics superfluous. I do not think this is an exaggeration. Again and again in the last year I have listened to political statements that present Science as a unified, imperative and infallible voice indicating an indisputable course of action. The implication is that knowledge can replace judgement. But it cannot—because knowledge, as I have argued, is limited both in practice and in principle. Moral judgment is unavoidable, and is the proper domain of politics. To institute a lockdown which protects that part of the population able to shelter at home, while exposing another part to the harms that follow from lockdown, involves a political judgment. To disguise it as a scientific judgement is, in the first place, deceitful. At the time the decision was made no evidence whatsoever existed to support a policy of mass quarantine of a healthy population. Such a policy had never even been tried before and, even after the fact, is not really amenable to controlled study in any case. But more important was the moral abdication that was involved. Instead of an honest evaluation of the harms avoided and the harms induced, the public was told that Science had spoken, and the case was closed. [. . .] Where there was no science, the myth of Science became a screen and a shield behind which politicians could shelter themselves from the consequences of decisions they could deny ever having made’ (Cayley, ‘Pandemic Revelations’). 84. Cayley, ‘Questions.’ When it comes to discerning the moment at which industrial production leads to institutional counterproductivity, ‘[o]nly political judgement can assess the balance’ (Illich, Limits to Medicine, 217). 85. Cayley, ‘Questions’; cf. Di Cesare, Immunodemocracy, 50ff. 86. The silence kept by scholars of the human sciences is belatedly being broken, and Toby Green is to be lauded for his bravery in leading the way with The Covid Consensus. A volume entitled Pandemic Response and the Cost of Lockdowns follows in his footsteps by demonstrating in a number of its ramifications that it is not only the Right who ought to and could have spoken out against these measures: Peter Sutoris, Aleida Mendes Borges, Sinéad Murphy, and Yossi Nehushtan (eds.), Pandemic Response and the Cost of Lockdowns: Global Debates from the Humanities and Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2023), in which a much shorter and much earlier version of the present work will be found. Agamben himself, along with the Invisible Committee, Byung-Chul Han, and the earlier incarnation of Peter Sloterdijk could also be situated in a tradition that might be identified as leftist, of a kind that has been marginalised but is once again stirring, and still more vigorously in light of the failure of all parts of the institutional Left to present anything but the most staunch support for recent repressive measures. 87. Pan(dem)ic!, 55f.

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88. Ibid., 89, although cf. 65 where he speaks largely at second-hand of China ‘doctoring data.’ 89. Pan(dem)ic!, 103. 90. Ibid., 125. 91. Pan(dem)ic! 2, 11; cf. 26. 92. Pan(dem)ic! 2, 101. 93. Pan(dem)ic! 2, 140. 94. Pan(dem)ic! 2, 122. 95. Cf. Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda, ‘The R-files 2.0: Aspects of [the New] Right-wing Extremism & Pandemic! 2: Chronicles of a Time Lost,’  Philosophical Salon, 14th December 2020. Hamza affirms, from a position of some mysterious superiority: ‘the greatest political and philosophical disappointment of the pandemic period, namely the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, whose texts on the role of the state, social distancing and masks [have] only turned his previous writings into caricatures of themselves [. . .].’ 96. Pan(dem)ic! 2, 146, emphasis added. 97. Ibid. 98. Pan(dem)ic! 2, 110. 99. Ibid., 103. 100. Pan(dem)ic!, 126. 101. Pan(dem)ic! 2, 27. He had largely forgotten this in the panicked confusion evinced by the previous work. 102. Pan(dem)ic!, 127. 103. Pan(dem)ic!, 126. 104. Pan(dem)ic!, 126–27. 105. Pan(dem)ic!, 126.

CHAPTER 3 1. This transformation of ‘essence’ (‘essential services,’ ‘essential worker’) would figure prominently within a more general consideration of the corruption of language that has gone hand in hand with the promotion of repression over the last three years: this other sense of logos will remain largely in the background here, as our attention is focused more on the logic of the affair, but its investigation remains a crucial philosophical task for the future (not that Heidegger and the Frankfurt school in particular have not made great strides in this direction). An instance of the transformation of ‘essence’ that touched the present author personally was a door sign symbolically barring the way to the Philosophy Department and indeed the entire building in which it is situated, allowing entry as it did only to ‘essential workers’ and prohibiting others on the grounds of ‘protecting’ those whose working lives were ‘of the essence,’ which had without our noticing, perhaps overnight, come to mean ‘necessary to bare life or mere bodily survival.’ 2. Žižek, in his generally confused contributions, has at least insisted upon this point from very early on (Žižek, Pan(dem)ic!, 26, cf. 122). Working at home (the

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preposition and its corruption are significant) was always a middle-class prerogative, as was studying and in general being confined to the home, if not a luxury devoutly to be wished at any other time by those lucky enough to have gardens, space, and quiet, and this allowed a group whose voice was already heard more readily than others to embrace the transvaluation of values that occurred in almost every aspect of our relation to our fellow man in a way that the working class could not. Middle-class radicals and Marxists showed themselves particularly insensitive to the exclusion of this class in their fanatical commitment to locking down others. 3. If only in passing, the dependence of the recent measures on technology is raised by Agamben: ‘Others, whoever they are—even loved ones—must not be approached or touched. Instead, we should establish between them and ourselves a distance that is one metre by some accounts, but that according to the latest suggestions by the so-called experts should be 4.5 metres (those fifty centimetres are so interesting!). Our neighbour has been abolished. [. . .] [/] [W]herever possible, machines can replace any contact—any contagion—among human beings’ (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 15–16). As he points out elsewhere, the ground has been well and truly prepared for this over the last twenty years or so, if not for much longer: ‘Digital devices have for quite some time accustomed us to distant, virtual relations. The epidemic and technology are here inseparably intertwined’ (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 62, translation slightly modified). Mark Sinclair has broached a consideration of the way in which technology facilitated the advocacy of lockdowns whilst urging something like a Heideggerian conception of technology, in the sense of a response to a new manner of revealing beings as a whole, as a potential way to resist such gestures in the future. This would involve acknowledging, as Agamben would likely endorse, that technology is not the sum total of useful or useless artefacts of a machinic character, but at the very least corresponds to a vision of the universe in which the exceptional merit of human beings is altogether elided in an indifference to ontological distinctions that allows them and everything they employ to be considered simply as ‘resources’ (Bestand) for energy production (Mark Sinclair, ‘How the Rise of Digital Technology Facilitated Lockdown,’ The Critic, 8th January 2021). On the non-egalitarian consequences of certain technologies, largely in the guise of the (presumably middle-class) user’s subjection to a certain kind of data-gathering, cf. Mark Wong, ‘Digital Society, Algorithmic Harm, and the Pandemic Response’ in Pandemic Response and the Cost of Lockdowns, although the text is largely trivial and even uncritical with respect to the very fact of lockdowns and the forcing of (again, middle-class) human beings into this virtual space, occasionally daring to, very obliquely, suggest that this increased surveillance of people’s online and intimate habits may have been motivated; but in the main it attempts to protect itself by allowing the reader to gather the impression that this all happened by unfortunate accident. It also seems to imagine that the primary problem with data-gathering by large companies is its inequitable instantiation, as if the gathering itself could somehow operate to ‘everyone’s advantage,’ if only people’s (apparently self-chosen, or at least self-perceived) ‘identities’ could be taken into account.

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In any case, everyone could and should have been able to guess that a comfortable, homely, online life was, yet again, the preserve of the middle classes. 4. On the impact of the police-response on the ‘third world,’ cf. Green, The Covid Consensus, esp. ch. 3; cf. Alex Broadbent, ‘Lockdown is Wrong for Africa,’ Mail & Guardian, 8th April 2020. And in relation to the differential effects of a single action when it comes to sex, race, and immigration, cf. Angela Mitropoulos, Pandemonium: Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve (London: Pluto Press, 2020), Introduction (e-book, n.p), Tina Chanter’s forthcoming text on the topic, which promises a similar focus (Chanter, Philosophy in Times of Crisis: The Pandemics of Covid-19, Racism, and Violence against Women [tbc.]), and Lambros Fatsis and Melayna Lamb, Policing the Pandemic: How Public Health Becomes Public Order (Bristol: Policy Press, 2022). In general, it seems to us that, however laudable in intent this type of differentiation may be, and however useful in stirring up opposition to lockdowns among certain parts of the politically active population, a certain focus on identity and the supposedly desirable recognition of such identities within the politico-legal or symbolic sphere will give us no purchase at all on the real evils of lockdowns. This evil is bound up with their universal reach and their damaging of majorities, and the way in which their conditions of possibility involve decisions regarding the human essence itself. At the very least a certain hypersensitivity to other’s (indulged) hypersensitivities has fostered a culture of thought and speech which stifles debates of the kind needed to risk questioning such gestures as ‘saving lives,’ ‘protecting lives,’ or indeed ‘recognising’ and ‘protecting’ ‘identities.’ 5. No doubt the absolutely universalising imposition of vaccine mandates in, for instance, the United States of America, was partly designed to obviate such questions; nevertheless, from an international perspective, it is clear that for certain age groups, those who are legally denied the vaccine, it is considered by the orthodoxy of that nation-state that the risks for them outweigh any possible benefit. It remains an immense and troubling question why, given that this dialectic between benefits and harms is implicit within these decisions and is therefore overt, the existence of an unusually large number of ‘adverse events’ in response to the mRNA vaccines in particular should be so utterly absent from most mainstream media. This was certainly the case at the time of writing, January–April 2023, and we can only hope that, as with almost all of the other aspects of this affair that were once marginalised as simple ‘misinformation’ put about by ‘conspiracy theorists,’ from the lab-leak hypothesis to the harms caused by lockdowns, to the very censorship of alternative views itself, the counterproductive side-effects of the vaccine and their true extent will eventually be allowed in to the public-mediatic discussion of what has happened over the last three years (on the hypothesis of lab leak, at least, cf. Ridley, Viral, 155ff, which reports unambiguously on Peter Daszak’s demand in that respect; elsewhere in the present work we discuss the same gesture with respect to the Great Barrington Declaration on the part of Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, cf. ‘How Fauci and Collins Shut Down Covid Debate,’ Wall Street Journal, 21st December 2021). Let it be noted that Andrew Bridgen, the Member of Parliament for North-West Leicestershire initiated a Backbench Adjournment debate in the United Kingdom’s

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Parliament on the topic on 13th December 2022 (cf. https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​ ?v​=-​ MSKzoI72eU​&ab​_channel​=Dr​.JohnCampbell). Some of the story of its censorship on social media may be found here https:​//​delingpole​.podbean​.com​/e​/andrew​ -bridgen​-mp​/. Presumably deliberately—though from what motives we can only guess—almost no MPs chose to attend the debate. Slightly earlier, on 24th October 2022, Christopher Chope made the following intervention in another (‘E-petition’) parliamentary debate (public petitions gathering more than 100,000 signatures are ‘considered’ for debate—in this case, the petition was signed 107,122 times, https:​//​petition​.parliament​.uk​/petitions​/602171): https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​ ?v​=MwXapOzcKzs​&ab​_channel​=Dr​.JohnCampbell: cf. Hansard: https://hansard. parliament.uk/commons/2022-10-24/debates/FF880636-BC3B-4BDB-A5E0D6D4B82B2888/Covid-19VaccinesSafety; cf. https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =GYFYq0xEAjQ​&ab​_channel​=Dr​.JohnCampbell & the complete debate, at the time of writing still available on the UK Parliament’s own YouTube channel, under the heading of ‘E-petition Debate Relating to the Safety of Covid-19 Vaccines—Monday 24th October 2022’: https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=pfgGCgxGYkk​&t​=0s​&ab​ _channel​=UKParliament [accessed 6th January 2023]. A later intervention by Bridgen was emblematic of the way debate has functioned throughout the affair: almost every Member of Parliament in attendance left the chamber before the question could even be raised (cf. Dr. John Campbell, ‘Vaccination Problems, UK Parliament,’ 17th March 2023, https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =JvSHD​_n3Lyg​&ab​_channel​=Dr​.JohnCampbell [accessed 19th March 2023]). 6. Already, in England, not by any means the least liberal country in this respect, one will simply have been excluded from various parts of social and cultural life, and at least certain types of employment, if one has not accepted the incursion—although at least this was vigorously contested, and the tide in this respect has, at least for now, in most places receded; and yet stories still circulate of the reappearance of the ominous ‘digital id’ which found an extraordinarily efficacious pretext in the virus and the vaccine in tandem, in a country that has always been culturally resistant to such things, from at least the Centre to the Right (at the time of writing: September 2022). Cf. the eminently measured text by Nick Corbishley, Scanned: Why Vaccine Passports and Digital IDs will mean the End of Privacy and Personal Freedom (London: Chelsea Green, 2022), for a largely empirical account of the progress that has already been made, after long preparation and pressure, for such ‘vaccine passports,’ and the effects this is already having across Europe and elsewhere. The text, as most do, despite invoking Agamben on a number of occasions, falls short when a philosophical question arises, but otherwise it is remarkably frank, often revelatory, and clearly written. In the case of each of the factors listed we have witnessed a truly remarkable and terrifying exertion of pressure, on as many fronts as could be imagined, urging us to take this material into our blood, come what may. In many places, this has been urged even upon the very youngest, and even effectively upon the unborn, with pregnant women assured that the vaccines had been tested for safety in that respect. And yet we find that it crosses the boundary of the placenta, nevertheless. (The steady flow of papers from the Pfizer submissions to the FDA in America are gradually unveiling

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this for all to see, as is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and its equivalents elsewhere, including the Yellow Card system in England. The injections were initially not recommended for pregnant women, even by the British NHS: Naomi Wolf has been campaigning fiercely on this topic in the name of women’s health, in avowed continuity with her infinitely well-received work prior to the epidemic.) We have also witnessed the remarkable pronouncement, effectively admitting that the risk-benefit analysis did not suggest that very young children and perhaps children tout court should be injected on medical grounds, that children were to be vaccinated for the sake of their mental health or for ‘broader reasons,’ and earlier on that despite the existence of studies demonstrating the danger of the virus to be so minute that the risk of side-effects in children of this age outweighed any potential benefits of the vaccine, and despite the government’s own advisory panel recommending against it, vaccinations of the young were urged by those in power, and most recently, in a patent contradiction, in response to a ‘variant’ which was deemed newsworthy precisely because it seemed possible that it resisted the effects of the injections administered, a still further and more intensive distribution was promulgated, and a debate as to its potentially compulsory nature effectively initiated, whilst other countries in Europe had already set their sinister precedent. (By the end of January 2022, in England [not in Scotland and Wales whose leaders have demonstrated exactly what happens when people of almost no influence over a very small and largely unpopulated domain get the slightest whiff of power], almost all measures put in place in a hasty panic in face of the Omicron variant at the end of November 2021 had already been rescinded, and at the time of writing, late September 2022, they remain so, and are barely mentioned, save by fanatical medics, perhaps wondering why they have been deposed and are no longer heeded. All news remains drowned out by a real war and a single [monarchic] death and resurrection.) 7. On the deterioration of political life that results from the concealment of the face, cf. Agamben, ‘The Face and the Mask,’ Where Are We Now?, 86ff, and ‘The Face and Death,’ loc cit. In Means Without End, Agamben devotes a chapter to the face that provides some context for the two more recent works. It is entitled ‘The Face’ and derives from 1990 (according to a correction to the date given in the English translation suggested by Leland de la Durantaye) (Agamben, Means without End, 91ff). Much could be said about this gesture, which was the first condition that those in power discovered could be set as the price for a restoration of ‘normality.’ We have broached it elsewhere, but if we end up devoting little space to it this should not give the reader the impression that we find it anything less than abhorrent. There is a worrying tendency even in the more sceptical texts, such as Mark Woolhouse’s, to risk suggesting that a society of masked men comes at a relatively low cost, and that the obliteration of the human face, its singularity, and the communication it involves us in, is effectively harmless; but the face is the unobjectivisable phenomenality of our very subjectivity, which is to say our humanity and our singularity as this human— eliding it can only amount to an objectivisation, either on our own part, or on that of others (‘we are primarily bearers of disease; long before we are human beings’). That some took it as a mark of their own virtuousness—proudly on display, as if profound,

