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Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics

Mar 06, 2023 Social Engineering

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

 

 

Fear makes thinking harder, yet there is an urgent need to think and to question every aspect of our current situation. The philosopher, which Agamben truly embodies, is a figure that must be heeded.

 

— Nina Power, Roehampton University

 

Agamben’s book title emphasizes a vital but all too often unappreciated question. By way of answer, he worries that we are collectively and individually in a very dangerous place that, contrary to popular opinion, has little to do with a virus or pandemic.

 

— T. Allan Hillman, University of South Alabama

 

Renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben presents his fierce, passionate, and deeply personal commentaries regarding the 2020 health emergency as it played out in Italy and across the world.

Alongside and beyond accusations, these texts reflect upon the great transformation affecting Western democracies. In the name of biosecurity and health, the model of bourgeois democracy—together with its rights, institutions, and constitutions—is surrendering everywhere to a new despotism where citizens accept unprecedented limitations to their freedoms.

The push to accept this new normal leads to the urgency of the volume’s title: Where Are We Now? For how long will we accept living in a constantly extended state of exception, the end of which remains impossible to see?”

 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538157602/Where-Are-We-Now-The-Epidemic-as-Politics

 

[Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life; Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; Profanations; The Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.]
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