Giorgio Agamben: "Medicine As Religion"

Disclaimer: this is an unofficial translation.

Source: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-la-medicina-come-religione

Giorgio Agamben

Medicine As Religion

May 2, 2020

The fact that science has become the religion of our times, that which people believe to believe, has been evident for some time by now. Within the modern West have coexisted and, in certain measure, still coexist three great systems of belief: Christianity, capitalism and science. In the history of modernity, these three “religions” have necessarily crossed one another multiple times, conflicting from time to time and then reconciling in various ways, until they progressively reached a sort of pacific, articulate coexistence, if not a real and actual collaboration in the name of a common interest.

What is new is that between science and the other two religions a subterranean and implacable conflict has reignited, whose victorious outcomes for science are today under our own eyes and which determinate, in a manner unheard of before, every aspect of our existence. This conflict does not concern, as it happened in the past, the theory and the general principles, but, so to speak, the cultual praxis. Even science, in fact, like every religion, knows different forms and levels through which it organizes and ordains its own structure: to the elaboration of a subtle and rigorous dogmatic corresponds in praxis an extremely ample and capillary cultual sphere that coincides with what we call technology.

It does not surprise that the protagonist of this new war of religion is that part of science where the dogmatic il less rigorous and where the pragmatic aspect is stronger: medicine, whose immediate object is the living body of human beings. Let’s try to fixate the essential characters of this victorious faith with which we will increasingly have reckon with.

1) The first character is that medicine, like capitalism, does not need a special dogmatic, but limits itself to borrowing its fundamental concepts from biology. Differently than biology, however, it articulates these concepts in a gnostic-Manichean sense, that is, according to an exasperated dualistic. There is a god or a malignant principle, the disease, indeed, whose specific agents are bacteria and viruses, and a god or a benefic principle, which is not to be healthy, but healing, whose cultual agents are doctors and therapy. Like in every gnostic faith, the two principles are clearly separated, but in practice they can contaminate one another and the benefic principle and the doctor who represents it can make mistakes and unknowingly collaborate with their enemy, without invalidating in any way the dualistic reality and the necessity of the cult through which the benefic principle fights its battle. And it is significant that the theologians who must secure its strategy are the representatives of a science, virology, that does not have a proper place, but that situates itself at the border between biology and medicine.

2) If until now this cultural practice was, like any liturgy, episodic and limited in time, the unexpected phenomenon we are witnessing is that it has become permanent and all pervasive. It is no longer the case of having to take medicines or to undergo a medical examination or a surgery when necessary: the entire life of human beings must become in every instant the site of an uninterrupted cultual celebration. The enemy, the virus, is always present and must be incessantly combated and without possible truce. Even the Christian religion knew similar totalitarian tendencies, but these interested only certain individuals — particularly the monks — who chose to put their entire existence under the banner “pray incessantly.” Medicine as religion gathers this Paulinian precept and, at the same time, turns it on its head: where monks gathered in convents to pray together, now the cult must be practiced just as assiduously, but maintaining separation and distance.

3) The cultual practice is no longer free and voluntary, only exposed to sanctions of a spiritual order, but must be made normatively compulsory. The collusion between religion and profane power is not certainly a new fact; completely new is, however, that this no longer entails, as it happened with heresies, the professing of dogmas, but the celebration of cult exclusively. The profane power must vigil that the liturgy of the medical religion, which now coincides with the entirety of life, must be punctually observed in fact. The fact that this is a cultual practice and not a rational scientific necessity is immediately evident. The most frequent cause of mortality in our country are by far cardiovascular diseases and it is known that these could be reduced by practicing a healthier lifestyle and by following a particular diet. But no doctor has ever thought that these types of lifestyle and diet, that they recommended to patients, would become the object of a legal norm, which would decree ex lege what must be eaten and how people must live, transforming the entire existence into a sanitary obligation. Exactly this has been done and, at least for now, people have accepted, as if this was obvious, to renounce to their own freedom of movement, to work, to friendships, to loves, to social relationships, to their religious and political convictions.

It is measured here how the other two religions in the West, the religion of Christ and the religion of money, have ceded primacy, apparently without a fight, to medicine and science. The Church has purely and simply reneged its principles, forgetting that the saint whose name the actual pontiff has taken hugged lepers, that one of mercy’s deeds was to visit the sick, that sacraments can only be administered in presence. For its part capitalism, while with some protestation, has accepted a loss in productivity that had never dared to take into account, probably hoping to find an agreement with the new religion later on, which seems to be willing to compromise on this point.

4) The medical religion has harvested without reservations the eschatological instance from Christianity that itself had dropped. Capitalism already, secularizing the theological paradigm of salvation, had eliminated the idea of an end of times, substituting it with a permanent state of crisis, with neither redemption nor end. Krisis is at its origin a medical concept, that within the Hippocratic corpus designated the moment when the doctor decided if the patient would have survived the disease. Theologians have resumed the term to indicate the final Judgment that takes place on the last day. If one observes the state of exception that we are living in, one would say that the medical religion conjugates together capitalism’s perpetual crisis with the Christian idea of end times, of an eschaton where the extreme decision is always in progress and the end is both precipitated and delayed, in the incessant attempt to govern it, but without ever resolving it once and for all. It is the religion of a world that feels to have reached the end and nevertheless is unable, like the Hippocratic doctor, to decide if it will survive or die.

5) Like capitalism and differently than Christianity, the medical religion does not offer a perspective of salvation and of redemption. On the contrary, the healing it aims at cannot be other than provisional, since the evil God, the virus, cannot be eliminated once and for all, but mutates continuously and always assumes new forms, presumably more dangerous. The epidemic, as the etymology of the terms suggests (in Greek demos are the people as political body and polemos epidemios is the name for civil war in Homer), is above all a political concept, that is soon to become the new terrain of world politics — or of the non-politics. It is possible, however, that the epidemic we are living in is the realization of the global civil war that according the most attentive political scientists has replaced the traditional world wars. All of the nations and all of the people are now endurably at war with themselves, because the invisible and elusive enemy they are fighting is inside ourselves.

As it has happened many times through history, philosophers will have to enter again into conflict with religion, which is no longer Christianity, but the science or that part of it that has assumed the shape of a religion. I do not know if stakes will be lit or if books will be singled out again, but certainly the thinking of those who will continue to search for the truth and refuse the dominant lie, as it is already happening under our own eyes, will be excluded and accused of diffusing false news (news, not ideas, since news are more important than reality!). Like in every moment of emergency, real or simulated, we will see once again the slandering of philosophers by the ignorant and the rascals trying to profit from the disasters they themselves have created. All this has already happened and will continue to happen, but those who testify for the truth will not stop doing it, because no one can testify for the witness.