TIM BEWES: I'm Tim
Bewes, Interim Director
of the Cogut Institute for the
Humanities at Brown University.
And I'm delighted to
introduce this conversation
with Peter Szendy,
who is David Herlihy
Professor of the Humanities
and Comparative Literature
here at Brown.
My conversation with Peter
took place on April the 19th,
a few days after his
article, "Viral Times"
was published on the
"In the Moment" blog,
hosted by the journal
Critical Inquiry.
Szendy's article is
the latest in a series
of pieces that reflect
on the COVID-19 pandemic.
His piece returns to
Michel Foucault's concept
of biopolitics, a model
of governmentality
that appears,
according to Foucault,
at the end of the 19th century.
And is defined by Foucault
as a shift of attention
on the part of power away
from individual bodies
subject to discipline and
towards human beings considered
as, quote, "A global
mass that is affected
by overall processes
characteristic of birth, death,
production, illness,
and so on," unquote.
biopolitics is concerned not
with punishment or exclusion,
as in the classical
model of sovereignty,
but with the management
of populations,
with hygiene,
birthrates, mortality,
and processes of centralizing
information, and normalizing
and regulating knowledge.
Szendy registers a limit
in Foucault's analysis,
while at the same time holding
to a Foucauldian methodology.
In other words,
he wants to retain
the possibility of an episteme
or a social theoretical model
of political governance.
And he asks questions, which
include, how do we understand
the contemporaneity of
the COVID-19 event using
the technologies of
discipline, sovereignty,
and control identified in
the Foucauldian analysis?
What use and standing can
such a theoretical analysis
have in the face of this life
and society changing event?
How are we to understand it's
a way of being concurrent
with major structural
changes in our society?
Or as Szendy himself
phrases the question,
what is the coronavirus the
metonymy or synecdoche of?
I began our conversation
by presenting him
with this overview
of his article,
and asking him if it
seemed to him to grasp
the central concerns
of his piece,
and whether there was
anything he wanted to add
as we began the discussion.
His reply to that question
begins the conversation
that follows.
Thank you for watching.
PETER SZENDY: Thank you
so much for hosting me,
and for this opportunity
of discussion and dialogue
that I really look forward
to in this isolated times
that we are living.
I mean, not everybody, but
as far as we are concerned.
And I think you perfectly
characterized and summed up
the general argument of
the article that I wrote.
What maybe I would
not so much as repeat
is that yes, I
find that there has
to be a critical reading of this
sort of sequence of paradigms
or epistemes, sovereignty
disciplinary power
and biopolitics.
We could even add Gilles
Deleuze's Control Societies.
So this succession, this
sort of chain of paradigms
has to be read critically.
And critically means that I
tried to lend an attentive ear
to the moments--
to the passages, from
the one to the other.
And what remains within
each of these paradigms,
or epistemes, what
remains has a sort
of internal polyphony,
an internal contradiction
between various times.
So I tried to lend
an attentive ear
to what resists this
distribution into paradigms.
But this, and that's what I
want to stress or emphasize,
this doesn't mean at all that
I wish to completely throw away
the very idea of these
paradigms or epistemes.
I think they provide us
with absolutely crucial
critical categories.
Indeed, we would be
completely unable to think
what is happening to us
without these very paradigms.
TIM BEWES: Well, let's talk a
little bit about the paradigms
and about the continuing--
the continuing imperative
of their usefulness.
Because in a way,
what I took-- one
of the aspects of
your argument that I
took, and in particular the
use of the term heterochrony,
was a sort of tension
between precisely
the paradigmatic thought,
and I wondered, I suppose,
whether heterochrony, or
the time differential,
was a new paradigm or
the end of paradigms.
So I guess I still have
that slight question.
And this question sort
of comes into fruition
in the piece, where you
ask the question, what
is the mode of the
coronavirus contemporary with?
So the motive biopolitics
is contemporary
with ecology, which
I find amazingly
sort of rich and clarifying.
And I went back to
society must be defended
to look at these passages.
And there, biopolitics--
Foucault says, "Biopolitics
will derive its knowledge from
and define its powers,
fields of intervention
in terms of the birth
rate, the mortality
rate, various biological
disabilities, and the effects
of the environment."
So you have the
question then, what
is the coronavirus
pandemic contemporary with,
if not ecology?
