Giorgio Agamben: "Social Distancing"

Disclaimer: this is an unofficial translation.

Source: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-distanziamento-sociale

Giorgio Agamben

Social Distancing

April 6, 2020

“We do not know where death awaits us; so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned to die, has unlearned to be a slave. Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint.”

Michel de Montaigne

Because history teaches us that every social phenomenon has or can have some political implications, it is opportune to register with attention the new concept that has entered the political lexicon of the West today: “social distancing.” Although the term has probably been produced as a euphemism compared to the crudeness of the term “confinement” used until now, it needs be asked what could be a political order founded on it. This is much more urgent, inasmuch as it does not concern solely a purely hypothetical hypothesis, if it is true, as it is beginning to be said by many sides, that the actual health emergency could be considered as the laboratory where the new political arrangements that await humanity are being prepared. Although there are, as it always happens, fools who suggest that such situation can be certainly considered something positive and that the new digital technologies have allowed to happily communicate from a distance for some time, I do not believe that a community founded upon “social distancing” is humanly and politically livable. In any case, whatever the perspective might be, it seems to me that it is on this theme that we should reflect upon.

A first consideration concerns the truly singular nature of the phenomenon that the “social distancing” measures have produced. Canetti, in that masterpiece that is Crowds and Power, defines the crowd upon which power is founded through the inversion of the fear of being touched. While men usually fear being touched by the stranger and all the distances that men institute around the self are born from this fear, the crowd is the only situation where this fear reverses itself into its opposite. “It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched… As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch… The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body… This reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest.”

I do not know what Canetti would have thought of the new phenomenology of the crowd that we find ourselves in front of: what social distancing measures and panic have created is certainly a crowd — but a crowd sort to speak reversed, formed by individuals who keep themselves at a distance from one another at any cost. A crowd that is not dense, therefore, but that is rarefied and which, however, is still a crowd, if this, as Canetti specifies later on, is defined by its compactness and passivity, in the sense that “it is impossible for it to move really freely … it waits. It waits for a head to be shown it.”

A few pages later, Canetti describes the crowd that is formed by a refusal, in which “a large number of people together refuse to continue to do what, then, they had done singly. They obey a prohibition, and this prohibition is sudden and self-imposed. It can be an old prohibition which has been forgotten, or one which is resuscitated from time to time. But, in any case, it strikes with enormous power. It is as absolute as a command, but what is decisive about it is its negative character.”

It is important not to overlook that a community founded upon social distancing would not have to deal with, as it could be naively believed, an individualism pushed to the excess: it would be, exactly to the contrary, like the one we see today around us, a rarefied crowd founded upon a refusal, but, exactly because of this, particularly compact and passive.