Agamben on COVID-19: Fear Is a Bad Adviser
Fear Is a Bad Adviser
Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics (London: ERIS, 2021)
Fear is almost certainly the central theme of Agamben’s reflections on the biosecurity response to the COVID-19 pandemic, collected in this newly published volume. Probably the most interesting essay in the book is ‘What is Fear?’, a sustained Heideggerian analysis of the feeling of fear as it relates to politics and our forms of life, but even before that penultimate piece the topic of fear is brought up in eight of the other essays.
On the topic of fear, Agamben’s central contention is that we must not let fear overwhelm us and determine the structure of our politics. In this regard his critique gets to the very heart of much right-wing thinking: conservative political theorists such as John Kekes have argued that fear is a central component of conservative thought. Fear about potentially disruptive or harmful changes to society has arguably been instrumental in preserving a social order which is itself based on significant harm perpetrated against minority groups: so long as societal harm does not cause fear for those in positions of power and privilege then it is not considered important.
Going even deeper we can say that fear is a vital factor in the logic of sovereignty, as is evidenced by its central place in the work of Thomas Hobbes. Once again, we can see from this example that the choice to allow fear to play a vital role in informing our politics is ultimately harmful and counter-productive. What Hobbes was above all concerned with was the preservation of life: individuals’ lives were under constant threat in the state of nature, so he thought that the institution of a sovereign authority, which could put an end to this state, would means people did not have to live in fear for their lives.
Yet, as Agamben has demonstrated throughout his political writings, this impulse to protect (bare) life is precisely what is behind the increasing power of the state over life itself, including the power to kill. With the pandemic, Agamben is arguing, we are being whipped up into a state of panic wherein we will allow the state to accumulate ever greater power to protect life, while also disregarding the aspects of our lives (the forms of our lives) that make them worth living. We can see the former tendency extremely clearly in the UK, where the government has brought in significant new laws limiting the right to protest and granting a range of new powers to the police. The state of exception has now become the (legal) norm. As to the second tendency, we can say that all of our forms of life have been disrupted and altered at the behest of the sovereign: through the institution of working-from-home, our lives and our jobs become indistinguishable from one another, reducing the physical and mental space wherein we are free to do as we like. Our non-productive, non-working lives, the forms that we give to our lives of our own volition, are abandoned (voluntarily but also, importantly, by force of law) in order to protect (bare) life.
This is the sovereign biopolitical logic which has been at the core of Agamben’s political project from the very beginning. It is the logic which does not recognise any form-of-life (any life defined by and inseparable from its form, from the choices one makes about how to live) and can see only bare life, biological life which needs to be protected. The extension of this logic is that in cases where certain lives pose a threat to others, these former may be killed or abandoned to the margins of society and allowed no rights or privileges. This is why it is still worth hearing Agamben’s voice on the topic of COVID lockdowns: while he may have been dismissed as a COVID-denier, a conspiracy theorist, or (in more frank estimations) a nutjob, his analysis works at a much deeper level than those of many other theorists or commentators. Like Foucault’s analyses of the plague towns in the Classical Age, the question Agamben is concerned with is not whether the measures introduced are ‘good’ or ‘bad’; rather, what Agamben is interested in are the underlying political logics which make such measures acceptable and what they mean for society at large. These logics have become so pervasive on both the left and the right (remember that the British Labour Party offered no substantial resistance to the severe increase in police powers) that anyone who offers any contrary opinion is dismissed or labelled dangerous.
Of course, none of this is to say that there are not genuinely dangerous figures propagating false information about the virus and the vaccines, but it’s important to remember that while Agamben’s science may not have always been accurate (although he does, in the volume’s titular essay – which was commissioned and rejected by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in March 2020 – argue that the virus does require significant changes to how we live, including the requirement to stay at home, to not travel, and to not engage as much in consumerist activities) he was certainly never in the same boat as the right libertarian anti-lockdown figures. He reminds us of this in an interview included in this volume, where he argues that we need to examine the reasons behind someone proffering an anti-lockdown perspective, with the obvious implication being that we will find very different reasons operating behind the opinions of a radical left-wing figure like Agamben and someone on the far-right.
Nevertheless, we might ask if there is not something worth criticising in Agamben’s unallied alignment with the libertarian right. He is certainly correct to balk at the accusation that his own position and theirs are reducible to one another, but despite their obvious and important differences I think that there is one vital similarity which bears investigation, a similarity which returns us to the central theme of fear and its relation to politics.
