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Political Theology and COVID-19: Agamben’s Critique of Science as a New “Pandemic Religion”
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Michael Ejercito
Nov 4, 2021, 10:26:23 AM11/4/21
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Political Theology and COVID-19: Agamben’s Critique of Science as a New
“Pandemic Religion”
Guillermo Andrés Duque Silva and Cristina Del Prado Higuera
From the journal Open Theology
https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2020-0177
Abstract
The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has reacted to the coronavirus crisis in
a way that markedly contrasts with most other positions in contemporary
political philosophy. His position has been described as irrational,
politically incorrect, and unfair toward the victims of COVID-19. In
this article, we delve into the foundations of this peculiar,
pessimistic, and controversial reaction. From Agamben’s conceptual
framework, we will explain how state responses to the COVID-19 crisis
have turned science into a new religion from the dogmas of which various
strategies have been developed in order for states to exercise
biopolitical power under theological guises.
Keywords: state of exception; political theology; COVID-19; sovereignty
1 Introduction
At the beginning of 2020, an important philosophical debate took place
on the COVID-19 crisis. Various contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj
Žižek, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy put forward their positions
regarding the critical situations then developing. In February 2020, the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben intervened with a press release that
aroused the most relentless criticism from the philosophical community.
The title of the publication: The invention of an epidemic revealed the
critical position that Agamben advanced against the measures that have
been imposed by states within their responses to the health emergency.
In that publication, the renowned philosopher called the state responses
to the pandemic crisis “frantic, irrational and completely unjustified.”
Agamben questioned why the media and the authorities were making an
effort “to spread a climate of panic, causing a true state of exception,
with serious limitations on movements and a suspension of the normal
functioning of living and working conditions in entire regions.” From
Agamben’s perspective, those measurements were totally out of proportion
to what, according to him, was simply a typical common flu.
A wave of criticism was quickly levied against Agamben and we shall
examine in this article the most important elements thereof. We will not
discuss the virus’s destructive capacity since Agamben’s classification
of COVID-19 as “simply flu” falls by itself. What interests us is the
link Agamben makes between the emergence of COVID-19 and what he
conceptualizes as a resultant permanent state of exception.
Agamben has devoted himself for more than twenty years to the scholarly
study of the state of exception in Western culture. While his study of
the subject began solely on a theoretical and abstract plane, it
suddenly took life before his eyes in the form of the worldwide response
to COVID-19. For this reason, quite beyond Agamben’s controversial
position on the lethality of the virus, we are interested in the
argument that the philosopher puts forward about a growing tendency of
states to use the state of exception as a standard paradigm of
government, a propensity of theirs for which the cover given by COVID-19
is ideally suited, as he explains in his most recent work.[1]
This article will fulfill three purposes, arranged into three sections.
First, we will examine Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical proposal of the
state of exception as a dialogue, on the one hand, with the criticisms
received from other philosophers, and, on the other hand, with the
possible applications that this theory would have in concrete situations
generated by the COVID-19 crisis. Second, we will analyze the conceptual
framework of political theology and economic theology in Giorgio
Agamben’s work, especially that developed in The Kingdom and the Glory:
For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Finally, we will
put this theory in the context of the health crisis and the question of
the origin and legitimacy of laws and measures that affect social life
in the state of emergency generated by the coronavirus. In Section 4, we
will draw attention to the scope of the current state of exception that,
in the Agambenian theoretical framework, will not be overcome with the
end of the pandemic, in the same way, that it did not begin with it.
2 Pandemic and homo sacer: Our neighbor has been abolished
The Italian philosopher has attempted to carry further the philosophical
project dealing with biopolitics and their underlying genealogical
considerations that was initiated by Michel Foucault. Agamben describes
the contemporary age as a time that manages to materialize the diagnosis
that Foucault hinted at in reference to the concept of “biopolitics” in
his last works. The notion of biopolitics has been used to describe the
administration of power in human life as a government paradigm in
Western culture. According to Foucault’s conception of human powers:
these act in two ways:[2] those that boost life or those that end it.[3]
From the first perspective, that of the impulse of life, human beings
are, for those in power, simply raw material to be preserved; however,
in the second case, those in power are compelled to exercise mechanisms
that end the life of a part of the population that they administer. The
two visions are complementary because, ultimately, the deaths of some
subjects may serve to protect the lives of others. Giorgio Agamben
revives the concept of biopolitics in order to describe contemporary
society and goes one step further: he focuses his attention on a
pessimistic perspective of biopolitics. Agamben dedicates himself to
understanding the criteria for the administration of death that are
exercised in the history of the West so as to identify biopolitical
patterns in the governments of Western societies, as well as the reduced
possibilities of resistance that may emerge in a world that has been
turning into a “gigantic concentration camp.”[4]
From Agamben’s perspective, the most reprehensible cruelties that have
taken place in the exercise of power in the West, instead of being
exceptional anomalies, constitute instances inherent in the process of
the social construction of modernity.[5] In this way, Giorgio Agamben
interprets Ernst Nolte’s position on Auschwitz: history seems to resist
being left in the past. Indeed, Auschwitz constitutes the obscene
paradigm of the modern that Agamben turns into the founding myth of a
biopolitical era. This paradigm refuses to “remain in the past” and
gives meaning to contemporary forms of government. The Italian follows
the weak but the constant beat of the Musselman [6] of Auschwitz. The
philosopher carries out, in a research program over a decade and
producing six books, a prodigious archaeological excavation of power so
as to identify among its meanings what is the essential core of the
modern, an explanation of the question of “how did we get to Auschwitz?”
and through that genealogy journey finds the origins of the concept of
“Nuda Vita.”[7]
Contemporary life, in the concept of biopolitics proposed by Agamben,
has become a bare life. Life thus conceived is reduced to what is
produced and managed by law. The individuals in a concentration camp are
stripped of all rights and political–legal status; their life is
treated, by the agents of power, as matter without human form, naked
life: they are data, figures, biological units that are always
disposable, as opposed to the greater value of the future and the
preservation, paradoxically, of other lives.[8] Under the rule exercised
by the agents of power, Nuda Vita, according to Agamben, gives rise to
the pauperization of human life in general. Among the concentration camp
subjects, Agamben focuses on two figures; the Musselman, on the one
hand, represents the most powerless figure in the concentration camp.
Resigned to dying, he is engulfed in humiliation, fear, and horror. On
the other hand, there is the homo sacer, who lives trapped in the middle
of an incongruity; on the one hand, he bears the burden of a crime, but
he is legally unsacrifiable. That is, it is forbidden to subject him to
death at the same time that he has to live knowing that others are
allowed impunity if they kill him.[9] Agamben advances and relates the
nuda vita and the homo sacer as metaphors of modern life and the
concentration camp as its paradigm. In this regard, Múnera and Benavides
indicate that:
Bared life [as life for death] is not the simple natural life, but a
politically unprotected life, permanently exposed to death or the
humiliations caused, with total impunity, by the sovereign power or by
those who compose it as citizens.[10]
It is inevitable to compare Agamben’s bare life concept with his
statements about the disease and the states of emergency that COVID-19
has generated.
In particular, the intergenerational differences that are promoted in
defense of general well-being are striking. All, but particularly the
older generations, have experienced, in a certain way, being locked in a
politically unprotected life, permanently exposed to death. The older
adult has become a Musselman of the twenty-first century, resigned to
death but while being unsacrifiable. His death is an expected result
that, however, is not directly ordered. The death is, in this case,
expected as a natural result of the isolation offered, in European
nursing homes, for instance. His death is considered a natural and
inevitable result. The fact that consideration of the option of saving a
patient with a ventilator leans naturally to a question as to who “has a
whole life ahead of him,” at no time admits the other option of
considering that choice as a criminal act in respect of other patients
not so saved, puts us face to face with biopower. If the meaning of that
choice seems justifiably natural, it is because in that normalization of
horror lies the essence of the administration of power in the
contemporary age, a power that conserves one life and ends another. This
is the meaning of the criticism that Agamben makes of the health
emergency’s political background, which not only affects the elderly as
Musselman of the XXI century but, in general, is directed at all
individuals of Western civilization destined to become a contemporary
homo sacer. For Agamben, the message that sustains the biopolitics of
COVID-19 is based on the promotion of horror: the governmental machine
tells us that “our neighbour has been abolished.”[11]
To analyze how life in the West has been transformed into a simple naked
life due to the pandemic, we have systematically studied all of Giorgio
Agamben’s discourse on the health emergency and the changes that are
taking place in some Western democracies. After studying the sixteen
chapters of the book A che punto siamo? L´epidemia come politica we have
come upon an interesting finding: not only can it be verified that we
live in a permanent state of exception, as Agamben presented in his
research, but the pandemic has created a particular religious need to
which the church cannot respond, but to which science can. That is, in
the pandemic crisis science has become the new religion and takes from
religion its forms and strategies of governing life, all the while using
scientific arguments.
The author presented his arguments in the face of the COVID-19 crisis,
as quarantines and restrictions on movement were being put into place in
Europe, being presented as the most plausible means of handling the
peaks of contagion during 2020. In our study, we have identified that
the progression of Agamben’s argument follows three basic stages, the
first of which is present in his February 2020 publications. Here we can
identify the notion of a fear of contagion as a key element.
The central idea raised by Agamben indicates that the management of the
COVID-19 crisis has generated “a perverse vicious circle: the limitation
of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire
for security that has been induced by governments themselves, the same
governments that are now intervening in order to satisfy that
desire.”[12] In this sense, this fear of contagion forms the fundamental
basis of a new form of the traditional transaction between protection
and obedience that has characterized the relationships between modern
states and their citizens.
