Foucault and Agamben are wrong – Covid proves the State has a role in protection and mediation divorced from capitalism

But what doesn’t make sense in Agamben’s critique is his insistence that economics now trumps all politics. The state’s response to the pandemic does not reflect the displacement that he fears but rather indicates a moment where politics gains traction over the economy. Agamben’s analysis is revelatory insofar as it gets the situation precisely backwards. The state’s political interventions occur in spite of the damage that they do to the capitalist economy. The pandemic prompts a political decision that interrupts capital’s dominance. But Agamben fails to see this because he doesn’t separate theoretically the workings of the state from those of capital, which is the defining error of the theory of biopower. At various points, Agamben rails against social distancing, lockdowns, and even mask mandates. All of the means that states use to fight against the explosion of the pandemic receive his scorn, and none receive his endorsement. If Agamben had his way, the vulnerable would simply be left to die, but at least they would die outside the paradigm of biopower. (21) As Agamben sees it, the responses represent the choice of preserving bare life over sustaining a form of life, which renders them complicit with the contemporary dominance of biopower. (22) Opting for survival over a livable form of life leaves us with a world in which no one can live. Or, as Agamben puts it in one of his short texts on the pandemic, “Bare life – and the danger of losing it – is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them. Other human beings … are now seen solely as possible spreaders of the plague whom one must avoid at all costs and from whom one needs to keep oneself at a distance of at least a meter.” (23) Agamben attacks the distancing used to stop the spread of the disease. As he sees it, social distancing is the worst type of oxymoron: distance entails the annihilation of sociality. Social and distance have nothing to do with each other. But here we can begin to see the error that runs through Agamben’s critique of the response to the pandemic and that ultimately undermines the theory of biopower. Both Foucault and Agamben exhibit a blindness to the role that mediation plays in social relations, a mediation that works through distance. By keeping a distance from each other, we do not act antisocially. Instead, we uphold the social bond insofar as we utilize forms of mediation. Sociality occurs when I exchange letters, have a conversation, or engage in a discussion. All of these forms of sociality rely on the mediation of language, which connects us to each other by separating us. The mediation of language provides the basis for the social bond, but it does so at the cost of actual proximity. When I relate to the other through words, these words enact a barrier between us, but this barrier is an enabling one. This mediation creates the bond through distance and enable the bond to exist through the separation that subjects have from each other. Social distance makes sociability possible through the creation of an interstitial space that mediates between the various subjects. I can interact with the other because the mediation of the public world gives me breathing space where the other is not over-present. In contrast to familial relations that involve proximity, the social bond holds us together through distance. Far from being an oxymoron, social distance represents the only possible form of sociality. The move from proximity to distance is the move from the closed connection of the family to the open bond of the society. Instead of recognizing distance as the sine qua non of sociality, Agamben ties our social being to proximity, which is why he recoils from the term social distance. The inability to recognize the necessity of mediation is also operative in Agamben’s critique of the state. He fails to see that the state is not just a sovereign authority. It represents the ultimate end point of mediation, providing a terrain on which subjects can engage with each other without simply colliding. (24) The state form signifies the connection that holds the society together. While the state can certainly act oppressively, its formal status as the signifier of the social bond does not inherently entail any oppressive expression of power. It is precisely the formal status of the state and of all mediation that Agamben misses in his critique of social distancing. The theory of biopower fails to recognize that the power of the state is not just oppressive but also constitutive of modern subjectivity. Agamben’s critique doesn’t stop with social distancing. From the very beginning of the pandemic, Agamben speaks out against the various lockdowns used to try to stem its spread. In “The Invention of an Epidemic,” he writes, “in a perverse vicious circle, the limitations of freedom imposed by governments are accepted in the name of a desire for safety that was created by the same governments that are now intervening to satisfy it.” (25) It is clear that Agamben is not wrong to fear that calls for safety often serve as the cover for mechanisms of oppressive interventions. But just because safety can function ideologically doesn’t mean that it necessarily does, as Agamben assumes. Agamben fails to distinguish between a state protecting citizens from a natural disaster and a state arming itself against an external enemy. The protection of citizens against a natural disaster brings out the formal function of the state, the state as a site of mediation, whereas foreign wars require the evocation of the state’s national content, the nation as a site of identification. The inability to see this distinction inevitably leads the thinker astray. In order to gin up enthusiasm for foreign wars, the state must call for nationalist pride, which foments the logic of us versus them and mobilizes an investment in the state as an oppressive force. In order to be the site of nationalist pride, the state must not just be a form. It must have a substantial content, and this content is always ideological. This is what is missing when the state acts as a pure form in response to a natural disaster. Rather than serving as a source of nationalist pride, the lockdowns spur a universalizing connection that the state form signifies. No one feels exceptional in a lockdown, which is why right-wing