In his now (in)famous Birth of Biopolitics lectures, Foucault discusses the formation of the neoliberal governmentality which now dominates the world. While certain important neoliberals such as Friedrich Hayek would attempt to distance their thought from that of conservatism, Foucault points out that a central feature of neoliberalism is fear, just as it is for conservative ideology (other figures, such as Wendy Brown and Jessica Whyte, deal with the close relation of conservatism and neoliberalism more overtly). For the neoliberals, the fear which defined their political-economic ideology was state-phobia, a form of fear which was common to many political figures of the same historical era as neoliberalism’s emergence. This state-phobia was premised on the belief that the state was inherently inflationary, that it would extend its authority over as many domains as it could. This led, Foucault argues, to a reductive form of analysis, wherein all of the various aspects of state expansion became equivalent to one another. For state-phobic thinkers, social security measures, including things like the social safety net, became the politico-moral equivalent of the expansion of state power under the Nazis.
It is important to remember that this state-phobia was not the exclusive property of the neoliberals but was a feature of various political orientations in the inter-war and post-World War Two eras. It is precisely this common trait, Foucault indicates, that allowed neoliberalism to infiltrate and overwhelm the alternative logics operating behind other political parties, such as the German Social Democrats. This tendency has only increased since Foucault first analysed neoliberalism in 1979, to the point where Margaret Thatcher’s infamous claim that ‘there is no alternative’ has become as accepted on the mainstream left as it is on the right.
It is Agamben’s own state-phobia that has brought him into an unlikely alignment with various figures on the far-right. Similar to the state-phobia of the neoliberals, Agamben can only see the expansion of state power as a step towards the concentration camps, leading to some truly unpalatable conclusions in his own writings on lockdown. The idea, for example, that the university professors who agree to conduct classes online are “the exact equivalent” (74) of the professors who pledged allegiance to the Italian Fascist regime is frankly absurd, ignoring the fact that many students are immunocompromised and would be put at very real risk of death should in-person classes be resumed. While it may be the sovereign biopolitical logic which mandates classes be conducted online, that is not the reason that professors agree to it. It is always important to read Agamben with a poetic mindset, aware of the fact that his genealogical, political-ontological mode of thought can often lead to statements that feel exaggerated or unusual on their face. Still, this is not one of Agamben’s other books, it is a collection of essays meant for popular consumption, and not a specialist work in philosophy, aesthetics, or political theory. When he claims that two things are exact equivalents it is not just poetic language, it is clear, precise, and deliberate phrasing.
Agamben’s state-phobia also means that he is unable or unwilling to offer concrete alternatives for how his ideal society would respond to the pandemic. What would a form-of-life look like in a global pandemic? What about the forms-of-life of those who are immunocompromised? Agamben’s claim that we must remain open to the world, even when it threatens us, is an interesting one from a philosophical perspective, but it gives us no guidance as to how we might live with an invisible and pervasive threat that we can inadvertently pose to those we love. Perhaps it is unfair to expect one philosopher to have the answers to these questions, but I think that his failure to articulate any real concrete answers for how we should respond is indicative of a deeper issue.
The neoliberals took advantage of widespread state-phobia in their reorganisation of society to their own liking, and we are still dealing with the catastrophic consequences of their ascendance. This was in part, as Foucault points out, because the left lacked its own autonomous logic of governance, it could only attach itself to authoritarian, liberal, or (as we have seen in recent decades) neoliberal governing logics. Similarly, Agamben’s opposition of lockdown from the left offers us no vision for how we might organise society and our lives outside of the current order.
While it might feel as though, given the proliferation of lockdown measures and increasing state authoritarianism, we are far from a right-libertarian ascendancy, it is worth remembering that various far-right governments (such as those under Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Jair Bolsonaro) were and still are avoiding taking any pandemic response measures which harm the functioning of the capitalist market, and they have used state-phobic logics to justify themselves. Agamben is right to point out the important differences between his own thought and those who oppose lockdowns from a far-right perspective; however, his failure is in refusing to analyse the perspective that he shares with them, a perspective which can and has caused significant harm across the world. If Agamben is right in warning us against allowing fear to structure our politics, then we need also to examine the shortcomings of state-phobic politics – even those of us who are opposed to the state. “Fear is a bad adviser” (17, 28): this applies as much to fear of the state as to fear of the virus.
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