In his March 11 publication, at one of the most critical moments of the
pandemic, Agamben explains that the fear of contagion has made citizens
accept unprecedented restrictions on their freedoms, fuelled by the
uncertainty generated by not being able to identify materially the
source of risk and harm. The second group of arguments follows from the
previous ones and supposes the transition from collective fear to
individual isolation, with the deterioration in human relationships that
this produces. These two elements, collective fear and individual
isolation, support the third argument, which leads to the culmination of
Agamben´s criticism of governments. More specifically, in Riflessioni
sulla pestee the author claims that the pandemic has reactivated a need
for religion that the church cannot satisfy. This demand for religiosity
is met today by what we refer to as science.
In summary, beyond confirming that we live in a permanent state of
exception, the interesting finding that we would like to highlight is
the emergence of a need for religion that the Church can no longer
satisfy but that science can, even if only through theological
strategies of government.
Agamben describes the theological form of science as a new religion made
evident through a discourse disseminated via the media that combines
religiosity with science. The author affirms that the obsessive appeal,
“especially in the American press, to the word ‘apocalypse’ and to the
end of the world is an indication of this.”[13] However, blind faith in
science is not only evident in the media’s discourse, but is also
transferred to politics and decision making, that is, to the terrain of
sovereignty. The decisions that promote life or end it in the context of
the pandemic have been supported by scientific reasons that are
sometimes contradictory. This reveals to us a science of differing
opinions and prescriptions that range “from the heretical minority
position (also represented by prestigious scientists) of those who deny
the seriousness of the phenomenon to those within the mainstream
orthodox discourse who affirm it and yet radically diverge among
themselves in their opinions on how to deal with the pandemic.”[14]
Contrary to what the essence of science would indicate, some experts (or
some self-defined as such) act like governmental commissioners to define
how life is to be promoted or ended. This situation is similar to that
of a religious conflict, where the role of experts is not always to
reach the best solution but rather “to ensure the favor of the monarch,
who at the time of the past religious disputes that divided
Christianity, took sides according to his interests with one current or
another and imposed his solutions.”[15] In other words, this new
“science” of religion comes interweaved with a new biopolitical
government relying on theological strategies. In this article, we will
analyze arguments that explain this change based on Agamben’s work,
mainly his genealogy of sovereignty in his work Il regno e la gloria.
It is indispensable to compare Agamben’s bare life concept with his
statements about the disease and the states of emergency that COVID-19
has generated. In particular, the intergenerational differences that are
promoted in defense of general societal well-being are striking. All,
but particularly the older generations, have experienced, in a certain
way, being locked into a politically unprotected life, permanently
exposed to death. The older adult has become a Musselman of the
twenty-first century, resigned to death, while being unsacrifiable. His
death is an expected result that, however, is not directly ordered. The
death is, in this case, expected as a natural result of the isolation
they offer, in Europe, for instance, in nursing homes. His death is
considered a natural and inevitable result. The fact that the choice
between saving a young patient with a ventilator leans naturally to who
“has a whole life ahead of him,” at no time admits the option of
considering it as a criminal act, puts us face to face with biopower. If
the meaning of that choice tends to naturalize, it is because in that
normalization of horror lies the essence of the administration of power
in the contemporary age, a power that drives one life and ends another.
This is the meaning of the criticism that Agamben makes of the health
emergency’s political background, which not only affects the elderly as
Musselman of the XXI century but, in general, is directed at all
individuals of Western civilization destined to become a contemporary
homo sacer. For Agamben, the message that sustains the biopolitics of
COVID-19 is based on the promotion of horror: the governmental machine
tells us that “our neighbor has been abolished.”[16]
The sovereignty exercised by the governmental powers in this
interpretation by Agamben does not require greater legitimacy than the
very fact of being able to dispose of the lives of subjects. That is,
the decisions of government agents are considered legitimate “by the
simple fact of their sovereignty.”[17] This is what grounds as legal and
legitimate the sovereign decision of the attribution of the ventilator
referred to above, where reasons may be given or not since the symptom
and the expression of sovereignty do not need reasons in order to be
exercised.
For Agamben, where this sovereignty is developed is closely related to
the duality between normality and exception that Carl Schmitt raised;
however, it breaks the dichotomous scheme that characterized
Plettenberg’s jurist. Agamben indicates that the sovereign is not the
one who decides in and on the state of exception but rather is the one
capable of maintaining exceptional actions as an area subject to his
control and presenting them as standard actions. Thus, to the old logic:
normality – exception – new normality that we would long for with
Schmitt’s scheme, Agamben proposes a notion of permanent exceptionality.
If Carl Schmitt went so far as to affirm that “the sovereign is at the
same time, outside and inside the legal order”[18] for his ability to
suspend normality with the declaration of a state of exception and
reinstitute a new legal order, Giorgio Agamben goes one step further: He
affirms that his sovereign acts under a self-justifying imperative,
which indicates: “the law is outside itself, and I, the sovereign, who
am outside the law, declare that there is no outside the law.”[19]
While in the Schmittian approach, exceptionality and sovereignty are
attributes of the political struggle,[20] in Agamben, the place of power
and its exercise are transcendent to political groups and actors.
Authority and administration are expressed from a permanent
exceptionality. For that reason, the sovereignty in Agamben is a place,
not a specific actor. The government is a verb rather than a noun. So,
while the sovereign for Schmitt may be a political party, a monarch, a
populist leader, or even, in its last stage, a guerrilla group that
decides in and on the state of exception, for Agamben, that role is the
experience of governing, not a specific social actor.[21] That is, it is
not the result of a specific decision-maker but of the social and legal
order that has been built in the West.[22] This form of exceptionality
is expressed permanently, without breaks or claims of new normalities.
For Agamben, sovereignty and the right that emanates from it do not
arise from the pauses of exceptionality that Schmitt proposes because,
in the contemporary West, there is nothing more normal than living in a
permanent state of exception. In other words, the state of exception in
Giorgio Agamben’s thought is not characterized by its abnormality and
contingency, and it is not explained in terms of “normality to come,”
but instead by its permanence, which is why it is, in most cases, an
imperceptible exceptionality.[23]
Although the approach to a permanent state of exception places the
COVID-19 crisis in a broad panorama, the criticisms received by another
biopolitics researcher, Roberto Esposito, reflect that it is still too
early to see beyond the “death toll,” as Agamben urges. It is not yet
time to analyze the qualitative effect that the decision to quarantine
humanity and its freedoms will leave in the long term. Specifically,
Esposito indicates to Agamben that the comparison between spending a few
days in isolation in a comfortable Italian middle-class house and the
horror of a concentration camp is implausible and irresponsible.[24]
Esposito is right. However, we should add to his reply that the way
COVID-19 restrictions are assumed is not the same in regions of the
world where, for example, washing hands with soap and water has been a
luxury for centuries. So, Esposito seems to lose sight of the fact that
the exceptional is not dictated by the circumstances in which isolation
is assumed but comes from how we internalize in customs what should not
under any circumstances be accepted.[25] For example, we have
incorporated as something “normal” that enormous regions of the world
live under the quarantine imposed by hunger and misery. Agamben reminds
us that the genuine plague is none other than the meekness with which we
accept to live with exceptional and reprehensible situations.[26]
Finally, this “normalization of the exceptional” is a consequence of
sovereignty in the biopolitical era and the permanent state of
exception, and the emergence of COVID-19 is settling into it, like its
most advanced chapter.
3 COVID-19 and democracy: A people that can reign but not govern
Many of the criticisms that Agamben received sought to label him as part
of the “conspiracy theorist paranoiacs” who assign to the states and the
capitalist elites the responsibility of having spread fear amongst
citizens when, in fact, capitalism and its government elites have been
highly affected by the crisis capitalism and its government elites have
been the main affected by the crisis. Žižek’s criticism of Agamben, for
example, questioned the benefit that the state of emergency could bring
to governments and capitalist elites because, in the end, the emergency
has accentuated, on the one hand, general distrust in the governments
and, on the other hand, an unprecedented economic crisis. Žižek asks
Agamben: what elite would be interested in promoting such a movement
against their interests? The answer in favor of Agamben to this question
can be found in the criticism that Paolo Flores d’Arcais made of Agamben
in MicroMega. For Flores d’Arcais, COVID-19 has not strengthened the
state or capital’s power. This position coincides with that of Žižek.
However, the pandemic has been characterized by the appearance of a new
“conspiracy of white coats”: doctors and scientists who appear today as
depositaries of the “last word” in government on the lives of its
citizens. According to Flores d’Arcais, this is/represents a power more
significant than the interests of governments and capital.[27]
If we focus on the way decisions are made in the COVID-19 state of
exception, and in the Agambenian theoretical framework, we will see that
governments rely on the medical-scientific argument to justify their
decisions with two benefits to them, such administrators; on the one
hand, they avoid the need to submit their proposals to the demanding
deliberation of democratic systems and, on the other hand – with that
shortcut and delegation to the scientists – the governments exempt from
their original responsibilities; as simple “operators” of a scientific
decision that, after all, is alien to them. So, that last decision of
the “white coats” to which Flores d’Arcais refers is not taken in some
way above the governments themselves but is instead used by the latter
as an argument of authority that operates theologically. If we consider
the theological background in which the scientific decisions that
subsequently sustain government actions arise, we see a correlation
between earthly government authorities and “scientific sovereignty.”
This self-power justifies coercive decisions under the irrefutable halo
that medicine offers. In the long term, contrary to what Žižek says,
those measures that in principle seem to affect capital and the states
will strengthen them notably, since the exceptional will become routine,
in an accelerated way and with a high democratic cost that will be
difficult to recover. In the end, with the irrefutable and self-imposed
argument of “medical reason,” the governments that have sustained the
temporary suspension of the legal order will have been able to justify
unprecedented control over the individual and society to protect them
from an unprecedented danger. In summary, by dint of the
medical–political duality, in the crisis of COVID-19, a contemporary
version of the theological–political duality that Agamben studied is
forged to explain that who governs, in the occidental democracies is
that power capable of converting the state of exception into order, and
the world – into a gigantic “concentration camp.” Seen like this, the
relationship between theology and politics that can be established in
the decisions taken to contain COVID-19, coming from Agamben, does not
correspond in any way with a conspiratorial agenda.
