History Matters: G. Agamben on 'The State of Exception'

First published in Il Manifesto on 26 Feb. 2020, Agamben decries--very early on, but eerily prescient--'the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm'.

Giorgio Agamben (*1942) is an Italian philosopher who, in 2003, wrote a monograph on The State of Exception. The below article appeared quite early in this Age of Coronavirus, and it is a translation of an article that first appeared as “Lo stato d’eccezione provocato da un’emergenza immotivata,” in il manifesto, 26 Feb. 2020.

Agamben is quite prolific and outspoken; if you haven’t heard about (of) him, here are his bio (on the European Graduate School and Wikipedia), here’s a review of his volume on The State of Exception, written by Brett Neilson (U of Western Sydney), and here’s an interview from 2004.

Given yesterday’s dive into the use of governmental decrees to restrict access to public services (see here), I thought you’d might like this piece by Agamben, too. Without much further ado, except this brief note:

This is a translation of an article that first appeared as Lo stato d’eccezione provocato da un’emergenza immotivata, in il manifesto, 26 Feb. 2020. I’ve found the English translation here.

The State of Exception Provoked by an Unmotivated Emergency, by Giorgio Agamben

In order to make sense of the frantic, irrational, and absolutely unwarranted emergency measures adopted for a supposed epidemic of coronavirus, we must begin from the declaration of the Italian National Research Council (NRC), according to which “there is no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy.”

It continues: in any case “the infection, according to the epidemiological data available as of today and based on tens of thousands of cases, causes light/moderate symptoms (a variant of flu) in 80-90% of cases. In 10-15%, there is a chance of pneumonia, but which also has a benign outcome in the large majority of cases. We estimate that only 4% of patients require intensive therapy.”

If this is the real situation, why do the media and the authorities do their utmost to create a climate of panic, thus provoking a true state of exception, with severe limitations on movement and the suspension of daily life and work activities for entire regions?

Two factors can help explain such a disproportionate response.

First and foremost, what is once again manifest here is the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm. The executive decree (decreto legge), approved by the government “for reasons of hygiene and public safety,” produces a real militarization “of those municipalities and areas in which there is at least one person who tests positive and for whom the source of the infection is unknown, or in which there is a least one case that is not connected to a person who recently traveled from an area affected by the contagion.”

Such a vague and indeterminate formula will allow [the government] to rapidly extend the state of exception to all regions, as it is practically impossible that other cases will not appear elsewhere.

Let us consider the serious limitations of freedom imposed by the executive decree:

1. A prohibition against leaving the affected municipality or area for all people in that municipality or area.

2. A prohibition against entering the affected municipality or area

3. The suspension of all events or initiatives (regardless of whether they are related to culture, sport, religion, or entertainment), and a suspension of meetings in any private or public space, including enclosed spaces if they are open to the public.

4. The suspension of educational services in kindergartens and schools at every level, including higher education and excluding only distance learning.

5. The closure of museums and other cultural institutions as listed in article 101 of the Statute on cultural heritage and landscape, and in executive decree number 42 from 01/22/2004. All regulations on free access to those institutions are also suspended.

6. The suspension of all kinds of educational travel, in Italy and abroad.

7. The suspension of all publicly held exams and all activities of public offices, except essential services or public utility services.

8. The enforcement of quarantine and active surveillance on individuals who had close contact with confirmed cases of infection.

   It is blatantly evident that these restrictions are disproportionate to the threat from what is, according to the NRC, a normal flu, not much different from those that affect us every year.

   We might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a justification for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext for broadening such measures beyond any limitation.

The other factor, no less disquieting, is the state of fear, which in recent years has diffused into individual consciousnesses and which translates into a real need for states of collective panic, for which the epidemic once again offers the ideal pretext.

Therefore, in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for safety, which has been created by the same governments who now intervene to satisfy it.