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Political Theology and COVID-19: Agamben’s Critique of Science as a New “Pandemic Religion”
Guillermo Andrés Duque Silva and Cristina Del Prado Higuera
From the journal Open Theology
https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2020-0177
Abstract
The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has reacted to the coronavirus crisis in
a way that markedly contrasts with most other positions in contemporary political philosophy. His position has been described as irrational, politically incorrect, and unfair toward the victims of COVID-19. In
this article, we delve into the foundations of this peculiar,
pessimistic, and controversial reaction. From Agamben’s conceptual
framework, we will explain how state responses to the COVID-19 crisis
have turned science into a new religion from the dogmas of which various strategies have been developed in order for states to exercise
biopolitical power under theological guises.
Keywords: state of exception; political theology; COVID-19; sovereignty
1 Introduction
At the beginning of 2020, an important philosophical debate took place
on the COVID-19 crisis. Various contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj
Žižek, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy put forward their positions regarding the critical situations then developing. In February 2020, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben intervened with a press release that aroused the most relentless criticism from the philosophical community.
The title of the publication: The invention of an epidemic revealed the critical position that Agamben advanced against the measures that have
been imposed by states within their responses to the health emergency.
In that publication, the renowned philosopher called the state responses
to the pandemic crisis “frantic, irrational and completely unjustified.” Agamben questioned why the media and the authorities were making an
effort “to spread a climate of panic, causing a true state of exception,
with serious limitations on movements and a suspension of the normal functioning of living and working conditions in entire regions.” From Agamben’s perspective, those measurements were totally out of proportion
to what, according to him, was simply a typical common flu.
A wave of criticism was quickly levied against Agamben and we shall
examine in this article the most important elements thereof. We will not discuss the virus’s destructive capacity since Agamben’s classification
of COVID-19 as “simply flu” falls by itself. What interests us is the
link Agamben makes between the emergence of COVID-19 and what he
conceptualizes as a resultant permanent state of exception.
Agamben has devoted himself for more than twenty years to the scholarly
study of the state of exception in Western culture. While his study of
the subject began solely on a theoretical and abstract plane, it
suddenly took life before his eyes in the form of the worldwide response
to COVID-19. For this reason, quite beyond Agamben’s controversial
position on the lethality of the virus, we are interested in the
argument that the philosopher puts forward about a growing tendency of
states to use the state of exception as a standard paradigm of
government, a propensity of theirs for which the cover given by COVID-19
is ideally suited, as he explains in his most recent work.[1]
This article will fulfill three purposes, arranged into three sections.
First, we will examine Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical proposal of the
state of exception as a dialogue, on the one hand, with the criticisms
received from other philosophers, and, on the other hand, with the
possible applications that this theory would have in concrete situations generated by the COVID-19 crisis. Second, we will analyze the conceptual framework of political theology and economic theology in Giorgio
Agamben’s work, especially that developed in The Kingdom and the Glory:
For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Finally, we will
put this theory in the context of the health crisis and the question of
the origin and legitimacy of laws and measures that affect social life
in the state of emergency generated by the coronavirus. In Section 4, we
will draw attention to the scope of the current state of exception that,
in the Agambenian theoretical framework, will not be overcome with the
end of the pandemic, in the same way, that it did not begin with it.
