Governing an emergency: a critical review of Agamben’s analysis of the Pandemic

Abstract

Throughout the pandemic generated by the coronavirus, the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben emerged as one of the most critical voices against the measures implemented by Western governments to manage it. Our objective is to carry out an analysis of the policies deployed during the pandemic in a Foucauldian key that allows us to glimpse the need for new frameworks to understand our present. First, we examine Agambenin’s analysis of the state of exception, underlining the need to think about how emergencies introduce a whole set of transformations in the relations between law and order. Secondly, we expose the author’s postulates around the figure of the untore as a figure of contagion. We establish how the governance of emergencies emergencies enables a continuity between phenomena by politically framing them as emerging threats that must be monitored.Thirdly, we revisit the notion of the nuda vida which, for Agamben, made it possible to situate the concentration camp as a paradigm of biopolitical governmentality. We argue that this concept is inadequate to analyze the conflict between “making live” and “letting die” which, during the pandemic, generated an intense debate around the question of triage.