Useless for Fascism? Giorgio Agamben’s Covid Critique and the Homo Sacer Project
Tuesday 6 May 2025
This seminar was presented by Daniel McLoughlin (University of New South Wales) and chaired by Richard Joyce.
On the 26th of February 2020, Giorgio Agamben published a short piece on his personal website, entitled ‘Invention of an Epidemic,’ which argued that the Italian state was exploiting the appearance of COVID-19 to govern by emergency decree. Over the following year, he went on to criticise the use of masks, compared the “Green Pass” to the Yellow Star, and argued that academics teaching online were the “perfect equivalent” of Nazi collaborators. Agamben’s work has been enormously influential in critical legal theory over the past two decades. However, these interventions generated a great deal of criticism, with commentators accusing him of peddling “critical-cum-conspiracy theory,” and urging us to “forget about Agamben.” This paper analysed Agamben’s interventions around the pandemic and their relationship to his philosophical critique of law and politics. It argued that they illustrate limits to his analysis of sovereignty and his concern with the politics of totalitarianism, as they have the potential to play into a politics that presupposes a virtuous liberal status quo that has been lost and needs to be restored. There are, however, two aspects of Agamben’s thought in the Homo Sacer project that mitigate against this conceptual danger: his deconstruction of the concepts that underpin the legitimacy of the modern democratic state; and his analysis of the relationship between liberal democracy, biopolitics, and governmentality. Daniel McLoughlin’s claim is that these issues, taken together, have generated the much-noted proximity between Agamben’s critique of the response to COVID, and that of the far right.
About the speaker
Daniel McLoughlin is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales. He has published extenisvely on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, and his research interests include theories of sovereignty and biopolitics, Marxist state theory, neoliberalism, the politics of human rights, and theories of political crisis. He is the editor of Agamben and Radical Politics (2016) and the co-editor of The Politics of Legality in a Neoliberal Age (2017). His recent publications include “Opposition or Indistinction? Authoritarianism and Liberal Democracy in Migel Vatter’s Divine Democracy’ “Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics (2024), pp. 257-268 and “Exchange or Production? Poulantzas on the Legal Form and Pashukanis” (Legal Form: Pashukanis and the Marxist Critique of Law, 2024), pp. 145-168.