By Gordon Hull
In a follow-up to a controversial piece in which he argued (in late February) that the social distancing and quarantining in Italy presented the temptation to universalize the state of exception, Agamben says this:
“Fear is a bad counsellor, but it makes us see many things we pretended not to see. The first thing the wave of panic that’s paralysed the country has clearly shown is that our society no longer believes in anything but naked life. It is evident that Italians are prepared to sacrifice practically everything – normal living conditions, social relations, work, even friendships and religious or political beliefs – to avoid the danger of falling ill. The naked life, and the fear of losing it, is not something that brings men and women together, but something that blinds and separates them. Other human beings, like those in the plague described by Manzoni, are now seen only as potential contaminators to be avoided at all costs or at least to keep at a distance of at least one metre. The dead – our dead – have no right to a funeral and it’s not clear what happens to the corpses of our loved ones. Our fellow humans have been erased and it’s odd that the Churches remain silent on this point. What will human relations become in a country that will be accustomed to living in this way for who knows how long? And what is a society with no other value other than survival?”
To be sure, there are and will be bad actors. William Barr’s DOJ has apparently seen the epidemic as a good time for a power grab (notably, one that has been sharply critiqued from both the right and the left). Ohio seems to be using it as a pretext to stop abortions. So – and this will be my point – we must always be vigilant about the expansion of emergency powers.
But when you have a leitmotif, you stick with it, and so Agamben reiterates his basic thesis about the combination of state of exception and bare life:
“There have been more serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought of declaring a state of emergency like today, one that forbids us even to move. Men have become so used to living in conditions of permanent crisis and emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their lives have been reduced to a purely biological condition, one that has lost not only any social and political dimension, but even any compassionate and emotional one.”
This is obviously not literally true; Foucault’s example of a town in lockdown during the plague is on point. But certainly this is new at a global scale. Various responses in the thread point out the obvious: that many more people will die of COVID-19 than the annual flu; that “overreaction” makes perfect sense when you cannot make the sorts of risk-based, prudential calculations to which we have become accustomed. In the process of making the latter argument, I even suggested that the current social distancing measures are unsustainable because our society is based on movement and circulation. They indeed put our bios into suspension.
But what we learn from Agamben is mainly that the bios/zoe distinction (where bios refers to way of life, and zoe refers to the biological process of living) he is invoking here makes no more sense now than it did in Homo Sacer. In what way is life reduced to a “purely biological condition?” How is that even coherent? Agamben in Homo Sacer says that bare life is so thoroughly debased that it loses even the “sweetness” that comes originally with the act of living. He quotes Aristotle, who says that “there is probably some kind of good in the mere fact of living. If there is no great difficulty as to the way of life [kata ton bion], clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life [zoe] as if it were a kind of serenity [euemeria, beautiful day] and a natural sweetness” (1278b, 23-31; qt HS 2, interpolations Agamben’s). We have all seen the touching videos of Italians singing together from their apartment balconies, and now there are Germans and Chinese singing in solidarity with them. These songs reject Agamben’s interpretation, even on his own terms!
Moreover, the idea that there is such a thing as purely biological life devoid of bios is rubbish. As William Connolly put it in response to Homo Sacer, “what a joke. Every way of life involves the infusion of norms, judgments, and standards into the affective life of participants at both private and public levels. Every way of life is biocultural and biopolitical” (in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, 29). Consider even eating: what parts of how we eat are not cultural? That is, both there must be a bios to being quarantined, and the decision to prioritize avoiding illness must be a biopolitical one. The discordance between Trump and the more responsible members of the federal government shows that the reverse decision to prioritize what passes for the index of bios in Trump’s mind – the stock markets – is a cynically political one. When it is replicated by spring breakers in Florida or crowds in packed bars, they enact another political decision: their bios matters more than the zoe of society’s most vulnerable. When elevated to a principle, either of these comes carelessly close to saying that those vulnerable lives don’t matter, or are expendable. As Latour pointed out somewhere, we do this all the time: the decision to keep speed limits where they are is a decision that those who could be saved by lowering them are expendable. It is true that Italy has banned funerals for now and this should give us pause – but how is it better to imply that the lives of the most vulnerable are less important than large, non-funereal social gatherings of strangers during a pandemic? No doubt, balancing matters, and the right level of social distancing from an epidemiological point of view is probably somewhere between life-as-normal and being utterly confined to one's own house with no exceptions, just as the right speed limit is somewhere between forcing everyone to walk and removing speed limits altogether. But how is this not a biopolitical discussion, one where the details matter? From an epidemiological perspective, at least, the spring breakers make it worse for everyone else: by refusing to socially isolate at all, they bring more isolation down on the rest of us. So too, as feminist theory has forcefully and for a long time underlined with regards to privacy, social distancing will be borne differently by different people. It's one thing for an office worker to telecommute, and something totally different to confine someone indefinitely in a house with their abuser. We are differentially vulnerable and resilient, and recognizing those differences matters.
