Dégringolade

 Fear Is a Bad Adviser Source : https://destitutetheory.wordpress.com/2021/03/20/agamben-on-covid-19-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 pot

COMMUNIST CAPITALISM                                  Originally published as: Giorgio Agamben, " Capitalismo comunista ”  Quodlibet , 15 dicembre,  2020                                                                                                          https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-quando-la-casa-brucia . The capitalism that is consolidating on a planetary scale is not capitalism in the form it took in the West: it is, rather, capitalism in its communist variant, which combined an extremely rapid development of production with a totalitarian political regime.  This is the historical significance of the leading role that China is assuming not only in the economy in the strict sense, but also, as the political use of the pandemic has eloquently shown, as a paradigm of human governance.  That the regimes established in the self-styled communist countries were a particular form of capitalism, especially suited to economically backward countries and therefore classifie