pandemic 2

PANDEMIC!
the suspension of daily life and work activities for entire
regions?”
Agamben sees the main reason for this “disproportionate
response” in “the growing tendency to use the
state of exception as a normal governing paradigm.” The
measures imposed in the emergency allow the government
to limit seriously our freedoms by executive decree:
It is blatantly evident that these restrictions are
disproportionate to the threat from what is,
according to the NRC, a normal flu, not much
different from those that affect us every year. We
might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a
justification for exceptional measures, the invention
of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext
for broadening such measures beyond any limitation.”
The second reason is “the state of fear,
which in recent years has diffused into individual
consciousnesses and which translates into a real
need for states of collective panic, for which the
epidemic once again offers the ideal pretext.
Agamben is describing an important aspect of the functioning
of state control in the ongoing epidemic, but there
are questions that remain open: why would state power
be interested in promoting such a panic which is accompanied
by distrust in state power (“they are helpless, they
74