Since the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, Agamben’s philosophical paranoia has made him the target of public criticism in Western left-wing academic circles. However, it is often the perversion of context that deflects the validity of the theory. The new round of epidemic since the beginning of 2022 has set off another round of strong intervention in various places. At a time when the political goals of dynamic clearing, arbitrary closure measures, forced isolation and treatment, normalized nucleic acid testing, and “return to daily life” are becoming a luxury, Agamben seems to be revived. When the Shanghai stories circulating in the market continue to force us to witness how the freedom of food is being deprived, and how the rescue of life is delayed in the name of anti-epidemic, perhaps we should not only ask the author of this article what happened to Agamben, but also do the opposite. Ask, is Agamben really completely ineffective?
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The evaluation of Agamben in the translation can be said to be the mainstream view in the United States, Europe and the United States and even Western academic circles. According to this view, Agamben’s remarks during the epidemic made a decisive mistake, including factual errors, logical errors, and rhetorical errors. The exaggeration of the world is at odds with taking the world by storm. While both Kotzko and Santner briefly articulated Agamben’s model of argument, they both concluded that the model did not correspond to Western (especially American) realities—which may have been the opposite of his analysis. But Agamben’s error was, at best, a degree to the translator, as evidenced by the strong relevance of his argument in many non-Western countries, such as India and China. Moreover, many of Agamben’s criticisms ignore Agamben’s own context and fail to take into account his reflections on language itself. Understanding the following two points may help us correctly evaluate Agamben’s thinking: First, what Agamben is against is not only the excess of power in dealing with the epidemic this time, but also the entire Western institutional framework or the Western anthropological machine. this excessive tendency. Second, what Agam wanted to defend was not any specific institutional arrangement that had existed in the past, but the possibility of “liberating” human potential by exploiting the machine and making it inoperative. In short, Agamben is not going back to some past, but back to that human potential that cannot be defined by anthropological machines or even our categorical definitions of language, that potential that manifests itself as a potential incapacity.
Author / Translator by Adam Kotsko / Original text by Liqiu Wang / Adam Kotsko, “What Happened to Giorgio Agamben?”, Slate, February 20, 2022
Link / https://ift.tt/AxpkZaG .
A demonstration in Milan on July 24. Photo: Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty ImagesAs with a staggering number, the problem started with a blog post. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has a blog (he’s a bit like the American Jonathan Franzen, the kind of brilliant and maverick that makes you feel like you have to respond whether you like it or not) , where he posts short articles about current events and other insights. Sometimes he commented on Greta Thunberg, an eco-friendly teenage girl; sometimes he wrote poetic musings on the decline of society. These things generally went unnoticed until February 2020, when he first stepped into the debate on emergency measures to stop the spread of the new coronavirus.
The article, titled “Inventing an Epidemic,” began by saying that people’s response to the virus was “crazy, irrational, and completely unfounded,” and it didn’t stop there. The article’s provocative argument is basically an accusation that the authorities are deliberately misleading the public about the threat of the new crown (like many others afterward, which Agamben felt was no more dangerous than the flu). The English translation of that article reads: “As if terrorism was not enough as a reason to take exceptional measures. The invention of an epidemic provides the perfect excuse for infinitely expanding the scale of exceptional measures.”
In other words, he claims, the authorities are trying to maintain their crumbling legitimacy and experiment with new forms of social control. Even more disturbing than “the seizure of power,” he said, there was little resistance. In a later article writing about the Italians’ reaction, he said: “It is clear that Italians tend to sacrifice virtually everything – normal living conditions, social relations, work, even friendships, relationships and Religious, political beliefs.” In another blog post, he described the willingness of people to let officials “only in the name of an unexplainable risk” (which he repeats like a mantra) , disrupting every aspect of their lives on a massive scale.
The remarks caused a stir. Subsequently, Agamben wrote numerous blog posts, was interviewed several times, and gave a speech to the Italian Senate. Even months later, as the pandemic intensifies, Agamben is adding weight to his critique of emergency measures for the pandemic. Finally, in the spring of 2021, he published some of his own criticisms in a small book to solemnly record them.
