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Foucault:
"The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies–this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city"
"The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies–this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city"
"In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague"
--Discipline and Punish
https://amzn.to/2you5nK
--Discipline and Punish
https://amzn.to/2you5nK
Roberto Esposito in "Cured to the Bitter End":
"I would personally avoid making any sort of comparison between maximum security prisons and a two-week quarantine in the Po Lowlands" https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/02/28/curati-a-oltranza/
"I would personally avoid making any sort of comparison between maximum security prisons and a two-week quarantine in the Po Lowlands" https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/02/28/curati-a-oltranza/
"We witness a politicization of medicine, invested with tasks of social control that do not belong to it – which explains the extremely heterogeneous assessments virologists are making on the nature and gravity of the coronavirus"
Sergio Benvenuto:
"But I also know that my relative disregard, though rationally based, is civically reprehensible: were I a good citizen I should behave as if I were panic-stricken" https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/03/05/benvenuto-in-clausura
"But I also know that my relative disregard, though rationally based, is civically reprehensible: were I a good citizen I should behave as if I were panic-stricken" https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/03/05/benvenuto-in-clausura
"Note that in the case of the 'Spanish' flu political power acted in exactly the opposite way as it is doing today: it concealed the epidemic, because in most cases the countries involved were at war"
More from Benvenuto:
"I am often surprised how often many philosophers need to be reminded of something that, paraphrasing Hamlet, sounds like: There are more politics in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
"I am often surprised how often many philosophers need to be reminded of something that, paraphrasing Hamlet, sounds like: There are more politics in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan:
"India has for long been full of exceptional peoples, making meaningless the notion of 'state of exception' or of 'extending' it"
"India has for long been full of exceptional peoples, making meaningless the notion of 'state of exception' or of 'extending' it"
Rocco Ronchi:
"The isolation, mistrust and suspicion the virus causes, make it alternatively 'populist' and 'sovereignist'. The emergency measures it forces upon us seem to universalize the 'state of exception'...has inherited from the political theology of the 20th century"
"The isolation, mistrust and suspicion the virus causes, make it alternatively 'populist' and 'sovereignist'. The emergency measures it forces upon us seem to universalize the 'state of exception'...has inherited from the political theology of the 20th century"
"An event is always traumatic to the point we may say that if there is no trauma there is no event, that if there is no trauma, literally nothing has happened. What exactly do events do? Events produce transformations that prior to their taking place were not even possible"
More from Ronchi:
"It follows that an event can only be thought of starting from the future it generates (and not from the past), because it transforms, because it creates that which is real, and with it possibility"
"It follows that an event can only be thought of starting from the future it generates (and not from the past), because it transforms, because it creates that which is real, and with it possibility"
"Covid 19 also possesses this virtue: it commands politics to take on its specific responsibility, it returns the primacy
that politics had delusionally left to other sovereign spheres, becoming subordinate to them... and limiting itself to playing an exclusively technical role"
that politics had delusionally left to other sovereign spheres, becoming subordinate to them... and limiting itself to playing an exclusively technical role"
Not sure I fully grasp this, but I think it gets at something important:
Here's Giorgio Agamben responding to some of the other interventions:
Interestingly put from Agamben:
"But a war against an invisible enemy that can nestle in any other human being is the most absurd of wars. It is, to be
truthful, a civil war. The enemy isn’t somewhere outside, it’s inside us"
"But a war against an invisible enemy that can nestle in any other human being is the most absurd of wars. It is, to be
truthful, a civil war. The enemy isn’t somewhere outside, it’s inside us"
Benvenuto responds again:
"The danger lies everywhere, even in a child, a grandparent, a lover… The basic signifying oppositions of our Schmittian being political animals – us versus them, me versus the other – collapse and we’re all equally dangerous"
"The danger lies everywhere, even in a child, a grandparent, a lover… The basic signifying oppositions of our Schmittian being political animals – us versus them, me versus the other – collapse and we’re all equally dangerous"
"A young friend of mine keeps me at a distance of at least three meters and smiles. I very much appreciate this non-gesture of his, because I know that it is mainly he who is trying to protect me; because I’m old"