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but in fact infinitely superficial—only testifies to the extraordinary reversal in moral thinking that took place between 2020 and 2021. 8. This is the role of certification, which in the European Union has assumed the English title, ‘Green Pass,’ assuming the most innocent interpretation of what is taking place. The green pass was a measure originally said to be intended to facilitate travel, but almost immediately it was used intranationally, in Italy among other countries, to control ingress into the most basic institutions of civil life (cf. Giorgio Agamben and Massimo Cacciari, ‘A proposito del decreto sul green pass,’ 26th July 2021; Agamben, ‘Tessera verde’ [Green Pass], 19th July 2021 et al., the latter being included in the expanded version of A che punto siamo? but not its English rendition; and cf. Corbishley, Scanned, 1ff for a history and prehistory of the Green Pass). In England, if one was exempt from the requirement to wear a mask on medical grounds, one was at risk of detention if one did not wear a badge of ‘exemption’ that rendered visible an invisible ‘disability.’ The logo on this badge was a yellow sunflower, of all the infantilising plants—the only element of flora that most English children will ever attempt to grow—and which here was chosen presumably so as to symbolise a ‘delicate flower.’ That one’s true identity, as exempt, as disabled, was invisible to the naked eye, rendering one indistinguishable from other, more normal folk, renders the analogy that Agamben draws in another way (with respect to those who did not accept or possess the Green Pass) with the yellow star of David all the more striking (Agamben, ‘Cittadini di seconda classe’ [Second Class Citizens], 16th July 2021, included in the second edition of A che punto siamo?). To go beyond the most innocent interpretation, certification has been taken simply as a way in to the gathering of information that begins or develops with certification, while some explanations for the bewildering vigour that has characterised the promotion of these types of experimental therapy even go so far as to whisper of ‘depopulation.’ The television series Utopia, in the original British version and its remarkably timed American remake, was just one among many cultural products which capitalised upon this notion, demonstrating it to be very much abroad in the popular imagination—the sheer proximity to the truth of what was going on, at least in general, caused Amazon Prime to insert an extraordinary disclaimer at the beginning of each episode of the American version, when it was first shown, insisting that this programme was ‘a work of fiction’ and (with an extraordinary banality and clumsiness of language) ‘not based on an actual pandemic’ (cf. https:​//​www​.amazon​ .co​.uk​/gp​/video​/detail​/B08D1K36DL​/ref​=atv​_dl​_rdr​?autoplay​=1). A reconsideration of V for Vendetta would also be illuminating at this level, many details of the film attaining today a new salience. It displays a remarkable grasp of the biopolitical logic of manufacturing a threat in order to instil a fear that then allows those in power to extend the reach of their power still further, by affirming that they alone have the strength to secure society against this threat. At the time of writing, in England and elsewhere, we are living in a time of unexplained excess deaths, not obviously caused by the virus, and the cancellation by PayPal and Facebook, and any number of other technological companies, of those who even hint at a connection between these deaths, often of the young and healthy, who were spared the trials of covid-19 itself, and either lockdowns or mRNA vaccination.

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These include organisations such as the Free Speech Union, which argues for the untrammelled expression of ideas. These are truly remarkable times. 9. I have in mind Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s definition of ‘totalitarianism’ as the infiltration of state power into every aspect of public and private life—‘the undivided reign of the political [. . .] the “everything is political” which near enough universally dominates today’—but I know of no definition of ‘totalitarian’ that recent actions do not fulfil (Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe, Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks, trans. Simon Sparks et al. [London: Routledge, 1997], 126). A year after the affair, with a focus on some extraordinary actions on the part of government agencies in Britain, the manufacturing of fear (through word and image: in an age of illiteracy but also one in which the immediate aesthetic power of the wordless picture has been realised, the rhetorical soliciting of the pathē took place as much through viciously manipulative and deliberately horrifying imagery as it did through the language of politicians and media) has been addressed in a monograph, often facile and inevitably journalistic in character, but still efficacious and capable of enjoying a mass audience, a compendium of facts, and some truly surprising candour from anonymous sources, by Laura Dodsworth, A State of Fear. Perhaps most pertinent for our purposes is the connection drawn here between the manufacturing of fear and the explicit invocation of ‘totalitarianism,’ a connection which Agamben has been accused of exaggerating (cf. Roberto Esposito, ‘Cured to the Bitter End,’ European Journal of Psychoanalysis, trans. anon., 28th February 2020). When those charged with this very strategy find themselves compelled—in their belated contrition—to employ a similar language, it should perhaps demonstrate that the notion is not so far-fetched as it seems to some (Gordon Rayner, ‘Use of Fear to Control Behaviour in Covid Crisis Was “Totalitarian,” Admit Scientists,’ Daily Telegraph, 14th May 2021; cf. State of Fear, 94 et al.; cf. above all, and conclusively, Claire Newell et al., ‘The Lockdown Files,’ Daily Telegraph, in which a Secretary of State is seen to employ the locution, as banal and juvenile as the infantilisation it implies at so many levels, and which is not even quite literate, to ‘frighten [sic] the pants off’ the populace, in some cases by the ingenious ruse of ‘deploy[ing]’ the notion of a ‘new variant,’ a new mutant, still worse, it is to be inferred, than the last). For a more complete explanation of how lockdowns might have come to be accepted in the democratic West, cf. Carlo Caduff, ‘What Went Wrong: Corona and the World after the Full Stop,’ and Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, ch.15. On the space of public discourse and the limits of the sayable, Stuart J. Murray was the author of a perceptive piece, early on in the affair: ‘biopolitical “commonsense” organises the scene of political speech’ (Murray, ‘COVID-19: Crisis, Critique, and the Limits of What We Can Hear,’ Topia, 20th March 2020). And for a sustained argument in favour of the word ‘fascist’ in this context, cf. Simon Elmer, The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (London: Architects for Social Housing, 2022) (esp. 3ff), which taken in the round provides a useful, avowedly popular, and fearless account of the entire affair, as well as a forthright assertion of the institutions who might be involved in constructing the global state that its title announces, all named with a greater certainty than we have generally allowed ourselves in the present work.

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10. ‘[M]odern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones’ (Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005], 2). Let us note in passing the careful documentation of the, in this case literal, state of emergency in relation to the British legal system—the legal dismantling of the rule of law itself, or of freedoms and rights supposedly guaranteed by law—by Adam Wagner: Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters (London: Bodley Head, 2022), esp. pp. 174–75 for the dreadful milestones that marked this descent into authoritarianism, and a certain, eventual emergence into the light of day on 26th January and 18th March 2022. 11. Byung-Chul Han has written on the analogies between the ‘war on terror’ and the supposed war on the virus: ‘The effects of the pandemic are similar to those of terrorism: terrorism also triggers an overwhelming immune response by throwing naked death at bare life. At airports everyone is treated like a potential terrorist. At airports we endure, without protest, the most humiliating security measures. We allow ourselves to be frisked for concealed weapons. The virus is a terror in the air. Everyone is suspected of being a potential carrier of the virus, and this leads to a quarantine society, which, in turn, will lead to a biopolitical surveillance regime. The pandemic does not promise a different form of life. In the war against the virus, life is more than ever a matter of mere survival. The virus only intensifies our mania for survival’ (Han, The Palliative Society, 18). The response is not to use one’s judgement but precisely to avoid doing that by universalising. Everyone. Potentially. And thus we have both an oppositional situation in which the enemies of the virus are pitted against its friends, who want it simply to ‘let rip,’ but at the same time this war is a civil war and the division rends the fabric of society: any one of us could be an unwitting friend of the virus by carrying it, unconsciously doing its bidding. We are therefore a step beyond the war on terror, for here we must treat even ourselves with suspicion. I am grateful to a reviewer of the present work for pointing out that this universalisation in the case of airport security and more generally the preventative measures taken by law enforcement agencies is, in certain respects, only an apparent one: it is overwhelmingly aimed at certain groups who are picked out by their race and class; at the same time, it is an identitarian and politically correct reaction against the potential for this kind of discrimination that has at least tacitly predominated, particularly in university circles, in the instigation and prolongation of certain biosecurity measures: rather than allowing individual judgement to be exercised, blanket regulations are drawn up, perhaps so as to avoid the situation in which we effectively stand now, in early 2023, and in fact since early 2022, in which the paranoid and the supposedly vulnerable are the only ones still clinging to these now defunct guidelines; posters, until very recently, remained immovably glued to the walls of various corridors, as

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if taking them down would be to render one’s self complicit in murder. The author recently wrote to his local City Council asking why, after three years, large red road signs still adorned the centre, reading ‘Covid 19: Keep Your Distance.’ As ever, one was left marvelling at the absence of logic implicit in that remarkable syntax, and that ever-disingenuous punctuation, the colon implying some sort of implicatory or justificatory connection without ever stating exactly what that might be. As of 2nd April 2023, no reply has been forthcoming. 12. Cf. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 28 et al. 13. Agamben is adapting Carl Schmitt (and Hannah Arendt) when he speaks of a convergence of both global and civil war in the form of a ‘global civil war’ (cf. Agamben, State of Exception, 2–3): ‘An epidemic, as is suggested by its etymological roots in the Greek term demos (which designates the people as a political body), is first and foremost a political concept. In Homer, polemos epidemios is the civil war. What we see today is that the epidemic is becoming the new terrain of politics, the battleground of a global civil war—because a civil war is a war against an internal enemy, one which lives inside of ourselves’ (Where Are We Now?, 59–60). 14. Cayley, ‘Questions.’ 15. Toby Green, having shown that the damage to bare life caused by lockdowns outweighs the most extreme predictions of what might have been inflicted by the disease itself, understands this not as the sacrifice of the present to the future, but of the future to the present, the young to the old, the healthy to the unhealthy (Green, Covid Consensus, 28, 80). Green’s text is an eminently sensible, largely factual account of the way in which the harm of the remedy outweighs its dubious salvific value. The only thing lacking from it is precisely philosophy, which would allow it an explanation for the consensus more satisfying than the one offered, an explanation which may broadly be summarised as an increasing nationalism and polarisation of opinion thanks to (social) media. And this may be related to the fact that in some of its strategies, it still places the value of ‘life’ at its foundation. To criticise the entire affair on a terrain other than life, we shall need to shift our discourse to the level of philosophy, and thus it may be said that Green’s inspirational book will have negatively delineated the task that the present book set itself. 16. To spare the reader a long series of references, let us advert here to the present author’s ‘Of (Auto-) Immune Life: Derrida, Esposito, Agamben,’ in Darian Meacham (ed.), Medicine and Society: New Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015). 17. ‘[In Algeria, in 1992,] they decided in a sovereign fashion to suspend, at least provisionally, democracy for its own good, so as to take care of it, so as to immunise it against a much worse and very likely assault. [. . .] [T]he hypothesis here is that of a taking of power, or rather, of a transferring of power (kratos) to a people (dēmos) who, in its electoral majority and following democratic procedures, would not have been able to avoid the destruction of democracy itself. Hence a certain suicide of democracy. Democracy has always been suicidal, and if there is a to-come for it, it is only on the condition of thinking life otherwise, life and the force of life. [. . .] [/] There is something paradigmatic in this autoimmune suicide’ (Derrida, Rogues:

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Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005], 33). We witness such a moral, or political, panic whenever ‘far Right’ parties are polling well, and no doubt the employment of the media to whip up fear at the very prospect is the more common contemporary form of this ‘democratic’ suspension of democracy. Such a reading of Derrida will receive more substantiation in a forthcoming monograph on Agamben, and finds a preliminary explication in ‘The Machine in Esposito and Agamben,’ Journal of Italian Philosophy 5 (2022) and our ‘Review of Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? And Other Writings,’ ibid. 18. Roberto Esposito, ‘The Twofold Face of Immunity,’ trans. Arbër Zaimi, Crisis and Critique 7:3 (2020), 24th November 2020, 77, emphasis added. Esposito pits his own position directly against Agamben in these terms: ‘I personally believe that the defence of life is a value superior to any other—if only because it is presupposed by them [these other values]: in order to be free or to communicate with others, one must first be alive’ (ibid., 78). This is precisely the position, with bare life standing as a ‘presupposition’ for all other forms of life, that we are about to challenge, by means of a critical reading of Derrida’s account of the logic of (auto)immunity. That said, as we shall suggest in the account of Esposito’s position that we are about to give, he does nuance this by proposing that even what is supposed to be ‘bare’ life ought to be understood in a way more akin to the understanding of ‘Leben’ given by the life-philosophers from at least Wilhelm Dilthey onwards, and likely as far back as Nietzsche if not further, a life that spontaneously creates meaning and value, that institutes itself and thus elevates itself beyond the natural and the biological (cf. Esposito, ‘Vitam instituere,’ trans. Emma Catherine Gainsforth, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 26th March 2020, which provides the basis for the quasi-prologue to Esposito’s Institution, trans. Z. Hanafi [Cambridge: Polity, 2022]; Istituzione [Bologna: Mulino, 2021]; cf. Esposito, Instituting Thought: Three Paradigms of Political Ontology, trans. M. W. Epstein [Cambridge: Polity, 2021]; Pensiero Istituente. Tre paradigmi di ontologia politica [Turin: Einaudi, 2020]). 19. The ones who were perhaps the quickest to begin putting such a notion abroad were the World Economic Forum (WEF). It had been on their mind for quite some time and has been honoured with the extremely sinister title of ‘the Great Reset’: cf. Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset (Geneva: Forum, 2020). The notion is considered in some depth by the Manifeste Conspirationniste, and Elmer’s Road to Fascism—which supplies useful information as to the WEF’s alumni (cf. 12ff)—among an increasing number of other texts that are, it seems to us, rightly fraught with worry, and which remain ignored or treated with both vocal and silent contempt by those in the mainstream.