And one-- I mean, one question
that was occurring to me,
really throughout
reading your pieces,
and to really to put it in
kind of straightforward terms,
what is the current
global pandemic,
or current global approach to
the pandemic, best seen as--
is it best seen as part
of the political paradigm?
Which seems to be how
Giorgio Agamben is seeing it.
Or is it a breaking
of that paradigm?
Is it the appearance of
profound and sort of--
sort of crucial limitations
of that paradigm,
I guess I want to ask?
And the paradigm, of course,
is a paradigm of control
and of discipline.
It's of a social and
political paradigm.
So I wonder whether there's
two sides of that question.
There's the global-- there's the
global response to the corona
pandemic, and then there's
also the American response.
And I wonder whether the
American response should be
still conceived within that--
the paradigm of
the biopolitical.
And in particular, what about
the federal American response?
What about the
Trumpian response?
Does that also
register limitations
of the biopolitical paradigm?
PETER SZENDY: In the
article, in "Viral Times,"
I mention that it's
true the contemporaneity
of environmental-- of the rise
of environmental awareness,
let's say, and the birth of
biopolitics, as mentioned
by Foucault himself, as we know.
But I mainly focused on
what Foucault characterizes
as a simultaneousness
of, on the one hand,
epidemics and sovereignty--
sovereignty-- the paradigm of
sovereignty on the one hand.
And on the other hand,
the simultaneousness
of let's say disciplinary
power and biopolitics.
Foucault sort of combines
them in a common paradigm,
internally differentiates it.
This disciplinary/biopolitical
paradigm
as contemporary with endemics--
endemic diseases, recurring,
but controlled in a way.
Now what seemed really
interesting to me
is that with this
new pandemic, we
have a sort of contamination
between these two
forms of illness.
And I want to make
it very clear,
I'm not talking about these
illnesses as an epidemiologist
would or as a--
I know nothing
about epidemiology.
But I'm talking about
them as conceptualized
by certain critical thought
epitomized by Foucault.
So if what we are witnessing
belongs neither to the,
let's say, to the philosophical
concept of epidemics
or pandemics, if it is
more precisely maybe
the contamination of the one
by the other, and vise versa--
that's why I coin
at a certain point
this monstrous lexical
formation as a sort of virus,
or lexical virus, what I suggest
we would call it pan-endemic.
And then, as a mirror
effect, we could ask what
about the societal
paradigms that
are revealed by this virus?
I mean, what I mean is
that on the one hand,
we don't really know how to
characterize this pan-endemic.
And on the other hand, as
a sort of backward effect,
we don't really know
how to characterize
the kind of society that this
viral pan-endemic belongs to.
So that's one thing.
But then, I continued reading
Foucault and reflecting
upon these things.
And well, I found
that in many ways,
society must be defended,
which is the lecture course,
where Foucault defines
these two forms of these--
what I call in the article a
nosological political paradigm.
I mean this co-belonging of
a certain kind of illness
and a certain
technology of power.
So in this lecture course,
there is another very, very
interesting passage that I
don't mention in the article,
which maybe I can
mention it now.
It's a passage
where Foucault talks
about the excesses
of biopolitics
by referring to
the atomic power,
and also by referring to the
possibility of virus that
would be so out of control that
it would become universally
destructive.
So there are these
two possibilities
that he considers, a worldwide
nuclear war and the birth
of a virus that would
be, as he himself says,
universally destructive.
Now what seems to
me very interesting
is that in both cases what
is at stake is an excess.
In the case of the atomic--
the atomic power, the
use of the atomic power,
he says that "It's not
simply the power to kill,"
and I'm quoting, "in
accordance with the rights that
are granted to any sovereign."
So clearly, he associates
the use of nuclear warfare
to a certain idea
of sovereignty,
to the paradigm of
sovereignty, as the hyperbole
of the sovereignty paradigm.
So the generalization without
limits of the right to kill.
But then, and this is what is
so interesting in this example,
he says that "the use," I
quote, "the use of the atom bomb
represents the deployment of
a sovereign power that kills,
but it is also the power
to kill life itself.
Therefore, to suppress
itself, in so far
as it is the power
that guarantees life."
So it's the use of a
sovereign power that would
destroy this power itself.
