During the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic
the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has published
a series of thoughts, successively included into a
book titled Where Are We Now: The Epidemic as
Politics (Agamben 2020). The core of his thinking
was the relationship between science and society,
namely medicine and politics. Agamben highlighted
the risks linked to the emergence of the concept of
“biosecurity”, i.e., the blocking of all social activities
in order to preserve “biological life”. How far can a
society go to defend biological life? How far can politics
stretch to control both society and the biological
life of citizens?
Agamben’s book has generated different and
mainly negative reactions. However, it is undeniable
that it addresses some unavoidable questions we are
currently facing. We were surprised to see that most
of the arguments made against him were flawed by
(unmentionable) ideological prejudices.
To deepen those questions, we propose herewith
an exclusive interview with Giorgio Agamben.
Naked Life
The concepts of personalization and prediction
are gaining ground in medicine. Thanks to new
diagnostic tools and big data, medicine claims to
predict the individual risk of developing certain
diseases in life. Once these risks are known, people
can be directed towards appropriate lifestyles.
Besides these screenings for genetic predisposition,
new technological tools known as “wearables”
enable the constant monitoring of certain
vital parameters. Today, they are mainly meant
for sportspersons who want to continually improve
their performance. Soon, however, they could
be extended to all citizens. Apparently such an
approach to medicine is guiding us toward what
you have defined as life reduced to mere biology—
“naked life”. Nonetheless, many scientists are questioning
the ethical and technical feasibility of
such a scenario. Would you share a reflection on
this topic? Also, in your opinion, what should be
done to reverse the trend?
In the perspective that you have outlined, the critical
moment is crossing the threshold beyond which personalization,
prediction, and screening are no more lifestyle
advice and suggestions, but become legal obligations.
This threshold has now been crossed. What used
to be presented as a health right has become an obligation
to be fulfilled at any price. Cardiovascular diseases
represent the most frequent cause of mortality in our
country. We know they could decrease if we practice a
healthier way of life and adhere to a particular diet. However,
no doctor had even thought of their own lifestyle
and dietary advice for patients to become the subject of
a legal regulation, which decrees ex lege how to live and
what to eat, transforming the whole of existence into a
health obligation. Moreover, the Italian doctor’s professional
oath prohibited this by mentioning, “respect
for civil rights regarding the person’s autonomy” (see
also WMA Declaration of Geneva: “I will respect the autonomy
and dignity of my patient” and “I will not use
my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil
liberties, even under threat”—translator’s note). This
is what has happened for COVID-19. At least for now,
people have accepted not only to give up their constitutional
freedoms, social relations, and political and religious
beliefs—they have even let their loved ones die in
solitude and without a funeral. In this sense, it can be
said that human existence has been reduced to a biological
fact, to a naked life to be saved at any cost. This
happened despite the IFR, i.e. the real mortality rate of
the disease, is less than 1% according to studies reported
in your journal. A process of increasing medicalization
of life has occurred. The unity of the vital experience of
each individual, which is always both corporeally and
spiritually inseparable, has split into a purely biological
entity on one side and a social, cultural, and emotional
existence on the other. Such a fracture is by all evidence
an abstraction. This abstraction, though, is so powerful
that people have sacrificed their normal conditions of
life to it. I said that the splitting of life is an abstraction.
However, as you know, modern medicine realized this
abstraction around the middle of the 20th century. It did
it through intensive care devices, which can keep a human
body in a state of pure vegetative life. The intensive
care unit, with its mechanical ventilators, cardiopulmonary
bypass, and equipment for maintaining body
temperature can indefinitely suspend a human body
between life and death. This is a dark area, which must
not go beyond its strictly medical boundaries. Instead,
what happened with the pandemic is that this purely
vegetative life, this body artificially suspended between
life and death, has become the new political paradigm
for citizens to regulate their behavior. What is most impressive
in what we are experiencing is that—at any price—
a naked life is kept separate in an abstract way from
an intellectual and spiritual life. Then, it is imposed not
as a criterion of life, but of mere survival.
