Agamben, the Virus, and the Biopolitical: a Riposte

The text is a philosophical critique of Agamben’s much debated response to the coronavirus pandemic and the states of emergency declared. It argues not against its (mis)interpretation of the force of the new pathogen but revisits instead the conceptual apparatus of its support: the “biopolitical,” “bare life,” “state of exception.” In the first part, the writing questions these (old) concepts, as developed in other texts by Agamben (Homo Sacer, State of Exception), and as inherited from Foucault, Benjamin, and Arendt, with regard to their “contemporaneity” today: at the time of a globalizing epidemic, the “geocide” on course, (Michel Deguy), the climate “collapse.” In the second part, the essay turns to Deleuze’s concept of a life in order to do justice to, to recuperate, a dimension of living that is neither “good life” nor reducible to “bare life.”