Viral Submission

Giorgio Agamben likes to shock. His 2021 book, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, makes the boldest of claims. Fear of catching a virus—and fear of death, for that matter—is irrational and has caused us to elevate "bare life," or what Agamben terms zōē, above any consideration of the particularities of our life, what he calls bios. (As an aside, Saint John's Gospel has a much richer use of the term zōē, using it to designate "eternal life.")

The current elevation of "bare life," reinforced by the coronavirus panic, offers political opportunity: world rulers use it to pursue their own, totalitarian ends. Conspiracy theories—particularly those involving Bill Gates—should be taken seriously. Science (or medicine) has become a religion, replacing Christianity and capitalism as top religious contender. Biopolitics is transforming the right to health into an obligation to be healthy. Mask mandates purge our common life of its political dimension. Social distancing—witnessed most notably in online learning and in the evacuation of physical, public sites of political and cultural discourse—is here to stay. The traditional division of powers (legislative, executive, and judiciary power) is collapsing through extended states of emergency as executive powers establish a "Security State."

The shock effect reaches its zenith in Agamben's multiple comparisons between the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s and today's political situation. Rulers have started to rule like the Führer once did. Government committees once again determine which news is true and which is fake. Just as Eichmann obeyed Kantian morals in acting according to his conscience, so we are tempted today to renounce the good (e.g., personal interactions) in order to save the good (physical health). Agreeing to teach online is the "exact equivalent" of pledging allegiance to the fascist regime (74). In fact, Agamben is convinced that the new despotism will be worse than the totalitarianisms we have known so far. The control we now face through cameras and cellphones "exceeds by far any form of control exercised under totalitarian regimes such as Fascism or Nazism" (43).

Thought with Deep Roots

Agamben is hardly a crackpot, trying to shock bourgeois sensibilities for the sake of shocking them. As a renowned philosopher, his musings on the epidemic have roots that run deep. This book does not display the root system in detail; it is a collection of journalistic, short essays and interviews published between February and November 2020. But for those in the know, throughout the book, Agamben's philosophical and political convictions, developed over a long career of writing and teaching, are on display.

Essentially, the book applies to the current political and social crisis insights Agamben developed at length in earlier works—books such as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) and State of Exception (2004). Agamben has thought long and deeply about how a "state of exception" has threatened to undermine democracy throughout the twentieth century. He has developed his notions of "biopolitics" and "biosecurity" through detailed dialogue with postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault. Both his apprehension of digital technology as removing physical presence from human relationships and his discussions of fear and anxiety build upon his many years of appropriating the phenomenological thought of Martin Heidegger.

Put differently, Agamben knows what he is doing in this book. We may think that his analysis of the situation is good for a laugh, but I would suggest the joke may be on us. Agamben's observations, rooted in existentialist and postmodern philosophical thought, deserve to be discussed with utter seriousness. The knee-jerk reaction to the epidemic has been a nearly universal, fearful concession of political power to health authorities and a serf-like compliance with political overreach, in terms of religious freedoms, freedom of expression (think of the massive YouTube and Twitter censorship currently underway), freedom of movement, and—needless to say—vaccine mandates, which have caused immense suffering for tens of thousands of noncompliant employees.

A Giant Makeover

Writing in April 2020, Agamben talks of the near-abolition of the traditional separation-of-powers as the demise of democracy:

Never before, not even under Fascism and during the two world wars, has the limitation of freedom been taken to such extremes; people have been confined to their houses and, deprived of all social relationships, reduced to a condition of biological survival. This barbarity does not even spare the dead: those who die are being deprived of their right to a funeral, their bodies instead burned. (38–39)

We may shrug our shoulders; perhaps we even consider the comparisons to fascism offensive. But they are offensive only if they truly are outlandish—that is to say, if the observations fail to match the descriptions.

It is not clear to me that they do. To be sure, Agamben might acknowledge more openly the gravity of the illness among elderly patients. And his discussion of fear fails to reflect upon how the relative legitimacy of concerns might relate to the appropriateness of a given course of action. It is the details of such observed realities that should make us either nod in agreement or shake our heads in disbelief at Agamben's approach. One may well wish that Agamben had embarked more robustly upon such careful, empirical weighing of the evidence. But perhaps his approach is the result of a kind of fatigue with a narrative peddled by mainstream media in the interest of upholding (or perhaps remaking) a particular type of regime. Such fatigue is quite understandable, even if it also betrays a methodological shortcoming.

Besides, Agamben's central observation—that our democratic life together is being replaced by totalitarianism as a result of today's biopolitics—is hardly in question. We may well debate together the origins of today's epidemic, and we may legitimately disagree about how best to respond in specific circumstances, but we would be hard pressed to counter Agamben's argument that media and politics are colluding in a giant makeover of our cultural and social life together.

The Most Troubling Aspect

Perhaps most distressing, for a Christian reader, are Agamben's legitimate barbs at the Church. As Christians, we have mostly stood on the sidelines as we treated each other primarily as spreaders of contagion, allowing the aged to languish in care homes, refusing last rites to the dying, and meekly consenting even to funeral prohibitions. Agamben puts it sharply:

Now a handmaiden of science—the latter having become the true religion of our time—the Church has radically disavowed its most essential principles. Led by a Pope named Francis, it is forgetting that St Francis embraced the lepers. It is forgetting that one of the works of mercy is visiting the sick. It is forgetting the martyrs' teaching that we must be willing to sacrifice life rather than faith, and that renouncing one's neighbour means renouncing faith. (36)

The Church's collaboration with newly emerging totalitarianism has been and continues to be the most troubling aspect of our current crisis.

The Call of the Moment

Agamben takes the title of his book from an essay he was commissioned to write that was then rejected by the Milanese daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. The title juxtaposes the question, "Where are we now?" with two other questions, which Agamben suggests we should stop dwelling upon, namely, "Where are we from?" and "Where are we going?"

For Agamben, the call of the moment is to dwell in the present, among the ruins, living a humbler, simpler form of life. The religion of capitalism—our never-ending pursuit of "stuff," our appetite for expensive, far-away holidays, and the like—must be renounced. Agamben's where-are-we-now question, along with his response of advocating stability of place, should ring true for anyone with a Christian memory. Perhaps the best form of resistance comes from those who, together and in community, deliberately and decisively resist the demands for the body's submission to the Security State. Perhaps, therefore, it is the stability of the Benedict Option that offers a genuine alternative to the biopolitics of the contemporary world.