It’s something of a relief to be reminded that Terror Derangement has not completely overrun Canada. This quite lengthy meditation by David Cayley begins with a defence of Giorgio Agamben (Simon Elmer has done so at much greater length on the ASH blog, I recommend unreservedly) before focusing in to muse, in a way, upon “What would Ivan Illich say”.
(Cayley has a biography to sell, perhaps I should add, which may explain why he selects this particular lens.)
Palaver and Dupuy are concerned with what they call the protection or preservation of life. Both argue that those who “minimize” the pandemic, criticize the measures taken against it, or flout the rules for its containment are recklessly endangering their neighbours. Both focus particularly on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben as the epitome of this recklessness. Agamben has argued throughout the pandemic that the official response has amounted to destroying the village in order to save it. By leaving the old to die alone and unconsoled, by making people afraid of one another, and by banning funerals, church services and other elementary forms of social and cultural life, he has written, we have eviscerated what is left of our way of life, and allowed medicine to establish itself as an all-powerful and virtually incontestable religious cult. Dupuy is outspoken in his criticisms. Agamben’s “intellectual posturing,” he writes, is the “soft version” of the same “reactionary violence” as one sees in “American far-right groups…shouting, guns in hand, in front of the steps of their legislatures.” This is already unfair and entirely ad hominem, but then Dupuy goes further. With respect to Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” by which Agamben clearly and explicitly means life without the cultural qualifications that give life narrative shape and dignity, Dupuy claims as an implication of this concept that Agamben must “despise… the simple, ‘animal’ life of the poor landless peasants of the Brazilian northeast.”
Earlier essays by the same author, in reverse order, include these:
Here is Simon Elmer’s translation of Agamben btw