What interests us is the link Agamben makes between the emergence of COVID-19 and what he conceptualizes as a resultant permanent state of exception.Īgamben has devoted himself for more than twenty years to the scholarly study of the state of exception in Western culture. We will not discuss the virus’s destructive capacity since Agamben’s classification of COVID-19 as “simply flu” falls by itself. In that publication, the renowned philosopher called the state responses to the pandemic crisis “frantic, irrational and completely unjustified.” Agamben questioned why the media and the authorities were making an effort “to spread a climate of panic, causing a true state of exception, with serious limitations on movements and a suspension of the normal functioning of living and working conditions in entire regions.” From Agamben’s perspective, those measurements were totally out of proportion to what, according to him, was simply a typical common flu.Ī wave of criticism was quickly levied against Agamben and we shall examine in this article the most important elements thereof.

The title of the publication: The invention of an epidemic revealed the critical position that Agamben advanced against the measures that have been imposed by states within their responses to the health emergency. In February 2020, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben intervened with a press release that aroused the most relentless criticism from the philosophical community. Various contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy put forward their positions regarding the critical situations then developing. At the beginning of 2020, an important philosophical debate took place on the COVID-19 crisis.

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