key: cord-0867501-m5r09y83
authors: Mitropoulos, Angela
title: The pandemic, and the pandemonium of European philosophy
date: 2020-09-04
journal: Polit Geogr
DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102275
sha: ba144d0a5cb3b908ca1d0047655b060342f5a8da
doc_id: 867501
cord_uid: m5r09y83

nan

Writing for Il Manifesto on February 26, Giorgio Agamben argued that "emergency measures adopted [by the Italian government] for a supposed epidemic of coronavirus" were "frantic, irrational, and absolutely unwarranted emergency measures." In support of this, he cited the Italian National Research Council (INRC) February 22 statement, going on to argue that "[i]t is almost as if with terrorism exhausted as the cause for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic offered the ideal pretext to uphold them beyond any limitation" (Agamben, 2020) .

While the pandemic may have laid bare the unequal patterning of health, ill-health and death, it has also highlighted the mystification-by some of the most esteemed European philosophers of a generation-of the conditions of private property that have given rise to those patterns. This mystification has persisted and become entrenched in subsequent debates, continuing to gloss over of the links between private property and nationalism (inasmuch as sovereignty is a variety of property law).

That is, much of the subsequent discussion around Agamben's statements has elided the conditions of quarantines and lockdowns. Far from representing the intrusion of public law on private (economic) spaces as Agamben implies, lockdowns have encouraged the displacement of risk on to individuals and private households, whose chances of survival become determined by access and connection to infrastructures of care, food, communication and, not least, inherited wealth. This applies equally to the distorted concept of "herd immunity" advanced by the Conservative government in the UK and practiced by the federalization and privatization of healthcare and welfare in the US. These governments have enabled the virus to cut a predictable path of destruction through existing patterns of private household wealth and ill-health-that is, geographies of race and class in which risk has been conditioned by public law, and both enforced and displaced as private risk. I illustrate this at greater length in Pandemonium (Mitropoulos, 2020d) .

But the key point here is that a tacit naturalization of the household, and consequent neglect of inequalities both within and between actual households, is a pervasive confounding error in political philosophy. It invites perennial, dead-end debates between negative and positive concepts of "liberty," to borrow Isaiah Berlin's terminology (1959) . Rarely does it raise explicit consideration of the tenets of private property law that underwrite the idea of legal personhood and "potential" (or life chances) implicit in both concepts of liberty (cf. Harris, 1993; Mitropoulos, 2020a; Moreton-Robinson, 2015) . This error sets the racialized (and gendered) limits on presumptions of destiny and reckonings of justice through the course of the pandemic.

Responding to Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy objects that the cause of pandemic-related deaths is not government, whom he describes as "nothing more than grim executioners." For Nancy, the real culprit is "globalisation" and the intensification of "technical interconnections" which grow "at the same rate as the population," resulting in "a longer life expectancy, hence an increase in the number of elderly people and, in general, of people at risk" (Nancy, 2020b; .

On the one hand, this argument falls back to a naturalist version of economic liberalism-that is, the definition of biopolitics as "the politicization of life" (Mitropoulos, 2012, pp. 59-62) . Public law is thereby presented as an infringement on (or politicization of) the presumably natural laws that govern a mysterious life-or, as Roberto Esposito recently put it: "domains that were once considered exclusively natural" (2020). Why Agamben distinguishes between public and private law, given his work on oikonomia, is a much longer discussion (Agamben, 2011; Mitropoulos, 2012) . But the hold of Natural Law on the European philosophical imagination is remarkable.

On the other hand, in line with phenomenological approaches, deconstruction anxiously circles the abyss of private property's contingent foundations, only to render that contingency into a fatal necessity. To his discredit, Heidegger retrieved ontological destiny from the abyss by embracing nationalism. Despite previous criticisms of Heidegger, Nancy erases centuries of plague before the 20th century so as to apply a Heideggerian view of technology as the transgression of the purportedly natural boundaries between peoples ("globalisation"). He goes on to imbue the pandemic with an inevitability by invoking Malthus' eschatological concept of "overpopulation."

Despite their differences, these arguments ground themselves in the overly familiar conflation in Natural Law, natural philosophy and a related Aristotelian or formal categorical logic of, on the one hand, private property and, on the other, the properties of things. It is however important to recall that conflation of private property and intrinsic properties in Natural Law accounts is the epistemic pivot of oikonomia-which, in Aristotle, gave rise to the concept of natural slavery As to the pandemic, its circumstances are not those imagined by Aristotelian philosophy and the classical sciences, according to which the validity of a law is derived from the intrinsic properties or "essence" of a thing and its proper classification. Yet Agamben's reasoning is Aristotelian or syllogistic: having read a description of symptoms as if it were a classification of properties ("a kind of flu"), he concludes that the laws are invalid, or "irrational, and absolutely unwarranted." They are however far closer to that of quantum physics: the apparatuses of measurement and validity (epidemiology), the conditions of the experiment (healthcare in the absence of a vaccine or known treatments), and the practices of observation converge to alter the course and described properties of the subatomic particle (the course of the virus).

For while the INRC statement was poorly worded for a nonepidemiological readership, Agamben misconstrues the meaning of epidemiological statements. That is, epidemiology is treated as if it were a neutral, geographically consistent apparatus with respect to knowledge of the properties of the virus, the course of the disease and definitions of risk.

Firstly, it may well have been technically true that, on February 22, "there is [or was] no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy." Yet "epidemic" is a statistical, variable, incomplete and nationalist category. Its accuracy depends on the scope of testing, and it yields an incomplete and conditional number. Its method of accounting is exclusive of confirmed cases that are not a result of travel or contact with someone who has traveled beyond national borders. Conversely, it is inclusive of confirmed instances of "community transmission" (those who have not "crossed borders"), and depends on the number of cases of a defined population rising to a threshold before being classed as an epidemic.