In Agamben’s viewpoint, the world configured as a concentration camp
predates COVID-19; in fact, it is as old as Western societies’ very
formation. How does Agamben explain why we got to this point? Agamben
considers that the West’s history is the history of creating a bipolar
biopolitical “governmental machine” that operates theologically on human
lives, despite having eliminated the need to sustain its actions in some
essence or primary political substance: the machinery of government that
does not need to refer to a divine foundation and, nevertheless, is
always presented as a sacred institution.[28]
The biopolitical government is clothed with celestial majesty without
properly a divine substance from which its authority emanates. In Il
regno e la gloria, Agamben performs a genealogical exercise of modern
government. He explains the emergence of this governmental machine,
moving back to the Judeo-Christian theological origins. This
genealogical development is highly relevant for understanding Agamben’s
criticism of the global state of exception that has unleashed through
COVID-19. Agamben’s research allows us to understand that modern Western
culture has built a type of government that can dispense with the need
to refer its decisions to a fundamental, essential, and superior power
and, even so, operate under theological principles. The modern
understood in this way does not presuppose, much less arise from, the
rupture between substance and form, nor the separation between
auctoritas and potestas. Rather, the modern invokes the discovery of an
absent, immobile divine power, whose sacredness depends not on itself,
but on the glorification of those who, without being God, have assumed
the management of its praxis on earth.
In modern government the providential and scientific levels – that of
power and that of authority–make up two poles that cooperate: they
maintain the place of the sacred as an empty throne, that is, without a
specific substance and, at the same time, they preserve the sacredness
in the management rites that, “in the name of the sacred,” are carried
out by angels, ministers, shepherds, saints for each prayer and, in
general, all the bureaucratic machinery responsible for religious
praxis. To reach this conclusion, Agamben faces the task of creating a
genealogy of government, similar to that carried out by Foucault while
going beyond Foucault’s work. Concurrently, the French philosopher finds
in the pastoral work of the first two centuries of Christianity the
authentically modern moment that found the birth of political power in
the theological contamination of the human government’s world. Let us
remember that for Foucault, this moment is characterized by transforming
power into a properly human management attribute, that is, detached from
transcendental sovereignty. Modern political power, that is, the
capacity to provide security, administration, and management to the
state, would be born, in Foucault’s perspective, from that pastoral
power, in essence, private, and oriented to the economic technique that
the priests and first Christian leaders carried out on their flock and
over each one his “sheeps.”[29] For his part, in various theological
treatises, Agamben analyzes how the political is also present in the
origins of Jewish and Christian religious dogmatic discourses. Agamben
explains, for example, that the term oikonomia, which characterizes the
first private management of the “pater familias,” not only has the
political implications that we know today in the states but also had and
has profound theological implications to which Foucault did not pay
enough attention. Thus, the domestic administration to which modern
oikonomia refers is part of both the theological and the political.[30]
For example, the Holy Trinity expresses a form of political management
of the world; the economy is applied as an internal articulation that
favors its praxis. Due to the internal connection that the three
elements that compose it are unity and, at the same time, plurality of
actions; here, the economy not only acts as a metaphor, of the modern
separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers – as
Foucault indicated – but they constitute – according to Agamben – its
historical origin since it took place first in theology and later in
politics.[31] In summary, through an analysis of theological treatises,
which are in themselves an invaluable finding,[32] Agamben overcomes, on
the one hand, the causal link between theology and politics and, on the
other hand, questions the overvalued secularization of present
theological concepts, for example, those of Carl Schmitt. For Agamben,
theology is at the base of politics in the same way that politics was at
the base of theology from its origins. The problematic issue has been
that the bureaucratic apparatus of “domestic administrators,” those who
today issue movement restriction orders, for example, has evolved to the
current forms of absolute control over a social life, without the
substance or foundation of those measures coming from absolute power.
Although Agamben refers to ancient theological texts, he argues that
these texts have implications for understanding the current political
decline, the tendency to authoritarianism, and the crisis of liberal
democracies. He considers that the contemporary era is characterized by
the total triumph of life’s economic government in all its dimensions.
With his genealogy, Agamben shows that life’s objectification as an
administrable good has not always been the prevailing paradigm. On the
contrary, Agamben explains that the birth of the modern perspective on
power is located precisely in the separation between two paradigms and
the subsequent autonomy of one over the other: political theology and
economic theology. In the first, God’s will is the origin of sovereign
power; that is, where the divine plan of salvation resides in the
Judeo-Christian culture. In the second, both God’s and human life are
manageable matter: objects of an economy of life administered by experts
and authorities authorized to resolve human vicissitudes.[33] In God’s
figure, political theology found the symbol of sovereign power, and
economic theology substitutes the said transcendence with the idea of an
oikonomia conceived as an immanent order.[34] The contemporary political
crisis, the one that has led to the creation of this gigantic
concentration camp, exacerbated by COVID-19, would be based on the fact
that political theology has lost almost all ground to economic theology,
a field of power that acquires independence and that does not need to be
justified in the will of God, that is in, authentic and transcendent
power, to rule. In this fracture between God and his praxis, Agamben
identifies the emergence of the “western governmental machine,” a
bipolar machine that separates God’s omnipotence from the world’s
rational government, that is, absolute power, from its worldly exercise.
To better explain the above, Agamben analyzes the motto of
constitutional monarchies with which kingdom and government differ, thus
graphically describing his finding of the fracture of God: in the same
way that “the king reigns, but does not rule,” God reigns, but does not
rule in modern societies of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Economic
theology gains greater independence as the field of government is
abrogated, sustaining its exclusivity overall “that which God cannot
do,” that field between the challenges of day-to-day human life and the
mystery of divine truth, “becomes in the paradigm of the distinction
between power and its exercise, between kingdom and government.”[35]
This division presents us with a powerless God before his creation since
“he can only act through the natural order that he has established.”[36]
He can do everything, but he cannot do anything that is not an automatic
response to his wisdom and to the logic of the order that he has
established. A God powerless in the face of the daily demands of his
creature since his logic does not belong to the world of the contingent
but of the transcendent. For its part, in the human world, changing and
unpredictable, everything is manageable from the understanding between
humans; that is why this is a world that fits the possibility of
government. Through a journey between primitive and medieval Christian
texts, Agamben argues that modern government is present to administer
the intermediate space between the particular and unpredictable events
of men and the general providence or absolute power of God. The
decisions of the men who govern that terrain will tend to apply general
providence to the situations they live, making a calculation, ultimately
an interpretation, of their decisions regarding the unknown plan of
salvation. In Agamben’s words, the first rulers of modern oikonomy
“would assume an idea of an order founded on the contingent play of
immanent effects.”[37]
This distinction between the divine, inaccessible, and incomprehensible
realm and human government may find an application in the case of the
coronavirus crisis. The truth about the origin and ultimate solution to
the pandemic seems to escape our frame of thought. Beyond the hope of a
vaccine, comprehensive knowledge about the COVID-19 phenomenon seems to
be sheltered in a place that is alien to us, before which we have left
only the interpretations and improvisations of human management. For
this reason, Jean-Luc Nancy’s criticism of Agamben, in which he replies
to the Italian philosopher that the experience we are living is a “viral
exception and not a political–legal exception.”[38] Nancy’s
differentiation reflects the duality between earthly management and the
mysterious core of power that Agamben describes in Il regno e la gloria.
In the distinction made by Nancy in his question to Agamben, a current
application of the difference between kingdom and government is
installing itself, a reflection of our natural inability to access the
origin of the problem, in such a way that we seek for the unknown,
stratagems and euphemisms such as that of the “viral exception,” behind
which we hide our impotence in the face of a problem that surpasses us
in understanding and control. It is certainly not truly clear what Nancy
means by a “viral exception” and how it differs from a political–legal
exception. What is clear is that, since we are not, as humanity, capable
of accessing a transcendent power to handle the problem of COVID-19 with
that power’s full knowledge, we use restrictions on liberties like the
exact measures of the imperfect world of government that we have built.
Only that explains the response to the crisis through quarantines and
impositions of authority that have not changed focus since the pest
control we did centuries ago, for example, to the Spanish flu. To this
same economic management of life belong, in fact, categories such as
Nancy’s, related to a supposed “viral exception,” since with them an
attempt is made to provide a mysterious legitimacy to the old and
precious political–legal shackles of the West. In summary, if the state
of exception in which we live has been based on the management of
calculations and interpretations of a transcendent power that is
inaccessible to us, then the contingent games of immanent effects that
we create around emergencies such as COVID-19, and not only in it,[39]
deserve questioning.
