Where Are We Now?
Douban
The Epidemic as Politics
Giorgio Agamben translator: VALERIA DANI
overview
Renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben presents his fierce, passionate, and deeply personal commentaries regarding the 2020 health emergency as it played out in Italy and across the world.
Alongside and beyond accusations, these texts reflect upon the great transformation affecting Western democracies. In the name of biosecurity and health, the model of bourgeois democracy—together with its rights, institutions, and constitutions—is surrendering everywhere to a new despotism where citizens accept unprecedented limitations to their freedoms.
The push to accept this new normal leads to the urgency of the volume’s title: Where Are We Now? For how long will we accept living in a constantly extended state of exception, the end of which remains impossible to see?
contents
Introduction
1. The Invention of an Epidemic
2. Contagion
3. Clarifications
4. Where Are We Now?
5. Reflections on the Plague
6. The Epidemic Shows That the State of Exception Has Become the Rule
7. Social Distancing
8. A Question
9. Bare Life
10. New Reflections
11. On Truth and Falsity
12. Medicine as Religion
13. Biosecurity and Politics
14. Polemos Epidemios
15. Requiem for the Students
16. Two Infamous Terms
17. Law and Life
18. State of Emergency and State of Exception
19. The Face and the Mask
20. What Is Fear?
21. On the Time to Come
