In a new book, Where Are We Now? The epidemic as politics, a collection of short essays, occasional pieces, and interviews, some written in response to the extreme lockdown measures enacted in northern Italy in 2020, Agamben dares to ask questions about the pandemic that focus on the losses rather than the so-called gains: ‘We will have to ask ourselves the only serious question that truly matters: not, as fake philosophers have been urging for centuries, “where are we from?”, or “where are we going?” but, simply: “where are we now?” … [It] is a question we should answer not just with our words, but with our lives too.’

One of the most influential figures in continental and political philosophy in the past three decades, Agamben has devoted most of his working life to analysing ‘states of exception’, ‘bare life’, and biopolitical governance. It comes as no surprise, then, that he has much to say about the current health crisis and its management. As Matthew Collins has written, Agamben ‘came to international prominence in the late 1990s by arguing that all states, liberal-democratic or otherwise, are founded on the capacity to exclude individuals from the political realm, and thus reduce them to their bare, biological life’. It is for the concepts of bare life and states of exception that Agamben is best known. Taken together, these concepts paint a picture of the current crisis as one in which the reduction of human life into ‘purely biological’ or ‘bare’ life, at the expense of social and cultural life, has led to the prolonged (and increasingly indefinite) ‘suspension of constitutional guarantees’. Agamben’s reference point is Weimar Germany; however, he also identifies this logic in the lockdown strategies and states of emergency invoked all over the world in response to Covid, noting how the ‘media and the authorities go out of their way to cultivate a climate of panic, establishing a state of exception which imposes severe limitations on mobility and suspends the normal functioning of life and work’. This ‘disproportionate response’ indicates, for Agamben, that ‘we are dealing with a growing tendency to trigger a state of exception as the standard paradigm of governance’. The most disquieting thing, for him, is the way this paradigm is becoming the norm. Indeed, what is alternately called the ‘new normal’ or ‘Covid-normal’ is precisely the ongoing state of exception to which Agamben is referring.

The response to Agamben’s interventions has been mixed. In the early days of the pandemic in Italy, he gained some sympathy, but as the seriousness of the pandemic began to dawn on his home country the tide turned against him, with some dismissing him as irrelevant, ill-informed, and wedded to a romantic or pre-modern concept of the human. In The Revenge of the Real, a recent book-length appraisal of Agamben’s views, Benjamin Bratton argues that they are the best example of the way philosophy has ‘failed us’ in the pandemic, ‘sometimes through ignorance or incoherence, sometimes outright intellectual fraud’. The late French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy referred to Agamben’s musings as ‘more like a diversionary manoeuvre than a political reflection’, counter-claiming that ‘there is a sort of viral exception – biological, computer-scientific, cultural – which is pandemic’ and that governments ‘are nothing more than grim executioners’ of necessary social measures. With rolling lockdowns and constantly shifting advice and parameters for dealing with the virus, Agamben’s work is finding new relevance among those who are beginning to question not only the gravity of the virus but also the legitimacy of state responses to it.

Agamben is certainly not a ‘virus denier’, as is sometimes claimed, but he does question the use of ‘pandemic’ to legitimate a certain shift in governing paradigms that will have far-reaching consequences. ‘It is not my intention,’ he claims, ‘to enter into the debate among scientists … I am only interested in the extremely serious ethical and political consequences that derive from [the pandemic].’ Nor does he necessarily disagree with the health directions, as extreme as he sometimes considers them. The pandemic, he argues, ‘certainly means, and should mean, staying at home’; however, it also means ‘staying lucid’, and Agamben sees his interventions as a way of maintaining lucidity in a time of great transformation and mystification.

For Agamben, the most precious thing in the gradual unfolding of untruth, as he characterises the current health crisis, is ‘a true word’. One interesting question he raises is how the virus is reported in the media. He is not the only big-name philosopher to do so: Slavoj Žižek, who has written two books and numerous commentaries on the pandemic (including a negative critique of Agamben, entitled ‘Monitor and Punish? Yes, Please!’, in The Philosophical Salon), also raised the question of where data ends and ideology begins. The numbers communicated each day, Agamben argues, ‘are intentionally vague, without any analysis in relation to the annual death rate or the definite causes of death – as would be essential if what was truly at stake was scientific’.