4 Promises of glorification
The Agambenian genealogy takes an unexpected and provocative turn when,
in the second part of The Kingdom and the Glory, the Italian philosopher
asks himself about the bureaucratic circle closest to the power of God;
the Angels. He wonders: what happens to them and their functional
specialization when doomsday arrives? The question is posed to the
theological tradition. However, the answer is found in the Heideggerian
ontology: according to Agamben, the angels who, in principle, would not
fulfill more functions than to satisfy the demands of humanity, would
remain limited to performing their most essential function. That is:
glorify God, keeping him isolated for his glory. What a paradox that
Agamben discovers; not even a hypothetical day of judgment would break
the logic of the government machine’s bipolarity by revealing the
absolute power of God. This paradox has implications in the current
coronavirus crisis and in the proposals for an alternate world to be
built.[40] With a hypothetical end of the world, the place of absolute
power would continue to be isolated by its splendor and by the acclaim
that the angels would do around and about it. From an imperfect
humankind point of view, this separation from the core-power would
reveal that pure power ever is, in essence, an empty place, a nothing
that to “be power” needs the glorification of the angels at the end of
the world, such as his earthly stewards did during normal times. Glory
is, consequently for Agamben, the essence of the concept of the
political that affects the supreme power of God in a different way than
what it can do over men since it contains a correlation: on the one
hand, God depends on the glory and glory of God and, on the other hand,
glory becomes glory only through glorification. That is to say, the only
sure thing, consequently, is that the human power resides in those who
can glorify the sacred and mysterious nucleus. In other words, Agamben
identifies that the power of the western governmental machine, the one
that has acquired current absolute dominance over social and individual
life, is sustained by the constant ovation and acclaim of men themselves
in order for it to exist.[41] In summary, the purest elemental power is
an empty nucleus surrounded by the veil of Glory. That veil, on the one
hand, glorifies it; that is, it elevates Glory to the place of absolute
power and, on the other hand, hides such pure power from humanity under
a halo of mystery. Agamben transfers this theological metaphor to the
level of the individual. The humankind without politics is like that
God, in essence, innocuous and isolated, described by Agamben as a being
at rest, immobile and oblivious to the tasks of government, his life
acquires a meaning when he is surrounded by Glory, at the same time that
it becomes his condemnation: he leads him to pursue, through politics,
utopias that, as such, are inaccessible; like promises about a kingdom
that, written with strokes of glorification, mark our political
identities with their indelible stamp.
For Agamben, the inaction of Glory brings together what we call
politics: it surrounds the simplicity of the human species, its natural
condition of lack of identity is overcome thanks to it. Politics
understood as Glory provides us with a purpose that, although it is
devoid of divine purity, justifies the absolute control over life as,
after all, our purpose. It could be said that theology and politics live
in the prelude to an “empty throne.” To build that anteroom full of
government mechanisms while simultaneously glorifying the inaccessible
sacred is the purpose of modern politics.
In conclusion, Glory as inaction unites the sacred and the profane gives
rise to the political as a meaning imposed on biological life. At
present, in Western culture the hegemonic power of Glory is expressed,
for example, in what we know under the name of “public opinion,” which
is constructed by the media, the social networks, and, in general, by
the mass media. The force of this public opinion hides an empty center
of truth that, despite its emptiness, rules over dissenting positions:
it does not possess pure truths and, nevertheless, its inertia affects
all political positions, even the best-supported ones, in such a way
that consistently tend to conform to it as a paradigm of “politically
correct.” The politicians’ or governmental agencies’ extreme sensitivity
to public opinion leads them to approach these views as more pressing
and deserving of justice.
Agamben questions the “pseudoscientific” claims of the approaches that
try to name, explain, and deify Glory. On the one hand, he questions
Habermas, who proposes certain idolatry in the search for consensus as
an “achieved utopia” of institutional channeling of sovereignty.[42]
According to Habermas, the public sphere and deliberation refer to the
pole of government. However, for Agamben, this is only one of the modern
forms that the old glorifying acclaim of modern oikonomy acquires. On
the other hand, he questions the power of the decision legitimized by a
“cheering people” that Schmitt exalts as sovereign in Constitutional
Theory; the acclamation of the demos around the ruler is just the other
pole of glorification, according to Agamben. [43] Both Habermas and
Schmitt try to impose a statute of logic and divinity on what, for
Agamben, is an inaccessible substance. Deliberation and decision are
nothing more than liturgical spectacles, two euphemistic artifacts
created by man to explain what has no explanation; to place in the place
of the “empty throne” that we described before, a role of authority that
does not belong to them and to present them as the “discovered” origins
of the power of governments. The truth, according to Agamben, is that
the origin of a general acceptance of laws that, for example, define the
life or death of thousands of people is unknown; what makes such a law
an obligation accepted by the citizenry does not arise from debate or
prior deliberation or from the simple fact of deciding. Deliberation and
decision are parts of an economy of power that do not constitute
transcendent sovereign power since there is nothing so rational and
indisputable within a decision or deliberation that can explain the
general acceptance of orders that define who lives and who does not.
Slavoj Žižek’s proposal regarding a humanistic emergence from which
“true communism” would result does not stop attracting attention; in
some way, it would adjust to one of the possible answers Agamben
analyzes about the hypothetical apocalyptic situation. We should ask
Žižek more than Agamben if the proposal of a “post-covid communism”[44]
is not another accommodation of modern oikonomia to maintain the
original divide between kingdom and government? Wouldn’t this new
communism be another form of glorification?
It is possible to find ourselves in front of another “mirage of
divinity,” another earthly “performance” such as that of Habermarsian
deliberation and Schmittian decisionism. It must be said that Agamben
does not offer an alternative to lockdowns and quarantines, beyond
criticizing the coercive response and warning of the totalitarian risk
that the crisis and the state of emergency is generating. It is not
clear that there really is an alternative proposed by Agamben to handle
the pandemic without it being also a biopolitical response. The
so-called herd immunity strategy, for example, or the actions that seek
to save the economy are also responses coming from the government
regarding people’s lives. Agamben’s argument does not suppose a miracle
solution with regard to the public management of COVID-19, it is simply
a warning that governments are taking advantage of the state of
exception to replace constitutional rights and to self-abrogate an
authority that goes beyond what is allowed by law.
5 Conclusion
When Agamben indicates that States’ response to COVID-19 is
disproportionate, he does so from an understanding and from genealogical
knowledge of the processes of government; it is not resulting from a
conspiracy theorist-paranoid or irrational approach. From that
perspective, governments’ authoritarian attributions are only the most
recent radicalization of the forms of absolute domination over social
life that has characterized Western culture since its origins.
For Agamben, modern biopolitics is expressed in the crisis of how
COVID-19 reinforces a status of obligational? Control over human life
grounded on in-determinacy and un-founded power. This indeterminacy of
the “place” and foundation of power is more aggressive concerning the
control that can be exercised, for example, in concrete forms of
government such as “totalitarianism” or “dictatorship.” The state of
exception that we experience is presented as a “threshold of
indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism,”[45] as Agamben has
proposed for decades. The West, according to Agamben, has built a state
of exception that “is not a dictatorship, but a vacuum space of law.
That is a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations are
deactivating.”[46] As a result of perverse and “intimate solidarity
between democracy and totalitarianism.”[47] So, the state of exception
generated by COVID-19 is just the continuity of that order.
Agamben has been wrong on one point: COVID-19 is not a regular flu: it
has been the “most important of all the flus” that he has been able to
witness since he began his research program in 1996. For better or
worse, COVID-19 has allowed the materializing for his critics to see “in
vivo” the meaning of his extensive and abstract work on the permanent
state of exception. Perhaps the harsh reality that forces us to
experience biopolitical decisions first-hand today allows us to
understand why the world, according to Agamben, has become a “place
where the state of exception perfectly coincides with the rule and where
the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of everyday life.” In
other words, it allows us to see how and why the world is transforming
into a gigantic concentration camp.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the Rey Juan Carlos University and Postdoctoral
research program Talent Attraction by the Community of Madrid, Spain.
Funding information: The research has been financially supported through
the EU Postdoctoral research program "Talent Attraction" by the
Government of Madrid, Spain, with Agreement number: 2019-T2/SOC-14447.
Furthermore, the publication has been financial with URJC Research
Program - Support for Publication expenses through Resolution of
09/14/2021 of the Vice-rectory for research.
Authors contribution: Both authors share equal responsibility for the
final text of this article.
Conflict of interest: Authors state no conflict of interest.
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Received: 2021-03-31
Revised: 2021-07-16
Accepted: 2021-08-27
Published Online: 2021-10-05
© 2021 Guillermo Andrés Duque Silva and Cristina Del Prado Higuera,
published by De Gruyter
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License.
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Political Theology and COVID-19: Agamben’s Critique of Science as a New
“Pandemic Religion”
Guillermo Andrés Duque Silva and Cristina Del Prado Higuera
From the journal Open Theology
https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2020-0177
Abstract
The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has reacted to the coronavirus crisis in
a way that markedly contrasts with most other positions in contemporary
political philosophy. His position has been described as irrational,
politically incorrect, and unfair toward the victims of COVID-19. In
this article, we delve into the foundations of this peculiar,
pessimistic, and controversial reaction. From Agamben’s conceptual
framework, we will explain how state responses to the COVID-19 crisis
have turned science into a new religion from the dogmas of which various
strategies have been developed in order for states to exercise
biopolitical power under theological guises.
Keywords: state of exception; political theology; COVID-19; sovereignty
1 Introduction
At the beginning of 2020, an important philosophical debate took place
on the COVID-19 crisis. Various contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj
Žižek, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy put forward their positions
regarding the critical situations then developing. In February 2020, the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben intervened with a press release that
aroused the most relentless criticism from the philosophical community.
The title of the publication: The invention of an epidemic revealed the
critical position that Agamben advanced against the measures that have
been imposed by states within their responses to the health emergency.
In that publication, the renowned philosopher called the state responses
to the pandemic crisis “frantic, irrational and completely unjustified.”
Agamben questioned why the media and the authorities were making an
effort “to spread a climate of panic, causing a true state of exception,
with serious limitations on movements and a suspension of the normal
functioning of living and working conditions in entire regions.” From
Agamben’s perspective, those measurements were totally out of proportion
to what, according to him, was simply a typical common flu.
A wave of criticism was quickly levied against Agamben and we shall
examine in this article the most important elements thereof. We will not
discuss the virus’s destructive capacity since Agamben’s classification
of COVID-19 as “simply flu” falls by itself. What interests us is the
link Agamben makes between the emergence of COVID-19 and what he
conceptualizes as a resultant permanent state of exception.
