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.

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.

Giorgio Agamben: "On Truth and Falsehood"

Disclaimer: this is an unofficial translation.

Source: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-sul-vero-e-sul-falso

Giorgio Agamben

On Truth and Falsehood

April 28, 2020

As expected, the Phase 2 confirms, by government decree, more or less the same diminutions of constitutional freedoms that can only be curtailed by law. But no less important is the limitation of a human right which is not enshrined in any constitution: the right to truth, the need of a true word.

What we are living in, before it being an unprecedented manipulation of everyone’s freedom, is, in fact, a gigantic operation of falsification of truth. If people agree to limit their personal liberty, this happens, in fact, because they accept without any verification the data and opinions that are provided by the media. Advertising had accustomed us for some time to discourses that were more effective because they did not pretend to be true. And for some time even political consensus was granted without deep conviction, assuming somehow that in electoral speeches truth was not into question. What is now happening under our own eyes is, however, something new, if only because with the truthfulness or the falsehood of the discourse that is currently passively accepted our very way of living, our whole, daily existence is at stake. For this reason, it would be urgent for everyone to try testing what is being proposed to them to at least an elementary verification.

I was not the only one to note that the data on the epidemic are provided in a generic manner and without any scientific criteria. From the epistemological point of view, it is obvious, for example, that to provide a number of deaths without relating it to the annual mortality rate for the same period and without specifying the effective cause of death has no meaning. Yet, this is exactly what is being done every day apparently without anyone noticing. This is even more surprising since the data that enable a verification are available to whomever would like to access them and I have already cited in this column the report by the president of ISTAT [Italian National Institute of Statistics] Gian Carlo Blangiardo that shows how the number of deaths by Covid-19 is inferior to the deaths by respiratory diseases in the previous two years. And yet, however unequivocal, it is as if this relationship did not exist, just as it has not been taken into consideration the fact, although declared, that even the positive patient who died by heart attack or any other cause is presumed to have died by Covid-19. Why, even when falsehood is documented, it is still believed? It could be said that a lie is assumed to be true exactly because, like advertising, it does not bother to hide its own falsity. As it happened for the first World War, the war against the virus can provide only false reasons.

Humanity is entering a phase of its history where truth is reduced to a moment within the movement of falsehood. True is that false discourse which must be assumed to be true even when its untruthfulness is demonstrated. But in this manner it is language itself as the site of the manifestation of truth that is being confiscated from human beings. Now they can only silently observe this movement — true because it is real — of the lie. For this reason, to stop this movement it is necessary for everyone to have the courage to search uncompromisingly for the most precious commodity: a true word.

Giorgio Agamben: "New Reflections"

What follows is an unofficial translation of the writings of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben regarding the response of the Italian government to the Covid-19 virus.

In this time of emergency, I will be posting more such translations with the goal of disseminating modes of thinking that counters the currently dominant structures of feeling.

I purposefully try to maintain Agamben's terminology as close to the original as possible in order to try to convey its meaning fully.

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Source: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-nuove-riflessioni

Giorgio Agamben

New Reflections

April 22, 2020

From an interview published today in an Italian newspaper

Are we living, with this forced reclusion, a new totalitarianism?

“On many sides the hypothesis is being formulated that in reality we are living the end of a world, that of bourgeois democracies, founded on rights, parliaments, and the division of powers, which is surrendering its place to a new despotism, that, in regard to the ubiquity of controls and the cessation of any political activity, it will be worse than the totalitarianisms that we have known until now. American political scientists call it the Security State, meaning a state where ‘for security reasons’ (in this case ‘public safety,’ term that recalls the notorious Committee of Public Safety during the Terror) any limit to individual liberties can be imposed. In Italy, after all, we have been accustomed to a legislation by urgent decree by executive power for some time, which in this manner substitutes itself to legislative power and in fact abolishes the principle of the separation of powers upon which democracy is based upon. And the control that is exerted by video camera and now, as it has been proposed, through cellular phones, exceeds by far any form of control exerted under the totalitarian regimes such as fascism or Nazism.”

Regarding data, besides those which will be collected through cellular phones, a reflection should be made also on data disseminated in the numerous press conferences, often incomplete or badly interpreted.

“This is an important point, because it touches the root of the phenomenon. Anyone who has some knowledge of epistemology cannot avoid being surprised by the fact that the media during all these months have disseminated numbers without any scientific criteria, not only by not comparing them to the annual mortality rate for the same period, but by not even specifying the cause of death. I am neither a virologist nor a doctor, but I limit myself to quote credible official sources. Twenty-one thousand deaths by Covid-19 seems and certainly is an impressive number. But if we compare it to the annual statistics things look different, and rightly so. The president of ISTAT [Italian National Institute of Statistics], Dr. Gian Carlo Blangiardo, a few weeks ago has issued the mortality rate for the previous year: 647,000 deaths (or 1,772 each day). If we analyze in detail the specific causes, we see that the most recent available data relative to 2017 shows 230,000 deaths due to cardiovascular diseases, 180,000 due to cancer, at least 53,000 deaths due to respiratory diseases. But one aspect is particularly important and it closely relates to our current situation.”

Which one?

“I quote the words of Dr. Blangiardo: ‘Deaths by respiratory diseases were 15,189 in March 2019 and 16,220 the year prior. Incidentally it turns out that these are more than the corresponding number of deaths by Covid (12,352) declared in March 2020.’ But if this is true and we have no reason to doubt it, without minimizing the importance of the epidemic, we must ask ourselves if this can justify those measures limiting individual liberty that had never been implemented in the history of our country, not even during the two world wars. This raises the legitimate doubt that, by spreading panic and isolating people in their homes, there was the intention of making people pay the price for the grave responsibilities of those governments that had first dismantled the national healthcare system and then, in Lombardy, committed a series of no less egregious errors in dealing with the epidemic.”

