Giorgio Agamben's political formalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article takes as its point of departure Agamben's comments about how sovereign nation-states responded to the pandemic – by requiring people to wear masks, socially distance, work from home and live under lockdown. Agamben has characterized such measures as ‘fascist’ and has been criticized for that characterization. Against the inflationary critical value of Agamben's ‘camp’ as a paradigm to judge the political form of ‘sovereignty’, this article considers the notion of form in Agamben's work through the lens of how it has recently been revitalized in literary studies in the work of Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh. The article does so to distinguish between the state's response to the pandemic (on the one hand) and fascism (on the other), and to think the state's response to the pandemic as a sovereign practice of care. While the article does not dispute that some of the techniques and technologies of such a practice may resemble those of a sovereign practice of control that might, in another historical context, be the techniques and technologies of fascism, it argues that in order to effectively resist fascism one must recognize the plurality of sovereignty's forms and pursue its critique rather than its wholesale rejection.