2 Pandemic and homo sacer: Our neighbor has been abolished
The Italian philosopher has attempted to carry further the philosophical project dealing with biopolitics and their underlying genealogical considerations that was initiated by Michel Foucault. Agamben describes
the contemporary age as a time that manages to materialize the diagnosis
that Foucault hinted at in reference to the concept of “biopolitics” in
his last works. The notion of biopolitics has been used to describe the administration of power in human life as a government paradigm in
Western culture. According to Foucault’s conception of human powers:
these act in two ways:[2] those that boost life or those that end it.[3]
From the first perspective, that of the impulse of life, human beings
are, for those in power, simply raw material to be preserved; however,
in the second case, those in power are compelled to exercise mechanisms
that end the life of a part of the population that they administer. The
two visions are complementary because, ultimately, the deaths of some
subjects may serve to protect the lives of others. Giorgio Agamben
revives the concept of biopolitics in order to describe contemporary
society and goes one step further: he focuses his attention on a
pessimistic perspective of biopolitics. Agamben dedicates himself to understanding the criteria for the administration of death that are
exercised in the history of the West so as to identify biopolitical
patterns in the governments of Western societies, as well as the reduced possibilities of resistance that may emerge in a world that has been
turning into a “gigantic concentration camp.”[4]
From Agamben’s perspective, the most reprehensible cruelties that have
taken place in the exercise of power in the West, instead of being
exceptional anomalies, constitute instances inherent in the process of
the social construction of modernity.[5] In this way, Giorgio Agamben interprets Ernst Nolte’s position on Auschwitz: history seems to resist
being left in the past. Indeed, Auschwitz constitutes the obscene
paradigm of the modern that Agamben turns into the founding myth of a biopolitical era. This paradigm refuses to “remain in the past” and
gives meaning to contemporary forms of government. The Italian follows
the weak but the constant beat of the Musselman [6] of Auschwitz. The philosopher carries out, in a research program over a decade and
producing six books, a prodigious archaeological excavation of power so
as to identify among its meanings what is the essential core of the
modern, an explanation of the question of “how did we get to Auschwitz?” and through that genealogy journey finds the origins of the concept of
“Nuda Vita.”[7]
Contemporary life, in the concept of biopolitics proposed by Agamben,
has become a bare life. Life thus conceived is reduced to what is
produced and managed by law. The individuals in a concentration camp are stripped of all rights and political–legal status; their life is
treated, by the agents of power, as matter without human form, naked
life: they are data, figures, biological units that are always
disposable, as opposed to the greater value of the future and the
preservation, paradoxically, of other lives.[8] Under the rule exercised
by the agents of power, Nuda Vita, according to Agamben, gives rise to
the pauperization of human life in general. Among the concentration camp subjects, Agamben focuses on two figures; the Musselman, on the one
hand, represents the most powerless figure in the concentration camp.
Resigned to dying, he is engulfed in humiliation, fear, and horror. On
the other hand, there is the homo sacer, who lives trapped in the middle
of an incongruity; on the one hand, he bears the burden of a crime, but
he is legally unsacrifiable. That is, it is forbidden to subject him to
death at the same time that he has to live knowing that others are
allowed impunity if they kill him.[9] Agamben advances and relates the
nuda vita and the homo sacer as metaphors of modern life and the
concentration camp as its paradigm. In this regard, Múnera and Benavides indicate that:
Bared life [as life for death] is not the simple natural life, but a politically unprotected life, permanently exposed to death or the
humiliations caused, with total impunity, by the sovereign power or by
those who compose it as citizens.[10]
It is inevitable to compare Agamben’s bare life concept with his
statements about the disease and the states of emergency that COVID-19
has generated.
In particular, the intergenerational differences that are promoted in
defense of general well-being are striking. All, but particularly the
older generations, have experienced, in a certain way, being locked in a politically unprotected life, permanently exposed to death. The older
adult has become a Musselman of the twenty-first century, resigned to
death but while being unsacrifiable. His death is an expected result
that, however, is not directly ordered. The death is, in this case,
expected as a natural result of the isolation offered, in European
nursing homes, for instance. His death is considered a natural and
inevitable result. The fact that consideration of the option of saving a patient with a ventilator leans naturally to a question as to who “has a whole life ahead of him,” at no time admits the other option of
considering that choice as a criminal act in respect of other patients
not so saved, puts us face to face with biopower. If the meaning of that
choice seems justifiably natural, it is because in that normalization of
horror lies the essence of the administration of power in the
contemporary age, a power that conserves one life and ends another. This
is the meaning of the criticism that Agamben makes of the health
emergency’s political background, which not only affects the elderly as Musselman of the XXI century but, in general, is directed at all
individuals of Western civilization destined to become a contemporary
homo sacer. For Agamben, the message that sustains the biopolitics of
COVID-19 is based on the promotion of horror: the governmental machine
tells us that “our neighbour has been abolished.”[11]
To analyze how life in the West has been transformed into a simple naked
life due to the pandemic, we have systematically studied all of Giorgio Agamben’s discourse on the health emergency and the changes that are
taking place in some Western democracies. After studying the sixteen
chapters of the book A che punto siamo? L´epidemia come politica we have
come upon an interesting finding: not only can it be verified that we
live in a permanent state of exception, as Agamben presented in his
research, but the pandemic has created a particular religious need to
which the church cannot respond, but to which science can. That is, in
the pandemic crisis science has become the new religion and takes from
religion its forms and strategies of governing life, all the while using scientific arguments.