Truth and Falsification
In 2016, Nature published the results of a survey
revealing that over 1,500 scientists had failed to reproduce
data obtained by colleagues. Dr. Glenn Bagley,
the oncology director of the multinational corporation,
Amgen, encountered the same problem in
2011. Before investing several million euros in a new
drug research project, he had decided to replicate the
53 experiments on which their development strategy
was based. He could only replicate 11% of them (Baker
2016; Begley 2012).
Paradoxically, science is facing an unprecedented,
deep crisis of credibility when it comes to the reliability
of the data it produces and the truthfulness of its
statements. Despite this, it seems almost impossible
to bring out hypotheses and results other than those
that are universally recognized as “scientific truths”
at the level of both public and academic opinion. Further,
political and economic decisions are often made
on the basis of these truths. You recently published a
post: “On True and False”. Would you help us further
investigate this issue?
Here, we see first hand that the problem of truth
is not an abstract philosophical problem. Rather, it is
something extremely concrete, which determines the
life of human beings in a considerable way. As far as
scientific truth is concerned, a famous book by Thomas
Kuhn had already shown that the scientific community’s
dominating paradigm is not necessarily the truest,
but simply the one that is able to conquer the largest
share of followers. This is also real, now, beyond scientific
truth. Humanity is entering a phase of its history in
which truth is reduced to a moment in the movement
of the false. In other, more precise words, this movement
is the omnipervasive unfolding of a language that
no longer contains any criteria for distinguishing what
it is true from what is false. True is that speech which is
declared as such and which must be kept true, even if its
untruth is proven. In the end, it is essential for the system
that any distinction between true and false fades.
Hence, confusion grows among conflicting news that is
even spread by official bodies. This means calling into
question the language itself as the place where truth
manifests itself.
Now, what happens in a society that has renounced
the truth and in which human beings can only silently
observe the multiform and contradictory movement of
falsehood? In order to stop this movement, everyone
must have the courage to ask the only question that matters
without compromise: what is a true word? From the
Gospel, everyone can recall Pilate’s well-known question
to Jesus, which Nietzsche considered “the subtlest joke
of all time”: “what is truth?” Actually, Pilate had responded
to Jesus’ immediately preceding statement, “for this
I have come into the world: to testify of the truth”. In fact,
there is no experience of truth without testimony: true
is that word for which we cannot but commit ourselves
to bear personal witness. Here, the difference between
a scientific and a philosophical truth emerges. In fact,
while a scientific truth is (or at least should be) independent
from the subject who enunciates it, the truth we are
talking about is such only if the subject who pronounces
it is wholly at stake in it. Indeed, it is a veridiction and
not a theorem. Faced with a non-truth imposed by law,
we can and must testify of the truth.
The Disappearance of the Hypotheses
In one post, you pointed out that the concept of
“news” often substitutes that of “idea”. Hence, the expression
“fake news” was introduced as a weapon for
silencing ideas or hypotheses. In your opinion, why do
people—regardless of education—still believe the news
whose falsehood has been well documented? What
communication strategy should a scientist use if he or
she has valid documentation proving the falsity of the
official narratives?
In a society that is no longer able to distinguish true
from false, news necessarily tends to replace reality.
The media operate on this omnipervasive substitution
of news for reality. Today’s media are a key tool of politics
precisely because they guarantee this replacement
that is so essential to the functioning of the system. In a
world where only news exists, only the dominant news
is true and, at the limit, no news is more true than another.
Hence the need to set up, as our government in
fact did, a commission for deciding which news should
be considered true and which news should be false. In
notes taken during World War II, Heidegger defined
the age in which he was living as “a machination of the
nonsensical” where an absolute absence of meaning is
algorithmically formulated and relentlessly calculated.
What we have under our eyes today looks like that.
