“We know that many suffer, but the state is there,” said the italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte, after announcing a 400 million euro food voucher programme for those who have lost their source of income due to the COVID-19 pandemic (part of a larger 4.3 billion national “solidarity fund” transferred to municipalities).
The programme is itself a response to news of people in the country now beginning to refuse to pay for food that they take from shops. Police are now called upon to patrol supermarkets, in the shadow of potentially larger “social unrest”. (The Guardian)
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Giorgio Agamben: Reflections on the pest
From the online site, Quodlibet …
The following thoughts are not about the epidemic, but about what we can understand from the reactions it causes in men. It is therefore a question of reflecting on how easily an entire society has accepted to feel itself contaminated by a plague, to isolate itself at home and to suspend its normal conditions of life, its bonds of work, of friendship, of love, and even its religious and political convictions. Why have there not been, as was nevertheless imaginable and as usually happens in such cases, protests and opposition? The hypothesis I would like to suggest is that, in some way, and yet unconsciously, the plague was already there, that obviously the living conditions of people had become such that a sudden sign was enough for them to appear for what they were – that is, intolerable, just like a plague. And that, in a way, is the only positive thing we can take from the present situation: it is possible that, later on, people will start to wonder if the way of life they had was good.
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