The Unprecedented Measures Regarding Population Mobility and dwelling that have been taken by states across the world have led the philosopher Giorgio Agamben to wonder whether the coronavirus pandemic represents the perfect opportunity for governments worldwide to take advantage of “collective panic” and instate the use of a state of exception as “a normal paradigm” (Agamben, “Invention of an Epidemic”). Agamben's intervention in the global conversation about the impact of the pandemic has been met with outright criticism among some commentators for at least two reasons. First, it seemed that he gave in too easily to the temptation of reading the reality of the quarantine zone containing potentially infected individuals as a confirmation of his own views of the state's minimization of the life of its citizens to the status of a bare/naked life (nuda vita) (Agamben, Homo Sacer 6; Agamben, Means without End 3). Second, the great contrast between the theoretically profound thinking with which Agamben accustomed the public and the philosophical thinness of the short essays exposing his views on the pandemic, also including hasty titles, such as his 2020 articles “The Invention of an Epidemic” and “The State of Exception Provoked by an Unmotivated Emergency” brings Agamben dangerously close, perhaps unfairly, to conspiracy theorists.This explains the prompt intervention of Sergio Benvenuto, who considers that “it is difficult to imagine an equally superficial reaction” than that of Agamben's (Benvenuto), or Anastasia Berg's opinion that “Agamben dresses up outdated jargon as courageous resistance,” worrying that corona skeptics worldwide acting as if responding to Agamben's calls for resistance have nothing in common with the “moral heroes” he might hope for (Berg). In a more conciliatory tone, Jean-Luc Nancy calls Agamben “an old friend,” but does not hesitate to argue that this old friend might simply be wrong in this case, although, generally speaking, governments “are nothing more than grim executioners” (Nancy 27). Equally dismissive of Agamben's original view that the states might have some interest in inventing or promoting a pandemic, Slavoj Žižek argues that the collective “distrust in state power,” which has emerged on the occasion of the governments implementing measures of containment of the virus, prevention of infection, and medical treatment of the sick, is enough to remain skeptical about such an argument (Žižek). Žižek's essay does not focus on criticizing Agamben, but rather takes Agamben's “radically different” position as an opportunity to bring into debate his own reflection on the coronavirus pandemic. It is mainly on Agamben's and Žižek's views that the reflection proposed in the subsequent sections of this essay will focus.* * *An essential feature, potentially one of the most important reasons behind Agamben's reaction, has been the early association by state authorities of SARS-CoV-2 with an enemy against which the efforts of limiting its spread and deadly effects are actual wartime measures. Agamben denounces this approach, which makes it tempting for citizens to sacrifice freedom for “so-called ‘security reasons’” (Agamben, “Clarifications”) and accept as reasonable enough the perpetual extension of the state of emergency for the sake of a society “living in a permanent state of fear and insecurity” (“Clarifications”). Besides, “a war against an invisible enemy that can nestle in any other human being is the most absurd of wars. It is, to be truthful, a civil war. The enemy isn't somewhere outside, it's inside us” (“Clarifications”). Perhaps the concise character of these arguments has prevented Agamben's critics from speculating about their profound resonances. To be sure, it is not a “civil war” in the sense of a state's internal war, which threatens the legitimacy of the incumbent state administrations, and not even in the Hobbesian basic sense of a war of “every man against his neighbour” (Hobbes 138) for the simple reason that the other human being that is perceived as a threat does not have the intention to kill me.This time, Agamben suggests, it is in the state's own interest to encourage its citizens to think that they are engaged in a civil war, some against others. It can be understood that the high stakes behind this shift consist in determining citizens to vicariously appropriate responsibility (Colburn and Lillehammer 153) for the biopolitical measures of the state. In other words, the biopolitics implemented by official measures gets translated into a biopolitical culture among citizens who will tend to become more and more inclined to apply biopolitical principles in their social relationships. As part of these relationships, not only the Other (e.g., the immigrant, the homeless, the minority), but even the neighbor or the family member is stripped of the multiple layers of their social life or bios to become bare or naked life. The fear of the Other is not primarily motivated by the Other's ill intention, but rather by the possibility that the Other might have become “infected,” or as it has lately been indicated by a “contradictory formula,” an “asymptomatic patient” (il malato asintomatico), that is, a potential