Even scientists, actually, did not come out looking good.  It seems that they were not able to give the answers that were expected from them. What do you think about this?

“It is always dangerous to allow doctors and scientists to make decisions that are ultimately ethical and political. You see, scientists, rightfully or wrongly, pursue their reasons in good faith, reasons that identify with the interest of science and in whose name ­– as history amply demonstrates – they are willing to sacrifice any moral principle. I do not need to remind you that during Nazism highly esteemed scientists guided the eugenics campaign and did not hesitate to take advantage of lagers in order to execute lethal experiments that they considered to be useful for scientific progress and for the well-being of German soldiers. The current spectacle is particularly disconcerting, because in reality, even though the media are hiding it, there is no agreement among scientists. Some illustrious ones among them, such as Didier Raoult, perhaps the most prominent French virologist, have different opinions on the importance of the epidemic and on the efficacy of the isolation measures, which in an interview he defined as a medieval superstition. Somewhere else I wrote that science has become the religion of our time. The analogy with religion must be taken literally: theologians used to declare that they could not clearly define what God is, but in his name they dictated rules of human conduct and did not hesitate to burn heretics; virologists admit not to know exactly what a virus is, but in its name they pretend to decide how human beings must live.”

We are told – as it has often happened in the past – that nothing will be as it used to and that our lives must change. What will happen in your opinion?

“I have already described the form of despotism that we must expect and against which we cannot tire to guard against. But if for a moment we set aside the present moment and we reflect upon the destiny of the human species on Earth, I am reminded of the considerations by Ludwig Bolk, a great scientist from Holland. According to Bolk, the human species is characterized by the progressive inhibition of natural vital processes of adaptation to the environment, which are substituted by an hypertrophic growth of technological devices that adapt the environment to humans. When this process surpasses a certain threshold, it reaches a point where it becomes counterproductive and it transforms itself into the destruction of the species. It seems to me that phenomenons like the one we are living through show that this threshold has been reached and that a medicine that was supposed to cure our ills is risking to produce a greater evil. We must resist against this risk with every means possible.”

Baran and Sweezy on Capitalist Bourgeois Oligarchic Democracy

As I study Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital I encountered this very cogent and clear explanation on the real functioning and limits of capitalist democracy.

Except in times of crisis, the normal political system of capitalism, whether competitive or monopolistic, is bourgeois democracy. Votes are the nominal source of political power, and money is the real source: the system, in other words, is democratic in form and plutocratic in content. This is by now so well recognized that it hardly seems necessary to argue the case. Suffice it to say that all the political activities and functions which may be said to constitute the essential characteristics of the system-indoctrinating and propagandizing the voting public, organizing and maintaining political parties, running electoral campaigns-can be carried out only by means of money, lots of money. And since in monopoly capitalism the big corporations are the source of big money, they are also the main sources of political power. 

It is true that there is a latent contradiction in this system. 

The non-property-owning voters, who constitute the overwhelming majority, may form their own mass organizations (trade unions, political parties ) , raise necessary funds through dues, and thereby become an effective political force. If they succeed in winning formal political power and then attempt to use it in a way which threatens the economic power and privileges of the moneyed oligarchy, the system is confronted by a crisis which can be resolved according to its own rules only if the oligarchy is prepared to give up without a fight. Since to the best of our knowledge there is no case in history of a privileged oligarchy's behaving this way, we can safely dismiss the possibility. What happens instead is that the oligarchy, which controls either directly or through trusted agents all the instrumentalities of coercion (armed forces, police, courts, etc.), abandons the democratic forms and resorts to some form of direct authoritarian rule. Such a breakdown of bourgeois democracy and resort to authoritarian rule may also occur for other reasons-such as, for example, a prolonged inability to form a stable parliamentary majority, or successful resistance by certain vested interests to reforms necessary for the proper functioning of the economy. The history of recent decades is particularly rich in examples of the substitution of authoritarian for democratic government in capitalist countries: Italy in the early 1920's, Germany in 1933, Spain in the later 1930's, France in 1958, and many more. 

In general, however, moneyed oligarchies prefer democratic to authoritarian government. The stability of the system is enhanced by periodic popular ratifications of oligarchic rule this is what parliamentary and presidential elections normally amount to-and certain very real dangers to the oligarchy itself of personal or military dictatorship are avoided. Hence in developed capitalist countries, especially those with a long history of democratic government, oligarchies are reluctant to resort to authoritarian methods of dealing with opposition movements or solving difficult problems, and instead devise more indirect and subtle means for accomplishing their ends. Concessions are made to pull the teeth of trade-union and labor political movements professing radical aims. Their leaders are bought off-with money, flattery, and honors. As a result, when they acquire power they stay within the confines of the system, merely trying to win a few more concessions here and there to keep the rank and file satisfied, yet never challenging the real bastions of oligarchic power in the economy and in the coercive branches of the state apparatus. Similarly, the oligarchy alters the machinery of government to the extent necessary to prevent any stalemates and deadlocks which might involve the breakdown of democratic procedures (for example, the number of political parties is deliberately limited to prevent the emergence of government by unstable parliamentary coalitions). By these methods, and many others, democracy is made to serve the interests of the oligarchy far more effectively and durably than authoritarian rule. The possibility of authoritarian rule is never renounced-indeed, most democratic constitutions make specific provision for it in times of emergency-but it is decidedly not the preferred form of government for normally functioning capitalist societies.

Baran, Paul A., and Paul M. Sweezy. 1966. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. United States of America: Monthly Review Press. 155-7