This is not the work of some isolated obsessive-compulsive disorder. Agamben is an intellectual mogul whose breadth over the past two decades has made him a major influence in the humanities and all areas of the theory-influenced social sciences. Although he had a law degree, Agamben made a name for himself in the fields of philosophy and literary studies early on—in part because he received research grants from the University of London’s prestigious Warburg Research Centre; more importantly, he also participated in An internal seminar hosted by Martin Heidegger, the most influential philosopher in continental Europe in the twentieth century.
Agamben’s work has been required reading in many humanities and social science disciplines for decades; it was only in the late ’90s that he became a true academic star when he began studying politics. Google Scholar lists some 24,000 citations to his most famous work, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), including those of top scholars in various fields. related discussions. Most scholars are lucky to be cited more than 100 times, let alone appear in the work of leading figures in multiple disciplines.
Today, the same opinions that have had such a huge impact are being used to promote conspiracy theories or to denounce the alleged persecution of anti-vaccinators. An author known for teasing out the nuances of Plato and Aristotle in the Greek original now sounds as disturbing as a right-wing eccentric; as a result, a true right-wing eccentric has praised him in the New York Times His own country’s far right-leaning politicians use his immense intellectual authority to justify their cause, while online anti-vaccinators have made memes calling for him to be Italy’s president.
Terrier picture: President AgambenAs a professor of the humanities, I would be apprehensive to see such a turn in the career of any senior scholar. However, it’s more about me personally than that. I am a researcher and translator of Agamben’s work, and his work has profoundly influenced my own. While we’re not privately close, we’re connected, and he asked me to translate some of his blog posts when I first learned of his turn to Covid-19 skepticism. I said yes, hoping to present his argument in the best possible way, while trying to get him to rethink his position (which ultimately failed). Ultimately, I regretted getting myself involved in this embarrassing affair, and began to wonder if his paranoid novel about Covid-19 would bring his other writing into question. The more I dabble in it, the darker the outlook becomes.
Agamben’s new argument on the coronavirus response is apparently based on his most famous book. In Homo Sacer, Agamben argues that political power in Western societies rests on a decision to include some people under the protection of the law while excluding others, depriving them of their rights to be human beings , and reduced them to a state of so-called “naked life”. In his view, this is not a simple distinction between inside and outside. In this system, those who are reduced to naked life are not expelled from society, but are brought into society as a subhuman class. This class, excluded from formal legal protection, is the foundation of social order.
Agamben’s prime example of the production of naked life is the Holocaust (Holocaust), which stripped Jews and other victims of their citizenship and exposed them to the limitless violence of concentration camps. While in one sense excluded from society because of the loss of citizenship, in another sense these groups became the primary focus of the Nazis, as society at the time revolved around the “final solution” plan” implementation.
Giorgio Agamben in Rome in 2018. Photo: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty ImagesAgamben believed that Nazi Germany was by no means an exceptional deviation from modern politics, but rather the paradigm of modern politics. Our legal system is supposed to function “normally”, always with the threat of a sudden and unwarranted transition to a new concentration camp. One of Agamben’s arguments in support of this highly contentious claim is that the Nazis were in a sense completely legitimate, and that alone is disturbing enough. The Nazis legalized their actions by declaring a state of emergency, which allowed Hitler to suspend the rights of citizens and the normal legal process.
In his 2005 sequel, State of Exception (the title is based on a more literal translation of the German “state of emergency”), Agamben argues that all major Western nation-states, are increasingly reluctant to govern through normal constitutional procedures, and are increasingly reliant on emergency powers, which they tend to invoke even when dealing with mundane problems like economic downturns. In the words of Agamben’s idol Walter Benjamin, “the state of the exception became the norm”.
