Governing Without Consensus

The Invention of an Epidemic Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 26, 2020 As we face the frenetic, irrational, and unprovoked emergency measures adopted against a supposed epidemic, we should turn to the National Research Council (CNR). The CNR not only confirms that “an epidemic of SARS-CoV-2 is not present in Italy”, but that, in any case, “the infection, according to the epidemiological data available today for tens of thousands of cases, causes mild/moderate symptoms (a sort of influenza) in 80–90% of cases. Ten to fifteen per cent can develop pneumonia, but even then, the progress in most cases is benign. It is calculated that only four per cent of incidents need to be hospitalized in intensive care”. If this is the case, why do 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? Two clues might explain this disproportionate response. Firstly, we are dealing with a growing tendency to trigger a state of exception as the standard paradigm of governance. The legislative decree immediately approved by the government “for public health and security reasons” resulted in an actual militarisation “of the municipalities and the areas where at least one person is positive and where the source of transmission is unknown, or in any instance where there is a case not ascribable to a person coming from an area already affected by the virus”. Such a vague and indeterminate formula will allow for the rapid diffusion of the state of exception to all regions, given that other cases are bound to occur elsewhere. Let us look at the severe limitations on freedom levied by the decree: Prohibition on exiting the municipality or affected area for all individuals present there. Prohibition on accessing the municipality or affected area. Suspension of events or initiatives of any nature, and of any kind of assembly in a public or private space, even if of a cultural, recreational, athletic, or religious nature, and even if carried out in enclosed spaces open to the public. Suspension of childcare services and closure of every school, as well as suspension of attendance for academic activities and higher education, unless these educational activities are carried out remotely. Closure of museums and other cultural institutions and places listed in Article 101 of the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape (see the legislative decree no. 42 of 22 January 2004), as well as suspension of open and free admission to those institutions and places. Suspension of any educational trips on national or international territory. Suspension of open competitive exams and closure of state offices, except for the supply of essential services and for public utility. Application of quarantine measures, with active surveillance of individuals who have been in close contact with confirmed cases of the disease. This disproportionate response to something the CNR considers to be a normal flu, not too dissimilar to the ones that recur every year, is absurd. We could argue that, once terrorism ceased to exist as a cause for measures of exception, the invention of an epidemic offers the ideal pretext for widening them beyond all known limits. Secondly, and no less disquietingly, we have to consider the state of precarity and fear that has been in recent years systematically cultivated in people's minds — a state which has resulted in a natural propensity for mass panic, for which an epidemic offers the ideal pretext. We could say that a massive wave of fear caused by a microscopic parasite is traversing humanity, and that the world’s rulers guide and orient it towards their own ends. Limitations on freedom are thus being willingly accepted, in a perverse and vicious cycle, in the name of a desire for security — a desire that has been generated by the same governments that are now intervening to satisfy it.

(English translation by Valeria Dani)

Vincent van Gogh, Prisoners’ Round (after Gustave Doré), 1890. Courtesy of WikiArt.