CHAPTER 4 1. For an attempt to delineate what Derrida ‘would have thought’ about recent events, cf. Areej Al-Khafaji, ‘Coviderrida: The Pandemic in Deconstructive

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Philosophy,’ Derrida Today 15:1 (May 2022): 67–84. Unfortunately, as if evincing the tendency of deconstruction at times not to decide, the text has the remarkable temerity to urge upon us ‘a shift from the metaphysical discourse which is built on [the] logocentric war of opposites into a discourse of friendship, hospitality, and autoimmunity’ (83) and to insist that the whole affair be spoken of biologically and not politically (81), which perhaps alone could explain the fact that it breathes not so much as a single word about the most eminent exercise of political power witnessed in our century, one which has installed physical barriers between friends and legally prohibited all hospitality, together with the auto-immune destruction of community that this has manifestly entailed. And despite the renunciation of war and the deconstruction of the divide between man and virus (70), the author joins in wholeheartedly with a ‘war’ on the virus itself (79, 81). We are still searching for a work that would do justice to Derrida, for whom it would have been characteristic to avoid easy answers (or as they are called today, ‘difficult decisions’). 2. Cf. the Editors’ Introduction to the collection, Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy for an account of the composition and publishing of these texts, and a note which we have been forced to add to the bibliography of the present work (Fernando Castrillón and Thomas Marchevsky [eds.], Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics, and Society [London: Routledge, 2021]). 3. Agamben, ‘L’invenzione di un’epidemia’; ‘The Invention of an Epidemic,’ trans. anon. European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 26th February 2020, reprinting an article on the topic that appeared simultaneously in the newspaper, Il Manifesto, under the title, ‘Lo stato d’eccezione provocato da un’emergenza immotivata,’ ‘The state of exception provoked by an unmotivated emergency.’ This became chapter 1 of Where Are We Now? and took the former title—the curious notion of the ‘unmotivated’ or ‘unprovoked’ in the context of the emergency itself suggests that the headline was not chosen by Agamben himself—and as the change makes clear it was not deemed ultimately satisfactory. 4. On the fatality of the virus, cf. Vighi, ‘Slavoj Žižek, Emergency Capitalism, and the Capitulation of the Left,’ Philosophical Salon, 24th May 2021. It was estimated by WHO themselves by this time as 0.23%, 0.05% for those under 70 years of age, and the estimates have now reached as low as 0.01% overall and still lower for those of working age (cf. Pezzullo et al., ‘Age-Stratified Infection Fatality Rate of Covid-19 in the Non-elderly Population,’ Environmental Research 216:3 [2023], loc. cit.), and as it emerges that the virus was in circulation much earlier than was first thought, the general prevalence of the virus amongst the population implies a larger denominator (those infected) that will in turn result in a lower estimate of the ‘infection fatality rate’ (whose numerator would be the number of those who died, which would then be divided by the denominator) (cf. Giovanni Apolone et al., ‘Unexpected Detection of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies in the Prepandemic Period in Italy,’ Tumori 107:5 [October 2021]: 446–51 and John Campbell’s analysis of the same at https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​ /watch​?v​=XzPophi​-9MY​&ab​_channel​=Dr​.JohnCampbell). 5. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Eccezione virale,’ Antinomie, 27th February 2020; ‘Viral Exception,’ trans. anon. European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

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6. Nancy, ‘Eccezione virale.’ 7. Let it be noted that in an addendum to ‘Viral Exception,’ which became the prologue to the English translation of Nancy’s An All-Too-Human Virus, the author says the following: ‘I understand that Giorgio considers our society’s obsession with health to be pathetic. Like him, I have Nietzsche’s concept of “great health” in mind. But when an entire civilisational organism is ill—and made all the more so by its obsession with health—it is understandable that it seeks a way out of the illness. Perhaps we will not find a way out, or will not do so unscathed—and this will perhaps present new opportunities. But the already ancient critique of religion [which he has just attributed to Agamben], however it might be formulated, has not yet managed to bring about a new civilisation’ (Nancy, An All-Too-Human Virus, 3). The text is dated April 2021. Four months later, Nancy would be dead, and perhaps this text will have allowed some manner of reconciliation between the two old friends, which is not nothing. 8. This is the absolutely invidious position that ‘critics’ are placed in: as Fabio Vighi puts it, ‘[t]oday, capitalist realism prevails through a plea that is almost impossible to counter: saving lives’ (‘Homo Pandemicus: COVID Ideology and Panic Consumption,’ Crisis and Critique 7:3 [November 2020], 458–59). 9. Nancy, ‘Un virus troppo umano,’ Antinomie, 20th March 2020; ‘A Much Too Human Virus,’ trans. Agnès Jacob, European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Nancy later included this text—along with all of the others we are dealing with here, save for the very first, ‘Viral Exception,’ which was nevertheless restored to the English translation, as a ‘Prologue’—in Un trop humain virus (Paris: Bayard, 2020); An All-Too-Human Virus, trans. Cory Stockwell, Sarah Clift, and David Fernbach (Cambridge: Polity, 2022). 10. Broadly speaking this is Andreas Malm’s point, more firmly in the register of ‘ecology’ (Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency). And indeed there was much work being done to ‘prepare’ (for) such an affair (cf. Manifeste Conspirationniste). 11. Nancy, ‘Viral Exception.’ 12. Ibid. 13. ‘The coronavirus pandemic is, on every level, a product of globalisation [mondialisation] [. . .]. It takes part in the wider process through which a culture becomes undone, to be replaced by something which is less a culture and more a system of forces indistinguishably technical, economic, authoritarian and sometimes psychological or physical (if we think of oil or the atom)’ (Nancy, ‘A Much Too Human Virus’). 14. Nancy, ‘A Much Too Human Virus.’ 15. Nancy, ‘A Much Too Human Virus.’ 16. Nancy indeed goes so far as to ‘celebrate’ this act of suspension in the name of ‘public health’ (Nancy, ‘Still too Human,’ Crisis and Critique 7:3 [2020], 24th November 2020, 268). In certain chapters of the book that collects and expands upon this cluster of texts, he does at least at times recognise the harm done by house arrest, whilst still not acknowledging an alternative. As with most leftists, he wrings his hands at the aporia and reassures himself that this collateral damage was ‘inevitable.’ 17. Esposito, ‘Cured to the Bitter End,’ 28th February 2020.

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18. Nancy responds, rather tersely, ‘neither “biology” nor “politics” are precisely determined terms today. I would actually say the contrary. That’s why I have no use for their assemblage’ (European Journal of Psychoanalysis, https:​//​www​.journal​ -psychoanalysis​.eu​/on​-pandemics​-nancy​-esposito​-nancy​/). In the French original of ‘Un trop humain virus,’ he speaks of the word as ‘dérisoire’ in such a context (Un trop humain virus, 18—translated into a more polite English form as ‘inadequate’). In a later text, Nancy continues in this vein by speaking of a failure of biopolitics as a theoretical approach and of the pandemic as something ‘which offers nothing if not a prominent occasion for celebrating the management of public health (it matters little whether such management takes place in an autocratic or libertarian/liberal manner)’—a remarkable thing to say, and not just from a biopolitical perspective— Biopolitics—already a dubious concept to begin with—takes a tumble and falls short here, which may in turn help shed some light on the problem at hand’ (Nancy, ‘Still too Human,’ Crisis and Critique 7:3 [November 2020], 268). It would then be in the very deficit of a biopolitical conceptualisation that we might find the philosophical core of the epidemic. To clarify this affair, he goes on: ‘bios, polis, life and the city have come to rank amongst the murkiest of our signifiers—and no algorithm is going to come up with new meanings for them. We are going to have to come up with another language, give up on our rusty Greek’ (ibid., 268). He had said as much in ‘A Much Too Human Virus,’ but in that case suggested that it was the incidence of the virus itself which had brought to light how complex both life and politics are, given the ambiguous relation between the virus and the living. 19. Cf. Esposito, ‘The Twofold Face of Immunity,’ trans. Arbër Zaimi, Crisis and Critique 7:3 (2020) (24th November 2020), 76, which adopts Nancy’s description of globalisation almost verbatim, but reconfigures it in terms of the generalisation of ‘immunisation.’ As a summary of Esposito’s work on the biopolitics of immunity and community, we might cite this helpful passage: ‘Both expressions—communitas and immunitas—derive from the Latin word, munus, which signifies law, office, obligation, but also gift. What takes shape at the centre of these meanings is a sort of law of gift, or care, in relation to others. But [. . .] if the community is related to munus in a positive sense, immunity is in a negative sense. While the members of the communitas feel bound by this obligation of mutual care, whoever declares himself immune feels exonerated, exempted from it. He is free from obligations towards others. And therefore, for the same reason, also protected from the risk that each sharing entails with regard to one’s personal identity’ (Esposito, ‘The Twofold Face of Immunity,’ 74). 20. Esposito, ‘Cured to the Bitter End.’ 21. Ibid. 22. Esposito, ‘The Twofold Face of Immunity,’ 77–78. In the context of online teaching, responding in part positively to Agamben’s ‘Requiem for the Students,’ Esposito states, ‘However, I share the analysis of the risks that accompany digital didactics. [. . .] [T]housand-year-old university traditions will be lost. I repeat though, this does not exclude [the possibility] that, in some cases, online teaching is necessary. It is still better than nothing, but it should be limited in

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time and in its application’ (‘The Biopolitics of Immunity in Times of COVID-19: An Interview with Roberto Esposito,’ Antipode Online, 16th June 2020). 23. Esposito admits elsewhere in his writings of the period that it is certainly possible for immunity to overpower community: ‘This brings us back to the constitutively ambivalent character of the immunitarian systems. They are at the same time necessary and dangerous for the human community. They are necessary because no organism, individual or social, would survive without an immune system capable of defending it from dangers of external provenance. They are dangerous because, beyond a certain threshold, they risk blocking, even destroying, the very thing that they aim to protect. The problem lies in identifying this threshold’ (Esposito, ‘The Twofold Face of Immunity,’ 75–76). Both immunity and community are mutually necessary, and what we have witnessed in the West in the twentieth century—and this is the general topic of Esposito’s work prior to the virus—is the tendency towards an imbalance in favour of the immune, leading to what Esposito describes as an ‘immunitary syndrome,’ in which immunity and the protection of the individual (or the imposition of measures in the name of ‘security’ in response to manufactured threats) take priority. What is not clear in this individual case is how Esposito thinks that one is to draw the line: in truth, he seems to be of the opinion that, provided the measures are finite in time, that balance has been more or less satisfactorily achieved already. 24. Esposito, ‘Cured to the Bitter End.’ 25. Esposito, ‘The Twofold Face of Immunity,’ 78. 26. Ibid., 78. 27. Esposito, Institution, 6. 28. Ibid. 29. Institution, 7. 30. Ibid. 31. Institution, 8. 32. Esposito, ‘Cured to the Bitter End.’ 33. Ibid. 34. Cf. Nancy, ‘Still too Human,’ 268. 35. Esposito, ‘Cured to the Bitter End.’ 36. Esposito, ‘Vitam instituere.’ 37. Esposito, Institution, 7. 38. Esposito, ‘The Twofold Face,’ 78. 39. Esposito, ‘Vitam instituere.’ These thoughts were in the process of being expanded so as to form the book, Institution, which itself had perhaps received an added impetus from the epidemic itself and indeed from the energy of the polemic. The epilogue to the monograph is dated ‘August 2020.’ 40. Esposito, ‘Vitam instituere.’ 41. Esposito, Institution, 90. 42. Esposito, Institution, 99. 43. Esposito’s English translators have so often had recourse to such distortions of the idiom that one is led to suspect that it may not be accidental; there seems to be something in these concealed technical terms that struggles to find its way into

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English. That said, ‘even when the two are conflated,’ ‘brought into close conjunction’ or ‘collapsed together,’ might better have met the case. For a more sustained consideration of these difficulties, cf. the present author’s ‘The Machine in Esposito and Agamben,’ Journal of Italian Philosophy 5 (2022). 44. Esposito, ‘Vitam instituere,’ emphasis added. 45. Esposito, Institution, 91. 46. Esposito, ‘Vitam instituere.’ 47. Esposito, Institution, 77, emphases added. 48. Esposito, ‘Vitam instituere.’ 49. Esposito, ‘Vitam instituere.’ 50. On rethinking immunity as hospitable, cf. Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Z. Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 16–17, 164ff et al. 51. Esposito, Institution, 8. 52. Esposito, ‘Vitam instituere.’ Another misconception, another totalisation that we are still in the process of diagnosing: one cannot in practice intern the whole of humanity—an entirely nonfunctional world in absolute paralysis would swiftly kill those imprisoned within it, having caused the breakdown of any form of sustainable biological or social life. And similarly his suggestion that institutions ‘represented the last line of resistance against the pandemic’ would have Ivan Illich turning in his grave at the lack of trust it displays in individual judgement, skill, and behaviour (cf. Institution, 7). As so often, the philosopher risks falling into the elementary fallacy that elides the legal and the ethical: it is not individual decision but a law that mandates this behaviour, an order issued by a central sovereign body, and often a global institution. 53. Institution, 9. 54. Institution, 6–7. Again, Illich revolves in frustration. 55. Institution, 10ff. 56. Institution, 43. 57. Institution, 76. 58. Institution, 95. 59. Negri, ‘Giorgio Agamben: The Discreet Taste of the Dialectic’ in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (eds.), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 60. The Great Barrington Declaration and its strategy of ‘focussed protection’ (https:​//​gbdeclaration​.org​/) still seems as fine an example of this approach as any. The violence of its rejection speaks only to the threat that its very moderation and selectivity posed for an almost absolutely hegemonic approach that differed from it in at least these two respects. 61. Daniele Lorenzini, ‘Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus,’ Critical Inquiry, 2nd April 2020. 62. In this light, Judith Butler seems to be mistaken in thinking that ‘the virus does not discriminate. We could say that it treats us equally, puts us equally at risk of falling ill,’ which was patently untrue from the very beginning. It is hardly mitigated by her attribution of this discrimination to the cultural conditions in which the virus found itself operating: ‘Social and economic inequality will make sure that the

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virus discriminates. The virus alone does not discriminate, but we humans surely do, formed and animated as we are by the interlocking powers of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and capitalism’ (Butler, ‘Capitalism Has its Limits,’ https:​//​www​ .versobooks​.com​/blogs​/4603​-capitalism​-has​-its​-limits, 30th March 2020). The virus was in fact inherently discriminatory to an extraordinary degree, with respect to age in particular, and this poses an especial problem for a scheme that risks giving such weight to superstructural constructions carried out by human culture. Where age can fit in such an idealist conception is not clear: there are indeed cultural constructions that surround the determination and treatment of ‘old age,’ but they cannot exhaust its biological character. Not that in the end this would affect Butler’s stance, since she seems to consider even the very oldest and sickest of lives to be ‘grievable’ (cf. Butler, What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology, 94 & 89ff). On p. 96 the elderly make an appearance that is rarer than it might be, paling as it does in comparison with the prominence given to the racial groups who are closer to the heart of what seems to be Butler’s most pressing concern. At this point, the book’s repeated rallying against the ‘economic’ rationality that sees ‘a certain number of deaths’ as an acceptable price for ‘opening up’ becomes distinctly redolent of a fantasy of immortality—or, still worse, an eternal lockdown, which doesn’t at all seem to be ruled out by Butler’s position (one notes a certain potential irony that in the book’s postscript she describes the migrant’s worrying situation in the following terms, whilst having no obvious reservations about its generalisation to nonmigrants, ‘sheltering in place’: ‘to enter into an indefinite time of detention, or to face the impossibility of transit, brutally closed borders, unsanitary conditions, denial of national and international rights, and repeated questions of how to survive, to move, and to arrive, and how to do all this with others who are caught in the same situation’ [ibid., 101–2]). No doubt a result of the law’s happily coinciding with the kind, ethical desire to undergo restriction that characterises the middle class academic, but this does not alter the fact that everything changes when an action is legally mandated; and such an alteration is never so much as touched upon by the text in question—and indeed this elision is marked by the continual blithe employment of the notion of ‘ability’ (‘one was unable to . . . [leave one’s home, move, enjoy one’s rights, attend funerals, marriages, the sick and the dying, or those just being born, experience education and culture, or simply congregate and mingle . . .]’). Consider the one moment at which this contrast between the legal and the ethical explicitly arises in the text: ‘The restrictions stop me from acting in certain ways, but they also lay out a vision of the interconnected world that I am asked to accept’ (ibid., 39). No one was asked and no one is asking. In general, for a text that so often designates its gesture as ‘radical,’ it embodies a remarkably naïve trust in the good intentions of the legislators, and above all in ‘the science’: in this respect one might read with some astonishment a line as uncritical as the following: ‘increasing numbers get vaccinated and accept mask-wearing as an obligation of public life,’ in opposition to those who would free us from lockdown (ibid., 28). In regard to the latter in particular, to not raise the slightest question as to the natural scientific underpinning of such a gesture or its societal effects displays a truly remarkable credulity. Despite everything the book likes to say about the mutual inhalation of a shared atmosphere,