The author presented his arguments in the face of the COVID-19 crisis,
as quarantines and restrictions on movement were being put into place in Europe, being presented as the most plausible means of handling the
peaks of contagion during 2020. In our study, we have identified that
the progression of Agamben’s argument follows three basic stages, the
first of which is present in his February 2020 publications. Here we can identify the notion of a fear of contagion as a key element.
The central idea raised by Agamben indicates that the management of the COVID-19 crisis has generated “a perverse vicious circle: the limitation
of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire
for security that has been induced by governments themselves, the same governments that are now intervening in order to satisfy that
desire.”[12] In this sense, this fear of contagion forms the fundamental basis of a new form of the traditional transaction between protection
and obedience that has characterized the relationships between modern
states and their citizens.
In his March 11 publication, at one of the most critical moments of the pandemic, Agamben explains that the fear of contagion has made citizens
accept unprecedented restrictions on their freedoms, fuelled by the
uncertainty generated by not being able to identify materially the
source of risk and harm. The second group of arguments follows from the previous ones and supposes the transition from collective fear to
individual isolation, with the deterioration in human relationships that
this produces. These two elements, collective fear and individual
isolation, support the third argument, which leads to the culmination of Agamben´s criticism of governments. More specifically, in Riflessioni
sulla pestee the author claims that the pandemic has reactivated a need
for religion that the church cannot satisfy. This demand for religiosity
is met today by what we refer to as science.
In summary, beyond confirming that we live in a permanent state of
exception, the interesting finding that we would like to highlight is
the emergence of a need for religion that the Church can no longer
satisfy but that science can, even if only through theological
strategies of government.
Agamben describes the theological form of science as a new religion made evident through a discourse disseminated via the media that combines religiosity with science. The author affirms that the obsessive appeal, “especially in the American press, to the word ‘apocalypse’ and to the end of the world is an indication of this.”[13] However, blind faith in science is not only evident in the media’s discourse, but is also
transferred to politics and decision making, that is, to the terrain of sovereignty. The decisions that promote life or end it in the context of
the pandemic have been supported by scientific reasons that are
sometimes contradictory. This reveals to us a science of differing
opinions and prescriptions that range “from the heretical minority
position (also represented by prestigious scientists) of those who deny
the seriousness of the phenomenon to those within the mainstream
orthodox discourse who affirm it and yet radically diverge among
themselves in their opinions on how to deal with the pandemic.”[14]
Contrary to what the essence of science would indicate, some experts (or
some self-defined as such) act like governmental commissioners to define
how life is to be promoted or ended. This situation is similar to that
of a religious conflict, where the role of experts is not always to
reach the best solution but rather “to ensure the favor of the monarch,
who at the time of the past religious disputes that divided
Christianity, took sides according to his interests with one current or
another and imposed his solutions.”[15] In other words, this new “science” of religion comes interweaved with a new biopolitical
government relying on theological strategies. In this article, we will
analyze arguments that explain this change based on Agamben’s work,
mainly his genealogy of sovereignty in his work Il regno e la gloria.
