The Epidemic, the Sovereign, and the Age of (Mis)Information: Giorgio Agamben vs. Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract

This essay discusses the recent works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben on the coronavirus. Quite some continental thinkers, such as Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek, offered their take on the epidemic already, yet those of Nancy and Agamben gained the most traction in the field. In the first section we elaborate Agamben’s somewhat formidable interpretation of “the invention” of the epidemic: Agamben apparently believed the epidemic to be one more biopolitical device deployed by governments to suit the masses. In the second section we present Nancy’s account of the philosophical consequences of the epidemic. Nancy’s work is, in large part, an oblique response to Agamben’s position, insisting that science and medicine would be the least bad mode of procedure available to halt the epidemic. It is, furthermore, not a question of the free, unlimited ego against biopolitical systems but rather of recognizing our frailty since all egos, well before saying ‘I’, are bound to each other from the very outset. The third section considers the most important critiques of Agamben’s work, which has caused quite the debate, in the secondary literature. The thesis of this article is that these, somehow, affirm the correctness of Nancy’s account of the epidemic on a number of themes, such as the fate of the sovereign, and sovereignty in an age of (mis)information: even the sovereign is not absolute. Yet, even if true, I will wonder: if there is too much critique of our democratic institutions in Agamben, is there enough critique of democracy in Nancy’s work? Are we satisfied with a spirituality alone?

Keywords: Coronavirus, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, sovereignty, information