When the book was published in the United States, it was the darkest hour of the Bush administration’s war on terror. At the time, the diagnosis of The Exceptional State seemed more predictable than hyperbolic. As Agamben has pointed out several times in the text, George W. Bush actually called for broad emergency powers based on claims such as the Patriot Act and the inherent rights of the president. He used those powers to create a whole new class of humans, the so-called “enemy combatants,” and imprisoned, abused them, and executed them by drone with little judicial oversight. In some cases, the executive branch can assassinate U.S. citizens with just a single sentence. You could also consider Agamben’s argument that Western power was born to produce concentration camps extreme or absurd in the 1990s when the original Homo Sacer was published. But after Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the argument became surprisingly plausible.
On this argument alone – that there is a link between the emergency powers of the sovereign and the production of disposable “naked life” – Agamben has earned an international academic reputation. He became an inescapable point of reference for academic analysis of the war on terror (most prominently Judith Butler’s Fragile and Restless Lives), and scholars have taken it and applied it other sites of state violence, such as prisons, borders and refugee camps. Even critics of his thesis accept many of its premises. In Habeas Viscus, 2014, black studies scholar Alexander Weherier argued that Agamben was too Eurocentric; in fact, slave plantations were a more appropriate paradigm than concentration camps— But he also doesn’t question the idea that hyperviolence dehumanization is the foundation of Western power structures.
Today, this authoritative work has been twisted into a new shape by Agamben himself. Over the past two years, anti-vaccinators and anti-blockades have repeatedly abused Holocaust memories, drawing parallels between their own situation and that of European Jews in the mid-20th century. Agamben’s recent arguments on the pandemic represent the most academically advanced, profoundly clear version.
Agamben’s academic fans will want to separate his Covid-19 writings from the ones that made him famous. For now, in Agamben’s own view, the current situation clearly affirms his thesis in a fundamental way. He argues that while the previous situation only targeted specific groups, the epidemic prevention measures covered all people, by depriving them of their rights (political, economic, religious, even in the name of maintaining their purely biological life) is the right to bury the dead), reducing people to “naked life”. And, from Agamben’s point of view, it was even worse that everyone was willing to cooperate, accepting the dictatorship of medicine, even claiming, as SS Major Adolf Eichmann did, that it was their moral duty to cooperate.
When Agamben asked me to translate the article comparing people who cooperated with epidemic prevention and control to Eichmann, I persuaded him to let me delete the irritating analogy in the English translation; but in Italian In the original text, this analogy was left intact. Even putting aside the rhetorical excesses of the Nazi analogy, I am troubled by this: his critique of the pandemic seems to seriously undercut the insights he offers in Homo Sacer; And over the past two decades, he has been deepening and complicating his analysis of Western politics.
While the works of that period were less influential (I translated many of them for Stanford University Press and Seagull Books), they were, in my opinion, much more subtle and interesting. While Homo Sacer focuses only on the most extreme scenarios, books like The Kingdom and the Glory or Opus Dei focus on how our day-to-day participation in the economy underpins Devastating Western power structures in focus.
At first, I tried to find this subtlety in his new work. I emailed Agamben, for example, to ask why there is no analysis of capitalism in his Covid-19 book; I hope he will reflect on this, asking for freedom from the pandemic that might expose oneself to the virus The workers under it became victims. He never got back to me, but the next article he asked me to translate did talk about the economy; he also just claimed that even capitalism has now completely succumbed to the so-called “religion” of medicine. At that time, I stopped trying to change his mind, and he stopped asking me to translate his articles. (I asked Agamben to comment on this article. At first he said he would talk to me, but then he stopped talking.)
When I wrote to ask some of my colleagues what they thought of Agamben’s recent writings, all agreed that no one would expect him to believe in the motives of politicians and public health authorities. Carlo Salzani, a researcher at the University of Vienna who published the first Italian monograph on Agamben (and helped me organize a volume on Agamben’s work), told me that Agamben has always been Fears that “governments and powers more generally use crises as weapons to strengthen their control over people’s lives”; however, he also laments that Agamben has allowed his “moral indignation” to overshadow “his political-philosophical” Analysis becomes a holy war.” Asked if the philosopher’s work on pandemics was a natural development of his previous work, Salzani replied, “Perhaps the way he sees pandemics is a natural consequence of his previous analysis, but I Believe he’s stuck in a rigid, constrained pattern that he can’t (and won’t) get out of.”
