Giorgio Agamben: "Biosecurity and Politics"

Disclaimer: this is an unofficial translation.

Source: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-biosicurezza

Giorgio Agamben

Biosecurity and Politics

May 11, 2020

What strikes in the reactions to the exceptional devices that have been actuated in our country (and not only in this one) is the incapacity to observe them beyond the immediate context in which they seem to operate. Rare are those who try instead, as a serious political analysis would impose to do, to interpret them as symptoms and signs of a wider experiment, in which a new paradigm of governance of humans and of things is at play. Already in a book published seven years ago, that is now worth rereading carefully (Tempêtes microbiennes, Gallimard 2013) Patrick Zylberman described the process through which health safety, left until then at the margins of political calculations, was becoming an essential part of state and international strategies. In question is no less than the creation of a sort of “sanitary terror” as an instrument to govern what had been defined as the worst case scenario. It is according to this logic of the worst that already in 2005 the World Health Organization had announced between “two and 150 million deaths due to the coming avian flu,”* suggesting a political strategy that states were not yet prepared to receive then. Zylberman shows that the device that was suggested was articulated in three points: 1) construction, based upon a possible risk, of a fictitious scenario, where data is presented in order to favor behaviors that allow to govern in an extreme situation; 2) adoption of the logic of the worst as a political regime; 3) the integral organization of citizens’ body in order to reinforce the adhesion to governmental institutions to the maximum, producing a sort of superlative civism in which the imposed obligations are presented as proof of altruism and the citizen no longer has a right to health (health safety), but becomes obliged to health juridically (biosecurity).

What Zylberman described in 2013 has duly occurred today. It is evident that, besides the emergency situation tied to a certain virus that could leave its place to another one in the future, in question is the design of a paradigm of governance whose efficacy greatly surpasses that of all forms of government that the political history of the West has known until now. If already, in the progressive decadence of ideologies and political faiths, security reasons had permitted the acceptance by citizens of limitations to liberty that they were not willing to accept before, biosecurity demonstrated itself to be capable of presenting the absolute cessation of every political activity and of every social relationship as the maximum form of civic participation. It was thus possible to view to the paradox of leftist organizations, traditionally accustomed to vindicate rights and denunciate violations of the constitution, unreservedly accept limitations on liberty decided by ministerial decrees lacking any legality and that even fascism had ever dreamed it could impose.

It is evident — and governmental authorities themselves do not stop reminding us — that the so called “social distancing” will become the model of politics that awaits us and (as the representatives of a so called task force, whose members find themselves in evident conflict of interest with the function they should be exercising, have announced) that will take advantage of this distancing in order to substitute everywhere the technological digital devices to human relationships in their physicality, having these become suspects of contagion as such (political contagion, that is). University lectures, as the MIUR [Ministry of Education, University and Research] has already recommended, as of next year will take place online stably; we will no longer recognize each other by looking at each other in the face, which could be covered by a face mask, but through digital devices that will recognize mandatorily obtained biological data and every “gathering,” whether political or friendly, will continue to be forbidden. In question is an entire conception of the destinies of human society in a perspective that in many respects seems by now to have taken over from religions at their sunset the apocalyptic idea of an end of the world. After politics had been replaced by the economy, now in order to govern even that must be integrated with the new biosecurity paradigm, to which all other needs will have to be sacrificed. It is legitimate to ask ourselves if such a society will be able to define itself as human or if the loss of sensible relationships, of faces, of friendship, of love could be truly compensated by an abstract and presumably totally fictitious sanitary security.