Where Are We Now by Giorgio Agamben

Author:Giorgio Agamben [Agamben, Giorgio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912475353
Publisher: Urtext Ltd
Published: 2021-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

Biosecurity and Politics

11 May 2020

What is striking about the reaction to the apparatus of exception that has been erected in our country and elsewhere is the inability to examine it outside of the immediate context in which it appears to operate. Rarely does anyone attempt to interpret these new structures, as any serious political analysis would demand, as signs and symptoms of a larger experiment in which a new paradigm for governing people and things is manifesting itself. In a book published seven years ago (Tempêtes microbiennes, Gallimard, 2013), one that is now worth rereading carefully, Patrick Zylberman described the process through which health security, which until then had been at the margins of political calculations, was becoming an essential component of state and international political strategies. What is at issue is nothing less than the creation of a sort of ‘health terror’ as a tool for governing the worst-case scenario12. It was according to this logic-of-the-worst that, as early as 2005, the World Health Organisation predicted between two and 150 million deaths from the upcoming bird flu, suggesting a political strategy that states were not at that point prepared to embrace. Zylberman shows that the proposed apparatus pivoted on three points: (i) the crafting, on the basis of a potential risk, of a fictitious scenario wherein data would be presented in such a way as to encourage behaviours that would make it possible to govern an extreme situation; (ii) the adoption of the logic-of-the-worst as a regime of political rationality; and (iii) the total organisation of the body of citizens so as fully to reinforce adhesion to governmental institutions, producing a sort of superlative civicism wherein the imposed obligations are presented as 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’).13

What Zylberman described in 2013 is exactly what is happening today. It is evident that, beyond the emergency situation associated with a specific virus that will in the future be replaced by another one, what is at stake is the design of a governance paradigm the effectiveness of which exceeds by far that of all other forms of governance that Western political history has ever known. If, amidst the progressive decay of ideologies and political beliefs, security measures had already conditioned citizens to accept limitations on their freedom that they were previously unwilling to accept, biosecurity has proven capable of presenting the absolute cessation of all political activity and social relationships as the highest form of civic participation. 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.

It is evident that—as the same government authorities unceasingly remind us—‘social distancing’ is the political model of the future, and that (as has been announced by representatives of a so-called ‘task

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