Eric Santner, a professor at the University of Chicago who has repeatedly cited Agamben’s concept in several works on literary criticism and political theory, expressed similar sentiments about this intellectual rigidity: “In my view Come on, Agamben’s statement about the pandemic turned his own work into an ideology; it made him an easy target for his critics. This especially saddens me .”
A rally in Brussels on December 5 against the Belgian government’s anti-epidemic measures and mandatory vaccination. Photo by Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty ImagesWhat baffles me the most is that Agamben can’t see a significant difference between the Nazi regime, which was designed to wipe out lives, and the immunization measures, which were designed to save lives . But as some of my colleagues have pointed out, the politics of public health policy has always been a headache, and the industry has a less glamorous past. Unfortunately, Agamben’s skepticism of science and medicine has put him automatically on the American right, said Claire Colebrook, a Penn State professor who has co-authored a book on Agamben’s political science. : “It’s OK to question the specific forms of science that governments choose to pursue, especially when they neglect the maintenance of the health care system, as Agamben points out.” Refs Agamben and Black Studies in Andrew Kaplan, an Emory graduate student linked to the debate, agrees that Agamben’s fundamental question is valuable, saying “conservative/liberal protest against any interference or regulation monopolizes the public discourse”, making it difficult for others to ask questions about “the neglected meaning of this state of emergency”.
Agamben’s skepticism of medical authority is a great example of the continuity of his thought. When I was baffled by his stance on the pandemic and turned back to Homo Sacer as a result, I noticed most of the examples he gave of producing “Naked Lives” (and “The Exception” with its political example is not the same), is “medical” in nature. In addition to concentration camp victims, Agamben cites examples of prisoners undergoing medical experiments or brain-dead patients being kept alive indefinitely. Apparently, he has long been deeply skeptical of all alliances between medicine and state power. As Santner puts it: “For Agamben, it seems that whenever hygiene becomes public health, for whatever intent or purpose, the exceptional state that becomes the norm captures, seizes, and captivates. us.”
Agamben’s distrust of public health has led him to deny the official narrative about the severity of the pandemic, and he’s arguably spreading misinformation as a result. As noted above, in his first article on the pandemic (written at the midst of Italy’s first severe Covid-19 wave), Agamben claimed that the new Covid-19 virus was essentially no different from the normal flu. When pressed by an interviewer for Le Monde that same month, he responded: “I don’t want to get in the way of scientists talking about epidemics. I’m interested in the extremely serious ethical and political consequences that follow. “However, he later returned to this point again and again, that the severity of the pandemic had been exaggerated. In April 2020, he said: “Data on epidemics are presented in a one-of-a-kind manner and lack scientific standards”. Later, in July 2020, he made a baseless claim: Will mass vaccination drive us to extinction like lemmings—after all, vaccines can cause cancer or other diseases.
Clearly, this is beyond healthy skepticism. It appears that Agamben has no trust in medical institutions. In February 2020, in response to Agamben’s earlier writings on epidemics, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy revealed something startling: “Almost thirty years ago, the doctor said I needed a heart transplant, Giorgio was one of the few who advised me not to listen to them. If I followed his advice, I would probably be dead very soon.”
The fact that Agamben would have given such poor advice is, of course, astonishing from a humane standpoint. But to those who have been reading him for a long time, the very fact that he would give specific advice is equally astounding. His work has always been longer than criticism and shorter than political prescriptions. Agamben has been known to be vague when it comes to saying “what to do” — and that vagueness is intentional. Readers of Homo Sacer and The State of Exception are likely to think that the solution to the overuse of emergency powers is a return to “normal” political structures; but in those books Agamben says that those “normal” The “structure” always leads inexorably to Auschwitz. He has written that we need a more fundamental solution: dismantling entire structures of law and power—a possibility he often evokes with literary or theological imagination rather than concrete, actionable plans.