Why, for example, are tallies used instead of percentages? Of course, percentages can create a sense of complacency about the situation when compared with raw data, but they do paint a very different picture and, to Agamben’s mind, a more accurate one. Anyone who knows anything about epistemology, he argues, ‘cannot but be astonished by the fact that … the media have been broadcasting numbers without exercising any scientific rigour’, in what amounts to ‘a massive campaign to falsify the truth’. Further, ‘uncorroborated data and opinions’ are used to impose hitherto unforeseen limits on personal freedom.

Fear, which Agamben identifies as the primary driving force of the pandemic (fear of becoming sick, fear of the contagious and the outsider), relies on presenting the data in a particular way. But anyone who examines the figures reported each morning may wonder why there is so much fear. If we take the recent New South Wales outbreak as an example, 1,000 cases in a single day may seem like a lot, but it represents less than one per cent of those being tested, and far less when measured against the state or, indeed, the national population. There was also the subtle but critical change midway through the pandemic in the reporting of deaths. Hospitals now make the distinction between those who died from Covid-19 and those who died with it, stoking much debate among doctors about what exactly constitutes a ‘cause’ of death. The death rate from/with Covid in Australia is currently two per cent, in line with the global death rate, and it is important to note that this percentage is obtained by measuring deaths against infections, not against the population, and that the rate of death tends to decrease as infections increase. To look at it another way, Covid currently has a global recovery rate of ninety-eight per cent. Of course, as Agamben reminds us, lockdowns are triggered more by projected scenarios than by current ones, through what he calls ‘the creation of a sort of “health terror” as a tool for governing the worst-case scenario’. But to what extent, he asks, is this modelling reliable?

Agamben’s question is: why have we, as a society, allowed ourselves to be swayed by ‘the science’ and the data presented uncritically each morning in press conferences which use heavy-handed rhetoric about battles, enemies, victory, and defeat (Premier Gladys Berejiklian recently called the Sydney situation ‘literally a war’)? The state, according to Agamben, ‘employs the pandemic data for its own ends, manipulating it to suit its specific needs’, and this is the hard sell of his analysis: why? What does a modern capitalist state have to gain by crippling its citizens and its economy through successive lockdowns if there is no serious threat? In other words, what is driving governments’ responses to the virus if we discount the ‘public health’ angle? We should know this is not really about public health but about the spectre of illness and death being mobilised for other reasons.

One need only observe the passing of responsibility for the pandemic from governments to citizens (the enemy is no longer the virus but the ‘spreader’ and those ‘doing the wrong thing’), a decision which Agamben views as the conscious burdening of citizens with ‘the grave responsibility governments bear’ for dismantling public health systems. The punitive and at times threatening rhetoric used in press conferences reflects the bad conscience of governments that know exactly what they have – or haven’t – done. One of the most disheartening things to emerge from the pandemic was WHO Director–General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s claim that countries ‘have been planning for scenarios like this for decades’, which makes you wonder why public health systems were allowed to deteriorate to the extent they have. Of course, this claim was supposed to reassure us. In the new world of biopolitics where, according to Agamben, health ‘is becoming a juridical obligation that has to be fulfilled at all costs’, the irony is that citizens and not governments have to take responsibility for the fulfilment of this ‘health at any cost’ injunction. Press conferences promoting fear and punishment and health legislation prohibiting the most basic of rights should not stand in for a fully funded and functioning healthcare system – but this, Agamben argues, is what has happened.

To return to the question of why, Agamben’s answer is: we are no longer dealing with a modern capitalist state but rather ‘the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm’. The era of bourgeois democracy, he claims, ‘with its rights, its constitutions, and its parliaments, is fading’. The pandemic is not so much a health crisis as another episode in the obsolescence of bourgeois democracy. Citing the biopolitical response to terrorism, Agamben identifies a recipe for political legitimation in the era of the loss of such: invent a crisis and show how well you can manage it, even if you don’t.

Agamben sidesteps the accusations of ‘conspiracy theorist’ and ‘fake left paranoia’ (Žižek) by pointing out that the contours of the new governing apparatus are ‘probably not entirely clear even to those who are sketching them’. Uncritically implemented directives like social distancing and mandatory face masks are two examples of how governments do not clearly understand the socio-political consequences of so-called ‘temporary’ health directives. Agamben’s point is not some sinister one about covert control and misuse of power; rather, by not thinking through the consequences of their management of the virus, governments are implementing a social order we will live with for a long time to come.

