The Prophet of Covid Tyranny

One major exception to the uncritical posture toward this new policy regime—a posture that became especially inflexible among intellectuals of the left—was Giorgio Agamben. The Italian philosopher had been writing for decades about the use of the “state of exception” to suspend normal freedoms and restraints on the exercise of power. This same line of analysis, which secured his intellectual influence in the aftermath of 9/11, made him a pariah during the Covid era. On Feb. 26, 2020, just five days after the provinces of Lodi and Padua enacted the first lockdowns outside China, Agamben published a column entitled “The Invention of an Epidemic” in the communist daily il manifesto. A considerable portion of the column is taken up with simply enumerating the severe limitations on basic freedoms facilitated by Italy’s emergency decree, which permitted such measures to be taken as soon as a single positive case was registered in a given region.