It is indispensable to compare Agamben’s bare life concept with his statements about the disease and the states of emergency that COVID-19
has generated. In particular, the intergenerational differences that are promoted in defense of general societal well-being are striking. All,
but particularly the older generations, have experienced, in a certain
way, being locked into a politically unprotected life, permanently
exposed to death. The older adult has become a Musselman of the
twenty-first century, resigned to death, while being unsacrifiable. His
death is an expected result that, however, is not directly ordered. The
death is, in this case, expected as a natural result of the isolation
they offer, in Europe, for instance, in nursing homes. His death is
considered a natural and inevitable result. The fact that the choice
between saving a young patient with a ventilator leans naturally to who
“has a whole life ahead of him,” at no time admits the option of considering it as a criminal act, puts us face to face with biopower. If
the meaning of that choice tends to naturalize, it is because in that normalization of horror lies the essence of the administration of power
in the contemporary age, a power that drives one life and ends another.
This is the meaning of the criticism that Agamben makes of the health emergency’s political background, which not only affects the elderly as Musselman of the XXI century but, in general, is directed at all
individuals of Western civilization destined to become a contemporary
homo sacer. For Agamben, the message that sustains the biopolitics of
COVID-19 is based on the promotion of horror: the governmental machine
tells us that “our neighbor has been abolished.”[16]
The sovereignty exercised by the governmental powers in this
interpretation by Agamben does not require greater legitimacy than the
very fact of being able to dispose of the lives of subjects. That is,
the decisions of government agents are considered legitimate “by the
simple fact of their sovereignty.”[17] This is what grounds as legal and legitimate the sovereign decision of the attribution of the ventilator
referred to above, where reasons may be given or not since the symptom
and the expression of sovereignty do not need reasons in order to be
exercised.
For Agamben, where this sovereignty is developed is closely related to
the duality between normality and exception that Carl Schmitt raised;
however, it breaks the dichotomous scheme that characterized
Plettenberg’s jurist. Agamben indicates that the sovereign is not the
one who decides in and on the state of exception but rather is the one
capable of maintaining exceptional actions as an area subject to his
control and presenting them as standard actions. Thus, to the old logic: normality – exception – new normality that we would long for with Schmitt’s scheme, Agamben proposes a notion of permanent exceptionality.
If Carl Schmitt went so far as to affirm that “the sovereign is at the
same time, outside and inside the legal order”[18] for his ability to
suspend normality with the declaration of a state of exception and
reinstitute a new legal order, Giorgio Agamben goes one step further: He affirms that his sovereign acts under a self-justifying imperative,
which indicates: “the law is outside itself, and I, the sovereign, who
am outside the law, declare that there is no outside the law.”[19]
While in the Schmittian approach, exceptionality and sovereignty are
attributes of the political struggle,[20] in Agamben, the place of power
and its exercise are transcendent to political groups and actors.
Authority and administration are expressed from a permanent
exceptionality. For that reason, the sovereignty in Agamben is a place,
not a specific actor. The government is a verb rather than a noun. So,
while the sovereign for Schmitt may be a political party, a monarch, a
populist leader, or even, in its last stage, a guerrilla group that
decides in and on the state of exception, for Agamben, that role is the experience of governing, not a specific social actor.[21] That is, it is
not the result of a specific decision-maker but of the social and legal
order that has been built in the West.[22] This form of exceptionality
is expressed permanently, without breaks or claims of new normalities.
For Agamben, sovereignty and the right that emanates from it do not
arise from the pauses of exceptionality that Schmitt proposes because,
in the contemporary West, there is nothing more normal than living in a permanent state of exception. In other words, the state of exception in
Giorgio Agamben’s thought is not characterized by its abnormality and contingency, and it is not explained in terms of “normality to come,”
but instead by its permanence, which is why it is, in most cases, an imperceptible exceptionality.[23]
Although the approach to a permanent state of exception places the
COVID-19 crisis in a broad panorama, the criticisms received by another biopolitics researcher, Roberto Esposito, reflect that it is still too
early to see beyond the “death toll,” as Agamben urges. It is not yet
time to analyze the qualitative effect that the decision to quarantine
humanity and its freedoms will leave in the long term. Specifically,
Esposito indicates to Agamben that the comparison between spending a few
days in isolation in a comfortable Italian middle-class house and the
horror of a concentration camp is implausible and irresponsible.[24]
Esposito is right. However, we should add to his reply that the way
COVID-19 restrictions are assumed is not the same in regions of the
world where, for example, washing hands with soap and water has been a
luxury for centuries. So, Esposito seems to lose sight of the fact that
the exceptional is not dictated by the circumstances in which isolation
is assumed but comes from how we internalize in customs what should not
under any circumstances be accepted.[25] For example, we have
incorporated as something “normal” that enormous regions of the world
live under the quarantine imposed by hunger and misery. Agamben reminds
us that the genuine plague is none other than the meekness with which we
accept to live with exceptional and reprehensible situations.[26]
Finally, this “normalization of the exceptional” is a consequence of sovereignty in the biopolitical era and the permanent state of
exception, and the emergence of COVID-19 is settling into it, like its
most advanced chapter.
