Jean-Luc Nancy: Viral Exception

Jean-Luc Nancy

Viral Exception
(Published in Italian on “Antinomie”,

https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/02/27/eccezione-virale/ ;)
27/02/2020

Giorgio Agamben, an old friend, argues that the coronavirus is hardly different from normal flu. He forgets that for the “normal” flu there is a vaccine that has been proven effective. And even that needs to be readapted to viral mutations year after year. Despite this, the “normal” flu always kills several people, while coronavirus, against which there is no vaccine, is evidently capable of causing far higher levels of mortality. The difference (according to sources of the same type as that Agamben uses) is about 1 to 30: it does not seem an insignificant difference to me.

Giorgio states that governments take advantage of all sorts of pretexts to continuously establish states of exception. But he fails to note that the exception is indeed becoming the rule in a world where technical interconnections of all kinds (movement, transfers of every type, impregnation or spread of substances, and so on) are reaching a hitherto unknown intensity that is growing at the same rate as the population. Even in rich countries, this increase in population entails a longer life expectancy, hence an increase in the number of elderly people and, in general, of people at risk.

We must be careful not to hit the wrong target: an entire civilization is in question, there is no doubt about it. There is a sort of viral exception – biological, computer-scientific, cultural – which is pandemic. Governments are nothing more than grim executioners, and taking it out on them seems more like a diversionary maneuver than a political reflection.

I mentioned that Giorgio is an old friend. And I apologize for bringing up a personal recollection, but I am not abandoning a register of general reflection by doing so. Almost thirty years ago doctors decided I needed a heart transplant. 

Giorgio was one of the very few who advised me not to listen to them. If I had followed his advice, I would have probably died soon enough. It is possible to make a mistake. Giorgio is nevertheless a spirit of such finesse and kindness that one may define him –without the slightest irony – as exceptional.

https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/

https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/

Giorgio Agamben 

Clarifications

17/03/2020

An Italian journalist applied himself, according to the best practice of his profession, to distorting and falsifying my considerations on the ethical confusion into which the epidemic is throwing the country, where there is no longer even any respect for the dead. In the same way, as it’s not worth mentioning his name, it’s not worth rectifying his predictable manipulations. Those who wish to do so may read my text Contagion on the Quodlibet publishers website. Instead, I would rather publish here some further reflections, which, despite their clarity, will presumably be falsified too.

Fear is a bad counselor, but it makes us see many things we pretended not to see. The first thing the wave of panic that’s paralyzed the country has clearly shown is that our society no longer believes in anything but naked life. It is evident that Italians are prepared to sacrifice practically everything – normal living conditions, social relations, work, even friendships, and religious or political beliefs – to avoid the danger of falling ill. The naked life, and the fear of losing it, is not something that brings men and women together, but something that blinds and separates them. Other human beings, like those in the plague described by Manzoni, are now seen only as potential contaminators to be avoided at all costs or at least to keep at a distance of at least one meter. The dead – our dead – have no right to a funeral and it’s not clear what happens to the corpses of our loved ones. Our fellow humans have been erased and it’s odd that the Churches remain silent on this point. What will human relations become in a country that will be accustomed to living in this way for who knows how long? And what is a society with no other value other than survival?

The other thing, no less disturbing than the first, is that the epidemic is clearly showing that the state of exception, which governments began to accustom us to years ago, has become an authentically normal condition. There have been more serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought of declaring a state of emergency like today, one that forbids us even to move. Men have become so used to living in conditions of permanent crisis and emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their lives have been reduced to a purely biological condition, one that has lost not only any social and political dimension but even any compassionate and emotional one. A society that lives in a permanent state of emergency cannot be a free one. We effectively live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “security reasons” and as a consequence has condemned itself to live in a permanent state of fear and insecurity.

It’s not surprising that we talk about the virus in terms of a war. The emergency provisions effectively force us to live under a curfew. But a war against an invisible enemy that can nestle in any other human being is the most absurd of wars. It is, to be truthful, a civil war. The enemy isn’t somewhere outside, it’s inside us.

What’s worrying is not so much the present, not only the present a least, but the aftermath. In the same way, as the legacies of wars on peacetime have included a whole range of nefarious technologies, from barbed wire to nuclear plants, so it is very likely that there will be attempts to carry on pursuing, even after the medical emergency is over, many of the experiments governments hadn’t been able to implement: may universities and schools remain shut, with lessons and lectures taking place online, may an end be put once and for all to meetings and gathering to talk about political and cultural questions, may we only exchange digital messages and may wherever possible machines replace any contact – any contagion – between human beings.