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no alternative to the potentially infinite prolongation of such a social arrangement is proffered. Either lockdowns or we ourselves seem destined for interminability. The wish for immortality seem to prevail in spite of the book’s stress on mourning or grief. One is tempted to say, bluntly, from a perspective that has attempted to relinquish this fantasy, that, naturally, any life—however aged—can and perhaps should be grieved; but this signifies nothing at the level of politics and legislation. The elision of the possibility of a non-legally mandated form of ‘caring’ at the very beginning of the affair and indeed at the very early stages of the disease itself will perhaps have been one of the most regrettable elements of the last two or three years—so much so that even Butler is forced to mark the fact (ibid., 94–96). One wonders if a symptomatic moment emerges when she endorses a paraphrase of words spoken by the director of the World Health Organisation, ‘no one is safe until everyone is safe’ (ibid., 63)—a line which is simply untrue, particularly of a virus which will have happily passed through the overwhelming (and largely invulnerable) majority of the population without their having been unduly troubled. And yet it bespeaks the conception of the human being that seems to underlie this type of position, which sees the human being as such as a vulnerable entity, or as one defined by its vulnerability (at one point, Butler appears to want the term to mean both something universal and something particular: ‘it [“vulnerability”] describes a shared condition of social life, of interdependency, exposure and porosity; [and yet] it names the greater likelihood of dying for those who are marginalised’ [ibid., 87]). Even if in some respects this might be a respectable approach, when it comes to the virus it demonstrates that its author has simply fallen victim to ideology, and all that entails. One might also note—so to speak, ‘for the record’—that Butler’s book does not deign to make a single reference to the work of Agamben. 63. Lorenzini, ‘Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus.’ 64. Ibid. 65. Certain absurd numbers were quoted by the British press, entirely without context as ever, which suggested an ‘approval’ for lockdowns of around 83% (cited uncritically by Spiegelhalter & Masters, Covid by Numbers, 194). How could people in such a context be expected to have spoken otherwise? (How often are people polled as to whether they would recommend breaking the law?) What those who deploy such a statistic to support lockdowns might well have given some thought to is the idea that if a certain way of behaving were endorsed by such a high percentage of citizens, there would be no need whatsoever to legally enforce it. 66. Cf. Sinéad Murphy, ‘Lest We Forget: Life Is Not Non-Death,’ Daily Sceptic, 30th December 2020. Cf. Spiegelhalter & Masters, Covid by Numbers, 103, for an estimate of the number of years that have been lost thanks to every death from the disease (c. 10 years of life). Even if we ignore the fact that the measures these numbers are used to advocate, both non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical, might easily destroy lives with many more years to come, and no heed is apparently paid to the quality of life that might characterise these years, given that death comes almost exclusively to those who are already dying or in a similarly fragile state, this number

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is troubling, not to say perplexing: how is it to be reconciled with the median age of death from the coronavirus as standing at 83 years? 67. As Alessandro Manzoni has it in The Betrothed, describing an incidence of plague in seventeenth-century Milan. The Italian is L’untore: one who spreads contagion by touching things with ‘unction’ or ‘unguents’ (cf. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 14ff; cf. 18). Although this is a ‘fact’ that remains at the level of science and is thus subject to falsification and revision (indeed it has been almost altogether refuted at that level, little though we will have heard about it), the notion of the ‘asymptomatic spreader’ is among the most dubious put abroad mediatically and governmentally over the last three years, not least because it has had the most severe consequences for the healthy and for the normal course of life—without it, a quarantine of the healthy on such a massive scale would surely have proved impossible. Without the purported invisibility of the danger, the enforced yielding up of identity—of an identity to which the citizen themselves would be oblivious—and the consequent power wielded over the life of the citizen, would likely not have been (at least so readily) accepted. Agamben’s Italian speaks, in a literal translation, of the ‘precocious’ (precoce)— those who are supposed to be infectious prior to, ‘earlier than,’ the manifestation of symptoms, if any such thing appears at all (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 15/22). ‘[P]urely in the name of an indeterminate risk [. . .]. Because our neighbour has become a potential [possibile] source of contagion, we have effectively agreed to suspend our relations of friendship and love’ (ibid., 35/48, translation modified). In ‘Some Data’ he will speak of ‘malati non sintomatici,’ the asymptomatic infected (Agamben, ‘Alcuni dati’). It is clear by now, and it could have been from very early on—although it still seems to be implicitly or explicitly denied by those whose own interests depend on it—that such a process of infection is either extremely rare, insignificant in those places in which infection most frequently took place, or simply nonexistent, the means of transmission without symptoms (nasal and oral expulsions) being too limited to have any serious effect. The majority of serious cases of infection took place in confined spaces of ‘care’ or respite (cf. Reiss & Bhakdi, Corona False Alarm?, 32f); Kennedy refers to a Chinese study from December 2020 which finds that ‘asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 is infinitesimally rare’ (Shaun Griffin, ‘Covid-19: Asymptomatic Cases May Not Be Infectious, Wuhan Study Indicates,’ British Medical Journal, 1st December 2020, cited in The Real Anthony Fauci, 2). 68. Stimilli, ‘Being in Common at a Distance,’ trans. Greg Bird. Topia, 9th March 2020. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Stimilli, ‘“Il laboratorio Italia.” Ripensare il debito ai tempi del virus,’ Antinomie, 29th March 2020; ‘The Italian Laboratory—Rethinking Debt in Viral Times,’ trans. Greg Bird, European Journal of Psychoanalysis. 72. Stimilli, ‘The Italian Laboratory.’ In truth, and partly thanks to the same source, Arendt, who exerts as great an influence upon Agamben as Heidegger did, the Italian philosopher at times suggests that

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the home-centred reproduction of life is also a part of bare life, or at least a part of what the seizure of life by power transports from the realm of zōē into that of the distinct notion of ‘bare life.’ 73. Stimilli even rather casually suggests that the bellicose securitising response is ‘presumably unconscious[. . .]’ (‘The Italian Laboratory’). 74. Stimilli, ‘Being in Common at a Distance.’ 75. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 115. We would also propose that bare life is not altogether deprived of power, and that the task of constructing a ‘positive’ or ‘affirmative biopolitics,’ if such a thing remains intelligible on Agamben’s conceptual scheme, is precisely to demonstrate how the minimal human traits of linguisticality and politicality may be generated from bare life, and so restored thereunto in a new form. Perhaps in the end this will lead us to a fourth kind of life, beyond zōē, bios, and bare life, which from very early on took the title—later to be one amongst many—of zōē aionios. 76. Anastasia Berg, ‘Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 23rd March 2020. As this text demonstrates, the (partly biopolitical, also transcendental) theoretical armoury is straightforwardly unavailable to the analytic-philosophical discourse in its mainstream forms, but at the same time, analytic philosophy seems to the present author much more tightly bound up with and dependent upon its institutionalised professional form than its continental counterpart, and thus when it comes to matters as controversial as this, its tendency has been to shy away from polemics (cf. Neil Levy, ‘Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Explaining the Differences,’ Metaphilosophy 34:3 [April 2003], 284–304). At the other end of the scale and at what we still allow ourselves to hope is the other end of this ‘pandemic,’ one might consult with minimal profit the largely journalistic and psycho-sociologistic renunciation of Agamben by one of his own translators, who owes whatever small renown he has acquired exclusively to the Italian philosopher: Adam Kotsko, ‘What Happened to Giorgio Agamben?,’ Slate, 20th February 2022. The best one can say of this is that it embodies any number of the characteristics of the debate with respect to ‘dissent’ on this question that the present work has in part set itself to analyse. How dispiriting, though, to read this (as it was to read the same author’s self-regarding, empirical and barely philosophical trudge through Agamben’s texts, Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory), and this from one who should understand a philosopher, and understand him philosophically, so much better; but who also—and this is far worse—cannot resist repeatedly implying that the limits of his own capacities to understand are the limits of the inherent intelligibility of the work in question. Benjamin Bratton has given himself over to a still more intemperate aggression towards Agamben—which can only bear the disreputable and sadistic mark of kicking someone when they’re down, as if such voices can never be silent enough—in the name of what he calls a ‘positive biopolitics’ (Bratton, Revenge of the Real, 1, 12 et al.), which seems to mean an embrace of a certain kind of ‘globalist’ (ibid., 166) or, in his words, ‘planetary’ intervention, that treats the human population as an objectal system subject to statistical modelling, which the likes of Agamben and Illich (for whom Bratton reserves some choice words on pp. 126–27) set themselves

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so resolutely against (ibid., 5, 8). The only possible alternative, for Bratton, appears to be an entirely malign ‘nationalist populism’ (‘xenophobic myth-mongering [sic]’ [27]), somehow bound up with a ‘mythical’ individualism and an equally mythical ‘individual autonomy’—which he blames for what he imagines went wrong in recent years (12–13). The people are, above all, not to be trusted, and indeed the book regularly allows itself to give in to a limitless contempt for them. More and still more ‘governance,’ and indeed a positive rethinking of ‘surveillance’ is Bratton’s remedy: we need to think of ourselves primarily as biological, epidemiological objects—such is our new ‘responsibility’; but it seems like this will not be up to us. (For Bratton’s tireless gibes against Agamben, one might wish to consult an unedifying summary from p. 108 onwards: what can possess the author to imagine that describing an intellectual opponent as ‘mad’ [109], as having succumbed to ‘paranoia’ [117], and his texts as ‘agitated, delusional, and frankly embarrassing’ [109], whilst laying repeated stress on his interlocutor’s age [a ‘septuagenarian’ (110) possessed of an ‘old mind’ (115)] has anything philosophical about it is difficult to fathom. One can barely restrain the thought that our philosophical culture has come to a pretty pass. Everything is already settled: Heidegger is a fool, simply because he attributes some importance to language and phenomenality and since he does not speak often enough of Darwin, who is somehow the hero of the piece, and anyone who wonders if that can be the end of the story must be ‘premodern.’) 77. Berg, ‘Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness.’ 78. See infra. 79. In an essay on ‘Useless Suffering,’ Levinas will have pointed out the problems inherent in the attempt made by all theodicies to justify not simply one’s own suffering but especially the suffering of others, in a context that includes Marxism (as a kind of secularised theology) and which we might extend to a good deal of Left-wing thought (‘Useless Suffering’ [1982] in Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinkingof-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav [London: Continuum, 2006], 78ff). Earlier on we suggested that such a gesture, which instrumentalises others, often en masse, for the sake of some future Good, is often to be found on the Left. At this point the notion of ‘self-exploitation,’ in which one becomes a slave to one’s own magisterial self, a notion tirelessly investigated by Byung-Chul Han in the wake of a certain Foucault, demonstrates its incompletion. Does such a gesture extend beyond the ambitious middle classes? (Cf. Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, Ch. 2, ‘Why Revolution is Impossible Today.’) 80. Berg, ‘Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness.’ 81. A situation of inarticulacy and illiteracy which has likely been perpetuated by the ‘lockdowns’ themselves. As I set down these words, The Sunday Post reports on a ‘Speech Crisis: Therapists Say Lockdown Damaged Children’s Language and Communication Skills,’ Sunday Post, 8th January 2023. 82. Berg, ‘Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness.’ 83. Ibid., emphases added. 84. Among a hundred studies, if one needed empirical proof when one could easily have inferred this a priori, cf. Ingrid Torjesen, ‘Covid-19: Mental Health Services

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Must Be Boosted to Deal with “Tsunami” of Cases After Lockdown,’ British Medical Journal 369 (2020). 85. Berg, ‘Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness.’ 86. And we were not lacking in medical personnel who seemed to find a permanently auto-immune future somehow sustainable and acceptable: those who told us ‘the days of handshakes are over’ or that the face should be permanently covered in communal life from this point on, indefinitely, in yet another mimicry of far Eastern thought and behaviour. That in August 2022 some academics are still assuming that it is acceptable that conferring should be taking place solely or even partially online implies that the doctors are not alone. At this point, fortunately, for us in the West in any case, it was realised that the political competence of doctors (and academics) had well and truly reached its limit. 87. Esposito, ‘The Twofold Face of Immunity,’ 74, cf. 75–76. 88. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Communovirus,’ Libération, 24th March 2020; trans. David Fernbach, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 22nd April 2020. This becomes chapter 2 of Nancy, Un trop humain virus. 89. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Communovirus,’ emphasis added. On the ‘crowned virus,’ see also Di Cesare, Immunodemocracy, 31: ‘even the virus’s name tells us that it is sovereign.’ 90. Žižek, Pan(dem)ic!, 77. 91. Žižek, ‘Is Barbarism with a Human Face Our Fate?,’ Critical Inquiry, 18th March 2020, reprinted in Pan(dem)ic!, 88. 92. Pan(dem)ic!, 2–3. It remains altogether unclear how the final passages of Žižek’s text, ‘Monitor and Punish?,’ which advocate what he sees as a Tolstoyian vision of man as ‘a passive empty medium infected by affect-laden cultural elements which, like contagious bacilli, spread from one individual to another’ (Pan(dem)ic!, 80) follows in any way from the advocacy of immunitary measures designed precisely to halt transmission through a supposedly acceptable state intervention, unless his point is to kindle ‘the struggle between good and bad infections’ of which the coronavirus would be the latter. 93. Pan(dem)ic!, 56. 94. Cf. Pan(dem)ic 2!, 93, 100–101. 95. Pan(dem)ic!, 92. 96. Richard Kearney notes in an even-handed manner that touch has come to be appreciated all the more in its absence, having been taken for granted when it could be, and that it returns in virtual and phantasmatic forms, the inventiveness of which he broadly celebrates: ‘when faced with the loss of carnal contact, the human imagination responded by contriving new possibilities of haptic communion. [. . .] [/] One of the most important lessons of COVID-19 is, I believe, the question of “connection”’ (Kearney, Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense [New York: Columbia University Press, 2021], 139–40, cf. 133ff), and this in an age when not incarnation but ‘excarnation’ was already becoming the rule (ibid., 2ff), as touch is usurped by ‘touchscreen’ and digits by the digital. ‘The more virtually connected we are, the more solitary we become. [. . .] Cyber connection and human isolation can go hand in glove’ (4–5). At barely a single point does he dispute the necessity for such enforced separation,

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even going so far as to attribute it repeatedly to the virus itself rather than to the institutional response made to it, as if nothing political entered into the affair anywhere. Continental philosophers used to be experts at identifying ideology almost everywhere. For a similar gesture, cf. Judith Butler’s stress on touch and the ‘intertwining’ of touching and touched in a way that also seems quite unable to think beyond a situation in which this contact has been rendered illegal (What World Is This?, 35ff et al.). 97. Nobus, ‘A Viral Revaluation of All Values?,’ European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 15th April 2020. 98. Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations,’ Social Research 38:3 (Autumn 1971), 436. 99. Gabriel Martin, ‘Arendt on Thinking and the Coronavirus Pandemic,’ https:​ //​thevimblog​.com​/2020​/04​/08​/arendt​-on​-thinking​-and​-the​-coronavirus ​-pandemic​/​ ?fbclid​=IwAR0LM76wRz07RgVwhqEHmEmyaM5v86hFyQdPzsieOuJf3I​-EH94​ -1d1FR​_E, 8th April 2020. 100. Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations,’ 417. 101. Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations,’ 445–46. 102. Ratcliffe and Kidd, ‘Welcome to Covidworld,’ The Critic, November 2020.

