The work of Agamben and Baudrillard shares a deep and necessary distrust of the contemporary nation state. In “Form of Life,” we find Agamben, like Baudrillard, uncomfortably at home in the uncertainty of our times, attempting to provide a challenge to the system which envelopes us. Agamben is a proponent of thought and writing against the systemic forces of science and technology. For Agamben a political life is aimed at the one thing that makes us human – the fact that happiness is always at stake in our living – essential to our form-of-life as humans. For Agamben life can never be separated from its form-of-life but this is precisely what political power attempts to do today as what Agamben terms “pseudo-scientific” ideology has invented the term “biological life” as the secularized term for “naked life.” Naked life, for Agamben is now the dominant form of life everywhere because political power has succeeded in founding itself on a separation of naked life from “form-of-life”.
I think of Agamben when Baudrillard speaks of his own “virtual state of rupture” with the political world and it is precisely this break, the lack of system commitments, that make both he and Agamben such acute commentators on the (trans)political today. Baudrillard has long identified the state with the management of “the epidemic of consensus” from which terrorism, ridiculous and destined to failure as it is, protects us. Indeed, the state and terrorism both serve the system well. The state has held us nuclear hostages since the end of World War II, and now the entire planet is reduced to a battleground for the war against terrorism. Today terrorism and the state have become “accomplices in a circular set-up where terrorism makes no more sense than the state does.
Taken together, the thought of Agamben and Baudrillard anticipates a kind of escape velocity from the tired formulas and repressing structures of the present and its seeming slide into the inhuman. Agamben recognizes not only that the “state of emergency” is not the exception but the rule in modern political power, while perceptively pointing out that political power works very hard to produce emergency and in so doing attempts to construct “naked life” as the dominant form of life everywhere (which is the hidden foundation of modern political power). This is not far from Baudrillard’s focus on the “police state globalization” and “total control” of the “terror” of economic deregulation and liberal globalization which “ends up in a maximum of constraints and restrictions, akin to those of a fundamentalist society”.15 For Baudrillard, a survivor of the twentieth century, the century of the camps, of Stalin, and of the stillborn but enforced consumer freedoms of the West, “terrorism is still a lesser evil than a police state capable of ending it”. As he wrote over two decades ago:
…what kind of state would be capable of dissuading and annihilating all terrorism in the bud…? It would have to arm itself with such terrorism and generalize terror on every level. If this is the price of security, is everybody deep down dreaming of this?
Here we find Baudrillard’s position very close to Agamben’s assessment of the state of exception: “If the terms were not contradictory, one would say that security has become our destiny…”an“ overprotected species which, in their domestication, are dying of too much security”.
The Invention of An Epidemic’: Agamben (2020) endorses in the way Covid-19 has enabled the tendency to use a state of exception as a normal paradigm for government. He argues:
Faced with the frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded emergency measures adopted against an alleged epidemic of Faced with the frenetic coronavirus ... . why do the media and the authorities do their utmost to spread a state of panic, thus provoking an authentic state of exception with serious limitations on movement and a suspension of daily life in entire regions? (Agamben, 2020, https://www.quodlibet.it/ giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia)
Agamben is concerned about ‘the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal paradigm of government’ where the law has imposed serious limitations on freedom, and he lists the following:
(a) prohibition on the removal from the municipality or area concerned by all individuals present in the municipality or area; (b) prohibition of access to the municipality or area concerned; (c) suspension of events or initiatives of any kind, of events and of any form of meeting in a public or private place, including cultural, recreational, sporting and religious, even if held in closed places open to the public; (d) suspension of educational services for children and schools of all levels, as well as the frequency of school and higher education activities, except for distance learning activities; (e) suspension of the opening services to the public of museums and other cultural institutes and places ... ; (f) suspension of all educational trips, both on national and foreign territory; (g) suspension of bankruptcy proceedings and of the activities of public offices, without prejudice to the provision of essential and public utility services; (h) application of the quarantine measure with active surveillance among individuals who have had close contacts with confirmed cases of diffuse infectious disease.... It would seem that once terrorism is exhausted as a cause for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext to extend them beyond all limits. ... in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for security that has been prompted by the governments themselves who now intervene to satisfy it. https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia
‘A biopolitical dream’: Philipp Sarasin (2020) commenting on Foucault’s biopolitics in order to understand the pandemic, sums up the apogee of the modern conception of politics constituted in terms of the biological:
It looks like a biopolitical dream: governments, advised by physicians, impose pandemic dictatorship on entire populations. Getting rid of all democratic obstacles under the pretext of “health,” even “survival,” they are finally able to govern the population as they have, more or less openly, always done in modernity: as pure “biomass,” as “bare life” to be exploited.
He indicates three models by which modern societies have regulated populations during pandemic events: first, ‘The complete lockdown of Wuhan rigorously follows the plague model, and every curfew ultimately does so, too’; second, the liberal smallpox model of power – ‘The strategy to #flatten the curve means to reckon with the pathogen and to know that it cannot be eradicated, but to “extend” its distribution over time in such a way that the health system can handle it’; third, the old leprosy model ‘is lurking in the background’ ... ‘let old people die “to save the economy”‘—or abandon retirement and nursing homes .
In terms of COVID-19 we can significantly add to the analysis of Foucault-Agamben line by acknowledging a political rationality for the quarantine and social distancing of the pandemic that seems to suggest a common theme: the ‘quarantined subject’ and ‘staying at home’.
There is too much for a review, but I can give you an overview. In “One World Digital Dictatorship,” Korsgaard describes the social credit system that is being put in place in China. The social credit system is a behavior control system.The digital revolution allows mass spying, and China is using the capability to develop a real time profile of every citizen. A citizen’s social credit profile determines whether they may go to university, have a passport, a driving license, qualify for a loan, or have a pet. The individual loses all privacy and all autonomy and conforms his behavior to the government’s standard. In another essay, “The Future of Life in a Digital Gulag,” Korsgaard compares life in the digital world to solitary confinement in prison. He describes the ongoing work of American academics who are advocating “moral enhancement pills” in order to manipulate individuals’ moral behaviors by biological means in order to achieve conformity with desired behavior as determined by our controllers. The disregard of our constitutional protections by university professors should alarm us all. Many are committed to totalitarian control. All of us need to expand our minds and develop our awareness of the rising threats to us as individuals who make our own choices. If we are unaware of the intention to turn us into Borgs, we cannot resist.