Agamben has devoted himself for more than twenty years to the scholarly
study of the state of exception in Western culture. While his study of
the subject began solely on a theoretical and abstract plane, it
suddenly took life before his eyes in the form of the worldwide response
to COVID-19. For this reason, quite beyond Agamben’s controversial
position on the lethality of the virus, we are interested in the
argument that the philosopher puts forward about a growing tendency of
states to use the state of exception as a standard paradigm of
government, a propensity of theirs for which the cover given by COVID-19
is ideally suited, as he explains in his most recent work.[1]
This article will fulfill three purposes, arranged into three sections.
First, we will examine Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical proposal of the
state of exception as a dialogue, on the one hand, with the criticisms
received from other philosophers, and, on the other hand, with the
possible applications that this theory would have in concrete situations
generated by the COVID-19 crisis. Second, we will analyze the conceptual
framework of political theology and economic theology in Giorgio
Agamben’s work, especially that developed in The Kingdom and the Glory:
For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Finally, we will
put this theory in the context of the health crisis and the question of
the origin and legitimacy of laws and measures that affect social life
in the state of emergency generated by the coronavirus. In Section 4, we
will draw attention to the scope of the current state of exception that,
in the Agambenian theoretical framework, will not be overcome with the
end of the pandemic, in the same way, that it did not begin with it.
2 Pandemic and homo sacer: Our neighbor has been abolished
The Italian philosopher has attempted to carry further the philosophical
project dealing with biopolitics and their underlying genealogical
considerations that was initiated by Michel Foucault. Agamben describes
the contemporary age as a time that manages to materialize the diagnosis
that Foucault hinted at in reference to the concept of “biopolitics” in
his last works. The notion of biopolitics has been used to describe the
administration of power in human life as a government paradigm in
Western culture. According to Foucault’s conception of human powers:
these act in two ways:[2] those that boost life or those that end it.[3]
From the first perspective, that of the impulse of life, human beings
are, for those in power, simply raw material to be preserved; however,
in the second case, those in power are compelled to exercise mechanisms
that end the life of a part of the population that they administer. The
two visions are complementary because, ultimately, the deaths of some
subjects may serve to protect the lives of others. Giorgio Agamben
revives the concept of biopolitics in order to describe contemporary
society and goes one step further: he focuses his attention on a
pessimistic perspective of biopolitics. Agamben dedicates himself to
understanding the criteria for the administration of death that are
exercised in the history of the West so as to identify biopolitical
patterns in the governments of Western societies, as well as the reduced
possibilities of resistance that may emerge in a world that has been
turning into a “gigantic concentration camp.”[4]
From Agamben’s perspective, the most reprehensible cruelties that have
taken place in the exercise of power in the West, instead of being
exceptional anomalies, constitute instances inherent in the process of
the social construction of modernity.[5] In this way, Giorgio Agamben
interprets Ernst Nolte’s position on Auschwitz: history seems to resist
being left in the past. Indeed, Auschwitz constitutes the obscene
paradigm of the modern that Agamben turns into the founding myth of a
biopolitical era. This paradigm refuses to “remain in the past” and
gives meaning to contemporary forms of government. The Italian follows
the weak but the constant beat of the Musselman [6] of Auschwitz. The
philosopher carries out, in a research program over a decade and
producing six books, a prodigious archaeological excavation of power so
as to identify among its meanings what is the essential core of the
modern, an explanation of the question of “how did we get to Auschwitz?”
and through that genealogy journey finds the origins of the concept of
“Nuda Vita.”[7]
Contemporary life, in the concept of biopolitics proposed by Agamben,
has become a bare life. Life thus conceived is reduced to what is
produced and managed by law. The individuals in a concentration camp are
stripped of all rights and political–legal status; their life is
treated, by the agents of power, as matter without human form, naked
life: they are data, figures, biological units that are always
disposable, as opposed to the greater value of the future and the
preservation, paradoxically, of other lives.[8] Under the rule exercised
by the agents of power, Nuda Vita, according to Agamben, gives rise to
the pauperization of human life in general. Among the concentration camp
subjects, Agamben focuses on two figures; the Musselman, on the one
hand, represents the most powerless figure in the concentration camp.
Resigned to dying, he is engulfed in humiliation, fear, and horror. On
the other hand, there is the homo sacer, who lives trapped in the middle
of an incongruity; on the one hand, he bears the burden of a crime, but
he is legally unsacrifiable. That is, it is forbidden to subject him to
death at the same time that he has to live knowing that others are
allowed impunity if they kill him.[9] Agamben advances and relates the
nuda vita and the homo sacer as metaphors of modern life and the
concentration camp as its paradigm. In this regard, Múnera and Benavides
indicate that:
Bared life [as life for death] is not the simple natural life, but a
politically unprotected life, permanently exposed to death or the
humiliations caused, with total impunity, by the sovereign power or by
those who compose it as citizens.[10]
It is inevitable to compare Agamben’s bare life concept with his
statements about the disease and the states of emergency that COVID-19
has generated.
In particular, the intergenerational differences that are promoted in
defense of general well-being are striking. All, but particularly the
older generations, have experienced, in a certain way, being locked in a
politically unprotected life, permanently exposed to death. The older
adult has become a Musselman of the twenty-first century, resigned to
death but while being unsacrifiable. His death is an expected result
that, however, is not directly ordered. The death is, in this case,
expected as a natural result of the isolation offered, in European
nursing homes, for instance. His death is considered a natural and
inevitable result. The fact that consideration of the option of saving a
patient with a ventilator leans naturally to a question as to who “has a
whole life ahead of him,” at no time admits the other option of
considering that choice as a criminal act in respect of other patients
not so saved, puts us face to face with biopower. If the meaning of that
choice seems justifiably natural, it is because in that normalization of
horror lies the essence of the administration of power in the
contemporary age, a power that conserves one life and ends another. This
is the meaning of the criticism that Agamben makes of the health
emergency’s political background, which not only affects the elderly as
Musselman of the XXI century but, in general, is directed at all
individuals of Western civilization destined to become a contemporary
homo sacer. For Agamben, the message that sustains the biopolitics of
COVID-19 is based on the promotion of horror: the governmental machine
tells us that “our neighbour has been abolished.”[11]
To analyze how life in the West has been transformed into a simple naked
life due to the pandemic, we have systematically studied all of Giorgio
Agamben’s discourse on the health emergency and the changes that are
taking place in some Western democracies. After studying the sixteen
chapters of the book A che punto siamo? L´epidemia come politica we have
come upon an interesting finding: not only can it be verified that we
live in a permanent state of exception, as Agamben presented in his
research, but the pandemic has created a particular religious need to
which the church cannot respond, but to which science can. That is, in
the pandemic crisis science has become the new religion and takes from
religion its forms and strategies of governing life, all the while using
scientific arguments.
The author presented his arguments in the face of the COVID-19 crisis,
as quarantines and restrictions on movement were being put into place in
Europe, being presented as the most plausible means of handling the
peaks of contagion during 2020. In our study, we have identified that
the progression of Agamben’s argument follows three basic stages, the
first of which is present in his February 2020 publications. Here we can
identify the notion of a fear of contagion as a key element.
The central idea raised by Agamben indicates that the management of the
COVID-19 crisis has generated “a perverse vicious circle: the limitation
of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire
for security that has been induced by governments themselves, the same
governments that are now intervening in order to satisfy that
desire.”[12] In this sense, this fear of contagion forms the fundamental
basis of a new form of the traditional transaction between protection
and obedience that has characterized the relationships between modern
states and their citizens.
In his March 11 publication, at one of the most critical moments of the
pandemic, Agamben explains that the fear of contagion has made citizens
accept unprecedented restrictions on their freedoms, fuelled by the
uncertainty generated by not being able to identify materially the
source of risk and harm. The second group of arguments follows from the
previous ones and supposes the transition from collective fear to
individual isolation, with the deterioration in human relationships that
this produces. These two elements, collective fear and individual
isolation, support the third argument, which leads to the culmination of
Agamben´s criticism of governments. More specifically, in Riflessioni
sulla pestee the author claims that the pandemic has reactivated a need
for religion that the church cannot satisfy. This demand for religiosity
is met today by what we refer to as science.
In summary, beyond confirming that we live in a permanent state of
exception, the interesting finding that we would like to highlight is
the emergence of a need for religion that the Church can no longer
satisfy but that science can, even if only through theological
strategies of government.
Agamben describes the theological form of science as a new religion made
evident through a discourse disseminated via the media that combines
religiosity with science. The author affirms that the obsessive appeal,
“especially in the American press, to the word ‘apocalypse’ and to the
end of the world is an indication of this.”[13] However, blind faith in
science is not only evident in the media’s discourse, but is also
transferred to politics and decision making, that is, to the terrain of
sovereignty. The decisions that promote life or end it in the context of
the pandemic have been supported by scientific reasons that are
sometimes contradictory. This reveals to us a science of differing
opinions and prescriptions that range “from the heretical minority
position (also represented by prestigious scientists) of those who deny
the seriousness of the phenomenon to those within the mainstream
orthodox discourse who affirm it and yet radically diverge among
themselves in their opinions on how to deal with the pandemic.”[14]
Contrary to what the essence of science would indicate, some experts (or
some self-defined as such) act like governmental commissioners to define
how life is to be promoted or ended. This situation is similar to that
of a religious conflict, where the role of experts is not always to
reach the best solution but rather “to ensure the favor of the monarch,
who at the time of the past religious disputes that divided
Christianity, took sides according to his interests with one current or
another and imposed his solutions.”[15] In other words, this new
“science” of religion comes interweaved with a new biopolitical
government relying on theological strategies. In this article, we will
analyze arguments that explain this change based on Agamben’s work,
mainly his genealogy of sovereignty in his work Il regno e la gloria.
