Reject the Neg, their theories are based on a conspiracy theorist who compared the Covid lock down to concentration camps

But it is not simply the “rabble” who make this sad mess, but also some voices from the upper echelons of the academy. During the pandemic, when society desperately needed to make sense of the big picture, Philosophy failed the moment, sometimes through ignorance or incoherence, sometimes outright intellectual fraud. The lesson of Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, in part tells us why.

Famous for critiques of “biopolitics” that have helped to shape the Humanities’ perspectives on biology, society, science and politics, Agamben spent the pandemic publishing over a dozen editorials denouncing the situation in ways that closely parallel right-wing (and left-wing) conspiracy theories.

Over the past two decades, the soft power influence of his key concepts in the Humanities - homo sacer, zoē /bios, the state of exception, etc. - has been considerable. This has also helped to cement in a stale orthodoxy suspicious of any artificial governing intervention in the biological condition of human society as implicitly totalitarian. In the name of being “critical”, the default approach to any biotechnology is often to cast it as a coercive manipulation of the sovereignty of the body and lived experience.

If one were to imagine Alex Jones not as a Texas good ol’ boy, but rather as a Heideggerian seminary student, this would give a sense of how Agamben himself approached the requests for public comment on the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning in February 2020, with “The Invention of an Epidemic”, he called the virus a hoax and the belated lockdowns in Italy a “techno-medical despotism”. In “Requiem for the Students”, he denounced Zoom seminars as acquiescence to a Silicon Valley concentration camp condition (his words). In “The face and death”, he derided the use of masks as sacrificing the ritual humanity of the naked face.

Each short essay was more absurd and strident than the last. Upon publication of the earliest of these, Agamben’s friend, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, warned us to ignore him, and that if he himself had followed Agamben’s medical advice discouraging a heart transplant that saved his life, that he would be dead.

Earlier this month, Agamben went all in, directly and explicitly comparing vaccine passes to Nazi ‘Juden’ stars. In a short piece called, “Second class citizens”, he connects the fates of those who refuse vaccination to that of Jews under fascism and concludes that “The ‘green card’ (Italy’s vaccine pass) constitutes those who do not have it in bearers of a virtual yellow star.” After picking up my jaw, I cannot help but compare Agamben’s analysis to that of QAnon-influenced United States congressperson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who beat him to the punch when she tweeted back in May that “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi's forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.”

In this ongoing performance, Agamben explicitly rejects all pandemic-mitigation measures on behalf of an ‘embrace tradition, refuse modernity’ conviction which denies the relevance of a biology that is real regardless of the words used to name it. Something seems to have recently cracked open for him, and yet at the same time, re-reading his foundational texts in the light of the pandemic pieces is illuminating. His position has not suddenly changed. It was there all along.