As that infamous ’Grey Lady’ may preclude our visit, I quote at length. Giorgio Agamben is the most notable left-wing legal philosopher, recently shunned by his Italian colleagues after becoming a lockdown sceptic.
❧ “The part of the Italian intellectual establishment that calls itself ‘radical’ has been Mr. Agamben’s milieu for half a century. His position on the coronavirus has cost him its support. Paolo Flores d’Arcais, the influential editor of MicroMega, accused Agamben of ‘ranting.’ The newspapers La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera and Il Foglio all called him a negazionista regarding the coronavirus, using this word generally reserved for those who deny the holocaust. Just as unexpected are the sudden repudiations of Agamben’s recondite philosophy in the pages of La Verità and Il Giornale (newspapers more often sympathetic to Mr. Salvini’s League).
❧ “Agamben was very critical of the West’s “War on Terror”. In 2004, he was so alarmed by the U.S.’s new fingerprinting requirements for foreign visitors that he gave up a post at New York University rather than submit to them. He warned that these measures were only passing themselves off as temporary; they would inevitably become a normal part of peacetime life — His argument about the coronavirus runs along similar lines: The emergency declared by public-health experts replaces the discredited narrative of “national security experts” as a pretext for withdrawing rights and privacy from citizens. “Biosecurity” now serves as a reason for governments to rule in terms of “worst-case scenarios.” This means there is no level of cases or deaths below which locking down an entire nation of 60 million becomes unreasonable. Many European governments, including Italy’s, have developed national contact tracing apps that allow them to track their citizens using cellphones.
❧ “Agamben has written a series of critical pieces about the Italian authorities’ response to the virus and they’ve been published in a single volume called Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics. It hasn’t yet been translated into English, but it should be. Many of his sentiments will strike a chord with sceptics around the Anglosphere — The politics of the pandemic expose a deeper ethical, social and even metaphysical erosion. Agamben cites Italians’ most beloved 19th-century novel, Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed,” which describes how human relations degenerated in Milan during the plague of 1630. People came to see their neighbors not as fellow human beings but as spreaders of pestilence. As panic set in, authorities executed those suspected of daubing houses with plague germs.
❦ “When a society loses its collective cool, the cost is high.
❦ “Rich, atomized, diverse, our society has a weak spot, and the coronavirus has found it.
❥“‘For fear of getting sick,’ Mr. Agamben writes, ‘Italians are ready to sacrifice practically everything – their normal living conditions, their social relations, their jobs, right down to their friendships, their loves, their religious and political convictions.’
In fact, ‘the threshold that separates humanity from barbarism has been crossed,’ and the proof is in Italians’ treatment of their dead. ‘How could we have accepted, in the name of a risk that we couldn’t even quantify, not only that the people who are dear to us … should have to die alone but also – and this is something that had never happened before in all of history from Antigone to today – that their corpses should be burned without a funeral?’
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/opinion/sunday/giorgio-agamben-philosophy-coronavirus.html?