But now, as Salzani pointed out to me , Agamben is calling on us to resist “urgent measures as some kind of deliberate, planned plan to destroy ‘bourgeois democracy’ and limit individual freedoms.” In 2021 In a speech to the Italian Senate in October, Agamben complained that the legislature had become a rubber stamp for executive action. To take it lightly, you wouldn’t expect to see this kind of focus on due legislative process from an author who has repeatedly called on us to fundamentally reflect on our relationship with the law, language, and even our own bodies. Now he’s asking the Senate to oppose the executive branch, and impressively, in “State of Exception,” he suggests that we should respond to destructive legal structures by anticipating a future where “humanity will be like Children play with the law like discarded objects, not to restore them to their classic use, but to free them from it forever.” It’s not clear to the law what this playful new usage looks like in practice, but it’s part of his argument. We are so deeply shaped by the power structures of our culture that radical alternatives are bound to sound vague and contradictory to us—but if we want to escape, we must. By contrast, in his work on the pandemic, Agamben appears to have given up trying to find a way out.
As I pondered this chapter of Agamben’s intellectual life, I realized that if there is any truth to his embarrassing discourse on the pandemic, it is that we don’t need to listen to him, and certainly not his form of reflection. , that life is more than just survival. In the same vein, Simone de Beauvoir said it better in The Morality of Ambiguity: “Someone said to a young patient who was weeping because he had to leave home, his career and his whole past life, ‘Well Get up, nothing else matters,’ she replied, ‘but if nothing matters, what’s the use of getting better?'”
The problem is that Agamben does not provide any philosophical tools to help us with that question – what is most important to us? – Give a collective answer. Agamben has always been on the left, although he is a maverick anti-Marxist anarchist. In his pandemic writings, his positions clearly overlap with the right, but this is no accident. If all actions by state power, including the state medical sector, are inherently oppressive, then we have no choice but to retreat from our individuality – which is the libertarian position, For decades, the right has used it to preempt all efforts to challenge existing power structures.
As far as Agamben is concerned, the excessive distrust of all organs of state power blinds him to the fact that, in responding to a pandemic, stressing that the individual can resist power also strengthens the power of corporations and exacerbates the epidemic. It is not direct state interference but a policy that purports to give them freedom that reduces so-called essential workers and many others to naked lives that are disposable. Whatever fragmentary insights we may draw from Agamben’s work on the pandemic, it is because we fail to see that – namely, that it is precisely through our freedom itself that Western power structures make us victims — the political thinker still misses many (in fact, almost all) points of the matter. Even here, however, you can argue that he is not as good as he should be. Freedom can be a trap is one of the central ideas of my own work, and ironically, I came to this largely by critically reading Agamben’s work after Homo Sacer.
Although Agamben declined to talk to me about this article, we still exchange emails from time to time. I noticed that his blog has not been updated in months, and the most recent entry on the pandemic is an invited speech to the Italian Senate and to a student body. Agamben remained silent even as more and more people in various European countries protested against the new restrictions to prevent and control the Omicron virus. Perhaps, in the end, he lost his bad and too serious involvement in the pandemic; and, as he tells us time and time again, regained the childlike imagination; is our only hope. The question of how these two years will distort the legacy of him and his work, which has changed so many lives, remains to be answered.