One of the first health directives Agamben addressed was social distancing. He first took issue with the term itself, claiming that the word ‘social’, as opposed to ‘physical’, which he prefers, ushered in a new political space that, far from being temporary, would become a lasting legacy of the pandemic and an organising principle of the ‘new normal’. For Agamben, the imperative to socially distance is more than a health measure. As governments use the current state of exception to reshape the socio-political landscape, this transformation relies for its efficacy ‘upon digital technology which, as is now evident, works in harmony with the new structure of relationships known as “social distancing”. Human relationships will have to happen, on every occasion and as much as possible, without physical presence.’

Far from paranoid Ludditism, this techno-political ‘invention’ of the pandemic has also been proposed by Naomi Klein, who argues that ‘a living laboratory for a permanent – and highly profitable – no-touch future’ is the likely outcome of the pandemical iteration of ‘disaster capitalism’. In the essay, ‘The Face and the Mask’, Agamben identifies the human face as the ‘site of politics’ and our primary source of openness and communication; it is ‘by looking at their faces that individuals recognise themselves and develop a passion for one another; it is how they perceive affinity and diversity, distance and proximity’. When we don masks, we lose this ‘immediate and sensible foundation’ of our community. If you have, as I have daily, watched people cross the street as you approach, unable to determine if what you are seeing in their eyes is suspicion, fear, or goodwill, you will understand Agamben’s point. A strange reversal has taken place before our eyes: the criminal and the rioter go unmasked, while the good citizen covers their face. Thus, for Agamben, the combination of social distancing and face masks seals the fate of an open society, paving the way for a fearful and paranoid ‘new normal’ in which we are willing to renounce our ethical and political principles for the sake of health at any cost.

For Agamben, the abdication of our ethical and political principles can be measured in three main ways: our treatment of the dead and dying; our acceptance of limitations on freedom and movement (including the suspension of almost all social and family life) in the name of an ‘indeterminate risk’; and the division of our life into biological life on the one hand, and social or cultural life on the other.

It is on the first of these points that Agamben is most eloquent, and it is worth citing in full: ‘The first and perhaps most serious point pertains to the bodies of the dead. How did we accept, purely in the name of an indeterminable risk, that our dear ones – and human beings in general – should not only die alone, but that their bodies should be burned without a funeral – something that, from Antigone to the present day, has never happened?’ For Agamben, the sick and dying have quite literally been abandoned by God and man. Even Pope Francis has suspended the most basic of religious functions – visiting the sick and dying – because of the threat of contagion. Certainly, Covid-19 is dangerous for the vulnerable, and this is all the more reason to protect them. From time to time – though rarely – it can be serious for the otherwise healthy. No one wants to get sick; no one wants to die. No one wants those close to them to die. This is not, however, a philosophically or politically tenable position in the long run. A society in which life has devolved into the protection of purely biological or ‘bare’ life is no longer a society at all: ‘Bare life, and the fear of losing it,’ writes Agamben, ‘is not something that unites people: rather, it blinds and separates them.’ We live every day with a certain amount of risk, and we will probably have to live in some way with viruses and their mutations.

In this time of great transformation, Agamben argues that ‘new forms of resistance will be necessary, and those who can still envision a politics to come should be unhesitatingly committed to them’. What these will look like he does not say, alluding only obliquely to a ‘future politics’ beyond the current ‘technological-sanitationist despotism’, the totalitarian state ‘disguised as a democracy’. When sitting on a park bench with a friend is technically a crime, we need a voice like Agamben’s to remind us what we have lost among all the so-called ‘gains’; gains that will always remain abstract in relation to loss. It is surely right to condemn the ‘Freedom’ rallies, not so much for their ‘recklessness’ but because they are quickly mobilised by the government to silence any reasonable dissent – a fate that has befallen Agamben.

What is more interesting are the small acts of civil disobedience one sees in the park on Sunday or on quiet suburban streets in the evenings: the mask slipping down under the nose, the takeaway coffee cups carried long after they are empty; the small, illegal gatherings on the lawns on sunny afternoons; the mothers relaxing while their children climb on a playground. These little acts of reasoned rebellion against the overreach and unreasonableness of the state are signs of good political health. ‘The future,’ Agamben writes, ‘will consist of monks and delinquents.’ Maybe survival in the new pandemic age will mean being a little of both.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.