Sacred Shores?

Early in 2020, when COVID-19 was becoming regarded as a virus that could not be contained by countries or within regions of the planet, Giorgio Agamben offered some provocative claims about the nature of the pandemic that it produced. Whereas many analysts and observers swiftly arrived at something like a consensus – that the virus demanded intensified population control and heightened state authority in many of the world’s nations – Agamben’s strikingly different conclusion was that ‘frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded emergency measures’ were being introduced, with a ‘state of panic’ manufactured by the media and state institutions. This ‘disproportionate’ response, he proposed, needs to be seen as another manifestation of the exceptionality that is essential to governmental rationality. Rather than a health emergency that justifies the suspension of social norms and the urgent introduction of extraordinary forms of regulation, the COVID-19 pandemic instead allowed states once again to step outside of established political and juridical order and introduce new legislative measures to preserve their professed sovereign right to rule. As he continued to write about the virus in the early months of 2020, Agamben sought to correct what he saw as misreadings and distortions of his claim that coronavirus was being instrumentalised by the agents of political power. What persists in these interventions, however, is an incredulity towards the abandoning of ethical and political principles that followed the spread of the virus. The question on which he ‘has never stopped reflecting’ is ‘How can it happen that an entire country, without noticing it, politically and ethically collapsed in the face of an illness?’.