It is indispensable to compare Agamben’s bare life concept with his
statements about the disease and the states of emergency that COVID-19
has generated. In particular, the intergenerational differences that are
promoted in defense of general societal well-being are striking. All,
but particularly the older generations, have experienced, in a certain
way, being locked into a politically unprotected life, permanently
exposed to death. The older adult has become a Musselman of the
twenty-first century, resigned to death, while being unsacrifiable. His
death is an expected result that, however, is not directly ordered. The
death is, in this case, expected as a natural result of the isolation
they offer, in Europe, for instance, in nursing homes. His death is
considered a natural and inevitable result. The fact that the choice
between saving a young patient with a ventilator leans naturally to who
“has a whole life ahead of him,” at no time admits the option of
considering it as a criminal act, puts us face to face with biopower. If
the meaning of that choice tends to naturalize, it is because in that
normalization of horror lies the essence of the administration of power
in the contemporary age, a power that drives one life and ends another.
This is the meaning of the criticism that Agamben makes of the health
emergency’s political background, which not only affects the elderly as
Musselman of the XXI century but, in general, is directed at all
individuals of Western civilization destined to become a contemporary
homo sacer. For Agamben, the message that sustains the biopolitics of
COVID-19 is based on the promotion of horror: the governmental machine
tells us that “our neighbor has been abolished.”[16]
The sovereignty exercised by the governmental powers in this
interpretation by Agamben does not require greater legitimacy than the
very fact of being able to dispose of the lives of subjects. That is,
the decisions of government agents are considered legitimate “by the
simple fact of their sovereignty.”[17] This is what grounds as legal and
legitimate the sovereign decision of the attribution of the ventilator
referred to above, where reasons may be given or not since the symptom
and the expression of sovereignty do not need reasons in order to be
exercised.
For Agamben, where this sovereignty is developed is closely related to
the duality between normality and exception that Carl Schmitt raised;
however, it breaks the dichotomous scheme that characterized
Plettenberg’s jurist. Agamben indicates that the sovereign is not the
one who decides in and on the state of exception but rather is the one
capable of maintaining exceptional actions as an area subject to his
control and presenting them as standard actions. Thus, to the old logic:
normality – exception – new normality that we would long for with
Schmitt’s scheme, Agamben proposes a notion of permanent exceptionality.
If Carl Schmitt went so far as to affirm that “the sovereign is at the
same time, outside and inside the legal order”[18] for his ability to
suspend normality with the declaration of a state of exception and
reinstitute a new legal order, Giorgio Agamben goes one step further: He
affirms that his sovereign acts under a self-justifying imperative,
which indicates: “the law is outside itself, and I, the sovereign, who
am outside the law, declare that there is no outside the law.”[19]
While in the Schmittian approach, exceptionality and sovereignty are
attributes of the political struggle,[20] in Agamben, the place of power
and its exercise are transcendent to political groups and actors.
Authority and administration are expressed from a permanent
exceptionality. For that reason, the sovereignty in Agamben is a place,
not a specific actor. The government is a verb rather than a noun. So,
while the sovereign for Schmitt may be a political party, a monarch, a
populist leader, or even, in its last stage, a guerrilla group that
decides in and on the state of exception, for Agamben, that role is the
experience of governing, not a specific social actor.[21] That is, it is
not the result of a specific decision-maker but of the social and legal
order that has been built in the West.[22] This form of exceptionality
is expressed permanently, without breaks or claims of new normalities.
For Agamben, sovereignty and the right that emanates from it do not
arise from the pauses of exceptionality that Schmitt proposes because,
in the contemporary West, there is nothing more normal than living in a
permanent state of exception. In other words, the state of exception in
Giorgio Agamben’s thought is not characterized by its abnormality and
contingency, and it is not explained in terms of “normality to come,”
but instead by its permanence, which is why it is, in most cases, an
imperceptible exceptionality.[23]
Although the approach to a permanent state of exception places the
COVID-19 crisis in a broad panorama, the criticisms received by another
biopolitics researcher, Roberto Esposito, reflect that it is still too
early to see beyond the “death toll,” as Agamben urges. It is not yet
time to analyze the qualitative effect that the decision to quarantine
humanity and its freedoms will leave in the long term. Specifically,
Esposito indicates to Agamben that the comparison between spending a few
days in isolation in a comfortable Italian middle-class house and the
horror of a concentration camp is implausible and irresponsible.[24]
Esposito is right. However, we should add to his reply that the way
COVID-19 restrictions are assumed is not the same in regions of the
world where, for example, washing hands with soap and water has been a
luxury for centuries. So, Esposito seems to lose sight of the fact that
the exceptional is not dictated by the circumstances in which isolation
is assumed but comes from how we internalize in customs what should not
under any circumstances be accepted.[25] For example, we have
incorporated as something “normal” that enormous regions of the world
live under the quarantine imposed by hunger and misery. Agamben reminds
us that the genuine plague is none other than the meekness with which we
accept to live with exceptional and reprehensible situations.[26]
Finally, this “normalization of the exceptional” is a consequence of
sovereignty in the biopolitical era and the permanent state of
exception, and the emergence of COVID-19 is settling into it, like its
most advanced chapter.
3 COVID-19 and democracy: A people that can reign but not govern
Many of the criticisms that Agamben received sought to label him as part
of the “conspiracy theorist paranoiacs” who assign to the states and the
capitalist elites the responsibility of having spread fear amongst
citizens when, in fact, capitalism and its government elites have been
highly affected by the crisis capitalism and its government elites have
been the main affected by the crisis. Žižek’s criticism of Agamben, for
example, questioned the benefit that the state of emergency could bring
to governments and capitalist elites because, in the end, the emergency
has accentuated, on the one hand, general distrust in the governments
and, on the other hand, an unprecedented economic crisis. Žižek asks
Agamben: what elite would be interested in promoting such a movement
against their interests? The answer in favor of Agamben to this question
can be found in the criticism that Paolo Flores d’Arcais made of Agamben
in MicroMega. For Flores d’Arcais, COVID-19 has not strengthened the
state or capital’s power. This position coincides with that of Žižek.
However, the pandemic has been characterized by the appearance of a new
“conspiracy of white coats”: doctors and scientists who appear today as
depositaries of the “last word” in government on the lives of its
citizens. According to Flores d’Arcais, this is/represents a power more
significant than the interests of governments and capital.[27]
If we focus on the way decisions are made in the COVID-19 state of
exception, and in the Agambenian theoretical framework, we will see that
governments rely on the medical-scientific argument to justify their
decisions with two benefits to them, such administrators; on the one
hand, they avoid the need to submit their proposals to the demanding
deliberation of democratic systems and, on the other hand – with that
shortcut and delegation to the scientists – the governments exempt from
their original responsibilities; as simple “operators” of a scientific
decision that, after all, is alien to them. So, that last decision of
the “white coats” to which Flores d’Arcais refers is not taken in some
way above the governments themselves but is instead used by the latter
as an argument of authority that operates theologically. If we consider
the theological background in which the scientific decisions that
subsequently sustain government actions arise, we see a correlation
between earthly government authorities and “scientific sovereignty.”
This self-power justifies coercive decisions under the irrefutable halo
that medicine offers. In the long term, contrary to what Žižek says,
those measures that in principle seem to affect capital and the states
will strengthen them notably, since the exceptional will become routine,
in an accelerated way and with a high democratic cost that will be
difficult to recover. In the end, with the irrefutable and self-imposed
argument of “medical reason,” the governments that have sustained the
temporary suspension of the legal order will have been able to justify
unprecedented control over the individual and society to protect them
from an unprecedented danger. In summary, by dint of the
medical–political duality, in the crisis of COVID-19, a contemporary
version of the theological–political duality that Agamben studied is
forged to explain that who governs, in the occidental democracies is
that power capable of converting the state of exception into order, and
the world – into a gigantic “concentration camp.” Seen like this, the
relationship between theology and politics that can be established in
the decisions taken to contain COVID-19, coming from Agamben, does not
correspond in any way with a conspiratorial agenda.
In Agamben’s viewpoint, the world configured as a concentration camp
predates COVID-19; in fact, it is as old as Western societies’ very
formation. How does Agamben explain why we got to this point? Agamben
considers that the West’s history is the history of creating a bipolar
biopolitical “governmental machine” that operates theologically on human
lives, despite having eliminated the need to sustain its actions in some
essence or primary political substance: the machinery of government that
does not need to refer to a divine foundation and, nevertheless, is
always presented as a sacred institution.[28]
The biopolitical government is clothed with celestial majesty without
properly a divine substance from which its authority emanates. In Il
regno e la gloria, Agamben performs a genealogical exercise of modern
government. He explains the emergence of this governmental machine,
moving back to the Judeo-Christian theological origins. This
genealogical development is highly relevant for understanding Agamben’s
criticism of the global state of exception that has unleashed through
COVID-19. Agamben’s research allows us to understand that modern Western
culture has built a type of government that can dispense with the need
to refer its decisions to a fundamental, essential, and superior power
and, even so, operate under theological principles. The modern
understood in this way does not presuppose, much less arise from, the
rupture between substance and form, nor the separation between
auctoritas and potestas. Rather, the modern invokes the discovery of an
absent, immobile divine power, whose sacredness depends not on itself,
but on the glorification of those who, without being God, have assumed
the management of its praxis on earth.