carrier of the virus without even knowing it (Agamben, “La nuda vita”). This is not a fear of the human Other, but rather a fear of sick life. It is, in my eyes more than in the eyes of the state, that the Other is losing the contours of a human being. It is in my perception that the Other is becoming more and more an amorphous conglomerate of cells, a potentially infected organism, denuded indeed by an involuntary but no less unholy communion of a bare life intimately permeated by an alien virus slowly sucking it into non-existence.This aspect of a biopolitical education for the masses is also alluded to by Žižek, who observes the extent to which “our most elementary interactions” have been deeply affected by the state measures of disease control. In this view, previously apparently harmless gestures, such as touching things, shaking hands, sitting on benches or on public toilets, embracing others, touching one's own nose, or rubbing one's own eyes, have become potential indicators of disorderly behavior of a potentially infected body: “[I]t's not only the state and other agencies that will control us; we should learn to control and discipline ourselves!” (Žižek). Nevertheless, it is less the biopolitical dimension of this self-control and discipline that preoccupies Žižek, who prefers to reflect on the anti-humanist dimension involved in the relation of humanity not only with this or another virus, but also with nature sending us “a zero-level life,” a “biological caricature” as a response for the human's own viral-like grasp of nature's processes (Žižek).This anti-humanist dimension of human relationships with their environment serves as a framework for Žižek's reflection on the possibility of new forms of solidarity between people despite their characterization as rational and “egotistic” animals endowed with a virus-like “spirit” (Žižek). Žižek seems rather interested in the potential contributions of these new forms of solidarity that have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, to the resilience of Western political culture. He rejoins Agamben in the aspect that the “new forms of local and global solidarity” are called to proclaim “the need for control over power itself” (Žižek), but at the same time, he addresses the limitations of the Western political culture in the context of globalization: “The challenge that Europe faces is to prove that what China did can be done in a more transparent and democratic way” (Žižek). It is not because China is a rising global power that the Western culture needs a re-evaluation of its values, but rather because population growth itself and globalization pose some challenges that China has been able to deal with effectively, while the Western world lags behind not knowing how to formulate an ideological response that would integrate coherently both the need for preserving individual freedom and the necessity for legitimate measures of “control and regulation” (Žižek). This is the aspect emphasized also by Jean-Luc Nancy, who argues that there is a need for reflection over a certain kind of legitimacy of the state's involvement in dealing with concrete issues of globalization that nation-states have not encountered before, such as the ever-increasing number of “elderly people” and “people at risk” in the context of an ever-intensified population movement facilitating the spread of viruses, or the heightened risk of pollution in a world affected by “technical interconnections of all kinds” (Nancy 27).* * *The great challenge of the Western world, Žižek admits, quoting Bratton, still consists in finding the right “vocabulary of intervention” as to distinguish blunt “surveillance” from other “forms of sensing” and “social control” from “active governance” (Žižek). This view can be interpreted as a departure from Agamben's refusal to make any concession regarding the potential extension of the state's involvement in protecting citizens even when threats such as terrorism are on the rise (Agamben, “Invention of an Epidemic”). After all, Agamben reminds the reader that the norm asserting that “we must renounce the good to save the good is just as false and contradictory” as the norm “which, to protect freedom, orders us to renounce freedom” (“Question”). This renouncing of longtime Western values for the sake of punctual efficient solving of a political or social problem might become tempting for the state apparatus, especially in a context such as the COVID-19 pandemic where the identified signs of a potential infection overlap with the signs of a common flu or other diseases or are simply absent in the “asymptomatic patient” (Agamben, “La nuda vita”).What kind of “vocabulary of intervention” may then be formulated that would justify the state's growing authority in matters as yet thought of as part of one's personal initiative and freedom? Would not the state be tempted to sacrifice a few people who are actually not infected, or even as many as needed in order to save or maintain social comfort among the majority and their sense of protection by those in power? This is a challenging issue not only for countries having adopted a zero-tolerance policy regarding the spread of the virus, but actually for