Donatella Di Cesare: “Dear Agamben, I write to you…”
From profound critic of neo-liberalism, to guru of anti-vaxxers. The philosopher Donatella Di Cesare writes a ‘letter from afar’ to Giorgio Agamben.
As the second year of the planetary pandemic draws to a close, one cannot help but recognize, among the many devastating effects of this vast catastrophe, a tragic event that fully affects philosophy. I would like to call it the ‘Agamben Case,’ not to objectify the protagonist — to whom I am addressing myself, as if writing a letter from afar — but to underline its importance.
Giorgio Agamben — like it or not — has been, and is, the most significant philosopher of the last few decades, not only on the European scene, but throughout the world. From American university classrooms to the most remote oppositional groups of Latin American, Agamben’s name, in some ways even going beyond the philosopher himself, has become the banner of a new critical thought. For those of my generation, who lived through the 1970s, his books — particularly starting with Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life in 1995 — were a chance not only to scrutinize the disturbing and authoritarian depths of neo-liberalism, but also to unmask the successful and watered-down pseudo-left, which today self-identifies as a moderate progressivism. This pseudo-left has no critique of progress, and a philosophical inventory that came to a halt in the 1980s, it practices a politics that reduces its activities and direction to administrative governance under the dictate of the economy. In the wake of the best tradition of the twentieth century — from Foucault to Arendt, from Benjamin to Heidegger — Agamben has offered us the vocabulary and conceptual repertoire to try to orient ourselves in the complex terrain of the twenty-first century. How can we forget the pages on the “camp,” which after Auschwitz, rather than disappearing, became part of the political landscape, and also those on bare life, first and foremost of those exposed without rights, or on post-totalitarian democracy that maintains a link with the past?
This makes what has recently happened all the more traumatic. In the blog ‘Una voce,’ hosted on the Quodlibet website, Agamben took to commenting on the irruption of the coronavirus in semi-journalistic terms. The first post on February 26, 2020, was titled “The Invention of a Pandemic.” Today this sounds like a malicious prognosis. At the time, however, Agamben was not alone in deluding himself that covid-19 was little more than a flu. There was a lack of data and the magnitude of the disease had not yet been revealed. In my own pessimism, which caused me to see the first signs of covid as the entry to a new, worse, era, I felt surrounded by people who preferred to downplay the phenomenon or detach from it. During the lockdown we were all struck by the measures taken to combat the virus, as indispensable as they were shocking. Life confined within domestic walls, our being consigned to the screen, deprived of others and the polis… it all seemed almost unbearable — until the suffering of those emerged who, without breath, were fighting for life in intensive care units. The image of the trucks transporting coffins in Bergamo marked the point of no return for the whole world. The sovereign virus, which the sovereignist regimes, from Trump to Bolsonaro, grotesquely pretended either to ignore or to bend to their own purposes, manifested itself in all its terrible potency. The catastrophe was ungovernable. And it exposed the pettiness and ineptitude of the politics of closed borders. Europe responded.
The time had come for Agamben to acknowledge outright: “I made an interpretative error, because the pandemic is not an invention.” But Agamben never rectified his error.
His posts continued until July 2020 in the same vein. As news of his developing denialism spread abroad, I read his embarrassing texts convinced that the nightmare would soon be over. But it wasn’t. His posts have become the subject of two books and the ‘voice’ of the blog has continued with its prognosis, reaching its lowest point with two interventions of July 2021 — “Second Class citizens” and “Green Pass” — where the Green Pass was obscenely likened to the yellow star. This gave significant succour to the worst of the anti-vax movement, intellectually and philosophically legitimizing them. The rest, including the ‘Doubt and Precaution Committee,’[1] is (recent) history.