In modern government the providential and scientific levels – that of
power and that of authority–make up two poles that cooperate: they
maintain the place of the sacred as an empty throne, that is, without a
specific substance and, at the same time, they preserve the sacredness
in the management rites that, “in the name of the sacred,” are carried
out by angels, ministers, shepherds, saints for each prayer and, in
general, all the bureaucratic machinery responsible for religious
praxis. To reach this conclusion, Agamben faces the task of creating a
genealogy of government, similar to that carried out by Foucault while
going beyond Foucault’s work. Concurrently, the French philosopher finds
in the pastoral work of the first two centuries of Christianity the
authentically modern moment that found the birth of political power in
the theological contamination of the human government’s world. Let us
remember that for Foucault, this moment is characterized by transforming
power into a properly human management attribute, that is, detached from
transcendental sovereignty. Modern political power, that is, the
capacity to provide security, administration, and management to the
state, would be born, in Foucault’s perspective, from that pastoral
power, in essence, private, and oriented to the economic technique that
the priests and first Christian leaders carried out on their flock and
over each one his “sheeps.”[29] For his part, in various theological
treatises, Agamben analyzes how the political is also present in the
origins of Jewish and Christian religious dogmatic discourses. Agamben
explains, for example, that the term oikonomia, which characterizes the
first private management of the “pater familias,” not only has the
political implications that we know today in the states but also had and
has profound theological implications to which Foucault did not pay
enough attention. Thus, the domestic administration to which modern
oikonomia refers is part of both the theological and the political.[30]
For example, the Holy Trinity expresses a form of political management
of the world; the economy is applied as an internal articulation that
favors its praxis. Due to the internal connection that the three
elements that compose it are unity and, at the same time, plurality of
actions; here, the economy not only acts as a metaphor, of the modern
separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers – as
Foucault indicated – but they constitute – according to Agamben – its
historical origin since it took place first in theology and later in
politics.[31] In summary, through an analysis of theological treatises,
which are in themselves an invaluable finding,[32] Agamben overcomes, on
the one hand, the causal link between theology and politics and, on the
other hand, questions the overvalued secularization of present
theological concepts, for example, those of Carl Schmitt. For Agamben,
theology is at the base of politics in the same way that politics was at
the base of theology from its origins. The problematic issue has been
that the bureaucratic apparatus of “domestic administrators,” those who
today issue movement restriction orders, for example, has evolved to the
current forms of absolute control over a social life, without the
substance or foundation of those measures coming from absolute power.
Although Agamben refers to ancient theological texts, he argues that
these texts have implications for understanding the current political
decline, the tendency to authoritarianism, and the crisis of liberal
democracies. He considers that the contemporary era is characterized by
the total triumph of life’s economic government in all its dimensions.
With his genealogy, Agamben shows that life’s objectification as an
administrable good has not always been the prevailing paradigm. On the
contrary, Agamben explains that the birth of the modern perspective on
power is located precisely in the separation between two paradigms and
the subsequent autonomy of one over the other: political theology and
economic theology. In the first, God’s will is the origin of sovereign
power; that is, where the divine plan of salvation resides in the
Judeo-Christian culture. In the second, both God’s and human life are
manageable matter: objects of an economy of life administered by experts
and authorities authorized to resolve human vicissitudes.[33] In God’s
figure, political theology found the symbol of sovereign power, and
economic theology substitutes the said transcendence with the idea of an
oikonomia conceived as an immanent order.[34] The contemporary political
crisis, the one that has led to the creation of this gigantic
concentration camp, exacerbated by COVID-19, would be based on the fact
that political theology has lost almost all ground to economic theology,
a field of power that acquires independence and that does not need to be
justified in the will of God, that is in, authentic and transcendent
power, to rule. In this fracture between God and his praxis, Agamben
identifies the emergence of the “western governmental machine,” a
bipolar machine that separates God’s omnipotence from the world’s
rational government, that is, absolute power, from its worldly exercise.
To better explain the above, Agamben analyzes the motto of
constitutional monarchies with which kingdom and government differ, thus
graphically describing his finding of the fracture of God: in the same
way that “the king reigns, but does not rule,” God reigns, but does not
rule in modern societies of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Economic
theology gains greater independence as the field of government is
abrogated, sustaining its exclusivity overall “that which God cannot
do,” that field between the challenges of day-to-day human life and the
mystery of divine truth, “becomes in the paradigm of the distinction
between power and its exercise, between kingdom and government.”[35]
This division presents us with a powerless God before his creation since
“he can only act through the natural order that he has established.”[36]
He can do everything, but he cannot do anything that is not an automatic
response to his wisdom and to the logic of the order that he has
established. A God powerless in the face of the daily demands of his
creature since his logic does not belong to the world of the contingent
but of the transcendent. For its part, in the human world, changing and
unpredictable, everything is manageable from the understanding between
humans; that is why this is a world that fits the possibility of
government. Through a journey between primitive and medieval Christian
texts, Agamben argues that modern government is present to administer
the intermediate space between the particular and unpredictable events
of men and the general providence or absolute power of God. The
decisions of the men who govern that terrain will tend to apply general
providence to the situations they live, making a calculation, ultimately
an interpretation, of their decisions regarding the unknown plan of
salvation. In Agamben’s words, the first rulers of modern oikonomy
“would assume an idea of an order founded on the contingent play of
immanent effects.”[37]
This distinction between the divine, inaccessible, and incomprehensible
realm and human government may find an application in the case of the
coronavirus crisis. The truth about the origin and ultimate solution to
the pandemic seems to escape our frame of thought. Beyond the hope of a
vaccine, comprehensive knowledge about the COVID-19 phenomenon seems to
be sheltered in a place that is alien to us, before which we have left
only the interpretations and improvisations of human management. For
this reason, Jean-Luc Nancy’s criticism of Agamben, in which he replies
to the Italian philosopher that the experience we are living is a “viral
exception and not a political–legal exception.”[38] Nancy’s
differentiation reflects the duality between earthly management and the
mysterious core of power that Agamben describes in Il regno e la gloria.
In the distinction made by Nancy in his question to Agamben, a current
application of the difference between kingdom and government is
installing itself, a reflection of our natural inability to access the
origin of the problem, in such a way that we seek for the unknown,
stratagems and euphemisms such as that of the “viral exception,” behind
which we hide our impotence in the face of a problem that surpasses us
in understanding and control. It is certainly not truly clear what Nancy
means by a “viral exception” and how it differs from a political–legal
exception. What is clear is that, since we are not, as humanity, capable
of accessing a transcendent power to handle the problem of COVID-19 with
that power’s full knowledge, we use restrictions on liberties like the
exact measures of the imperfect world of government that we have built.
Only that explains the response to the crisis through quarantines and
impositions of authority that have not changed focus since the pest
control we did centuries ago, for example, to the Spanish flu. To this
same economic management of life belong, in fact, categories such as
Nancy’s, related to a supposed “viral exception,” since with them an
attempt is made to provide a mysterious legitimacy to the old and
precious political–legal shackles of the West. In summary, if the state
of exception in which we live has been based on the management of
calculations and interpretations of a transcendent power that is
inaccessible to us, then the contingent games of immanent effects that
we create around emergencies such as COVID-19, and not only in it,[39]
deserve questioning.
4 Promises of glorification
The Agambenian genealogy takes an unexpected and provocative turn when,
in the second part of The Kingdom and the Glory, the Italian philosopher
asks himself about the bureaucratic circle closest to the power of God;
the Angels. He wonders: what happens to them and their functional
specialization when doomsday arrives? The question is posed to the
theological tradition. However, the answer is found in the Heideggerian
ontology: according to Agamben, the angels who, in principle, would not
fulfill more functions than to satisfy the demands of humanity, would
remain limited to performing their most essential function. That is:
glorify God, keeping him isolated for his glory. What a paradox that
Agamben discovers; not even a hypothetical day of judgment would break
the logic of the government machine’s bipolarity by revealing the
absolute power of God. This paradox has implications in the current
coronavirus crisis and in the proposals for an alternate world to be
built.[40] With a hypothetical end of the world, the place of absolute
power would continue to be isolated by its splendor and by the acclaim
that the angels would do around and about it. From an imperfect
humankind point of view, this separation from the core-power would
reveal that pure power ever is, in essence, an empty place, a nothing
that to “be power” needs the glorification of the angels at the end of
the world, such as his earthly stewards did during normal times. Glory
is, consequently for Agamben, the essence of the concept of the
political that affects the supreme power of God in a different way than
what it can do over men since it contains a correlation: on the one
hand, God depends on the glory and glory of God and, on the other hand,
glory becomes glory only through glorification. That is to say, the only
sure thing, consequently, is that the human power resides in those who
can glorify the sacred and mysterious nucleus. In other words, Agamben
identifies that the power of the western governmental machine, the one
that has acquired current absolute dominance over social and individual
life, is sustained by the constant ovation and acclaim of men themselves
in order for it to exist.[41] In summary, the purest elemental power is
an empty nucleus surrounded by the veil of Glory. That veil, on the one
hand, glorifies it; that is, it elevates Glory to the place of absolute
power and, on the other hand, hides such pure power from humanity under
a halo of mystery. Agamben transfers this theological metaphor to the
level of the individual. The humankind without politics is like that
God, in essence, innocuous and isolated, described by Agamben as a being
at rest, immobile and oblivious to the tasks of government, his life
acquires a meaning when he is surrounded by Glory, at the same time that
it becomes his condemnation: he leads him to pursue, through politics,
utopias that, as such, are inaccessible; like promises about a kingdom
that, written with strokes of glorification, mark our political
identities with their indelible stamp.
For Agamben, the inaction of Glory brings together what we call
politics: it surrounds the simplicity of the human species, its natural
condition of lack of identity is overcome thanks to it. Politics
understood as Glory provides us with a purpose that, although it is
devoid of divine purity, justifies the absolute control over life as,
after all, our purpose. It could be said that theology and politics live
in the prelude to an “empty throne.” To build that anteroom full of
government mechanisms while simultaneously glorifying the inaccessible
sacred is the purpose of modern politics.