appendix
Eric Santner on Agamben’s Writing During the Pandemic
Reflections on Hobbes form a central part of Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty in the first volume of his Homo Sacer project. In his lecture series at Princeton shortly after 9/11, Agamben returned to Hobbes in the context of discussing the concept of Stasis, the “Civil War as a Political Paradigm.” In the lecture, Agamben attempted to distill his earlier analysis of the concept of the state of nature (which, in his view, was synonymous with what seemed to be a dissolved city-state [ut tanquam dissolute consideretur]). Although he did not explicitly say this, he presumably meant that (to Hobbes) the Civil War somehow represented that this “seems” to have come true, that is, that the real exception or state of emergency had arisen, In this state, a truly divided (and not just “as if disbanded”) group of people attempts to reconstitute themselves as the people by establishing a new sovereign authority. This sovereign authority will be the mediator of its unity, representing itself as one to itself. Or the (nearly real) disbanded crowd represents the remnant of the (real) divided crowd, and it reminds us of the latter, a crowd of people in the hands of the sovereign (the one who decides the state of exception). In a state of exception, sovereign power suspends the rule of law in the name of keeping people safe in the face of some urgent threat. At this exceptional moment, the people returned to a pre-political state in a sense, a “state of nature,” which is now directly under the power and authority of the state, no longer covered and mediated by legal norms.
All of this presupposes this Hobbesian view that only through symbolic “mergers”, through the “artificial” efficacy of a representative sovereign body, the people – those who participate together in the state – truly become one. As Hobbes put it, “man” must “give all his power and strength to one man or group of persons, and let this person or group assume their personality; each thinks and recognizes himself is the author of everything that the one who bears their personality does or is compelled to do…and thereby subject their will to his will and their judgment to his judgment. It’s not just agreement or coordination; it’s their The true unity of all men, into one person.” Hobbes went on to argue, as if:
Everyone should say to everyone, I authorize my right to govern myself to this person or group of people, on the condition that you similarly give him your rights and authorize all his actions. This group of people unified into one personality is called the nation, which in Latin is Civitas. This is the origin of the great Leviathan…and the person who assumes this personality is called the sovereign, we can say that he has sovereign power, and everyone else is his subject.
Stasis thus represents a transition from a mythical or fictional state of exception—a state of nature immanent and assumed by sovereign power—to a truly exceptional state that leads to a sort of “world night” ”, in this world night, the other, the Leviathan, who guarantees the coherence of the polity of the “people” no longer exists. The appearance of the state of nature is thus made clear, it is a fundamental illusion – “the people are being beaten” – which underwrites the transfer to that other, in another Hegelian formulation Said, played the role of a determination of reflection. Thus, we can say that the function of the state of nature (the state of exception in the construction of the state) is to “make” us unaware of the night of the world during the day of our city-state life. The naked life or the sacrificed life Agamben speaks of is the life that no longer has the luxury of living on the threshold of this night. There, the life is completely exposed to the object of anxiety, the dissolution of the city-state hidden in the city-state. Agamben believes that this is the secret of sovereign power and authority, the state secret (arcanum imperii) of Western political life. Agamben’s archaeology program is devoted to unearthing the structures of this fundamental fantasy. Through this fantasy, we bring to life a primordial anxiety and, with it, subjectivize our social ties.
In the lecture, Agamben talked about the two little figures who were placed next to the cathedral in Hobbes’ Leviathan illustrations, and featured on their heads special masks like those worn by plague doctors . Because a group of people becomes the people of a nation simply by being represented (by the sovereign), this group “can only be represented by the guards who oversee their obedience and the doctor who treats them. This group lives in the city, but only as a The duty and the object of care of those who exercise sovereignty,” in which the “biopolitical turn of sovereign power” begins to take shape. “We can therefore compare the disbanded populations living in the city-states under Leviathan with the populations of plague victims who must be treated and governed” (Stasis, 48-49; emphasis added). That is to say, at least at one level, the subject of biopolitics is not so much the measurable vitality of populations (Foucault generally thinks so), but rather is expressed as the biopolitical management of public health The “naked life” conjured by the exceptional state; in a word, the plague here is not just a physical disease – a natural phenomenon – it is largely the continuation of the natural state in the city-state, and also That is, a state of “dissolution” that is by no means natural is concerned. Or rather, here the state of nature is seen as a quasi-judicial condition in which the rule of law is replaced by the administration of the naked life of the population.