3 COVID-19 and democracy: A people that can reign but not govern
Many of the criticisms that Agamben received sought to label him as part
of the “conspiracy theorist paranoiacs” who assign to the states and the capitalist elites the responsibility of having spread fear amongst
citizens when, in fact, capitalism and its government elites have been
highly affected by the crisis capitalism and its government elites have
been the main affected by the crisis. Žižek’s criticism of Agamben, for example, questioned the benefit that the state of emergency could bring
to governments and capitalist elites because, in the end, the emergency
has accentuated, on the one hand, general distrust in the governments
and, on the other hand, an unprecedented economic crisis. Žižek asks
Agamben: what elite would be interested in promoting such a movement
against their interests? The answer in favor of Agamben to this question
can be found in the criticism that Paolo Flores d’Arcais made of Agamben
in MicroMega. For Flores d’Arcais, COVID-19 has not strengthened the
state or capital’s power. This position coincides with that of Žižek. However, the pandemic has been characterized by the appearance of a new “conspiracy of white coats”: doctors and scientists who appear today as depositaries of the “last word” in government on the lives of its
citizens. According to Flores d’Arcais, this is/represents a power more significant than the interests of governments and capital.[27]
If we focus on the way decisions are made in the COVID-19 state of
exception, and in the Agambenian theoretical framework, we will see that governments rely on the medical-scientific argument to justify their
decisions with two benefits to them, such administrators; on the one
hand, they avoid the need to submit their proposals to the demanding deliberation of democratic systems and, on the other hand – with that shortcut and delegation to the scientists – the governments exempt from
their original responsibilities; as simple “operators” of a scientific decision that, after all, is alien to them. So, that last decision of
the “white coats” to which Flores d’Arcais refers is not taken in some way above the governments themselves but is instead used by the latter
as an argument of authority that operates theologically. If we consider
the theological background in which the scientific decisions that
subsequently sustain government actions arise, we see a correlation
between earthly government authorities and “scientific sovereignty.”
This self-power justifies coercive decisions under the irrefutable halo
that medicine offers. In the long term, contrary to what Žižek says,
those measures that in principle seem to affect capital and the states
will strengthen them notably, since the exceptional will become routine,
in an accelerated way and with a high democratic cost that will be
difficult to recover. In the end, with the irrefutable and self-imposed argument of “medical reason,” the governments that have sustained the temporary suspension of the legal order will have been able to justify unprecedented control over the individual and society to protect them
from an unprecedented danger. In summary, by dint of the
medical–political duality, in the crisis of COVID-19, a contemporary
version of the theological–political duality that Agamben studied is
forged to explain that who governs, in the occidental democracies is
that power capable of converting the state of exception into order, and
the world – into a gigantic “concentration camp.” Seen like this, the relationship between theology and politics that can be established in
the decisions taken to contain COVID-19, coming from Agamben, does not correspond in any way with a conspiratorial agenda.
