The first pandemic texts, published in the book Where Have We Gone? Epidemic as Politics (“A che punto siamo? L'epidemia come politica”, Quodlibet, 2020), link Agamben's central notion of ”bare life” to fear, placing it at the center of his predictions for the sunset of bourgeois democracies and the rise of despotism based on the notion of ”biosecurity”. The theme culminates in the essay ”What is Fear?” presented here. Unlike the previous ones, it originally appeared on the website of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Research. Being the most philosophically saturated text of the series, it rethinks the key categories of Heideggerian existential analytics, fear and fearing, in the horizon of the pandemic situation, problematizing the ontological priority given by Heidegger to anxiety over fearing, in order to derive fearing as the mood through which power is established and justified.