This is how I understand Agamben’s writings during the pandemic, what he’s trying to say is that the people – in Agamben, his concern, almost exclusively the Italian people – allow themselves to be treated and governed like Like so many samples of naked life, thrown into such a state of nature. It seems that, for Agamben, once health (sanitation) becomes public health (public health)—a type of what used to be called policing (Polizeiwissenschaft) in German—we, consciously or not, fall into a The snare of the exceptional state that becomes the norm, caught and bound by this exceptional state. Once the state became involved in monitoring and maintaining homeostasis, the management of the lives of its citizens, those citizens sent themselves to the brink of civil war, barely controlled by the state.
Perhaps, because much of my experience with the pandemic comes from the Trump years in America, I have a different understanding of whether Agamben’s conceptual thinking about stasis fits with life during the Covid-19 era. In the United States, the problem is not so much an excess of biopolitical governance as its inadequacy. I would say that in the US the state is not so much deploying and exploiting those “plague doctors” as it is preventing them from doing their “cure and governance” work. Indeed, Trump himself is not declaring an emergency; instead, he appears to be promoting a real civil war. This civil war has come ever closer to reality through his continued pretense of being sovereign since he stepped down. Here, the “crowd” fails to address the issue that Agamben and Ron DeSantis, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and others have reduced to biopolitical security by exaggerating Foucault’s ideas. The institutional thing yields to it, but resists it superficially. In America, this group of often armed resisters seeks to reconstitute themselves as the real people still (or again) represented by Trump, the only real Leviathan.
换种方式来说，大流行病和其他许多事情一起暴露的，不是公民的生命，而是医疗保健系统，后者旨在使那些公民从疾病中恢复过来，否则，疾病会把他们贬为赤裸生命，使他们死亡。的确，在很大程度上，阿甘本极力批评的紧急措施，是为了使那些医疗保健系统不至于被冲垮。阿甘本的立场的一个矛盾之处在于，在很大程度上，人们正是以新自由主义的，反对用税收来资助“深层”生物政治安全国家的名义，从这些医疗系统和其他政府支持系统抽走资源的。
关于阿甘本新冠时期的写作，显然还有更多的东西可说：装腔作势甚至是末世论的语气，急着拿疫情期间的生活来和纳粹死亡营里的生活比较的冲动——在这里，阿甘本看起来摆出了一个见证城兼营（city-cum-camp）里的生活的新普利莫·莱维的姿态——没有团结病人、垂死者和死者的意识，把治疗病人的人斥为新崇拜的司祷，把医学斥为宗教。他最极端、最装腔作势的宣告还包括，他把在疫情最严重的时候奋力发展网上教学能力的教师和教授，等同于1931年向法西斯主义政权宣誓效忠的意大利学院人士。这些东西，使大量批评者想要全面推翻阿甘本的全部作品，认为他在疫情期间说的话，使他多年来用来推动福柯的突破性工作（特别是关于主权和生命政治的那部分）的基本概念和论证也失去了效力。与之相反，在我看来，阿甘本关于大流行病的评论，把他自己的作品变成了一种意识形态，对他的批评者来说，这使他成为了一个容易攻击的靶子。我们可以说，在他关于大流行病的著作中，阿甘本可悲地变成了一个“阿甘本派” 。虽然我还在继续阅读和介入阿甘本的著作，但在我看来，这点是显然的，这次事态的转变，邀请我们仔细地重新思考他庞大且在我看来依然令人信服的作品。
【作者简介】
亚当·科茨科（Adam Kotsko），任教于中北大学夏默学院，著有《阿甘本的哲学轨迹》（Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory, Edinburgh University Press, 2020）、《新自由主义的妖魔》（Neoliberalism’s Demons, Stanford University Press, 2018）等书，也是阿甘本多部著作的英译者。
【译者简介】
王立秋，云南弥勒人，北京大学国际关系学院比较政治学博士，哈尔滨工程大学人文社会科学学院讲师。
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