Now, what is interesting is,
that the way Foucault describes
it, it seems it's
very strange actually,
because he says that "the use of
the atom bomb," I quote again,
"is also the power for
this sovereign power
to kill life itself.
Therefore, to suppress
itself insofar as it
is the power that
guarantees life,"
as if sovereignty, sovereign
power would guarantee life.
Which one would
think, no, that's
what biopolitical power does.
TIM BEWES: Right.
PETER SZENDY: Now, in
the other instance,
Foucault considers
the possibility that,
I quote again, "When it becomes
technologically and politically
possible for man to create,
to build the monster,
create living matter, and to
build viruses that cannot be
controlled and that are
universally destructive"--
that's the other possibility
that he considers.
And it's true that there are
so many conspiratorial theories
going on now for very
precise reasons, like--
I mean, they are spread like
a contagion by Donald Trump
himself or by other people, and
the idea that this virus was--
the coronavirus was engineered,
or that it was more or less
intentionally released
from a lab in China--
I mean, all these
conspiracy theories.
This is obviously not what
Foucault is talking about.
But it's interesting that even
if we don't want to hear about
these conspiracy theories,
and I absolutely don't believe
in them for a second, but
what is interesting in them
as a symptom is that they say
something about the fact that
the natural character of this
virus cannot be opposed to its
artificial character.
I mean, in both cases,
whether it has been born,
it is born naturally, or
if it has been engineered,
it's the same.
I mean, it has been
engineered by decades
of environmental destruction.
So it's an engineered
virus in the end.
But, so, getting back to
Foucault, what he says
is that building such a virus,
whether it's intentional
or just environmentally
engineered, if I may say so,
is what he characterizes
as a formidable extension
of biopower.
So as an excess of biopower
compared to sovereignty.
So we have these two
situations, nuclear power
as an excess of
sovereignty over biopower,
and an universally destructive
virus as an excessive biopower
over sovereign.
And he considers them
in a simultaneous--
as a simultaneous possibility.
So there is a sort of
charismatic excess,
if I may put it so,
of the sovereign power
over the biopolitical, and
of the biopolitical power
over the sovereign power.
And this is a sign to me that--
and this is in a way the most
Derridean moment in Foucault
that I know of,
which is fascinating,
but above all, it is a
sign that these paradigms,
they are basically struggling--
they are basically--
their very texture,
if I may say so, relies
upon an internal struggle
between themselves.
So each paradigm consists in its
very struggle with the other.
So this is what we
could characterize
as a sort of
heterochrony at work,
or micro polyphony at
work in the very texture
of these paradigms.
TIM BEWES: I think I'm
going to, in a way,
respond by putting a bit of
pressure, historical pressure,
in a sense, both
looking to the past,
to the way that
Foucault generated
the distinction between endemics
and pandemics, which is very,
very interesting, and your
proposition in the paper,
and also as you've just sort
of expounded a little bit,
that the moment that
we're in exceeds
the current, those
existing paradigms.
And that the pan-endemic
is in some sense
an excess of those paradigms.
When Foucault talks
about endemics,
he's talking, of course,
about the 18th century,
and conditions that had to
be resolved so that order
could be maintained,
conditions facing
the biopolitical regimes.
So, as he put it, he
described endemics
as "permanent
factors which sapped
the population's strength,
shortened the working week,
wasted energy, and cost money,
both because they led to a fall
in production, and because
treating them was expensive."
So one of the
interesting things you do
is resuscitate this
concept of endemics.
And precisely, as you
just said, place it
into a kind of tension
with epidemics.
And this is what you
say in the article.
"The endemic plague
of health care systems
under capitalism,"--
I think this is such
an important moment
in your essay--
"the endemic plague
of health care
systems under
capitalism,"-- meaning
precisely the weakness
of health care systems,
and the inequality
that's part of--
of health care systems--
"has exploded into
a pandemic crisis.
The latter is the subject
of permanent statistical
monitoring, of course.
But it seems to thwart
insurential preparation
and regulatory controls.
In short, what arises with
this new nosological formation
is the very time differential
between these paradigms
to which it belongs, while
exceeding them in every way."
And the question I want
to ask is about that word,
"exceeding them."
And I mean, is it the case
that the new moment exceeds
those paradigms?
Or is it really
something else which has
been occurring to me today--
is it really that we
have not yet broached,
or really approached the
biopolitical, at least
in the United States?