all political cultures reclaiming a legitimacy based on values such as freedom and the common good. Perhaps the explosion of online hate messages against those who have been considered as the origin of the spread of the virus in some countries or regions is indeed a public signaling that at least some citizens are willing to empower their official administrations beyond what has been traditionally agreed upon publicly as the state's legitimate use of violence (Pearce 166).Although adopting the opinion of the necessity of a more nuanced view on state's “intervention,” Žižek is nevertheless not willing to weaken the focus on freedom predominant in Agamben's argument. Anticipating the shift in scientists’ and some governments’ discourse, from a zero-tolerance to a co-existence with the virus strategy, after failed attempts to contain the spreads and keep it at bay (Perng 151; Frost), Žižek suggested that there are two forms of collective “acceptance” that the virus will continue to be with us for a longer time than initially believed. These two forms of acceptance remain compatible with the idea of freedom, but one of them is more passive, “OK, people will be dying, but life will go on, maybe there will be even some good side effects,” while the other is meant to boost the idea of freedom in an active direction, “[o]r acceptance can (and should) propel us to mobilize ourselves without panic and illusions, to act in collective solidarity” (Žižek). This might mean that, in the context of a revised vocabulary of intervention, people might accept that the state has been extraordinarily given extended powers to investigate and identify clusters of infection, but at the same time, “new forms of global and local solidarity” are needed to exert “control over power itself” (Žižek).Žižek's preference for the second version of solidarity makes Agamben's unwillingness to accept any extension of the state of emergency appear as a lack of confidence in the human capacities to counter exaggerated claims for uncontrolled power of the states. If co-existence with the virus is in the making, this situation needs to be turned into the human beings’ advantage, as an opportunity for the resilience of human political cultures in general and of the Western paradigm in particular to cope with totally new challenges. Appropriating Daniel Dennett's view that “a person is a hominid with an infected brain” (Dennett 173), Žižek argues that viruses have always been with us and, in an anti-humanist key of interpretation, the human spirit itself may be defined as “some kind of virus that parasitizes of[f] the human animal, exploits it for its own self-reproduction, and sometimes threaten[s] to destroy it” (Žižek). In short, this position can be translated into the Latin form of Homo naturae virus, but since human history has been built rather on the threat to destroy the other human animal's body, the Homo homini lupus formula, which lies at the basis of modern political theory (Terrel 249), may be interpreted in the context of the coronavirus pandemic as Homo homini virus. Žižek does not use any of the formulas, but the striking argument at the end of his essay contains elements that can be synthetically represented as such.The discovery that the human spirit can be seen as a virus is taken by him as an opportunity for finding new ways of co-existence—not only a co-existence with the virus but also a dynamic version of co-existence among peoples or communities within certain nations and among governments. Moreover, there is an explicit connection in Žižek's argument between the human “spirit” as a virus and cultural production, spread, and domination in some regions of the world. Žižek takes inspiration from Leo Tolstoy's “unique theory of art and humanity in general” and interprets Tolstoy's anthropology as an “infection: a human subject is a passive empty medium infected by affect-laden cultural elements that, like contagious bacilli, spread from one individual to another” (Žižek). Žižek's overall point is that if, at least from a cultural point of view, humans are viruses to each other, and they have still learned how to co-exist, co-existence implies choosing which kind of infection to capitalize on toward boosting human personal and cultural capacities for resilience: “The only struggle [in Tolstoy's view] is the struggle between good and bad infections: Christianity itself is an infection, if—for Tolstoy—a good one” (Žižek).This may be read as a broadly formulated answer to Agamben's rather passive understanding of co-existence. It emphasizes the need for an active engagement at all levels of society that would bring new ways, especially if we are talking about the Western culture, to go through an unexpected cultural or viral infection by being mindful of the potential evolutionary advantages this infection might bring. The Western world has been able to go through the Christian infection and leave it behind, while preserving the incentives and the antibodies that have led to the philosophical and political formulation of values that make Western culture recognizable.