CHAPTER 5 1. Sloterdijk, ‘Co-Immunism in the Age of Pandemics And Climate Change,’ Noema, 12th June 2020. Sloterdijk’s responses to the measures are collected in Der Staat streift seine Samthandschuhe ab: Ausgewählte Gespräche und Beiträge 2020– 2021 (The State Removes its Kid Gloves) (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021) (cf. pp. 30ff for a German rendition of what appears to be an English original. The latter is cited here). The text as a whole is a depressing story of betrayal, after a promising start (and there is no-one so ardent as a convert), but it is in Sloterdijk’s nature never to say anything that is not at least somewhat interesting, even when he is falling into line. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Malabou, ‘To Quarantine from Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, and “I,”’ Critical Inquiry, 23rd March 2020. The notion of bracketing in the Husserlian sense has often arisen in philosophical accounts of the transformation of human community over the past three years, and while there is unquestionably some truth in the idea that we have been allowed to re-examine human community in light of its cessation, this presupposes both the temporary character of the ‘suspension’ and concedes too much to a universalising way of thinking that we have here set ourselves to resist (in the sense of the non-universality of the purported universality of each of the three moments of the present affair [the Science, the non-pharmaceutical, and the pharmaceutical], and hence the impossibility of everyone attaining such a state of meditative tranquillity)—it also rather offensively suggests that—however true this may be in a certain sense, given that the campus university is itself a kind of bracketing—others would ideally be kept at such a distance under normal circumstances: a certain kind of other, in any case. We advert

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elsewhere to the complexities of the position of the university and its relation to the outside, particularly in the current context. 5. Continental philosophers otherwise seemed to forget immediately or to disavow the notion that contagion, particularly for a tradition of thinkers inspired by Nietzsche and Bataille, has been if not actually valorised then at least considered within a broader context (a more general economy) as an essential part of what it is to live. Cf. David Farrell Krell’s Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), with its amusing inscription, ‘For my students at DePaul University from 1993 through 1996 [sic], who were carriers.’ These days, stating such an obvious fact would be enough to get you expelled from the academy altogether. Perhaps Keith Ansell Pearson’s better-known Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997) may be situated in the same lineage. 6. Malabou, ‘To Quarantine from Quarantine.’ 7. Ibid. 8. Murphy, ‘Stay Safe: The Abuse and Neglect of Care,’ OffGuardian, 19th July 2020; cf. Nina Power, ‘The Politics of Care: Rethinking Collective Being in the Wake of COVID-19,’ https:​//​ninapower​.net​/2020​/10​/, 26th October 2020, and ‘Life and Humanity in Covid Times with Reference to Ivan Illich and Giorgio Agamben,’ https:​ //​ninapower​.net​/2021​/08​/30​/life​-and​-humanity​-in​-covid​-times​-with​-reference​-to​-ivan​ -illich​-and​-giorgio​-agamben​/​?fbclid​=IwAR3tiWIA7​-qgvzJnmmeH0​-s​-0GU7O2e​ -fuoBqgp9pzxaN3FMu1puTJOapRY, 30th August 2021. 9. One should here consider the social life of the child, their education, which includes their elementary socialisation, along with their entire subsequent development to a putative adulthood: in England at least, they are now being told that they must (or ‘may’) even receive vaccinations, to somehow ward off a disease that has little interest in them, to assume yet more risk and burden for the sake of others. They bore the brunt of the damage and now they are being asked to partake in our redemption from it. The extremely vicious neglect and mistreatment of the young in general is charted in a book written by the founders of UsForThem, a group dedicated to campaigning against this, and who were, let it be said, recently ‘demonetised’ by PayPal for such a crime (Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley, The Children’s Inquiry: How the State and Society Failed the Young during the Covid-19 Pandemic), and to a lesser but not negligible degree in Mark Woolhouse’s The Year the World Went Mad. 10. Timofeeva, ‘Do Not Offend the Flies,’ trans. Andrej Jovanchevski, Identities, 6th April 2020. First published in Russian on the very same day as Malabou’s intervention, at https:​//​syg​.ma​/@oksana​-timofieieva​/nie​-obizhaitie​-mukh, 23rd March 2020. 11. Timofeeva, ‘Do Not Offend the Flies.’ 12. Timofeeva, ‘Do Not Offend the Flies.’ 13. Timofeeva, ‘Georges Bataille: A Pandemic Read,’ https:​//​tqw​.at​/the​-moment​ -of​-truth​-george​-bataille​-and​-the​-pandemic​-timofeeva​/​?fbclid​=IwAR3mZSLFXrmqd HGjjJginmqAObFvZaP1lH0Oqx1ySlPWHRwxynGMXLMqpHU, 28th April 2020. 14. Timofeeva, ‘Georges Bataille: A Pandemic Read.’ 15. Timofeeva, ‘For Sharing the Space,’ e-flux, 24th June 2020.

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16. This gesture forms part of Timofeeva’s broader project to conceive of a ‘politics of nature’ that would be modelled more closely upon the general economy of nature than upon the restricted economy of capitalism, or accumulation and exchange more generally: from the former perspective, even a virus which indirectly leads to the closure of workplaces everywhere is nothing troubling: ‘What humanity conceives as a huge problem, indifferent nature celebrates as abundance and splendour’ (Timofeeva, ‘From the Quarantine to the General Strike: On Bataille’s Political Economy,’ Stasis 9:1 [2020], 146, cf. 162). Cf. Timofeeva, Solar Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2022), which seems to involve some unfortunate compromises on the question of the virus, going nothing like as far as the texts under discussion here. 17. Timofeeva, ‘We Covid Ticks,’ http:​//​artsoftheworkingclass​.org​/text​/we​-covid​ -ticks​?fbclid​=IwAR34Pv99e​-7idoMNryFPU6HyKZK1PBDBSUNoumSOUNID2​ -2oMI5SJWDl7zM, 27th January 2021. 18. Ibid. 19. Han, The Palliative Society, 17. 20. Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, 17, cf. ch. 1: ‘Capitalism and the Death Drive,’ passim; cf. Malabou, ‘Contagion: State of Exception or Erotic Excess? Agamben, Nancy, and Bataille,’ Crisis and Critique 7:3 (2020), 225; and Boris Groys’ Philosophy of Care (London: Verso, 2022), 49 et al. for a Bataillean account of the need or desire for exposure that stands in contrast with the State’s biopolitical enforcement of the necessity for immunisation, and which may even have been stirred by it. Groys’ book otherwise remains too imprecise and confused for us to establish what it is urging, or the direction it is taking. Its most promising suggestions indicate that institutional care has its limits, in the way that Ivan Illich proposes, but they remain undeveloped. In truth, the likening of humanity to a virus or bacillus will have been common even under non-exceptional circumstances for at least the last century (cf. Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, 1ff; 121). One of the few merits of Areej Al-Khafaji’s text on deconstruction and the virus is to have pointed out that a suffusion of the concept of life with that of death is among the conceptual preconditions for thinking man and virus in a way that does not oppose them to one another (Al-Khafaji, ‘Coviderrida: The Pandemic in Deconstructive Philosophy,’ 70 et al.). 21. Timofeeva, ‘Rathole: Beyond the Rituals of Handwashing,’ e-flux #119 (June 2021). In a surprising aside akin to Timofeeva’s ‘We are Covid Ticks,’ Andreas Malm, if not quite encouraging us to think ourselves into the subjectivity of the viral other, comes close to assimilating us to the virus and its supposed bearers, by speaking of herd immunity in bats. These extraordinary mammals are gifted with flight and thus the ability to disseminate whatever they carry far and wide, in a frantic beating of wings which leads them to generate feverish levels of heat. These high temperatures in turn allow them to shrug off the many viruses which they inherit from their own and other species of bat, a frequent occurrence in their dense roosting communities: ‘swapping viruses back and forth—a paradise for pathogens and their evolution, and an ideal formula for herd immunity. Bats, in other word, live by breaking the two

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principal rules of the 2020 lockdowns: do not travel and do not form crowds’ (Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, 36–37). As we have intimated above with the scapegoating of the young, asked to pay endless penance so as to heal others of an ailment that affects them not a jot, a certain empathy with these ‘viral’ creatures would have spared them needless suffering (not to speak of death) over the last few years. 22. Cf. Reiss & Bakhdi, Corona: False Alarm?, 101ff. 23. Woolhouse cites an overall occupancy of 65%, despite what we were led to believe (The Year the World Went Mad, 62). 24. Illich, Limits to Medicine, 7; cf. 211ff. Our reading of Illich, along with the subsequent engagement with Gadamer, remain preliminary and stand in need of a much richer development. We depend on them here for their assistance in prising open a distinction within the notion of ‘care’ in such a way that the elision of an alternative to the pharmaceutical might be projected in outline. At present, we are straying beyond the limits of our competence, and invite others to follow in our train. 25. Limits to Medicine, 13–14. 26. Limits to Medicine, 16. 27. Limits to Medicine, 33–34. 28. Limits, 41; cf. ibid., 112 & 170f on the language of the body. 29. Limits, 42. 30. Limits, 43. 31. Limits, 166. 32. Limits to Medicine, 35. 33. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, trans. Jason Gaiger and Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), viii. The text is a collection of essays which frequently recur to the same points, and as a consequence we shall allow ourselves to quote passages somewhat eclectically. 34. Enigma, 9. 35. On bios and zōē in Gadamer, cf. Enigma, 143. 36. Enigma, 165. 37. Ibid. 38. Enigma, 96. Let it be noted in this context that the German title of the book we are reading is Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit, ‘On the Concealedness of Health,’ concealedness being a Heideggerian term for a certain forgetting, a lethic moment within truth or ‘unconcealment’ (alētheia). 39. Engima, 19. 40. Enigma, 52. 41. Enigma, 130. 42. Enigma, 16. 43. Enigma, 95. 44. Enigma, 19. 45. Peter McCullough has been one of their fiercest advocates and has suffered the consequences (cf. McCullough & John Leake, The Courage to Face Covid-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex [Dallas, TX: Counterplay, 2022]). Robert F. Kennedy provides an account of this process by which these perfectly standard drugs had their reputations besmirched in

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all its remarkable detail (Kennedy, The Real Anthony Fauci), as do Peter R. Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, in COVID-19 and the Global Predators (Ithaca, NY: Lake Edge, 2021), 139ff. A discussion of the flaws that may be discerned in the various refutations of the efficacy of these remedies may be found online in the podcast discussions offered by Brett Weinstein and Heather Heyting, who have provided a remarkable example of academic integrity, even if they remain at times insensitive to continental philosophy, to the point of blaming ‘postmodernism’ for many of the ills they diagnose (https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/c​/BretWeinsteinDarkHorse). Partly by virtue of this exemplarity they were, of course, compelled to leave academia. 46. Cf. The Children’s Inquiry, 16, 75 (citing Woolhouse, The Year the World Went Mad), 150ff. 47. As proposed by one of the spontaneous (scientific) organisations devoted to questioning the predominant response, whose position was expressed in the Great Barrington Declaration. The need to vilify its authors quite so violently bespeaks much more than just a scientific disagreement. There is something truly threatening in the idea of a respectable alternative (cf. the published message from the Head of the National Institutes of Health to Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, describing the Declaration’s authors as belonging to a ‘fringe’ and insisting that ‘[t]here needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises’ (‘How Fauci and Collins Shut Down Covid Debate,’ Wall Street Journal, 21st December 2021; cited in Cole & Kingsley, The Children’s Inquiry, 145). The rather vulgar need to stress the credentials of every academic who stood up against the hegemonic response here finds something like a justification: these people were effectively described not only as immoral but as not even speaking at a level that could be described as scientific. The sheer implausibility of that notion—that these figures were speaking immoral and dangerous ‘nonsense’—is emphasised by the fact of their academic qualifications and positions. The aggressive disputation of any positive effects of drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin has a more obvious provenance, to do with the impossibility of gaining emergency use authorisation for a ‘vaccine’ if the disease ostensibly treated by the latter has any readily available alternative. The Left at least used to be attuned to the aggression and violence of the pharmaceutical industry’s nature, but here trusted absolutely to its good faith—as indeed it did with respect to every aspect of the State and other institutional apparatuses that it once would never have dreamed of. 48. And this even more so, given the stringent criteria for pharmaceutical licensure in the United States in particular, where the existence of any already established pharmaceutic remedy for the disease would have delayed or prevented any authorisation for the vaccinations, and still more for their widespread mandating (cf. The Real Anthony Fauci, 19 & n.2 for the reference). Pfizer, one of the manufacturers of the mRNA vaccine, the most unheard of and thus the one most unknown in its consequences for the human body and its immune system, attempted to protect the documentation related to its own procedures for three quarters of a century; this was overturned by judicial decision under a freedom of information request (Jenna Greene, ‘“Paramount importance”: Judge Orders FDA to Hasten Release of Pfizer Vaccine Docs,’ Reuters, https:​//​www​.reuters​.com​/legal​

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/government​/paramount​-importance​-judge​-orders​-fda​-hasten​-release​-pfizer​-vaccine​ -docs​-2022​-01​-07​/, 7th January 2022). These pages, estimated here to number nearly half a million, remain resistant to individual analysis given their sheer length, but the noble efforts of Naomi Wolf and the researchers whose work is being made available on the website, Daily Clout, among others, have given rise to insights that are all the more disturbing for their almost complete lack of reverberation in the mainstream media. The Pfizer documents are available here https:​//​phmpt​.org​/ pfizers​-documents​/ (accessed 5th September 2022), and are being subjected to an ambitious analysis here: https:​//​dailyclout​.io​/; cf. esp. https:​//​campaigns​.dailyclout​ .io​/campaign​/brand​/cc3b3e5a​-6536​-4738​-8ed6​-5ee368c67240; and for a summary of the preliminary findings: https:​//​dailyclout​.io​/product​/war​-room​-dailyclout​-pfizer​ -documents​-analysis​-volunteers​-reports​/. Cf. Kennedy, The Real Anthony Fauci, 76ff for an extract and summary of Pfizer’s submission to the Food and Drug Administration service (FDA). As this manuscript was going to press, the following analysis appeared, suggesting one in every eight hundred doses of the mRNA vaccines had already been discovered by the manufacturers themselves to lead to a ‘serious adverse event,’ and still this registered barely a ripple in political and mediatic life, at least in the United Kingdom. It reanalyses the Phase 3 trial data produced by Pfizer and Moderna themselves: J. Fraiman, J. Erviti, M. Jones, S. Greenland, P. Whelan, R. M. Kaplan, and P. Doshi, ‘Serious Adverse Events of Special Interest Following mRNA Covid-19 Vaccination in Randomized Trials in Adults,’ Vaccine 40:40 (September 2022): 5798–5805. A helpful analysis by John Campbell is available here: https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​ ?v​=JYR1wz​-Cf​_M​&ab​_channel​=Dr​.JohnCampbell​/. For an explanation of why these events might be occurring, and why this could be connected with the especial character of this particular type of injection, one should consult the illuminating book by Robert Malone, despite its occasional unevenness of tone (evenness being difficult to maintain under such personal and political circumstances): Robert W. Malone, Lies my Gov’t [sic] Told Me: And the Better Future Coming (New York: Skyhorse, 2022), esp. ch. 11, pp. 117–43, for his reading of the nature and effects of the ‘pseudouridine-mRNA’ ‘immuno-therapeutics’ (p. 131). 49. Cf. the committee debate in the European Parliament in which a director of Pfizer admitted that the vaccines had not even been tested for their potential effects upon transmission: https:​//​rumble​.com​/v1nry2m​-for​-ages​-most​-believed​-c19​-jabs​ -stopped​-transmission​.​-40000​-care​-workers​-fo​.html; analysed by John Campbell here: ‘Viral transmission not tested in Pfizer trials,’ https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​ ?v​=J6VbI8gOnUM​&ab​_channel​=Dr​.JohnCampbell. 50. Žižek, Pan(dem)ic!, 100–101. 51. Ibid., 101. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 102. 54. Pan(dem)ic!, 120ff. 55. Ibid., 121n5. 56. Ibid., 121. 57. Pan(dem)ic! 2, 28.