In other words, Agamben’s argument above replicates the problems of Homo Sacer because it obscures too many details that matter in figuring out how to navigate an impossible situation under conditions of radical uncertainty. It precisely obscures politics in the broader sense. Let me focus on the level of consequences. Agamben wrote that the apotheosis of bare life was found in Auschwitz, and in particular in the figure of the so-called Muselmann, “the most extreme figure of the camp inhabitant … a being from whom humiliation, horror, and fear had so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely apathetic” (Homo Sacer, 184-85). Antonio Negri calls this description dangerous:
“I believe that the concept of naked life is not an impossible, unfeasible one. I believe it is possible to push the image of power to the point at which a defenseless human being is crushed, to conceive of that extreme point at which Power tries to eliminate that ultimate resistance which is the sheer attempt to keep oneself alive. From a logical standpoint, it is possible to think all this: the naked bodies of the people in the camps, for example, can lead one precisely in this direction. But this is also the point at which this concept turns into ideology …. Isn’t this the story about Power that Power itself would like us to believe in and reiterate? Isn’t it far more politically useful to conceive of this limit from the standpoint of those who are not yet or not completely crushed by Power, from the standpoint of those still struggling to overcome such a limit, from the standpoint of the process of constitution” (In Praise of the Common, 155, my emphasis)?
Negri accordingly proposes that “the conclusions” Agamben “draws in Homo Sacer lead to dangerous political outcomes” (ibid.).
Here, Agamben’s procrustean bios/zoe distinction here doesn’t just ignore the evidence of bios in all forms of life. It ignores the efforts to find meaning and solidarity in life, in spite of and even because of quarantine. It ignores meaning and solidarity that challenges the conditions that led to quarantine. Citing Baudrillard’s controversial proclamation that 9/11 represented the West waging war on itself, Andrew O’Hehir proposes:
“We didn't want this to happen; I'm not saying that. But we wanted something to happen. We all understood, consciously or otherwise, that the life we have all been living, the global economy we have created, was not sustainable. Many of us knew it would take a crisis of global proportions before we could consider that seriously, on the level of the human collective. Well, here we are. If the dolphins of Venice are not real, we invented them for a reason. We need them to show us the way.”
In treating life today as mere zoe, Agamben occludes the very voices and imaginings that might change the biopolitical status quo he so detests. And in doing that, he gives power to the Donald Trumps and William Barrs of the world. This is not a trivial point, because we should indeed fear the entrenchment of surveillance culture and the permanent replacement of human contact by the very screens that we now need to get through our day just as we should fear the accretion and normalizing of emergency powers. In a thoughtful essay on Slate (you really should read it), Steven W. Thrasher looks at his own research on the effects of HIV/AIDS (which has killed 38 million so far) and the resistance movements that emerged from it. He warns that social isolation is damaging in itself. He underlines that social distancing becomes bearable only if it is accompanied by data that allows it to be accurately targeted (one should remember here that Foucault’s plague-infested town was a place of data collection, not just frozen movement). He talks about how both epidemics have laid bare the necropolitics of Republican administrations that assume that only those they don’t care about will get sick and die. Thrasher recounts to politics of ACT UP and other groups, a politics based on putting bodies in the way and on the line. Thrasher concludes:
“There’s power in how, for the first time in history, any human on the planet can instantly communicate with any other and talk about facing the same challenge. This new crisis will change everything. Everything. Everything about how we work and socialize, everything about how we make love and make politics. It might very well be a less haptic world, a more screen-centered and surveilled world. The world will be rebuilt, and we have a chance to make it better—but this will only happen if we can figure out mutual care and mass mobilization with tactics that have never been used on such a scale before. We’d do well to listen to leadership from disabled activists who have a lot of experience with political action without needing physical presence. But we have to keep thinking critically. There are no easy answers, and the status quo won’t do.”
I don’t know if the current pandemic will change everything, or more to the point, what it will change. The 1918 flu pandemic likely brought us public health, starting with the Soviet Union and spreading to Europe and then, in diluted form, to the U.S. Thrasher documents the many changes HIV/AIDS have brought.
Being a part of these changes, pushing for the ones that are worth having and resisting those that are bad, will be vital. But if you see everybody in quarantine as Agamben sees Muselmänner, you also won’t see the politics that can move us forward. Donald Trump is a declining tinpot dictator who depends on a vast network of sycophants to constantly recreate the hall of mirrors in which he lives. He wants nothing more than for us to see social isolation as bare life, because then we can go back to making him richer, the body count be damned.
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