Sharing the continuing reflections of Giorgio Agamben on the COVID-19 pandemic …
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Lebanon: Chronicles of revolution in times of a pandemic
From Lundi Matin #241, 04/05/2020 …
Since October 17, 2019, Lebanon has been living at the rhythm of an uprising targeting both the political class and a moribund economic regime. As elsewhere, the spread of the virus and the health emergency measures first put an end to the contestation. On March 21, Megaphone media released a video titled “Tripoli: Expect to Meet Us After the Corona.” The extreme deterioration of the economic situation and the total lack of resources encountered by a large number of inhabitants following confinement have finally advanced this prognosis. Despite a quarantine in effect until the 10th of May, movements are taking to the streets, and once again targeting banks that are crystallising discontent. And again, the city of Tripoli has occupied a unique place, and this since the beginning of the uprising. On April 27, the army, which is actively involved in the repression, killed a young man, Fawaz Fouad Samman, whose death only increased popular anger.
Continue readingNietzschean reflections in times of the pandemic
Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.
Friedrich Nietszche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
With the COVID-19 pandemic in the background, what follows is an essay that calls for a rethinking of our ethical thought, of our way of being in the world, inspired by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and the innocence of childhood.
Continue readingTomás Ibáñez: The State and the pandemic
You might as well be hung for death
As breaking a machine–
So now my Lad, your sword unsheath
And make it sharp and keen-
We are ready now your cause to join
Whenever you may call;
So make foul blood run clear & fine
Of Tyrants great and small!–
From the Luddite song, “Welcome Ned Ludd”
Ludd, Hypermidernity and neo-totalitarianism in times of COVID-19
Tomás Ibáñez (El Lokal, 01/05/2020)
A little over two centuries ago, back in 1811 and for the next five years, England was the scene of a powerful social revolt known as the Luddite Rebellion – in allusion to its eponymous protagonist Ned Ludd – that destroyed part of the novel textile machinery whose installation eliminated jobs and condemned part of the population to misery. Thousands of soldiers were necessary to quell the insurgency that, far from obeying technophobic motivations, was framed in the workplace and sought to oppose the most damaging consequences of the “progress” of capitalist exploitation.
Continue readingCOVID-19: Translating a pandemic politically (3)
The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis
I
If political sovereignty is defined by the decision on the exception (Carl Schmitt), on what is to be excluded from and included within the domain of law, modern sovereignty’s decision is inherently biopolitical, for the included is defined as much, and is increasingly so, by the immunity of a population against the biologically threatening that is excluded (Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito). Law and medical knowledge and practice steadily coincide. What is “healthy” becomes what is “legal”.
Continue readingMapping our dystopia
We continue to share translations from the not bored collective which are generously forwarded to us.
Ongoing reflections on the politics of a pandemic …
Continue readingSantiago López Petit: Coronavirus as theatre of truth
Humanity is entering a phase of its history in which truth is reduced to a moment in the movement of the false. True is that false speech that must be kept true even when its untruth is proven. But in this way it is language itself as the place of the manifestation of truth that is confiscated from human beings. They can now only mute the movement – true because real – of the lie. To bring this movement to a stop, everyone must have the courage to seek without compromise the most precious asset: a true word.
Giorgio Agamben, Sul vero e sul falso (Quodlibet 28/04/2020)
From Lobo suelto!, a reflection on the Covid-19 pandemic, by Santiago López Petit …
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Posted in Commentary
Tagged anti-capitalism, Santiago López Petit, State and Capital
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Achille Mbembe: The necropolitics of a pandemic
… the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
From a brazilian newspaper, an interview with Achille Mbembe …
Mbembe is known for having coined the term “necropolitics”. In the essay of the same name, he analyses the way in which governments decide who lives and who dies, and in which way they will die.
Necropolitics reveals itself in the fact that the virus does not affect everyone in the same way. There is a debate about prioritising care for the young and letting the old die. And there are still those, such as Jair Bolsonaro, who insist that the economy cannot stop even if a part of the population must die to guarantee productivity. “Will some die? They will die. I am sorry, that’s life”, he said recently. The capitalist system is based on the unequal distribution of the opportunity to live and die, claims Mbembe. The logic of sacrifice has always been at the heart of neoliberalism; it has always functioned with the idea that some are worth more than others. And who is without value can be discarded.
Continue readingGiorgio Agamben: A Question
A further contribution for the understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic from Giorgio Agamben. We again thank the not bored! collective for this translation.
This is a text which we partially shared in an earlier post.
A Question
Giorgio Agamben(1)
For the city, the plague marked the beginning of the corruption. . . . No one was disposed any longer to stay on the road that he had previously judged to be the best, because he believed that perhaps he would die before getting there.
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, II, 53.(2)
I would like to share with whomever has the desire to join the discussion a question upon which, for more than a month now, I haven’t stopped reflecting.(3) How can it happen that an entire country,(4) without realizing it, collapses ethically and politically because it has been confronted with a disease? Each of the words I have chosen to formulate this question has been carefully considered. Measuring the extent of the abdication of our ethical and political principles is indeed very simple: it is a question of asking oneself about the limit beyond which we are not disposed to abandon them. I believe that the reader who will take the trouble to consider the following points cannot but agree – without realizing it or feigning not to realize it – that the threshold that separates humanity from barbarity has been crossed.
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Arundhati Roy: Our task is to disable the engine
The coronavirus pandemic has brought the machine of capitalism to a grinding halt.
Arundhati Roy (Progressive International, 02/05/2020)
While the human race is momentarily incarcerated, and even as a record-size hole opens in the ozone layer above the Arctic, the earth has given us an indication of her ability to heal. Even in our moments of sickness and loss we cannot help but hold our collective breath in wonder at the show she has put on. But plans are afoot to put an end to all of that. In India, for example, just in these last few days, a large portion of a tiger reserve is about to be turned over to a religious gathering—the Kumbh Mela—which attracts tens of millions of Hindu pilgrims. An elephant reserve in Assam is being marked off for coal mining, and thousands of acres of pristine Himalayan forest in Arunachal Pradesh marked off for submergence by the reservoir of a new hydroelectric dam. Meanwhile, not to be outdone, President Trump has signed an executive order allowing mining on the moon.
In very much the same way as the coronavirus has entered human bodies and amplified existing illnesses, it has entered countries and societies and amplified their structural infirmities and illnesses. It has amplified injustice, sectarianism, racism, casteism and above all class inequality.
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