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58. Ibid., 9. 59. Cf. Pan(dem)ic! 2, 30. Even prospectively: the British government’s own ‘cost-benefit’ analysis of the measures finally revealed that the cost would amount to at least two hundred thousand deaths (‘Lockdown May Cost 200,000 Lives, Government Report Shows,’ Daily Telegraph, 19th July 2020), whilst others had already suggested over half a million (‘Lockdown Will Claim the Equivalent of 560,000 Lives Because of the Health Impact of the “Deep and Prolonged Recession It Will Cause,” Expert Warns,’ Daily Mail online, 8th November 2020). Much later, in the summer of 2022, the main headline on the Daily Telegraph’s front page read, ‘Lockdown Feared to Be Killing More Than Covid’ (Friday 19th August 2022). Cf. supra for further references on the inefficacies and dangers of lockdowns. 60. Matthew Collins says as much in ‘The Left’s Lockdown Critique,’ Irish Times, 21st January 2021: probably this is the moment he finds something of worth in Žižek (in a personal communication). 61. Esposito, ‘The Biopolitics of Immunity in Times of COVID-19: An Interview with Roberto Esposito,’ Antipode Online, 16th June 2020. 62. Esposito, ‘Vitam Instituere.’ 63. Which in truth does elide the distinction between the citizen and the criminal, since breathing itself has become a crime: we are all potential bioterrorists. As Illich has it, ‘[u]ntil proved healthy, the citizen is now presumed to be sick’ (Limits to Medicine, 121). 64. The former insight remains perhaps the principal merit of Simon Critchley’s short text on the virus appended to his Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts, ed. Peter Catapano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 225ff. Otherwise the text is instructive as an emblem of the overwhelming majority of responses made by philosophers to the virus, being devoted primarily to broadcasting its own (implicitly virtuous) fear, stressing the ‘vulnerability’ of ‘all life,’ including theirs (in this case a very healthy man in his late fifties or early sixties), and their (explicitly virtuous) concern for others. It begins with the telling first person plural, arrogating to itself the imaginary voice of everyone, in a manner that verges on the mawkish: ‘We’re scared’ (ibid., 225). Frankly, we are not, and a little less fear (whether of one’s own overactive conscience, one’s trade unionist reputation, or of death and debility) and somewhat more courage would have spared us more misery than these proudly fearful ones seem capable of imagining. If we must be frightened, let us be equally afraid of what is lost when a democratic population is placed under curfews and house arrests, as Frank Furedi suggests, albeit a little timidly (Furedi, Democracy under Siege: Don’t Let Them Lock it Down! [Winchester: Zero, 2021], 5). On the connection between tyranny and fear, cf. Dodsworth, A State of Fear, 94 et al. This is Agamben’s objection to the Leviathanic regime we are living under, a transfer of power to the sovereign State that is grounded upon a fear of some life-threatening plague (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 24–25). In ‘What Is Fear?’ in particular, Agamben has shown himself to be acutely attuned to the manipulations

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of the ‘fears’ of a population (all too openly assumed by politicians themselves, who frequently, as if confessing to a certain ‘all-too-human’ frailty, pronounce themselves ‘worried,’ or even ‘spooked’ [Omicron will have that effect . . .], or, in more patrician and paternalistic terms, ‘concerned’—a term which in idiomatic English almost always connotes that the little ones are not acting ‘in their own best interests’ and simply do not know what is best for them—and so they must be told) (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 88ff). 65. On the implicit ideal of ‘immortality’ that underlies a good deal of contemporary life and its oblivious attitude towards dying (along with death’s avatars, including pain), Byung-Chul Han says the following: ‘The virus is a mirror. It shows what society we live in. We live in a survival society that is ultimately based on fear of death. Today survival is absolute, as if we were in a permanent state of war. All the forces of life are being used to prolong life. A society of survival loses all sense of the good life. Enjoyment is also sacrificed for health, which, in turn, is raised to an end in itself. [. . .] The more life is one of survival, the more fear you have of death. The pandemic makes death, which we have carefully suppressed and outsourced, visible again. The constant presence of death in the mass media makes people nervous’ (Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, 120). Death is perhaps so taboo that we tend to be more comfortable speaking about it in terms of pain: ‘The pain-free life of permanent happiness is not a human life. Life which tracks down and drives out its own negativity cancels itself out. Death and pain belong together. In pain, death is anticipated. If you seek to remove all pain, you will have also to abolish death. But life without death and pain is not human life; it is undead life. In order to survive, humans are abolishing themselves. They may succeed in becoming immortal, but only at the expense of life itself’ (The Palliative Society, 60). Cf. Ivan Illich in Conversation, 273f.

CHAPTER 6 1. Byung-Chul Han speaks in an eponymous book of the other’s ‘expulsion’ (The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today, trans. W. Hoban [Cambridge: Polity, 2018]). 2. Where Are We Now?, 15–16. 3. Where Are We Now?, 28. 4. Where Are We Now?, 35. 5. Where Are We Now?, 18. 6. Where Are We Now?, 29. 7. Where Are We Now?, 20. 8. Where Are We Now?, 36. 9. Where Are We Now?, 29, emphasis added. 10. Where Are We Now?, 15, emphasis added. 11. Where Are We Now?, 60.

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12. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 56; cf. Patrick Zylberman, Tempêtes microbiennes: Essai sur la politique de sécurité sanitaire dans le monde transatlantique (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 385–91 et al. One great distinction between Agamben’s work and the Manifeste Conspirationniste, to which he is otherwise rather close, is the role that Zylberman plays for the latter, where he is certainly not on the side of the ‘dissenters,’ as Agamben’s presentation seems to imply. 13. Agamben juxtaposes contact and contagion whilst commenting on the way in which this remarkable coincidentia oppositorum has been made possible in the late twentieth century thanks to the intermediation of digital technology, allowing contact to be both broken and yet maintained in another, more tenuous sense: ‘wherever possible, machines can replace any contact—any contagion—among human beings’ (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 15–16). But this is precisely what is intolerable for Agamben, and the coincidence between immunising gestures of distantiation and a now ‘connected’ community constitutes the abolition of the latter and the negation of humanity itself (cf. Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, 120, loc. cit.). 14. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 56. 15. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 56–57. 16. Di Cesare, Immunodemocracy: Capitalist Asphyxia, 46. Originally, Virus sovrano? L’asfissia capitalistica (Turin: Boringhieri, 2020). Lost in translation are all obvious traces of the virus. 17. Ibid., 47. 18. Ibid., 48. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 49. 21. Ibid., 48. 22. Ibid., 31ff. 23. Ibid., 8. 24. Ibid., 49. 25. Ibid., 63. 26. Ibid., 76. 27. Ibid., 77. 28. Where Are We Now?, ch. 19, ‘The Face and the Mask’; cf. ‘The Face and Death,’ 3rd May 2021, included in the second edition of A che punto siamo? at the expense of the former. 29. Catherine Malabou recognises that both Nancy and Agamben oppose their work to the paradigm of sacrifice and a sacrificial notion of death; proposed in their stead is the possibility of an unsacrificeable life, of the kind that we see in homo sacer. Malabou makes this point however only to contrast these two figures with Bataille’s notion of transgression and a pre-political or nonpolitical understanding of transgression, which for Bataille constitutes an access to the sacred itself: ‘Neither of them seems to acknowledge the unconfessed desire for contact, the secret craving for getting the disease [. . .]. Neither of them seems to admit that protection measures against contagion immediately awaken the primitive desire to transgress them, the craving to disobey confinement and jump into the fires’ (Malabou, ‘Contagion: State

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of Exception or Erotic Excess? Agamben, Nancy, and Bataille,’ Crisis and Critique 7:3 [2020], 225). For a nuance on this point from Agamben’s perspective, according to which ‘[t]he dimension of bare life that constitutes the immediate referent of sovereign violence is more original than the opposition of the sacrificeable and the unsacrificeable,’ cf. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 113–14. 30. One should note that this terrorism is not simply that upon which the American ‘War on Terror’ was waged; as so often in his viral writings, Agamben is referring first of all to the Italian case—even if this also functions as a metonym for the entire European and Western response: ‘Italy, as we witnessed during the years of terrorism, is a sort of political laboratory where new technologies of governance are tested. It does not surprise me that Italy is at the moment spearheading the development of a technology of governance that, in the name of public health, renders acceptable a set of life conditions which eliminate all possible political activity, pure and simple. This country is always on the verge of falling back into Fascism, and there are many signs today that this is something more than a risk. Suffice it to say that the government has appointed a committee that has the power to decide which news is true and which should be considered fake’ (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 41). 31. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 28. 32. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 37. 33. Which is not to say that Agamben has been silent on the question of the political effects and the biological safety of the new vaccines. At the same time, we have to recognise that the most troubling of these interventions does not in fact obey the logic of inoculation in the way that the old ‘attenuated’ types did. This will not however spare the new mRNA vaccines from a certain autoimmunity: it has been suggested that susceptibility to reinfection and death (in ‘breakthrough’ cases) is equally if not more prevalent in those who have received the injection (cf. John Campbell, ‘More Vaccinated Deaths Than Unvaccinated Deaths from Covid (US),’ YouTube, https:​ //​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=Jb2YMvfvm​_M​&ab​_channel​=Dr​.JohnCampbell, for references to CDC data on the topic). And this is not to speak of the auto-immune effects these vaccines and their passports have had in relation to the political body in general, with the sacrifice of that part of the social body stigmatised by the name ‘unvaccinated.’ Without presupposing that one could pronounce terribly accurately on the details of their mechanism, we can say that Agamben has astutely analysed their deployment in the form of sub-legal coercion, transferring responsibility for their effects from State to individual, in the same way that health protection measures were first transferred from the institutions of health to the individuals charged with not becoming ill so as to protect the institutions—this obligation to behave in a sanitary, ‘risk-free’ way became legally compulsory, and has now largely reverted to being the object of a sub-legal and implicitly moral imperative. This imperative, let it be noted, is still being pronounced by doctors and medical men: around Christmas of 2022, simply as a result of industrial action among ambulance drivers in the United Kingdom, they were quite without irony instructing citizens to ‘avoid risky behaviour.’ Agamben writes upon the question of the vaccine first of all in ‘La nuda vita e il vaccino’ (16th April 2021) where he treats it solely in the context of the human

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being’s status as bare life, subject to swabbing and puncturing, before developing an increasing concern with regard to its safety, as the side-effects of the intervention became more manifest (Agamben, ‘Uomini e lemmings’ (Men and Lemmings), 28th July 2021). He was also troubled by the way in which a certain coercion (involving the European Union’s ‘green pass,’ enthusiastically embraced by the Italian government), and indeed the threat of being refused entry to work and socio-cultural life, replaced actual legislation which would render vaccinations legally compulsory for all, but at the cost of rendering the state liable for the consequences, a liability that in Italy at least it was unwilling to accept, preferring, as with the gesture of asking its potential patients to ‘protect the health service,’ to transfer responsibility from the State to the citizen (Agamben, ‘Cittadini di seconda classe,’ 16th July 2021; cf. Agamben, ‘Tessera verde’ [Green Pass], 19th July 2021; cf. ‘Non discutiamo le vaccinazioni ma l’uso politico del Green Pass’ [‘We are not speaking about vaccinations but about the political use to which the Green Pass is put’], La Stampa, 30th July 2021). This sequence culminates in at least two texts with Massimo Cacciari (‘A proposito del decreto sul green pass’ [Concerning the Green Pass Decree], 26th July 2021, and ‘Vaccinazione: la responsabilità della scelta’ [Vaccination: The Responsibility of Choice], https:​//​www​.iisf​.it​/index​.php​/progetti​/diario​-della​-crisi​/giorgio​-agamben​ -massimo​-cacciari​-vaccinazione​-la​-responsabilita​-della​-scelta​.html​?fbclid​=IwAR1H 3VEduH9iXkNkzk1cWWUhmLyG0TKbT2s7​_24Y4PEx​_P​_KD0x6Lq9EBF4, 9th August 2021). 34. ‘[T]he citizen no longer has a right to health [. . .] but is instead forced by law to be healthy (“biosecurity”),’ to secure and protect health and the services which maintain it (Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 56). Even the potential for unhealthiness is enough to warrant legally mandated confinement or curfew. For an account of a legally obligatory, fully immune community, in a similar vein, cf. Di Cesare, Immunodemocracy, 63, 76–7. 35. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1ff. 36. Where Are We Now?, 63. Agamben is reiterating the same point that he had made earlier on: ‘we have divided the unity of our vital experience—which is always and inseparably corporeal and spiritual—into a purely biological entity, on the one hand, and a social [sic; affettiva, affective, emotional, in the original—possibly a mistake corrected by the author in the English translation] and cultural life, on the other’ (ibid., 35/48). 37. ‘[I]f this condition is extended beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries that pertain to it—as is presently being attempted—so that it becomes a sort of social behaviour principle, we may fall into contradictions from which there is no way out’ (ibid., 35, translation modified). 38. Where Are We Now?, 64. 39. Cf. Berg, op. cit. 40. Where Are We Now?, 31. 41. Where Are We Now?, 24–25. 42. Esposito, ‘Vitam instituere.’

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CONCLUSION 1. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 32. 2. Ibid. 3. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 33, translation slightly modified; cf. 57–58 & 61–62. 4. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 24–25. 5. A forthcoming edition of the Journal of Italian Philosophy (Volume 8) will be devoted to the relation between these two thinkers and will hope to clarify what here remains obscure in that connection. 6. Manifeste Conspirationniste, 45. For an all too brief but lucid summary of why the Left might have advocated the biopolitical measures they did (because it seemed like the return of a big State that had in truth never gone away, not even with neoliberalism, and because it seemed like this State was enforcing a collective action aimed at a social good) and for a fine account of what was in fact taking place here, which involved a technocratic government accruing immense power by deploying an instance external to the demos, and bypassing any recourse to their skill, judgement, or opinion by means of a reference to ‘the Science,’ an account tacitly and perhaps unwittingly aligned with that of the Manifeste and Agamben himself, if not Ivan Illich, albeit a little obliquely, see Tara McCormack, ‘The New Parasitic Leviathan,’ Brownstone Institute, 26th September 2022. 7. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 36; cf. 39. ‘The fact that this is not a temporary situation [this situation of exception, which hovers, in this text, between a return to normality and a transition to a new constitution or some new politics] is expressed vehemently by the same rulers who endlessly reiterate that not only has the virus not disappeared, but that it can reappear at any time’ (ibid., 84). As David Cayley puts it: ‘My fear, and one that I think is shared by many, is that it will leave behind a disposition to accept much increased surveillance and social control, more telescreens and telepresencing, and heightened mistrust. At the moment, everyone is optimistically describing physical distancing as a form of solidarity, but it’s also practice in regarding one another, and even ourselves—“don’t touch your face”—as potential disease vectors.’ He concludes his text with the following lines: ‘A lot will depend on what the event is understood to have meant. If, in the aftermath, the certainties I have sketched here are not brought into question, then the only possible outcome I can see is that they will fasten themselves all the more securely on our minds and become obvious, invisible, and unquestionable’ (Cayley, ‘Questions’). Byung-Chul Han suggests in a similar vein that the effects of the supposed exception will likely remain with us permanently: ‘In the face of the pandemic, we are heading for a biopolitical surveillance regime. Not only in our communication but also our bodies: our health will be subject to digital surveillance. [. . .] The pandemic shock will ensure that a digital biopolitics takes hold globally that, with its control and monitoring system, seizes control of our bodies in a biopolitical disciplinary society that also constantly monitors our state of health. Faced with the shock of the