And the question I
have for you, Peter,
is it appropriate for us to
talk about a new paradigm that
somehow exceeds the old
ones, when it's not clear
that we've really even
achieved the biopolitical.
So re-reading Foucault, I've
been thinking about the sort
of--
I've been wondering
whether we ever
achieved, whether we
have ever achieved
even biopolitics in America.
I was mentioning
to you before we
started recording an article
in the current New York
Times, today's New York Times.
It's part of a special issue
called, "The America We Need."
And it's a very sobering,
very disturbing article,
overview of the current
moment that we're in.
And it sort of--
it occurred to me
that maybe America, maybe for
a brief moment after the Second
World War, we had something like
the biopolitical regime emerge.
But if we think about
statements like this.
This is from the New York Times.
"The inequalities of wealth have
become inequalities of health.
A middle-aged American in
the top fifth of the income
distribution can expect to
live about 13 years longer
than a person in the bottom
fifth, an advantage that has
more than doubled since 1980."
OK, and then it
goes on to say this.
"The United States
does not guarantee
the availability of affordable
housing to its citizens."
I mean we know all
this, of course.
"Does not guarantee
the availability
of affordable housing, as
do most developed nations.
It does not guarantee reliable
access to health care,
as does virtually every
other developed nation.
And beyond the threadbare nature
of the American safety net,
the government has pulled
back from investment
in infrastructure, education,
and basic scientific research,
the building blocks
of future prosperity.
It is not surprising that many
Americans have lost confidence
in the government as a vehicle
for achieving the ends that we
cannot achieve alone."
So I guess my question--
reading this, I was
thinking America
can't afford a Foucauldian
critique of biopolitics.
What America yearns
for is biopolitics.
What we need is
the biopolitical.
And isn't it the case
that Foucault profoundly
overestimated the timeframe in
which disciplinary formations
would give way to
biopolitical ones?
I love reading
Foucault, but how can--
can we afford the luxury
of a Foucauldian critique
of biopolitics?
Isn't the thing that
we need right now
is biopolitics as a sort
of basis of our society?
So I wondered how you
might respond to that.
PETER SZENDY: So first of
all, when I talk about excess,
the excess of one paradigm
over the other, it's not--
what I'm suggesting, it's
not that we are approaching
a new paradigm, but that
these existing paradigms,
they are in excess over one
another, which is different.
So they are working--
they are working
as differentials.
Which is far from an
abstract assertion,
because this leads me to a
direct answer to your question,
which is an urgent question.
I mean, this is what we are
witnessing dramatically today
in the US, especially,
but not only.
I come, as you
know, from France,
where there is a very strong
tradition of public health,
but it has been
completely destroyed.
And there have been, before the
outbreak of the coronavirus,
there were many, many protests
from health care professionals
against the terrible state
in which public health
care has been put by decades
of neoliberal governance
in France.
So I think it has
become increasingly
difficult to sustain that,
let's say, Europe still
has a valid, viable
public health care system,
even if it's still better
than the one in the US.
I mean, even if it's better,
let's suppose, distributed.
But what I want to say
is that biopolitics--
so in direct response to
your question, biopolitics,
I think, if I understand
Foucault correctly,
has never been about an
equal and fair distribution
of resources and possibilities.
It's rather about, let's
say, economically reasonable
management of what is available.
In terms also of
illnesses epidemics,
but it's also about the
monitoring, the control.
And it doesn't mean that the--
I mean, the horizon
in biopolitics,
it would be really
naive, I think,
to think that its horizon
is an equal distribution
of resources.
And so, when I put the emphasis
on this paradigm differential,
on this internal polyphony
within the various paradigms,
I think this could be
useful to conceptualize
what is happening in America
under the proper name Donald
Trump.
Obviously, one could
think that there
is a very strong biopolitical
paradigm at work here.
I mean, constant monitoring,
statistical modes of governing
have not disappeared at all.
Maybe they have simply
shifted from the state power
to the power of big
multinational companies,
like Google, or mainly American
ones, it has to be said.
So there is maybe a shift
from this biopolitical kind
of governance, from the state
power to another kind of power.
It's a global capitalist
power, but the seat of which
is mainly America.
