Comments on: The return of the plague-spreader https://allegralaboratory.net/the-return-of-the-plague-spreader/ Anthropology for Radical Optimism Mon, 30 Mar 2020 20:47:21 +0000 hourly 1 By: Mateusz Laszczkowski https://allegralaboratory.net/the-return-of-the-plague-spreader/#comment-99550 Sat, 28 Mar 2020 11:47:15 +0000 https://allegralaboratory.net/?p=32635#comment-99550 In reply to Ivan Rajković.

Hi Ivan, thanks for your comment. I’m familiar with the kind of arguments you are referencing in general, and with Berg’s piece in particular. In a nutshell, I think it expresses just the kind of thinking I’m critiquing here. Meanwhile, I’ve submitted another post to Allegra that partly responds to those arguments. It’s in the works, and I hope it sees light on Allegra soon. Doubtless, it will not exhaust the debate – I hope it’ll help stir it up further!

]]> By: Ivan Rajković https://allegralaboratory.net/the-return-of-the-plague-spreader/#comment-99536 Thu, 26 Mar 2020 17:46:13 +0000 https://allegralaboratory.net/?p=32635#comment-99536 Interesting points about ‘user-generated pantopticism’. But I am afraid immunity/community dichotomy here is false, or at least, depending on the country one is observing. Many have actually welcomed the isolation and wished for quicker measures of the state, not for the preservation of middle class individualism or mindless pleasure of self-discipline, but as an act of care for those more vulnerable they see as being potentially sacrificed by the state, if the crisis hits the healthcare system. Also, Agamben is forgetting that in 19th century, the poor no longer blamed the outcasts for plague outbreaks, but the rich and the state apparatus. We see the same nowadays too, and isolation and DIY measures of citizens are often ambivalent, and sometimes very much opposed to what is proscribed by sovereign power. Corona morale is not wholly translatable to the responsibilisation of the neoliberal subject.

I recommend Anastasia Berg’s essay “Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness” as a good counterpoint: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Giorgio-Agamben-s/248306

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