protesters inveigh against the state when it orders lockdowns but not when the state declares war. This distinction is one that should preoccupy our thinking much more than it does. Finally, Agamben’s critique also extends to the mask mandate. It seems as if the mask mandate would have nothing to do with the biopolitics. It is a measure designed to allow for more of the freedom of movement during the pandemic, which is what Agamben claims that he wants. But nonetheless, he includes a critique of masks in his diatribe against the measures taken to stem the effects of the pandemic. In an essay entitled “When the House Burns,” he writes, “The face is the most human thing; the human has a face and not simply a muzzle or a snout because we dwell in the open, because in our faces we expose ourselves and communicate. This is why the face is the place of politics. Our impolitical time does not want to see its own face; keeps it at a distance, masks and covers it. There must be no more faces, only numbers and figures. Even the tyrant is faceless.” (26) Covering the face, for Agamben, represents a betrayal of politics for the sake of tyranny. (27) Agamben’s attempt to link the exposed face to humanity misses the role that masks play in the constitution of subjectivity. One becomes a subject through putting on a mask, not through exposing one’s face. The subject emerges through its ability to lie, to present a fiction that separates the subject from its environment. Without the mask, without the obfuscation that distances subjectivity from those around it, there is no space for the subject’s freedom. While the mask can allow one to act maliciously, it also provides a realm invisible to any prying eyes. Like social distancing, the mask plays a constitutive role in the formation of a public world. If no one wore a mask and simply revealed a private self in every public interaction, no public interaction would be possible. The public world exists because I withhold my private views, which is what the film comedy Liar Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) shows. The great achievement of this film is that it exposes the impossibility of public existence without a mask. (28) The film’s hero, Fletcher Reede (Jim Carrey) must spend an entire day incapable of lying, thanks to a curse levelling by a son exasperated with his deceitful father. Forced to live without a mask and constantly reveal what he’s thinking, Reede is simply incapable of interacting with anyone. He reveals his judgments on the appearance of his coworkers and his views of the incompetence of those around him. When a woman asks him how he likes her new dress, he looks at her unusual haircut and responds, “Whatever takes the focus off your head.” He then insults an overweight man and remarks on the existence of a pimple on another’s face. Such disturbances continue in every interaction he has. As a result, no one can tolerate his presence. He lives unmasked, and no one can bear to be around him. The film illustrates that life without a mask condemns us to privacy overwhelming and swallowing up the public world. The alignment of the mask with the public world is essential to its political valence. The mask is not the evanescence of politics, as Agamben would have it. It is the genesis of politics because it establishes the distance from the private world in which political struggle can take place. The public world is a world of masks, not a world where we bare our private selves. The political terrain is not that of competing private interests – this is the conservative vision – but instead that of the struggle to enact a form of universality. This is a struggle that can only take place in public among those masking their private selves. Agamben’s hostility to the mask is the extension of his hostility to any form of mediation, but it is mediation that is the ground of politics. The tyrant, contra Agamben, isn’t faceless. The tyrant, as Donald Trump shows, is the one who refuses to cover his face, who insists that his face must remain visible. Tyrants plaster their faces all over their domain in order to show not their political position but an image that resides beyond the political and that constitutes the basis of their rule. (29) Trump refuses to wear a mask because he refuses to engage in political struggle. He demands allegiance to his private self rather than political struggle taking place in public. Like Agamben, Trump does not care for how the mask interferes with the social bond. He explicitly invokes this when describing his own refusal to wear one. On April 3, 2020, he says, “I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens – I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just, I just don’t.” (30) As Trump laments the aesthetic damage that a mask does, he makes an objection related to that of Agamben. But in Trump’s case, the mask represents a political position that he wants to remain aloof from. To be masked is to be thrust into a public world of political contestation. Although Trump has different reasons for attacking to the various responses to the pandemic, he nonetheless echoes Agamben’s critique. He comes out against social distancing, lockdowns, and mask mandates because he sees all these measures as irresponsible disruptions of economic freedom. When various parts of the United States locked down to stop the spread of the disease, he tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” (31) Trump is not a theorist of biopower, but he does share with such theorists a belief that the state response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been itself another disaster. Trump and Agamben are not politically aligned. But their proximity on the response to the pandemic should give us pause when thinking about the theory of biopower. No one is simply guilty by association, but Agamben’s response to the pandemic mirrors Trump’s too precisely not to garner attention. Trump’s resistance to the measures that other countries used to effectively combat the spread of Covid-19 led to thousands of needless deaths in the United States. Refusing any exercise of state power out of a fear of expanding the reach of biopower amounts to implicitly taking up Trump’s attitude and contributing to the ravages of the disease. But even more significantly, it entails missing the role that the state form or the state as a form can play in combatting the ravages of contemporary capitalism.