Renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben collects all of his fierce, passionate, and deeply personal interventions regarding the 2020 health emergency as it played out in Italy and across the world.
Alongside and beyond accusations, these texts variously reflect upon the great transformation affecting Western democracies. In the name of biosecurity and health, the model of bourgeois democracy-together with its rights, parliaments, and constitutions-is everywhere surrendering to a new despotism where citizens seem to accept unprecedented limitations to their freedoms.
This leads to the urgency of the volumes title: Where Are We Now? For how long will we accept living in a constantly extended state of exception, the end of which remains impossible to see?
Giorgio Agamben is a contemporary Italian philosopher and political theorist whose original works have gained critical acclaim and been translated into numerous languages. His most recent books are Creation and Anarchy: The Work or Art and the Religion of Capitalism and What Is Real? . As seen in the essays within Where Are We Now?: The Epidemic as Politics, Agamben is a frequent contributor to a variety of international newspapers and other media.
Introduction
1. The Invention of an Epidemic
2. Contagion
3. Clarifications
4. Where Are We Now?
5. Reflections on the Plague
6. The Epidemic Shows That the State of Exception Has Become the Rule
7. Social Distancing
8. A Question
9. Bare Life
10. New Reflections
11. On Truth and Falsity
12. Medicine as Religion
13. Biosecurity and Politics
14. Polemos Epidemios
15. Requiem for the Students
16. Two Infamous Terms
17. Law and Life
18. State of Emergency and State of Exception
19. The Face and the Mask
20. What Is Fear?
21. On the Time to Come
Agamben’s work is finding new relevance among those who are beginning to question not only the gravity of the virus but also the legitimacy of state responses to it. Agamben is certainly not a ‘virus denier’. . . but he does question the use of ‘pandemic’ to legitimate a certain shift in governing paradigms that will have far-reaching consequences . . . When sitting on a park bench with a friend is technically a crime, we need a voice like Agamben’s to remind us what we have lost among all the so-called ‘gains. — David Jack, Australian Book Review
What happens when health replaces salvation, biological life replaces eternal life, and social distancing displaces community? These are theological as well as political questions, and Agamben has correctly brought them to our attention. — Postdigital Science & Education
An on-the-spot study of the link between power and knowledge. — Christopher Caldwell; The New York Times
A fascinating intervention on the encroaching state of biosecurity we are witnessing before our very eyes. — Colby Dickinson, Loyola University Chicago
Fear makes thinking harder, yet there is an urgent need to think and to question every aspect of our current situation. The philosopher, which Agamben truly embodies, is a figure that must be heeded. — Nina Power, Roehampton University
Agambens book title emphasizes a vital but all too often unappreciated question. By way of answer, he worries that we are collectively and individually in a very dangerous place that, contrary to popular opinion, has little to do with a virus or pandemic." — T. Allan Hillman, University of South Alabama
Agamben is right that our rulers will use every opportunity to consolidate their power, especially in times of crisis. That coronavirus is being exploited to strengthen mass-surveillance infrastructure is no secret. — Marco dEramo, New Left Review