Sergio Benvenuto

Forget about Agamben

20/03/2020

The immediate reaction of the sovereignists – an ennobling euphemism to define neo-fascists – to the coronavirus pandemic was the reflex we would all have expected from xenophobes: closing borders and identifying Covid-19 with the Foreigner. It’s what Trump did by blocking communications with Europe without doing anything at the domestic level. The danger is always from the outside, never from within.

It was said that this pandemic would have pulled the rug from under the feet of the neo-fascists (among whom I include Trump, Johnson, Salvini, Erdogan…). Indeed, in cases in which anyone can be infected, the danger is not from the outside – Africa, China, Muslims, and so on – and not even from another nameable and circumscribable group from within, one that can be isolated like the Jews were for centuries in Europe. The danger lies everywhere, even in a child, a grandparent, a lover…. As the journalist, Massimo Giannini said, “We are not in danger, we are the danger.” The basic signifying oppositions of our Schmittian being political animals – us versus them, me versus the other – collapse and we’re all equally dangerous, the gypsy is no more dangerous than my own daughter, racist categorizations lose all their mobilizing charm at a stroke.

Within this picture, it doesn’t worry me that the various countries have suspended Schengen. It would have been more disturbing had there been a closure of each country against another, but in fact, it’s just another of many closures at all levels: each citizen closes him or herself to the other.

The eminent philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes (in this same Tribune):

Even sadder than the limitations on freedom implicit in the provisions is, in my opinion, the degeneration of human relations they can generate. The other man, whoever he may be, even a loved one, must not be approached or touched, and indeed it is necessary to keep a specific distance form him, which according to some should be of one meter, but according to the latest recommendations by experts should be of 4.5 meters (interesting to note those extra fifty centimeters!) Our fellow man has been abolished.

It is difficult to imagine an equally superficial reaction. In fact, the epidemic overturns the cliché that if I love my fellow men or women I should hug them, kiss them or stick to them like sardines … Today I display my love for the other by keeping her or him at a distance.  This is the paradox that collapses all the lazy ideological frameworks (ideological not in the Marxist sense) of the left and right,  not to mention of the populists.

The edifying propaganda of some politicians and the media appeals to our selfishness as well as to our altruism: “If you avoid others, you are protecting them, but yourself too.” Now, very often this is by no means true. It is now common knowledge that young people can be infected like everyone else but that it’s quite rare for them to fall ill; it’s also common knowledge that this pandemic is a geronticide, that those really at risk are the over 65s.

A young friend of mine keeps me at a distance of at least three meters and smiles. I very much appreciate this non-gesture of his, because I know that it is mainly he who is trying to protect me; because I’m old. It’s true that he’s also protecting the elderly in his own family: his father, his mother… But in any case, I’m grateful to him. The more the others keep at a distance from me, the closer I feel to them. This is why Agamben has failed to understand anything about what’s happening in the molecularity of human relations.

On the contrary, in recent days I came across several people who did not respect this secure distance and didn’t even wear gloves or face masks; and they expressed their skepticism on the gravity of the disease… I could gather from their arguments that they were basically cynical and ultimately antisocial individuals. Today the sociable avoid society.

Last winter 8000 people died in Italy as a consequence of lung complications due to influenza, mostly the elderly.  This year, with coronavirus, the death rate will probably rise to something between 20 and 25 thousand, three times the “normal” number of victims, mostly among the elderly.  Is the fact that “only” three times as many people die because of a seasonal illness enough to say that Agamben is right in saying that this is a fake epidemic?   No. Because this is an unknown virus that could have even more disastrous consequences.  Everything that’s being done is merely preventive.  And, above all: in our societies, it is unacceptable that three times as many people as normal die in one winter.  It’s a biopolitical – that is, ethical – choice.

A grotesque clown-like Boris Johnson told the British people to “prepare to lose loved ones before their time”.  But why not address the dying too?  Why not say “prepare to lose your lives”?   As if death were always the death of the other.  Perhaps he meant “prepare to lose your elderly….”   For BoJo those who will die, those who have all the ingredients for death, also lose the quality of addressees, they’re no longer even a “you”.  Italy made a different choice: quarantine and economic paralysis to protect its senior citizens.  Among them, we also find Agamben, born in 1942.  I sense something of the heroic in this vigorous defense of those who do not have long to live.

Colophon.

Ces écrits sur le thème de la Couronne virus me font penser qu’il est très différent d’être dans l’agréable Italie d’un endroit où tout manque, jusqu’à la sagesse pour l’affronter.

Néanmoins, ces réflexions contribuent à éclairer la manière dont nous pouvons agir pour nous protéger sans nous toucher et sans paniquer.

Percy Cayetano Acuña
Lima, 05.07.2020