In conclusion, Glory as inaction unites the sacred and the profane gives
rise to the political as a meaning imposed on biological life. At
present, in Western culture the hegemonic power of Glory is expressed,
for example, in what we know under the name of “public opinion,” which
is constructed by the media, the social networks, and, in general, by
the mass media. The force of this public opinion hides an empty center
of truth that, despite its emptiness, rules over dissenting positions:
it does not possess pure truths and, nevertheless, its inertia affects
all political positions, even the best-supported ones, in such a way
that consistently tend to conform to it as a paradigm of “politically
correct.” The politicians’ or governmental agencies’ extreme sensitivity
to public opinion leads them to approach these views as more pressing
and deserving of justice.
Agamben questions the “pseudoscientific” claims of the approaches that
try to name, explain, and deify Glory. On the one hand, he questions
Habermas, who proposes certain idolatry in the search for consensus as
an “achieved utopia” of institutional channeling of sovereignty.[42]
According to Habermas, the public sphere and deliberation refer to the
pole of government. However, for Agamben, this is only one of the modern
forms that the old glorifying acclaim of modern oikonomy acquires. On
the other hand, he questions the power of the decision legitimized by a
“cheering people” that Schmitt exalts as sovereign in Constitutional
Theory; the acclamation of the demos around the ruler is just the other
pole of glorification, according to Agamben. [43] Both Habermas and
Schmitt try to impose a statute of logic and divinity on what, for
Agamben, is an inaccessible substance. Deliberation and decision are
nothing more than liturgical spectacles, two euphemistic artifacts
created by man to explain what has no explanation; to place in the place
of the “empty throne” that we described before, a role of authority that
does not belong to them and to present them as the “discovered” origins
of the power of governments. The truth, according to Agamben, is that
the origin of a general acceptance of laws that, for example, define the
life or death of thousands of people is unknown; what makes such a law
an obligation accepted by the citizenry does not arise from debate or
prior deliberation or from the simple fact of deciding. Deliberation and
decision are parts of an economy of power that do not constitute
transcendent sovereign power since there is nothing so rational and
indisputable within a decision or deliberation that can explain the
general acceptance of orders that define who lives and who does not.
Slavoj Žižek’s proposal regarding a humanistic emergence from which
“true communism” would result does not stop attracting attention; in
some way, it would adjust to one of the possible answers Agamben
analyzes about the hypothetical apocalyptic situation. We should ask
Žižek more than Agamben if the proposal of a “post-covid communism”[44]
is not another accommodation of modern oikonomia to maintain the
original divide between kingdom and government? Wouldn’t this new
communism be another form of glorification?
It is possible to find ourselves in front of another “mirage of
divinity,” another earthly “performance” such as that of Habermarsian
deliberation and Schmittian decisionism. It must be said that Agamben
does not offer an alternative to lockdowns and quarantines, beyond
criticizing the coercive response and warning of the totalitarian risk
that the crisis and the state of emergency is generating. It is not
clear that there really is an alternative proposed by Agamben to handle
the pandemic without it being also a biopolitical response. The
so-called herd immunity strategy, for example, or the actions that seek
to save the economy are also responses coming from the government
regarding people’s lives. Agamben’s argument does not suppose a miracle
solution with regard to the public management of COVID-19, it is simply
a warning that governments are taking advantage of the state of
exception to replace constitutional rights and to self-abrogate an
authority that goes beyond what is allowed by law.
5 Conclusion
When Agamben indicates that States’ response to COVID-19 is
disproportionate, he does so from an understanding and from genealogical
knowledge of the processes of government; it is not resulting from a
conspiracy theorist-paranoid or irrational approach. From that
perspective, governments’ authoritarian attributions are only the most
recent radicalization of the forms of absolute domination over social
life that has characterized Western culture since its origins.
For Agamben, modern biopolitics is expressed in the crisis of how
COVID-19 reinforces a status of obligational? Control over human life
grounded on in-determinacy and un-founded power. This indeterminacy of
the “place” and foundation of power is more aggressive concerning the
control that can be exercised, for example, in concrete forms of
government such as “totalitarianism” or “dictatorship.” The state of
exception that we experience is presented as a “threshold of
indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism,”[45] as Agamben has
proposed for decades. The West, according to Agamben, has built a state
of exception that “is not a dictatorship, but a vacuum space of law.
That is a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations are
deactivating.”[46] As a result of perverse and “intimate solidarity
between democracy and totalitarianism.”[47] So, the state of exception
generated by COVID-19 is just the continuity of that order.
Agamben has been wrong on one point: COVID-19 is not a regular flu: it
has been the “most important of all the flus” that he has been able to
witness since he began his research program in 1996. For better or
worse, COVID-19 has allowed the materializing for his critics to see “in
vivo” the meaning of his extensive and abstract work on the permanent
state of exception. Perhaps the harsh reality that forces us to
experience biopolitical decisions first-hand today allows us to
understand why the world, according to Agamben, has become a “place
where the state of exception perfectly coincides with the rule and where
the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of everyday life.” In
other words, it allows us to see how and why the world is transforming
into a gigantic concentration camp.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the Rey Juan Carlos University and Postdoctoral
research program Talent Attraction by the Community of Madrid, Spain.
Funding information: The research has been financially supported through
the EU Postdoctoral research program "Talent Attraction" by the
Government of Madrid, Spain, with Agreement number: 2019-T2/SOC-14447.
Furthermore, the publication has been financial with URJC Research
Program - Support for Publication expenses through Resolution of
09/14/2021 of the Vice-rectory for research.
Authors contribution: Both authors share equal responsibility for the
final text of this article.
Conflict of interest: Authors state no conflict of interest.
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Received: 2021-03-31
Revised: 2021-07-16
Accepted: 2021-08-27
Published Online: 2021-10-05
© 2021 Guillermo Andrés Duque Silva and Cristina Del Prado Higuera,
published by De Gruyter
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License.
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HeartDoc Andrew
Nov 4, 2021, 11:46:18 AM11/4/21
to
is either typical or common.
U.S. & elsewhere is by rapidly ( http://bit.ly/RapidTestCOVID-19 )
finding out at any given moment, including even while on-line, who
among us are unwittingly contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or
asymptomatic) in order to http://bit.ly/convince_it_forward (John
15:12) for them to call their doctor and self-quarantine per their
doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic. Thus, we're hoping for the
best while preparing for the worse-case scenario of the Alpha lineage
mutations and others like the Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu &
Delta lineage mutations combining to form hybrids that render current
COVID vaccines/pills no longer effective.
Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry ( http://bit.ly/RapidTestCOVID-19 )
and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.
So how are you ?
...because we mindfully choose to openly care with our heart,
HeartDoc Andrew <><
--
Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
Cardiologist with an http://HeartMDPhD.com/EternalMedicalLicense
2024 & upwards non-partisan candidate for U.S. President:
http://HeartMDPhD.com/WonderfullyHungryPresident
and author of the 2PD-OMER Approach:
http://HeartMDPhD.com/HeartDocAndrewCare
which is the only **healthy** cure for the U.S. healthcare crisis
Michael Ejercito
Nov 5, 2021, 12:17:06 AM11/5/21
to
On Thursday, November 4, 2021 at 8:46:18 AM UTC-7, Andrew B. Chung,
> So how are you ? '
I am wonderfully hungry!
Michael
I am wonderfully hungry!
Michael
HeartDoc Andrew
Nov 5, 2021, 12:31:00 AM11/5/21
to
MichaelE wrote:
While wonderfully hungry in the Holy Spirit, Who causes (Deuteronomy
8:3) us to hunger, I note that you, Michael, not only don't have
COVID-19 but are rapture (Luke 17:37) ready and pray (2 Chronicles
7:14) that our Everlasting (Isaiah 9:6) Father in Heaven continues to
give us "much more" (Luke 11:13) Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) so
that we'd have much more of His Help to always say/write that we're
"wonderfully hungry" in **all** ways including especially caring to
http://bit.ly/convince_it_forward (John 15:12 as shown by
http://bit.ly/RapidTestCOVID-19 ) with all glory (
http://bit.ly/Psalm117_ ) to GOD (aka HaShem, Elohim, Abba, DEO), in
the name (John 16:23) of LORD Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.
Laus DEO !
Suggested further reading:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/5EWtT4CwCOg/m/QjNF57xRBAAJ
Shorter link:
http://bit.ly/StatCOVID-19Test
Be hungrier, which really is wonderfully healthier especially for
diabetics and other heart disease patients:
http://HeartMDPhD.com/HeartDocAndrewToutsHunger (Luke 6:21a) with all
glory ( http://HeartMDPhD.com/Psalm117_ ) to GOD, Who causes us to
hunger (Deuteronomy 8:3) when He blesses us right now (Luke 6:21a)
thereby removing the http://HeartMDPhD.com/VAT from around the heart
8:3) us to hunger, I note that you, Michael, not only don't have
COVID-19 but are rapture (Luke 17:37) ready and pray (2 Chronicles
7:14) that our Everlasting (Isaiah 9:6) Father in Heaven continues to
give us "much more" (Luke 11:13) Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) so
that we'd have much more of His Help to always say/write that we're
"wonderfully hungry" in **all** ways including especially caring to
http://bit.ly/convince_it_forward (John 15:12 as shown by
http://bit.ly/RapidTestCOVID-19 ) with all glory (
http://bit.ly/Psalm117_ ) to GOD (aka HaShem, Elohim, Abba, DEO), in
the name (John 16:23) of LORD Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.
Laus DEO !
Suggested further reading:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/5EWtT4CwCOg/m/QjNF57xRBAAJ
Shorter link:
http://bit.ly/StatCOVID-19Test
Be hungrier, which really is wonderfully healthier especially for
diabetics and other heart disease patients:
http://HeartMDPhD.com/HeartDocAndrewToutsHunger (Luke 6:21a) with all
glory ( http://HeartMDPhD.com/Psalm117_ ) to GOD, Who causes us to
hunger (Deuteronomy 8:3) when He blesses us right now (Luke 6:21a)
thereby removing the http://HeartMDPhD.com/VAT from around the heart
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