In front of this, facing
this, Donald Trump
is probably the name
of a certain revival
of at least a fantasy
of sovereignty.
And I think that Foucault's
analysis in Society Must Be
Defended is strikingly relevant
to the current situation,
especially when he
characterizes racism.
And we could, I think,
think of racism in--
if that's the good term--
in the broader exception.
I mean, it's obviously
racism in terms of race,
but we could even speak of
a social kind of racism.
So what I mean is that when
Foucault characterizes racism
as what is needed, what
biopolitics need in order
to include some aspects of the
old sovereign right to kill,
and vise versa, racism as the
instrument for sovereignty
to exercise its power
in biopolitical terms,
I think this is
absolutely relevant
to the current situation.
Well, what I would simply
says is that I really
don't think that the Foucauldian
paradigms are simply obsolete.
What I think is
that in a way they
have become a sort of
caricature of themselves,
not only in
Foucault's reception,
with these very
clear-cut moments,
like parentheses in time,
we think about as episteme,
and then the next century
will be a completely different
episteme.
That's really the caricature
of these paradigms.
But even in Foucault
himself, you
have many of these moments
when you have the feeling
that he hypothesises these
clear-cut transitions.
But in other moments in
Foucault, in other passages,
you have these very
interesting, highly complex,
charismatic relations
between paradigms,
or the emergence of one paradigm
within the very temporality
of another.
And these are interesting
moments in Foucault, I think.
TIM BEWES: I think what
you're saying is also,
it reminds me a little bit
of this passage from Abnormal
that I was reading a couple
of days ago, where he--
where Foucault talks about
the dream, the political dream
of the plague and the
political dream of leprosy.
So leprosy and
plague in Abnormal
becomes a kind of model in
which Foucault talks precisely
about the two paradigms of
disciplinary sovereignty
and the biopolitical.
And one of the
things he says is,
"There is an extremely
interesting body of literature
in which the plague appears
as the moment of panic
and confusion, in which
individuals threatened
by visitations of death
abandon their identities,
throw off their masks,
forget their status,
and abandon themselves to
the great debauchery of those
who know they are going to die.
There is a literature
of plague," he says,
"that is a literature of the
decomposition of individuality,
a kind of orgiastic dream in
which plague is the moment when
individuals come apart and
when the law is forgotten.
As soon as plague breaks out,
the towns forms of lawfulness
disappear."
That's how he characterizes
the literature of plague.
But he goes on to
say, "But you can
see there's another dream of
the plague, a political dream,
in which the plague is rather
the marvelous moment when
political power is
exercised to the full.
Plague is the moment when
the spatial partitioning
and division of a
population is taken
to its extreme point, where
dangerous communications,
disorderly communities,
and forbidden contexts
can no longer appear."
And I wonder if that, partly, at
least, in some tiny part of it,
characterizes something like
the global capitalist paradigm
that we're also emerging into.
And again, the seat of
which, I think you--
I like the way that
you phrased it--
the seat of which is America.
And that-- so we can
sort of see where--
so we're not simply in this--
in other words,
this extreme point
of Trumpian
phantasmatic sovereignty
is not different from
what's happening in Europe.
It's really part of it.
And perhaps it
has something like
a heterochronic
relationship to it.
I wonder if that's
partly what you
mean by your use of
the term heterochrony
and then also the use
of the term polyphony
earlier on in the article.
Maybe we could talk about
the temporal dimension
of your piece in those times.
PETER SZENDY: Absolutely.
Maybe what I can also say--
I will immediately get back to
this notion of heterochrony,
which I think is
really crucial, and I
know your you're also
working on it in many ways.
But what I could say, since you
mentioned the lecture course
at the College de France from
'74-'75, the Abnormal, there,
and specifically in the passage
you mentioned about plague
and leprosy, there is one of
these moments in an exemplary
way where temporalities are
so complex that it's really
interesting in terms of this
polyphony that we are talking
about.
So this is the moment when
Foucault says, I quote,
"we still describe the way power
is exercised in these terms."
It's on page 43, I think.
So he says the
paradigm, let's say,
of the exclusion
of the letter, it
is still the way we
describe-- these are still
precisely the terms
in which we describe
the way power is exercised.
And then immediately afterwards,
a paragraph further, he
says that this model
of power, and I quote,
"finally disappeared roughly
at the end of the 17th
and the beginning of
the 18th centuries."