The Betrayed Oath
The first point from the modern Italian version of
the Hippocratic Oath reads, “I swear to practice medicine
in autonomy of judgment and responsibility
of behavior, countering any undue conditioning that
limits the freedom and independence of the profession.”
How much autonomy do doctors still have? Is
the very figure of the physician being transformed into
something new? What do you think the doctor-patient
relationship of trust will be like in the future? How do
you relate personally to your own doctor and the care
for your health?
What you have mentioned is just one of the points of
the professional oath that are systematically transgressed
today. In addition to the aforementioned points 4
and 5 about respecting the patient’s civil rights and autonomy,
point 15 is also threatened. This requires the
need “to respect professional secrecy and to protect the
confidentiality of everything that was shared with me,
that I am observing or have observed, understood, or
intuited in my profession or by reason of my state or office.”
While this confidentiality was always observed in
the past, anyone who is positive (even simply positive,
not just sick) today is publicly denounced as such and
isolated. Consequently, even point 6, which requires the
need “to treat every patient with care and commitment,
without any discrimination”, is transgressed. We have
reached the point where the doctor does not visit positive
patients.
It is difficult to maintain a relationship of individual
trust with a doctor who also acts as a representative of
a governmental system. Medicine and therapy must remain
separate from power and legislation.
Medicine as a Religion
In several contributions, you have presented the
idea that medicine and science have become today’s
religion. However, many doctors and scientists would
find it hard to perceive themselves as representatives
of this religion. Perhaps we are referring to different
concepts while using a single name, such as medicine
or science? Would you help us distinguish what kind of
medicine and science have turned into a religion?
The analogy I was suggesting is not merely metaphorical.
If we call religion what people think they believe
in, then science is certainly a religion today. However,
a distinction must be made in every religion between
the dogmatic apparatus (the truths in which one must
believe) and the cult, that is, the behaviors and practices
that derive from it. The common believer could ignore
the dogmas and heresies that theologians had passionately
debated. Likewise, the common person of today
can completely ignore the scientific theories that scientists
argue about. However, the cult, i.e. the practices
and behaviors increasingly define him or her, and this is
particularly true for medicine. Furthermore, just as the
Christian religion proposed salvation through the cult,
so does medicine target health through therapy. The
first is about sin and the other is about illness, but the
analogy is clear. Health in this sense is nothing other
than a secularization of that “eternal life” that the Christians
hoped to obtain through their cultural practices.
The medicalization of life had already been growing
beyond all measure in recent decades, but it has become
permanent and all-pervasive in the situation we are
experiencing today. It is no longer a question of taking
medicine or having a medical examination or surgery, if
necessary: the whole life of human beings must become
the place of an uninterrupted worship at every moment.
The enemy, the virus, is invisible and always present
and must be fought with no truce in every moment of
one’s existence.
Transhumanism
More and more funding for science comes from the
IT industry. This has launched numerous researches
on the merge of man and machine which, on the one
hand, represents a new market. On the other is a new
promise: potential human faculties and prolonged life.
What do you think of this progressive digitization and
robotization of life?
I think it is appropriate to consider the phenomenon
you are talking about in the perspective of the development
of the human species. We owe the idea of
pedomorphosis or constitutive immaturity of homo
sapiens to a brilliant Dutch scientist, Ludwik Bolk. Almost
a century has now passed since he had foreseen
that the technical apparatuses humans increasingly
rely on to survive as a species would have reached a
point of extreme exasperation. There, these apparatuses
would have reversed into their opposite and ended
up causing the end of the species. Paul Alsberg discussed
the external technological projection of body organ
functions in the ’20s of the 20th century. He showed
that the result is the progressive deactivation of these
organs in favor of the artificial instruments that replace
them. While the animal adapts its bodily functions to
natural conditions, man deactivates them, entrusting
them to artificial instruments. Thus, every exosomatic
technical progress corresponds to a regression of
the endosomatic functions. But if this regression goes
beyond a certain limit, then the very survival of the species
is called into question.