In Agamben’s viewpoint, the world configured as a concentration camp
predates COVID-19; in fact, it is as old as Western societies’ very formation. How does Agamben explain why we got to this point? Agamben
considers that the West’s history is the history of creating a bipolar biopolitical “governmental machine” that operates theologically on human lives, despite having eliminated the need to sustain its actions in some essence or primary political substance: the machinery of government that
does not need to refer to a divine foundation and, nevertheless, is
always presented as a sacred institution.[28]
The biopolitical government is clothed with celestial majesty without
properly a divine substance from which its authority emanates. In Il
regno e la gloria, Agamben performs a genealogical exercise of modern government. He explains the emergence of this governmental machine,
moving back to the Judeo-Christian theological origins. This
genealogical development is highly relevant for understanding Agamben’s criticism of the global state of exception that has unleashed through
COVID-19. Agamben’s research allows us to understand that modern Western culture has built a type of government that can dispense with the need
to refer its decisions to a fundamental, essential, and superior power
and, even so, operate under theological principles. The modern
understood in this way does not presuppose, much less arise from, the
rupture between substance and form, nor the separation between
auctoritas and potestas. Rather, the modern invokes the discovery of an
absent, immobile divine power, whose sacredness depends not on itself,
but on the glorification of those who, without being God, have assumed
the management of its praxis on earth.
In modern government the providential and scientific levels – that of power and that of authority–make up two poles that cooperate: they
maintain the place of the sacred as an empty throne, that is, without a specific substance and, at the same time, they preserve the sacredness
in the management rites that, “in the name of the sacred,” are carried
out by angels, ministers, shepherds, saints for each prayer and, in
general, all the bureaucratic machinery responsible for religious
praxis. To reach this conclusion, Agamben faces the task of creating a genealogy of government, similar to that carried out by Foucault while
going beyond Foucault’s work. Concurrently, the French philosopher finds
in the pastoral work of the first two centuries of Christianity the authentically modern moment that found the birth of political power in
the theological contamination of the human government’s world. Let us remember that for Foucault, this moment is characterized by transforming
power into a properly human management attribute, that is, detached from transcendental sovereignty. Modern political power, that is, the
capacity to provide security, administration, and management to the
state, would be born, in Foucault’s perspective, from that pastoral
power, in essence, private, and oriented to the economic technique that
the priests and first Christian leaders carried out on their flock and
over each one his “sheeps.”[29] For his part, in various theological treatises, Agamben analyzes how the political is also present in the
origins of Jewish and Christian religious dogmatic discourses. Agamben explains, for example, that the term oikonomia, which characterizes the
first private management of the “pater familias,” not only has the political implications that we know today in the states but also had and
has profound theological implications to which Foucault did not pay
enough attention. Thus, the domestic administration to which modern
oikonomia refers is part of both the theological and the political.[30]
For example, the Holy Trinity expresses a form of political management
of the world; the economy is applied as an internal articulation that
favors its praxis. Due to the internal connection that the three
elements that compose it are unity and, at the same time, plurality of
actions; here, the economy not only acts as a metaphor, of the modern separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers – as
Foucault indicated – but they constitute – according to Agamben – its historical origin since it took place first in theology and later in politics.[31] In summary, through an analysis of theological treatises,
which are in themselves an invaluable finding,[32] Agamben overcomes, on
the one hand, the causal link between theology and politics and, on the
other hand, questions the overvalued secularization of present
theological concepts, for example, those of Carl Schmitt. For Agamben,
theology is at the base of politics in the same way that politics was at
the base of theology from its origins. The problematic issue has been
that the bureaucratic apparatus of “domestic administrators,” those who today issue movement restriction orders, for example, has evolved to the current forms of absolute control over a social life, without the
substance or foundation of those measures coming from absolute power.
Although Agamben refers to ancient theological texts, he argues that
these texts have implications for understanding the current political
decline, the tendency to authoritarianism, and the crisis of liberal democracies. He considers that the contemporary era is characterized by
the total triumph of life’s economic government in all its dimensions.
With his genealogy, Agamben shows that life’s objectification as an administrable good has not always been the prevailing paradigm. On the contrary, Agamben explains that the birth of the modern perspective on
power is located precisely in the separation between two paradigms and
the subsequent autonomy of one over the other: political theology and
economic theology. In the first, God’s will is the origin of sovereign
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