So he just said that we
still describe in these terms
the way power is exercised.
Then he says that it's
finally disappeared well
before our times.
And he adds that it was
replaced by a different model,
as he calls it.
That different model--
so the one you mentioned,
the control and the partitioning
of plague infested towns--
this different model, he says,
is as old as the previous one,
but it has been reactivated.
So we have a super complex
intra-temporal interaction
here.
It's a paradigm that
still continues,
but has been replaced.
And where it has
been replaced, it
has been replaced by a
new one, which is supposed
to be more contemporary.
But this new one is as old
as the one it replaces,
and it is simply
being reactivated.
That's exactly what
I call a heterochrony
or a temporal polyphony.
Heterochrony provided that
we take the precaution,
I would say, to distinguish
the use, I would suggest,
and I'm sure you
would agree with me,
because we've already
discussed this Bakhtin,
and you mentioned interesting
passages in Bakhtin
that go in this direction.
So distinguishing,
let's say, let's
call it the Bakhtinian
idea of heterochrony,
from Foucault's use of the term.
Because Foucault himself
uses the word heterochrony,
but in a very specific way that
is, I would say, reductive.
He uses it in this
famous article titled,
"Of Other Spaces."
Where he talks mainly about
what he calls heterotopias.
So these other spaces
that are not utopias,
but these enclaves, let's
say, of a different space
within the space we live in.
And by analogy, he suggests that
heterochronia, heterochrony,
would be a sort of enclave
of a different time
within a chronological time,
or within the passing of time.
And he gives a
number of examples--
cemeteries.
And the other example
is as interesting--
archives, libraries.
So this is where
time doesn't pass.
Time is at a standstill.
And obviously, there
is a form of polyphony
in Foucault's notion of
heterochrony in the sense
that within the flow of
time there is a standstill,
there is a suspended time.
But it's like a bubble.
It's like an enclave where time
is at a standstill, is halted.
And that's not how I would like
to think about heterochrony.
Because within this
bubble or enclave,
it seems that there is
a homogeneity of time,
far from a heterochrony.
Whereas, what I find interesting
in these passages by Foucault,
we commented, and many others,
is that there is conflicting
multilayered
temporality at play,
and not just a parentheses,
like in a cemetery.
TIM BEWES: Yeah.
That's really very
helpful, Peter.
And in fact, this also speaks
to the complexity of the term
regime in Foucault, and
also in other figures
who use it, like Ranciere.
And it sort of
crystallizes the sense
in which even when Trump
is indulging in this very
Sinophobic rhetoric, this racist
rhetoric around the causes
of the coronavirus, calls it the
Chinese virus, the Wuhan virus,
even when we're in
the grip of this, what
seems almost a kind
of old, older form
of phantasmatic
sovereignty, even in--
I mean, in a sense our very
outrage that that rhetoric
is also part of something else.
It's a heterochrony, in fact.
I mean, it coexists
with our outrage.
It coexists with the possibility
that The New York Times will
write this quite radical,
really, for The New York Times,
analysis of the place
that America is in,
the challenges that face it,
the opportunity that we have
to remake things at the moment.
So I take what you're saying
about heterochrony being
not quite what Foucault
is talking about,
and not quite what Bakhtin
is talking about either,
but certainly a way to kind
of grapple with the way
that power and
discourse is operating
within the group at
the current moment.
PETER SZENDY: If I may just
add a few words about this.
TIM BEWES: Yes.
Because I'm thinking
of a passage
that you gave me from Bakhtin.
You drew my attention on
this marvelous passage
where Bakhtin, I think it's
a late essay on Goethe, where
he, was speaking about
Goethe, he says that for him,
for Goethe--
I'm quoting,
"Contemporaneity is revealed
as an essential
multi-temporality,
as remnants or relics
of various stages
and formations of the past."
So I think this is
pretty close to what
is happening in these
very strange moments
when Foucault shows that
from within the biopolitical
paradigm there is this
resurgence of sovereignty
or this excess of sovereignty
that sort of spills over
into biopolitics, as in the
examples of nuclear power
versus a universal virus.
TIM BEWES: Can I ask
about the occasion
of your writing the article?
Because a few weeks
ago, I remember
we were talking a bit about
the sort of proliferation
of articles about
the coronavirus.