Concerns over securitarian drifts are justified. The politics of fear, the phobocracy that governs and subdues ‘us’ by instilling a fear of what is outside, nurturing hatred for the other, is the current political phenomenon that characterizes immunitarian democracies and it precedes the pandemic. In different ways philosophers, sociologists, economists, and political scientists have denounced it. It is equally right to argue that the Italian context is in this respect a political laboratory without equal. However, a state of emergency cannot be confused with a state of exception. An earthquake, a flood, a pandemic are unexpected events that must be faced in their necessity. A state of exception is dictated by a sovereign will. Of course, one can border on the other, and we are therefore aware both of the danger of an institutionalized state of emergency and of the threat represented by those control and surveillance measures which, once in place, risk becoming indelible. It is true: there is no government that cannot avail itself of the pandemic. Let’s keep the suspicion; such suspicion is the salt of democracy.
But the further step, which is a drift into conspiracy-theorising, we should not take. Therefore, we do not say that the covid-19 epidemic is an invention, nor that it has been used intentionally as a pretext, as Agamben does with the caveat included in his book: “if the powers that govern the world have decided to take the pretext of a pandemic — at this point it does not matter if it is real or simulated…”
Personalizing power, making it a subject with a will, attributing an intention to it, means endorsing a conspiratorial vision. And it also means not considering the role of technique, or technology, that machinery that, as Heidegger teaches, employs those who pretend to employ it. The designers become the designed. Through this perspective one can see how power works. It is precisely the sovereign virus that has shown all the limits of this power that runs amok, is unjust, violent, and yet is impotent in the face of disaster, incapable of dealing with the world’s disease.
No, I do not associate myself with the anti-conspiracist vulgarity of those who, certain of possessing reason and truth, reduce a complex phenomenon to a mental cramp or a lie. With even more regret, I say that Agamben’s gloomy insinuations, his declarations on the “construction of a fictitious scenario” and on the “integral organization of the body of citizens,” which refer to a new paradigm of biosecurity and to a sort of sanitary terror, simply embed him within the contemporary landscape of conspiracy.
As is known, Agamben has found himself on the right, or rather the ultra-right, with a following consisting of anti-vaxxers and those against the Green Pass. From time-to-time he has even lashed out against those on the left who defended the vaccination plan. It does not seem to me, however, that in these two years he has expended a word for the riots in prisons, for the elderly decimated in the nursing homes, for the homeless abandoned in the city, for those left suddenly without work, for the delivery riders, the laborers, and the invisible. I would have expected, from the philosopher who made us reflect on ‘bare life,’ an appeal for the migrants who are brutalized, rejected, and left to die at the European borders. Indeed, an initiative that, with his authority, would have had certain weight. But there has been none of that.
He has often forced us into to distorting analyses but, above all, by taking paradoxical positions, he has pushed us towards common sense. As far as I am concerned, perhaps this is one of the major damages, since philosophy requires radicality. But the damages go beyond this and are difficult to estimate, starting from the surfeit of discredit cast upon philosophy itself.
For us Agambeniani, survivors of this trauma, it will be a matter of rethinking categories, concepts, terms, some of which — such as ‘state of exception’ — have become almost grotesque. And it will be necessary to save ‘Agamben’ from Agamben; to preserve the legacy of his thought from this drift. Nor can we gloss over the political problem, given that one of the decisive points of reference for a left that surrenders neither to neo-liberalism nor to the model of moderate progressivism is now missing, and in such a disastrous way. The path will be rough.
Donatella Di Cesare
19 December 2021 (L’Espresso)
Approved translation by Mickey Moosenhauer, 20 December 2021
[1] [Translators note: The brainchild of Ugo Mattei, the group was set up on December 8 by Mattei, Agamben, Massimo Cacciari, and Carlo Freccero. They have branded themselves, in honour of Stefano Rodotà, who died four years ago, as ‘Future Generations Rodotà’. But Rodotà’s daughter is unhappy with this and has indicated that her father would have judged them to be “idiots” for their perspective on the pandemic. Their mission statement reads: “The goal is to protect freedom and human rights under international law.”]