I believe we are at this threshold today. However,
experience shows that what seems inevitable does not
always happen. In the words of Euripides: “The expected
does not turn out; for the unexpected the gods
find a way”.
Language
You pointed out that the very terminology seems
selected to support a paradigm of society. For
example, the term “social distancing” could have
been different, e.g. “personal” or “physical” distancing.
Do you think the language is somehow spun,
or rather, are we already so immersed in a new governance
paradigm that such a language emerges
spontaneously at all levels of society? I mean—like
some sort of natural evolution? Many scientists have
long struggled with misleading and inappropriate
terms and yet, despite numerous strong arguments,
we are unable to influence the universal language.
What are the mechanisms that make certain terms
acquired and consolidated?
The relationship between humans and language,
and the experience that the speakers have of their language
is not simple. Perhaps this is the first problem
that thought must deal with. Language is something
that human beings try to master and manipulate and,
at the same time, it is what they have always been
dominated and determined by—something that must
necessarily be dealt with.
It goes without saying that the great transformation
wrought by modern technology and science
would not have been possible without a profound
change in the experience of language.
The ancient world could not and did not want to
have access to science and technology in the modern
sense. The reason is that—despite the development of
mathematics (significantly not in algebraic form)—its
experience of language could not refer to the world in
a way purportedly independent from how the world revealed
itself through language. Language was not a neutral
tool, replaceable by figures and algorithms. Rather,
it was the place where things first reveal themselves and
communicate in their truth. Only the reduction of language
to a neutral instrument, which took place with
Ockham and the late nominalism, allowed the delinguisticization
of knowledge which culminated in modern
science. Truth moved from the realm of words and language
to that of numbers and mathematics. Language
became a system of pure conventional signs and looked,
at least in appearance, as dominable and manipulable.
Since then, it was no longer the place of a possible truth.
Now, precisely a language that is no longer related to
truth can turn into a prison—a sort of machine that seems
to work autonomously and from which it seems we
cannot get out. Perhaps human beings have never been
so helpless and passive in the face of a language that
increasingly determines them.
Philosophy of Nature
In the past, science used to be identified as the
“Philosophy of Nature”. People like Goethe who were
interested in science, philosophy, and literature were
considered the most intelligent. Today, science has
turned toward a constantly increasing specialization
that has undoubtedly led to enormous technicalscientific
advances. These are two radically divergent
paths. What do you recommend to young students
and researchers who are taking their first steps in the
world of science today?
An important moment in the history of the West is
when philosophy realizes that it can no longer control
science, since science has enfranchised itself from it.
This is perfectly clear in Kant. His philosophy represents
the last attempt to maintain a relationship with
science, aiming to be a doctrine of knowledge capable
of setting limits to any experience. I do not think that
anything similar fits the tasks of philosophy today. The
relationship between thought and science is not played
on the level of knowledge. Philosophy is not a science—
nor can it be resolved into a doctrine of knowledge. In
fact, science has shown that it does not need it at all.
Philosophy is always about ethics. It always implies a
form of life. Now, this is true for every single human
being and, therefore, also for every scientist who does
not want to give up being human. Of course, scientists
have shown that they are ready to unscrupulously sacrifice
ethics for the interests of science. Otherwise we
would not have seen illustrious scientists experimenting
on Nazi camp deportees. I would remind a young
person taking his first steps in science to never sacrifice
an ethical principle to his own will to know.
Resistance
You spoke of the need to develop new forms of
resistance. What do you mean? Can you give us
some examples?
I am a philosopher, not a strategist. Of course, the
clear awareness of one’s situation is the first condition
for finding a way out. I can only add that I do not believe
today’s way out necessarily passes, as perhaps it has
been long believed, through a struggle for the conquest
of power. There can be no good power—and, therefore,
no good state either. We can only, in an unjust and false
society, attest to the presence of the right and the true.
We can only, in the middle of hell, testify of heaven.