In particular, sort
of prompted in a way
by Agamben's article, which is--
was making very deliberate
use of Foucauldian categories
of biopolitics.
And at that point, you
said, I don't think--
I'm not going to write
anything about this.
I have nothing
whatsoever to say.
And then about two weeks
later, or maybe less than that,
you send me your article.
And it became very apparent
that you had something very much
to say.
So the occasion of
the piece, I take it--
because of the way that
you-- you don't really
mention Agamben here, but
the occasion of the piece
seemed to be Agamben's
article, and the introduction
of this theoretical vocabulary
into the current situation.
Would you-- I mean, do
you feel inclined to make
explicit the degree
to which, or just
the occasion of the
article, and what
led you to want to, I think,
take on Agamben, in a sense,
or take on certainly
a body of essays
that had appeared in the
grip of this pandemic,
and to register a certain
kind of corrective?
Would you like to say
something about that--
the occasion of the article?
PETER SZENDY: It's
true that I wrote
the article in the midst of what
our common friend Alex Garcia
Duttmann recently
described as a hectic drive
to write about the virus.
Everyone is writing
about the virus.
And in a way, I think, yes,
Agamben might have initiated.
I don't know.
He was certainly not the
first to write something.
But he has crystallized
this sort of will to debate,
so to speak.
And well, he has--
there has been a shower
of criticism raining
upon Agamben's first
intervention, where obviously,
it was the end of February.
He completely
mistakenly minimized
the impact of the current
affairs pandemic in Italy.
Which then shortly
afterwards revealed
how terribly
mistaken Agamben was.
But I think that this doesn't
invalidate other things
that Agamben says.
And maybe-- you know, what I
was really interested in reading
Agamben in this moment is maybe
not so much what he's talking
about, and what
everyone's talking about,
biopolitics and the
state of exception,
the generalization of
the state of exception,
but mainly what he
says about civil war,
in a very short book
which is fascinating--
Stasis.
And speaking of-- since
you were raising questions
about how we can understand the
current situation in the United
States specifically and about
the politics of Donald Trump,
I think that what Agamben
is analyzing and describing
in Stasis is really,
really interesting.
Because in a way, what is
happening in these days,
since two or three days, these
protests against lockdown,
so the protests from
certain parts of the people
against the local government.
But it's a protest
that is backed
from the federal government, by
the president in many complex,
but in the end,
quite obvious ways.
So this is a very
interesting structure.
I was thinking about
these events in terms
of what Agamben describes.
He coins a word for it,
what he describes as ademia.
And it's an interesting word.
In Agamben analysis,
it could be actually
added-- it almost sounds
like another form of illness.
You know, not only epidemics,
and endemics, and pandemia, so
ademia.
What he means by
ademia, it's what
he describes as the
condition, almost as
if he were talking about
an illness, the condition
of the political in the West.
That is to say, the structural
impossibility for the people
to be represented.
And in the very moment that the
are represented, the people--
the very moment the
people is represented,
the people disappear and
dissolve into a multitude.
Now this, well, the multitude,
of course, the multitude
represents for
Agamben without being
able to be represented,
but the multitude embodies,
rather, the threat of civil war.
And this is in the course of
a very close and fascinating
reading of Hobbes' Leviathan.
Now, what I was
thinking these days is
that we have this strange
paradoxical, very dangerous
situation, where a president
pretends to represent
the irrepresentable, that
is to say this multitude,
the multitude that
embodies the threat
of civil war against the
very power that in a way
should represent it.
So it's a completely
paradoxical situation.
A president who has been elected
by the majority, supposedly--
that's not true.
Let's say the
fiction wants that he
has been elected by the
majority of American citizens.
And he represents, or
claims to represent
this minority that
is the ferment
of a possible civil war.
So it's an impossible situation.
And this is a sort of
political sickness,
if we come to think of
ademia in terms of illness,
that is really threatening.
TIM BEWES: Peter, I
just wanted, you know,
to thank you for talking with
me about your article, which
I found really
super interesting,
and really one of the
really convincing and
thought-provoking pieces that
have come out of this moment.
PETER SZENDY: Thank you
so much for organizing
this conversation,
which I really enjoyed.
And I was really happy to have
this opportunity of continuing
a conversation that
we already started
in so many other contexts.