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pandemic, the West will be forced to give up its liberal principles. Then the West faces a biopolitical quarantine society that permanently restricts our freedom’ (Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive: Interview, ‘COVID-19 Has Reduced Us to a “Society of Survival”’ [originally from May 2020], 119–20; cf. Han, The Palliative Society, 14ff, 25–26, 52, 57ff, cf. ibid., 62n.1 for a direct reference to Agamben from this chapter). 8. Can panics not be manufactured? Slavoj Žižek has spent a lifetime analysing fantasies that unite a people around a fearful object whose excising once and for all will—it is said, by the ideological fantasy itself promulgated so as to protect those in power—ensure a return to a harmonious communal body that is really a pure fabulation. Only once in his first book on the epidemic, despite the sensationalist distortion of the title, Pan(dem)ic!, does he speak, and then in passing, of the ‘ideological mechanisms of fear and panic’ that have been deployed, in a passage admitting that ‘[t]he coronavirus epidemic itself is clearly not just a biological phenomenon’ (110). And yet he proceeds to say absolutely nothing about these mechanisms—even at p. 122 when the idea resurfaces, only to be dismissed: ‘the Left-liberal worry that the enhanced social control triggered by the virus will continue after it has disappeared and constrain our freedom’ (122), ‘this worry misses what is actually occurring today’ (123). (Let us note in passing that in Pan(dem)ic 2! Žižek is prepared to speak of Agamben as part of the ‘radical Left’ [Pan(dem)ic 2!, 100, emphasis added].) That said, Žižek is prepared to attribute panic to the sovereign powers themselves: ‘The message from us, the subjects, to state power is that we will gladly follow your orders, but they are YOUR [sic] orders, and there is no guarantee that our obeying them will fully work. Those in charge of the state are in a panic because they know not only that they are not in control of the situation, but also that we, their subjects, know this. The impotence of power is now laid bare’ (Pan(dem)ic!, 123). This at least is a step in the right direction: one should not give too much credit to one’s enemy. Agamben also speaks of panic and fear on the part of the rulers, and indeed in the face of that power’s collapse (cf. Where Are We Now?, 11 et al.). Žižek, in his own way, agrees, ‘all the dictatorial powers that the state apparatuses are amassing simply make their basic impotence all the more palpable’ (Pan(dem)ic!, 124). 9. Agamben, Where Are We Now?, 94. 10. Where Are We Now?, 95. 11. Agamben, ‘Fase 2’ (Phase 2), 20th April 2020. 12. Emmanuel Alloa, ‘Coronavirus: A Contingency that Eliminates Contingency,’ Critical Inquiry, 20th April 2020. 13. Ibid. 14. It was perhaps this tone which misled Agon Hamza into identifying a ‘liberalism’ (‘underlying liberal positions [sic]’) in Agamben (Hamza & Ruda, ‘The R-files 2.0’). 15. Where Are We Now?, 70. 16. Where Are We Now?, 71/97, translation modified. 17. Where Are We Now?, 12. 18. Where Are We Now?, 69/95. 19. Where Are We Now?, 8. 20. Where Are We Now?, 9.

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21. Where Are We Now?, 7. 22. Where Are We Now?, 10. 23. Where Are We Now?, 10. 24. Where Are We Now?, 8. 25. Where Are We Now?, 8. 26. Where Are We Now?, 8. And this shift from right to obligation is the result of a political choice, to extend political power into the realm of the medical, not a choice on the part of the medical men themselves, even if they welcome the prestige and willingly seize hold of the sceptre: ‘to no doctor has it ever occurred that this lifestyle and diet [. . .] could become the object of a legal rule’ (Where Are We Now?, 52). The epidemic is a political affair: ‘The epidemic, as the etymology of the term suggests, is first and foremost a political concept’ (Where Are We Now?, 53). 27. Where Are We Now?, 96–97. 28. Where Are We Now?, 10. 29. Where Are We Now?, 97. 30. Where Are We Now?, 97. 31. Where Are We Now?, 97.

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Index

advertising, 24 advice, 17, 42, 83, 171n19, 188n61 Africa, 32, 173n26, 199n4 Agamben, Giorgio, 3–4, 12, 15, 17, 21–23, 28, 30, 35, 37–41, 43, 46–53, 57–61, 64, 66–67, 69, 73, 78, 81–88, 90–92, 95–103, 106–111, 118, 127, 129, 135–45, 147–55, 160, 161n1, 164n8, 164n12, 164n14, 165n18, 165–6n1, 166nn2–3, 167n4, 167nn6–7, 168n10,168n12, 168–9n13, 169n14, 170–71n19, 171n20, 172n21, 173n27, 176– 78n30, 178n36, 179n39, 180n41, 182n4, 184n11, 186–87n55, 187n58, 193nn67–68, 194n78, 197n86, 197n95, 198n3, 201n7, 202n8, 204n10, 205n13, 206n18, 207n3, 208n7, 210n22, 214n67, 215n72, 215–16nn75–76, 225n64, 226nn12–13, 226–27n29, 227n30, 227–28n33, 228n34, 228n36, 229n7, 230n8, 231n14 Alloa, Emmanuel, 151, 230n12 anxiety, 66 aporia, 63, 65–66, 209n16 Arendt, Hannah, 99–101, 109–10, 184n11, 205n13, 215n72

Aristotle, 7, 51–53, 100, 118, 139, 141–42 auto-immunity, 7, 13, 15, 77–78, 83, 107, 139, 141, 144 158, 207n1, 217n86, 227n33 (auto)immunity, 77, 135, 206n18 autoimmunity, 12, 138, 207n1, 227n33 Badiou, Alain, 36, 180n40, 181n48 bare life, 9, 15, 22, 38, 44, 46, 67, 83, 85, 88, 91–93, 95–96, 98–102, 104– 106, 118, 128, 140–45, 155, 198n1, 204n11, 205n15, 206n18, 215n72, 215n75, 227n29, 228n33 Bataille, Georges, 4, 10, 113, 116, 137, 219n5, 220n16, 220n20, 226n29 Benvenuto, Sergio, 41–43, 180n41, 189n64 biological life, 7, 25, 29, 46, 76, 98, 102, 122, 142–43, 148, 154, 162n3, 167n4 biopower, 97, 101 bios, 7, 91–92, 94, 106, 142, 209n18, 215n75, 221n35 biosecurity, 43, 137, 154, 155, 168n10, 183n5, 204n11, 228n34 bioterrorist, 169n14, 224n63 Butler, Judith, 5, 163n5, 164n7, 212– 13n62, 218n96 249

250

Index

Cacciari, Massimo, 15, 42, 166n3, 182n4, 202n8, 228n33 cancellation, of people and events, 136, 139, 152, 179n39, 202n8 Canetti, Elias, 147 care, 31–32, 96, 99–101, 105, 114–15, 118, 120–24, 152, 154, 157–58, 170n17, 174n28, 176n30, 209n19, 214n67, 219n8, 220n20, 221n24 Cayley, David, 30–32, 39, 44–47, 54, 56, 62–63, 74–75, 129, 153, 171–72nn19–20, 174n28, 184n11, 193n67, 196n83, 229–30n7 certainty, 14, 16, 18, 40, 47, 56, 152, 204n9 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 35, 178nn34–35 civicism, 136 civic life, 6, 71, 83, 141–42, 165n16 civic responsibility, 136 civil life, 106, 143, 202n8 civil war, 73–74, 101, 150, 168n13, 187n55, 204nn10–11, 205n13 climate change, 3, 35–36, 178–79n37, 179n39, 208n10 closure, 3, 9, 12, 41–42, 72, 119, 139, 157, 159, 165nn15–16, 220n16 communism, 108 communitas, 88, 94, 107, 209n19 community, 9–10, 15–16, 31, 43, 59, 72, 76, 79, 81, 83, 85–89, 91, 93–95, 97, 99–103, 105, 107–14, 116–19, 126, 131, 135–39, 141, 143–45, 147–49, 151, 153, 157, 164n14, 170n19, 174n27, 207n1, 209n19, 210n23, 218n4, 220n21, 226n13, 228n34 conscience, 6, 26, 62, 66, 81, 140, 224n64 consensus, 5–6, 17, 23–25, 59–60, 62, 73, 116, 158, 205n15 Conspiracist Manifesto. See Manifeste Conspirationniste conspiracy, 18, 23, 60, 67, 86, 165n18, 167n7, 173n22, 177n30, 179n39, 180n41, 194n71, 199n5

contact, 22, 107, 113, 117, 133, 137–38, 145, 198n3, 217–18n96, 226n13, 226n29; human contact, 13, 15, 105, 109, 181n48, contagion, 9–10, 24, 60, 70, 112–114, 117–119, 133, 136–38, 163n4, 195n79, 198n3, 214n67, 219n5, 226n13, 227n29 control, 9, 37, 39, 55, 62, 65, 67, 75, 78, 86, 89, 96–97, 115, 119–120, 122, 126–28, 131, 147, 154, 157, 162n3, 167n4, 168n10, 170n16, 176n30, 178n30, 192n66, 195n79, 202n8, 203n9, 229–30nn7–8 counterproductivity, 7–8, 13, 17–18, 33, 108, 113, 121–22, 130, 149, 158, 182n5, 196n84, 199n5 crowd (Canetti), 147–49 data, 42, 46, 54, 58–61, 63–64, 67, 82, 84, 169n14, 193n68, 197n88, 198– 99n3, 223n48, 227n33 deconstruction, 76, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 121, 153, 192n66, 207n1, 220n20 democracy, 15, 76–78, 88, 137–38, 141, 151–55, 162n3, 206n17, 225n64 demographics, of Covid effects, 41, 61, 86, 126, 142 dēmos, 167n6, 168n13, 171n19, 205n13, 206n17, 229n6 denial, 34, 36–38, 159, 179n39 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 10, 12, 76, 78–79, 81, 87, 107, 138, 144, 206nn17–18, 207n1, 220n20 despotism, 154–155 dialectic, 21, 66, 81, 94, 111, 137, 139, 150, 153, 155, 158, 165n15, 199n5 Di Cesare, Donatella, 23, 137–38, 162n3, 179–80n39, 193n67, 196n85, 217n89, 226n16, 228n34 digital ID, 11, 158, 200n6

Index

distancing, 1, 11–12, 78, 107–8, 113, 138, 144, 147–48, 150, 185n15, 189n62, 197n95, 229n7 doctors, 1–2, 9, 13, 15, 21, 24, 32–33, 38, 45–46, 63, 83, 84, 90, 120–21, 124–25, 141, 143, 149, 172n21, 175n28, 190n65, 217n86, 227n33, 231n26 domestic life, 100–102; domestic abuse, 105, 114 doubt, ix, 1, 11, 16, 29, 50, 95, 133, 140, 149, 164n8, 182n1 driving, as example of risk, 169n16 emergency, 13, 22, 31, 36, 38, 40, 58–59, 67, 87–89, 101, 112, 125, 136, 143–44, 150, 153–55, 162n3, 168n10, 172n21, 177n30, 179nn38– 39, 183–84n5, 190n65, 204n10, 207n3, 222n47 enforcement, of laws and pandemic restrictions, 14, 112–13, 139, 142, 162n3, 169n16, 204n11, 220n20 Esposito, Roberto, 10, 28, 41, 43, 78, 81–82, 86–95, 102–3, 106–7, 119, 130–31, 137–40, 145, 149–50, 203n9, 206n18, 209nn17–21, 210nn22–23, 210n39, 211n43, 211n50, 211n52 event, 1, 3–4, 13, 15, 17, 23–25, 27–29, 31, 33–41, 46–48, 52–53, 56, 58–60, 63, 69–70, 75, 78, 84, 89, 96, 110, 132, 138, 152, 157, 159, 165n17, 178n31, 180n43, 187n55, 189n65, 199n5, 201n6, 223n48, 229n7 exception: no exceptions to restrictions, 7, 158; non-exceptional, Covid as, 181–82n48, 220n20; state of, 22, 38, 67, 78, 85–86, 97, 101–2, 127, 143, 153–55, 204n10, 207n3229–30n7 excommunication, 2, 125–126 face: covering of, 21–22, 72, 132, 151, 188n61, 201–2n7, 217n86; touching of, 229n7

251

fascism, 14, 65, 137, 181n46, 184n10, 192n66, 194n78, 204n9, 227n30 fatality, 41, 43, 61, 82, 86, 169n16, 175n28, 184n7, 195n79, 207–8n4; fatality rate, 43, 184n7, 207–8n4 fear, 13, 17, 22, 43, 54, 61, 116, 134, 145, 147, 150–51, 168n10, 173– 74n27, 202–3n8, 203n9, 206n17, 224–25n64, 225n65, 230n8. See also Hobbes, Thomas; Leviathan first person, speaking about Covid using, 104, 171n19, 224n64 flu. See influenza force, use of, 27, 30, 64, 76, 102–3, 116, 119, 132, 140, 158 form of life, 91–92, 98, 100, 106, 141, 143, 155, 173n26, 204n11 form-of-life (Agamben), 91, 95 Foucault, Michel, 4, 23, 33, 62, 87, 96–98, 141, 167n4, 184n11, 216n79 freedom, 5, 14–15, 27, 60, 93, 95–96, 104, 106, 109, 130, 136–37, 140– 41, 143, 152–54, 162n3, 166n2, 169–70n16, 172n21, 200n6, 204n10, 223n48, 230n7 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 123, 186n55, 187–88n59, 193n69, 221n24, 221n35 global action, on Covid, 30, 70, 106, 119, 121, 169n14, 177n30, 192n66 global civil war, 101, 168– 69n13, 205n13 globalisation, 35, 85, 208n13, 209n19, 216n76 global population, 19 the good life, 7, 46, 106, 118, 132, 140, 173–74n27, 225n65 government, 2, 11, 13, 23–24, 26–27, 30–31, 42–43, 47–49, 53, 58, 60, 62–63, 71, 85–86, 89, 104, 117, 126, 131, 133, 155, 161n2, 164n8, 168n12, 172n21, 193n67, 196n81, 201n6, 203n9, 224n59, 227n30, 229n6

