Agamben og "flensan"

Fín grein þar sem Giorgio Agamben er gagnrýndur fyrir illa grundaða andstöðu sína við sóttvarnaráðstafanir.

Tilvitnun:

"The problem is that Agamben has offered no philosophical tools to formulate any collective answer to the question of what matters most to us. Agamben has always been a man of the left, albeit an idiosyncratic anti-Marxist anarchist, but his apparent overlap with the right wing in his pandemic writings is no accident. If any action by the state, including by state medical authorities, is always intrinsically oppressive, then we have no alternative but to fall back on our own individuality—exactly the libertarian position that the right wing has used for decades to cut off in advance any effort to challenge existing power structures.

In Agamben s case, excessive distrust of any state authority has blinded him to the ways that individualistic approaches to the pandemic have reinforced corporate power while exacerbating the pandemic. The so-called essential workers, along with so many others, have been reduced to disposable bare life, not by direct state intervention, but by policies that claim to set them free. Whatever isolated insights we might be able to glean from Agamben s pandemic writings, a political thinker who can t see the ways that Western structures of power victimize us through our very freedom is missing a great deal—in fact, nearly everything."