* * *Žižek's critique of Agamben's position and his wider reflection occasioned by it, regarding the further challenges for the Western political culture—in particular, in the context of globalization and, in general, in the interaction between cultures—may be read as an attempt to initiate a shift in orientation toward the co-existence with or the existence in the proximity of the human Other or the culturally defined Other. Agamben had also pointed out how problematic the very idea of “proximity” has become in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, being straightforwardly identified as “a possible source of contagion” (Agamben, “Question”; emphasis in original). Žižek chooses to engage with the current perception of the idea of proximity as to re-widen its understanding as indeed a source of contagion, but not only viral. Nevertheless, by advancing the idea of a cultural contagion within the area of proximity between cultures and communities, especially when backed by his argument about the human spirit itself as a virus for nature, for other human beings, and even for one's own body, Žižek leaves open a door that Agamben would have preferred to keep shut.If a community that is predominantly “infected” with a certain cultural virus finds itself in the proximity of another community “infected” with a different kind of culture, Žižek seems to suggest that “contagion” between the two communities may generate new kinds of cultural interactions that in the end may help both communities not only survive the encounter, but also acquire new features and new strengths. This view largely ignores the biopolitical power of those governing such communities: What if the political power comes up with an ideological vaccine meant to prevent any cultural infection from outside the sphere of the established values? Agamben seems to hint toward this virtual possibility when he interprets the vaccine administered in the coronavirus pandemic as “the baptism of a new religion,” which, unlike the Christian baptism, needs to be repeated as many times as authorities will decide (Agamben, “La nuda vita”). What if this new kind of ideological vaccine is not something so new after all, but only now understood in its new facet, thanks to the coronavirus crisis? Perhaps the principle of an ideological vaccine has already been applied in modern and contemporary politics, if not even earlier, to ensure that the political authority's subjects have an acceptable level of ideological antibodies against any potential contagion from foreign viral cultures and ways of doing politics.If we are to follow this implication of Žižek's argument, we may realize that perhaps the pandemic has only revealed to us that both at the national and international levels, communities of people and collective subjects are caught in an agonistic game of co-existence. This means that such communities are struggling on one hand to stay impermeable to potentially viral influences from outside and doing their best, on the other hand, to become themselves as contagious as possible, at least for the individuals and communities in their proximity so as to gain hegemony over other communities (Mouffe 90). Žižek hopes that new forms of solidarity among individuals, communities, nations, and international organizations will finally close the biopolitical door through which governments worldwide will escape from public scrutiny. Nonetheless, once we take into account ideological vaccines, it can be observed that they sometimes offer more than enough antibodies to the citizens of a certain country—enough to make them immune to cultural infection even if they spend years or decades studying or working in another country, guaranteeing upon their return home an even more hardened embracing of nationalist pride.Contagious co-existence countered by ideological vaccines may indeed be a serious issue for the politics of the twenty-first century, especially when the passivity sought by the inoculation of the vaccine may determine subjects to be firmly established in feelings of nationalist pride, even when talking about or being effectively engaged in the opening to economic and technological relationships. Those people who only wish to co-exist with the Other (e.g., the migrant worker, the foreign resident, the minority)—that is, to only benefit from the Other's work, knowledge, or capital without any other commitment—will forever be inclined to find a close ally in the biopolitical power of the state. While in Western contemporary culture, this power may not be seen as providential or paternalistic anymore, it will still be tacitly or more explicitly welcomed to make citizens immune to the perceived threats of the day: the historical enemy, the terrorist, the alien, and even the potentially threatening “asymptomatic” person coming from abroad, having had the experience of another culture, or simply a different cultural experience within a minority community of a certain nation. Perhaps it is in this direction that we may read Agamben's short essays about the coronavirus pandemic, without the temptation of mixing his somehow hastily formulated arguments with the opinions of conspiracy theorists, and may appreciate the philosophical depth of his effort at touching a societal wound, although with incorrectly sterilized thinking.