Giorgio Agamben: "A Question"

Disclaimer: this is an unofficial translation.

Source: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-una-domanda

Giorgio Agamben

A Question

April 13, 2020

The plague marked the beginning of corruption… No one was willing to persevere any longer in that which before it was believed to be the good, because it was believed that one could perhaps die before reaching it.

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, II, 53

I would like to share with whoever is inclined a question which I have not stopped reflecting upon for more than a month now. How could it happen that an entire country has ethically and politically crumbled in the face of a disease without realizing it? The words I have used to formulate this question have been carefully  evaluated one by one. The measure of the abdication of our ethical and political principles is, in fact, very simple: we must ask ourselves what is the limit beyond which we are not willing to renounce them. I believe that the reader who will make the effort to consider the following points will have to convene that – without realizing it or pretending not to realize it – the threshold that separates humanity from barbarism has been crossed.

1) The first point, perhaps the gravest, has to do with the bodies of those who have died. How could we accept, solely in the name of a risk that was not possible to be properly assessed, that people who are dear to us and human beings in general not only would die alone, but – something that had never happened in history, from Antigone to this day – that their cadavers could be burned without a funeral?

2) We have then accepted without too many problems, solely in the name of a risk that was not possible to be properly assessed, to limit our freedom of movement in a manner that had never happened before in the history of the country, not even during the two World Wars (the curfew during the war was limited to specific hours). We have consequently accepted, solely in the name of a risk that was not possible to be properly assessed, to factually suspend our relations of love and friendship, because our fellow human had become a possible source of contagion.

3) This could have happened – and here we touch the root of the phenomenon – because we have split the unity of our vital experience, which has inseparably always been both corporal and spiritual, in a purely biological entity on one side and in an affective and cultural life on the other. Ivan Illich has shown, as David Cayley has recently reminded us here, the responsibilities of modern medicine in this split, which is given for granted but it is instead the greatest of abstractions. I know very well that this abstraction has been realized by modern science through the devices of reanimation, which can keep a body in a purely vegetative state.

But if this condition extends itself beyond its proper spatial and temporal boundaries, as we are trying to do today, and becomes a sort of principle of social behavior, we fall into contradictions from which it is impossible to escape.

I know that someone will rush to answer that we are dealing with a condition that is limited in time, after which everything will return as it was before. It is very peculiar that this can be repeated if not in bad faith, since the very authorities that have proclaimed the emergency do not stop reminding us that when the emergency will be overcome, it will be necessary to observe the very same directives of “social distancing,” as it has been called with a significant euphemism, will be the new organizing principle of society. And, in any case, that which, in good or bad faith, we have accepted to endure will not be possible to be erased.

I cannot, at this point, since I have indicted the responsibilities of each one of us, not mention the even graver responsibilities of those who should have had the task of watching over human dignity. First of all the Church, who, becoming the handmaid of science, which has become the true religion of our times, has radically disowned its most essential principles. The Church, under a Pope named Francis, has forgotten that Francis embraced lepers. It has forgotten that one of the tasks of mercifulness is that of visiting the sick. It has forgotten that martyrs teach us that one must be ready to sacrifice one’s life rather than one’s faith and that to abandon one’s fellow human means abandoning one’s faith.

Another category that has failed its own duties is that of jurists. We have for a while become used to the thoughtless use of emergency decrees through which executive power effectively substitutes itself to legislative power, abolishing the principle of the separation of powers which defines a democracy. But in this case every limit has been surpassed, and we have the impression that the words of the Prime Minister and the head of Civil Protection have, as it was said in regard to those of the Führer, immediately the power of law. And it cannot be envisioned how, once the temporal limit of the emergency decrees will be reached, the limitations of liberty could be, as it is announced, maintained. With what judicial devices? With a permanent state of exception? It is the duty of jurists to verify that constitutional rules are respected, but jurists are silent. Quare silete iuristae in munere vestro?

I know that someone will inevitably respond that this undoubtedly grave sacrifice has been done in the name of moral principles. To them I would like to remind that Eichmann, apparently in good faith, would not tire to repeat that he did what he did according to conscience, to obey what he believed to be the precepts of Kantian moral. A norm that affirms that we must renounce the good to do good, is just as false and contradictory as the one that, to protect liberty, imposes the renunciation of liberty.