252

Index

Green, Toby, 153, 168n8, 170n17, 173n26, 196n86, 205n15 guidelines, surrounding Covid, 16, 21, 98, 131, 148, 171n19, 189n62, 204n11 Han, Byung-Chul, 26, 112, 118, 123, 162n3, 169n14, 173–74n27, 181n49, 185n15, 197n86, 203n9, 204n11 216n79, 225n65, 225n1, 230n7 health, 2, 8, 13, 24–25, 30–32, 34, 44–45, 57, 59, 61, 69–70, 75, 82, 85, 89, 97, 102, 105, 108, 110, 120–23, 126, 132, 136–43, 148, 153–55, 157–58, 161n2, 162n3, 168n10, 169n14, 171n19, 173n27, 174n28, 177n30, 178n30, 184n11, 187n58, 192n66, 193n69, 201n6, 208n7, 209n16, 209n18, 225n65, 227n30, 227–28n33, 228n34, 230n7 healthcare, 12, 64, 125, 164n8, 170n17, 192n66 Hegel, G. W. F., 37, 117 hegemony, 3, 35, 127, 133, 139, 158– 59, 165n15, 190n66, 211n60, 222n47 Heidegger, Martin, 39, 45, 70, 100, 108, 151, 173n26, 197n1, 198n3, 215n72, 216n76, 221n38 herd immunity, 9, 66–67, 111, 119–20, 126–28, 130, 132–33, 139, 157, 191–92n66, 221n21 Hobbes, Thomas, 93, 148 house arrest, 3, 12, 18, 66, 108, 110, 162n3, 193n66, 209n16, 225n64 human, ix, 3–5, 7–11, 13, 15, 19, 21–22, 24–25, 27, 29, 32–35, 39, 44–49, 53–54, 66, 70, 72, 75–78, 82–84, 88, 90–94, 97, 100, 103–9, 112, 114–119, 122–24, 127–28, 131–32, 135–36, 139, 141–44, 147–49, 151, 155, 157–58, 162, 164n14, 167n6, 171n19, 174n27, 181n48, 188n61, 198n3, 199n4, 202n7, 212–13n62, 215n75, 218n4, 225n64, 225n65

humanities, 1, 25, 29, 44, 58–59, 63, 188n61, 190n65, 190n66 humanity, 5, 19, 27, 76, 90, 94, 96, 113, 115–16, 132, 139–40, 165n15, 188n61, 192n66, 202n7, 220n16, 220n20, 226n13 human sciences, 5, 25, 29, 123, 132, 196n86 hysteria, 42, 98, 174–75n27 idealism, 112 identitarism, 148, 152, 178n30, 204n11 identity, 5, 10, 12, 22, 26–27, 51, 65, 72, 74–78, 87, 107, 116, 139, 148, 159, 167n4, 167n6, 169n14, 199n4, 202n8, 209n19, 214n67 Illich, Ivan, 7, 30, 32, 44–47, 54–56, 62–63, 115, 120–24, 129, 148– 49, 170n17, 171n19, 173n27, 184n11, 192–93n66, 211n52, 216n76, 220n20, 221n24, 224n63, 225n65, 229n6 immunisation, 1, 6, 10, 12, 76, 78, 91, 94, 122, 138–39, 169n14, 209n19, 220n20. See also inoculation immunitas, 88, 94, 107, 209n19 immunity, 9–12, 15, 43, 66–67, 75–79, 81, 83, 87–88, 94, 99–100, 107, 111–13, 118–20, 126–28, 130, 132– 33, 135, 137–39, 141, 144, 148–49, 157, 191n66, 209n19, 210n23, 211n50. See also autoimmunity; herd immunity influenza (flu), 31, 42, 82, 133, 136, 150, 169n16, 190n66 inoculation, 15, 72–73, 77, 121, 126, 141, 166n3, 182n4, 227n33. See also immunisation institution, 12–13, 16, 24, 30, 34, 44, 82, 88, 90–95, 101–2, 117, 120–23, 136, 139, 148–50, 158, 164n8, 164n14, 170n17, 171n19, 174n27, 176n30, 192n66, 196n84, 197n86, 202n8, 204n9, 211n52, 215n76, 218n96, 220n20, 222n47, 227n33

Index

isolation, 4, 10–11, 16, 56, 61, 69, 77, 87, 91, 94, 99, 103, 105, 107–8, 113–14, 117, 119, 141, 144, 147–48, 164–65n15, 195n79, 218n96 ivermectin, 125, 222n47 judgement, 6, 9, 28–29, 33, 59, 63, 78, 84, 87–88, 90, 94, 121, 123–24, 132, 140, 157, 159, 167n5, 170n16, 174n28, 192n66, 196n83, 196n84, 204–5n11, 211n52, 229n6 Kacem, Mehdi Belhaj, 162n3, 178n30, 181n49 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 57, 169n14, 180n41 Kennedy, Robert F., 125, 170n17, 176–77n30, 194–95n79, 214n67, 221n45, 223n48 Kidd, Iain, 110, 173n25 Latour, Bruno, 35, 57, 193n67 law, 2, 14–15, 17, 21, 27, 33, 44, 47–49, 54, 64, 73–74, 85, 96–97, 103–4, 113–114, 119, 124, 127, 133, 136– 37, 139–40, 142–44, 148–49, 151, 154, 159, 162n3, 168n10, 171n19, 204n10, 209n19, 211n52, 212n62, 213n65, 228n34 the Left (politics), 8, 63, 65–66, 81, 116, 129, 137, 148–49, 152–53, 163n4, 165n17, 178n30, 187n57, 188n61, 216n79, 222n47, 229n6, 230n8 Leviathan, 102, 144–45, 148. See also fear; Hobbes, Thomas Levinas, Emmanuel, 4, 99, 188n61, 216n79 liberalism, 65, 67, 152–55, 163, 200n6, 209n18, 230n7, 230n8, 231n14 liberation, 10, 71, 106, 113, 149 lockdown, 3, 8, 24, 27, 34–35, 38, 56, 58, 65–66, 69–73, 75, 77, 112, 126– 32, 139, 141, 158, 162n3, 163n4, 163–64n7, 173n26, 177n30, 178n37, 182n1, 182–84n5, 187n57, 189n62,

253

190n65, 190–92n66, 196n83, 198n3, 199n4, 199n5, 203n8, 203n9, 205n15, 212–13n62, 213n65, 216n81, 221n21, 224n59 logos, 4, 16, 19, 58, 91, 139, 157–60, 197n1 madness, 2, 3, 172n21, 216n76 mainstream media, 163n3, 199n5, 223n48 Malabou, Catherine, 112–15, 163n6, 182n49, 220n20, 226–27n29 Manifeste Conspirationniste, 18, 24, 37, 149, 165n18, 168n8, 171n19, 177n30, 180n41, 187n57, 206n19, 208n10, 226n12. margins, 3–4, 6, 16, 27, 58, 158, 167n5 masks, 22, 72, 118, 148, 188n61, 202n8, 212n62. See also face: covering of mass media, 8, 21, 158, 174n27, 175n28, 192n66, 225n65 media, 2, 8, 13, 21, 24, 26, 30–32, 37, 59–62, 67, 126, 133, 150, 158, 168n12, 171n19, 172n21, 175n28, 192n66, 193n66, 193n67, 194n78, 200n5, 203n9, 205n15, 206n17. See also mainstream media; mass media medical: doctors, 1, 43–44, 84, 217n86, 227n33, 231n26; establishment: 11, 15–16, 33, 46, 82; narrative: 107, 157 medicine, 9, 44, 63, 89–90, 120–25, 141, 143–44, 157, 170n17, 176– 77n30, 187n58, 191n66 messiah, 10, 11, 21–22, 57, 71, 126, 158 mRNA, 125, 166n3, 192n66, 199n5, 202n8, 223n48, 227n33 Murphy, Sinéad, 115, 165n15, 182n49, 213n66, 219n8 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 81–87, 89–90, 107–108, 110, 113, 136, 138, 203n9, 208n7, 208n9, 208n13, 209n16, 209nn18–19, 226n29 narcissism, 36–38, 40

254

Index

natural sciences, 5, 25, 44, 46, 49, 58, 60, 63, 69, 123, 187–88n59 negation, 36, 75, 159, 179n39, 226n13 Negri, Antonio 96 neurosis, 6, 14, 118, 133 Nobus, Dany, 109 nomos, 91 the non-pharmaceutical, 7, 30–31, 41, 54, 71, 73, 77, 82, 87, 96, 102, 111, 121, 124, 131, 135, 157, 168n8 norms, 21, 85, 98, 140, 148, 171n19 online life, 39, 159, 199n3, 209n22, 217n86 ostracisation, 22, 27, 73, 104, 121 passport, 11, 23, 26, 72–73, 139, 169n14, 200n6, 227n33 the pharmaceutical, 6–7, 9, 11, 18, 23–24, 57–60, 70–71, 73, 77, 112, 120–21, 123, 125, 139, 150, 157–58, 170n17, 171n20, 176–77n30, 192n66, 213n66, 218n4, 221n24, 222nn47–48 plague, 64, 83, 99, 113, 118, 136, 145, 189n64, 191n66, 214n67, 225n64 police, 12, 14, 21, 27, 30–31, 35, 90, 97, 107, 111, 118–19, 126–28, 131, 139, 159, 161–62n2, 162n3, 172n20, 199n4 polis, 4, 9, 33, 49, 100, 118, 142, 209n18 population, 2, 19, 21, 24, 32, 44–47, 53–55, 61, 64, 66, 70, 73, 77, 85–86, 89, 92, 96, 115, 119–20, 122, 126– 27, 130, 140, 142, 148, 153, 167n6, 170n16, 170–71n19, 184n7, 185n15, 191–92n66, 194n79, 196n83, 199n4, 207n4, 213n62, 216n76, 225n64 potential: carrier, of Covid, 12–13, 26, 72, 74, 99, 115, 136, 138, 169n14, 173n27, 204–5n11, 214n67, 224n63, 228n33, 228n34, 229n7; cases, in statistics, 42; potentiality (Aristotle),

51–52; risks, 55; for virtue signalling, 70 power, 9, 11, 13, 15–16, 26, 30–32, 34, 37–39, 43–44, 46, 57–59, 63–64, 67, 74, 77, 83, 85, 87, 89–90, 96–98, 100–102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 115, 124–25, 131, 135–36, 140–45, 147–49, 151, 154–55, 157–59, 163n3, 168n10, 171n19, 176–78n30, 181n48, 190n65, 192n66, 201nn6–7, 202–203n8, 203n9, 206n17, 207n1, 214n67, 215n72, 215n75, 225n64, 227n30, 229n6, 230n8, 231n26 Power, Nina, 163n6, 169n14, 182n49, 219n8 proportion, 28–29, 60, 65, 87–88, 90, 115–16, 121, 132, 140 psychosis, 66, 108, 129 public health, 44, 69, 102, 126, 157–58, 171n19, 176n30, 184n11, 189n65, 192n66, 208n16, 209n18, 227n30 public opinion, 43, 160 Ratcliffe, Matthew, 110, 173n25 regulation, 148, 205n11 religion, 57, 112, 155, 187n58, 208n7 restriction, 31, 37, 40, 58, 69, 71, 79, 92, 99, 104, 107, 129, 134, 139, 141, 151, 153, 157–58, 166n2, 174n27, 179n37, 180n46, 212n62 rhetoric, 43, 58, 61, 73, 76, 101, 126, 170n16, 172n the Right (politics), 5, 15, 17, 26, 30, 43, 122, 124, 129, 152–53, 155, 183n5, 196n86, 200n6 sacrifice, 9–10, 14–15, 57, 70, 75–78, 88, 93, 96, 103–6, 111, 113–15, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127–36, 139–41, 144, 149, 151–52, 174n27, 194n71, 205n15, 226–27n29, 227n33 SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) (UK), 58–59, 171n20, 189n62, 189n65, 190–92n66 schools, closing of, 3, 189n62

Index

science, 1, 5–6, 8–9, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33, 41, 44, 46–49, 51–53, 55, 57–63, 69, 123–24, 132, 141, 143–44, 157– 58, 161n2, 176n30, 187n58, 188n59, 188n61, 189n62, 190–92n66, 193n67, 194n71, 196n83, 213n62, 214n67, 219n4, 229n6. See also natural sciences; human sciences; humanities second person, speaking about Covid using, 104, 171n19 silencing, 2–6, 159 Sinclair, Mark, 198n3 Sloterdijk, Peter, 10, 111–12, 162n3, 181–82n49, 197n86, 218n1 Social Darwinism, 10 social distancing, 107, 138, 144, 147, 150, 185n15, 189n62, 197n95 sovereign, 9, 15, 25, 27, 30, 38, 44, 57, 62–63, 69, 74–75, 85–86, 88–90, 96–98, 100–102, 104, 106, 108, 114, 117–18, 134–35, 140–45, 147–48, 155, 157, 167n5, 192n66, 206n17, 211n52, 217n89, 225n64, 227n29, 230n8 spectacle, 32, 71, 168n12, 172n21, 187n55 State, 8–9, 12, 15, 17, 23, 26–27, 32, 35–36, 38–39, 43, 49–50, 55, 65, 85–86, 89, 91, 101, 115, 117, 120– 21, 125–28, 145, 148–50, 155, 159, 161–62n2, 162n3, 167n4, 170n16, 171n19, 175n28, 176–77n30, 181n48, 193n67, 197n95, 203n9, 204n9, 217n92, 220n20, 222n47, 225n64, 227–28n33, 229n6, 230n8 state of emergency, 13, 22, 36, 38, 40, 67, 88, 101, 144, 162n3, 204n10 state of exception, 22–23, 38, 67, 85, 97, 101–2, 127, 143, 153–55, 204n10, 207n3 statistics, 8, 41–47, 49, 51–53, 55, 57, 59–61, 63–65, 67, 84, 148, 180n41, 193n67, 193n69, 194–95n79

255

Stiegler, Barbara, 161–62n2, 164n11, 177n30, 182n49 Stimilli, Elettra, 23, 99–102, 215nn72–73 sublation, 147, 178n30 Sweden, 23, 128 system, 66–67, 84–85, 87, 150, 153, 185n13, 208n13, 215n76, 229n7; age of, 45; cultural, 25; healthcare, 64, 122, 164n8; immune, 13, 78, 120, 133, 166n3, 210n23, 222n48; political, 25, 89, 94, 155, 204n10; state of, 47–51, 53 technology, 35, 45, 70, 86, 125, 143, 167n6, 173n26, 198n3, 226n13, 227n30 terror: Covid as: 26, 204n11; spreading of, 43, 180n41 terrorism, 26, 115, 140, 169n14, 204n11, 227n30 Timofeeva, Oxana, 112, 115–18, 163n6, 182n49, 220n16, 220n21 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 154 totalisation, 126, 211n52 totalitarianism, 77, 109, 116, 153–54, 162n3, 178n30, 179–80n39, 203–4nn9–10 totality, 6, 45, 70, 72–73, 75, 116–17, 121, 152, 158 touch, 4, 10, 14, 108–109, 114, 147, 217–18n96, 229n7 the transcendental, 3, 5, 54, 84–85, 215n76 transfection, 166n3 transvaluation, 14, 109, 137, 143, 198n2 unity, 2, 5–6, 10, 25, 38, 41, 57, 59–60, 62–63, 69–71, 73–75, 77, 79, 121, 126, 158, 160, 192n66, 228n36 university, 3, 6, 122, 163n4, 164n11, 165n15, 179n38, 205n11, 209n22, 218–19nn4–5

256

Index

vaccination, 26, 72, 127, 164n13, 166n3, 184n7, 202n8, 219n9, 228n33. See also mRNA; transfection vaccines, 11, 21–22, 71–73, 77–78, 82, 119, 125–26, 130, 139, 158, 171n20, 176–77n30, 181n46, 191–93n66, 193n71, 199–201nn5–6, 222– 23nn47–49, 227–28n33 Vighi, Fabio, 67, 163n3, 183–84n5, 207–208n4, 208n8 violence, 4, 10, 14, 105, 116–17, 125, 152, 157, 159, 186n55, 211n60, 222n47, 227n29 vulnerability, 32, 65, 72, 86, 96, 95–101, 104, 122, 126, 127, 131, 133–34, 137, 148–49, 159, 182n1, 205n11, 213n62, 224n64

war, 4, 8–9, 22, 30, 35, 54, 60, 73–76, 101–2, 109, 112, 126, 150, 165n16, 168–69n13, 172n21, 173n27, 181n48, 183n5, 187n55, 201n6, 204nn10–11, 205n13, 207n1, 225n65, 227n30 Woolhouse, Mark, 82, 164n9, 168nn8–9, 170n16, 173n26, 177n30, 187n56, 189–93nn65–66, 195– 96nn79–81, 221n23 Žižek, Slavoj, 63–67, 107–8, 110, 113, 116, 127–31, 136, 177–78nn30–31, 198n2, 224n60, 230n8. See also the Left (politics) zōē, 7, 102, 106, 142–43, 215n75, 221n35. See also bios

About the Author

Michael Lewis is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and general editor of the Journal of Italian Philosophy. He is the author of Heidegger and the Place of Ethics; Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction: On Nature; Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing; and The Beautiful Animal: Sincerity, Charm, and the Fossilised Dialectic. He is coauthor of Phenomenology: An Introduction and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Italian Philosophy Reader. He was educated at the University of Warwick and the University of Essex. He has previously worked at the University of Sussex and the University of the West of England. He is currently working on two monographs, one on philosophical anthropology and the other on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben.

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