Even leaving aside that what is confirmed today of infection rates may not be true tomorrow, and the impact of preventative measures, epidemiology's reliance on nationalist methods of classification-the endemic, epidemic and pandemic, and concept of community transmission-encourages the mistaken view that these are quantitative indices. They are, however, qualitative categories associated with divergent system of national and global health governance. Epidemiology, as the statistical branch of medicine, has certainly altered its methods over a century, but it still mathematically encodes a border or limit through formulated delineations of variables, constants, and spaces of equivalence (Mitropoulos, 2020d, pp. 62-65) .

Still, it is unclear why Agamben did not read World Health Organization statements for comparison. He is not alone in having treated an implicitly nationalist (qualitative), incomplete and variable number as an index of the seriousness or extent of the disease-one that evokes the taxonomic implication that the disease is foreign. Similarly, Nancy's claim that "the coronavirus pandemic is, on every level, a product of globalisation" is a tautology. All pandemics are, by definition, international. That Nancy opts to treat this taxonomy and its traversal as deterministic implies a nationalist explanation of the causes of disease that is deeply Aristotelian.

Secondly, nor is Agamben alone in conflating a description of symptoms ("a kind of flu") with rough predictions of overall mortality risk of a defined population (described as "low" by the INRC)-while mistaking the conditions of both. In February, David Graeber derided the "global panic over what is basically a bad flu" (2020). And, while Nancy was correct to respond that, unlike influenza, there is no vaccine or standard treatments, his subsequent argument erases the significance of this point. Thus, each treats epidemiology and risk profiles as if these measured an independently-existing and uniform reality-and as if they were not, as with other forms of mapping, conditional, incomplete and linked to geographic systems that modify reality, including the course of disease and described risk ratio. Moreover, the tragedy of deaths from influenza is that they are preventable. But vaccine availability means there is no cascade of healthcare system and adjacent failures because most health and care workers seek out regular vaccination.

Further, where the taxonomy of epidemics and pandemics defines populations along national lines, the use of risk profiles and ratios derived from defined populations can render them as abstractly alike when omitting a crucial variable: the role and structure of care systems. The privatization of China's healthcare is one factor (Mitropoulos, 2020d, p. 8) . While Italy has a nominally national healthcare system, it has been subject to a period of austerity and relies heavily on unpaid, gendered care work in households. The rate of reproduction number (R0), no less than the averaged mortality rate of a given country, is not a universal or transcendent law of physics. It has been and can be changed. Finally, the most serious omission in Agamben's argument, preserved by many of his critics, is neglect of the principal question: Which measures are effective in stemming the transmission of respiratory infections, and this disease in particular? As I argued, quarantine promotes the identification of disease with groups of people (racialization and stigmatization) and is an unreliable method of interrupting the transmission of infectious diseases because it is based on intuitive knowledge of exposure (not testing) and organized through congregation (Mitropoulos, 2020c; 2020d) . Proponents of the quarantine continue to carelessly conflate quarantine, medical isolation of verified cases, and physical distancing.

What, then, requires explanation is why, after almost a century of being pushed to the margins of legal personhood and empire, the quarantine has spontaneously reappeared as a key measure for managing the health of populations. Foucault's descriptions of the medieval quarantine are a vivid precedent. However, his claim that the quarantine would disappear along with the eclipse of territorial discipline was not a lack of prescience than the more consistent assumption that biopolitics means the politicization of life. Nor was it an epochal overstatement that-despite Foucault's cautions against treating shifts in regimes of power as complete and remarkably few references to biopolitics-became unduly canonized by others as a Foucauldian theory of biopolitics. These nuances would hold more weight had Foucault not increasingly put forward rather romantic accounts of the ethics of the noble household, aristocratic parrhesia, and patriarchal clericalism (Pecora, 1997; Afary & Anderson, 2010; Mitropoulos, 2020b, pp. 98-99) . Either way, concepts of biopolitics that mystify a primordial "life, as such" by implicitly treating it as governed by a natural law are primed to omit critical attention to the oikonomic (racial, gendered and colonial) dynamics that set the moving thresholds of living, (property) rights, and exploitation. This neglect has unfortunately shaped Agamben's (and Nancy's) responses to the pandemic.

The broader answer to why the quarantine has assumed a central role is that its epistemology aligns with the resurgence of ethnonationalism, the far Right and conservative jurisprudence-all of which turn on categorical reasoning, some explicitly in deference to Natural Law. Neoliberalism never represented the eclipse of territoriality. Instead, neoliberalism conserved and reconfigured an oikonomic division between private, "self-regulated" governance and authoritarian control over the movements of populations. With the pandemic, the conditioning of life chances by assets and inherited wealth across that oikonomic division is grimly unambiguous. The pandemic calls for better than the rehearsal of rival positions within economic liberalism or the categorical fatalism of Natural Law.

Foucault and the Iranian revolution: Gender and the seductions of islamism

The kingdom and the glory: For a theological genealogy of economy and government

Lo stato d'eccezione provocato da un'emergenza immotivata'. Il Manifesto

Two concepts of liberty: An inaugural lecture delivered before the university of oxford on 31

Curati a oltranza'. Antinomie

Whiteness as property

Contract & contagion: From biopolitics to oikonomia. Wivenhoe

The hostile takeover: Human rights after corporate personhood

Against quarantine'. New inquiry

Pandemonium: Proliferating borders of capital and the pandemic swerve

The white possessive: Property, power, and indigenous sovereignty

Eccezione Virale'. Antinomie, February

A much too human virus

Households of the soul