COVID-19 and the Politics of Life

And there was once a wicked time when intellectuals grew feeble-minded and declared life to be the highest good. But now the dreadful time has come when every day proves that death begins his reign of terror when life becomes the highest good

Hannah Arendt[1]

Introduction

The elevation of the COVID-19 virus to the status of a global pandemic brings to the fore a phenomenon I will call ontological politics.

Ontology is that branch of philosophy which enquires into the nature of Being. A key presupposition in the Western philosophical tradition going back to Plato is that the highest form of being is God. And so, ontology has always been incipiently linked to theology. What distinguishes contemporary ontology is that it puts aside this theological dimension (thus Foucault called modern thought an “ontology without metaphysics”); nonetheless, a residue of it remains, in the popular notion that human life is ‘sacred’.

Modern ontology, then, is Being in the form of existence, the philosophy of a being who lives. Ontology enters the political sphere in precisely this form, as the politics which takes as its object the life and living being of individuals. As a consequence, the human increasingly comes be identified with a vital substance removed from every juridico-political form. But without the latter, persons are necessarily exposed to what both saves and annihilates them. This is why, as Michel Foucault points out, the “formidable power of death” unleashed by the wars of modern states “presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, to optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. . . . It is as managers of life, and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed”.[2]

The idea of a ‘governance of life’ is not exactly new. Foucault traced its origins to roughly the end of the 17th century, when for the first time in history, large-scale management of populations became the prerogative of the state. Moreover, whilst the Coronavirus has re-activated those bio-political exigencies which arose with the SARS and AIDS pandemics, to name only a few, the politics of life is not limited to such periodic explosions. A durable version of bio-politics has been with us for quite some time now, in the form of the politics of identity and gender, human rights activism and the ecological movement. In all these, the political unconscious is oriented by the conditions of what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”.[3] Taking charge of this biological zero-degree, whether through the preservation, enhancement or prevention of life, constitutes the entire scope of political power. In which case, to politics alone will be reserved the right to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death”.[4] Clearly, then, if we’re to understand the broader implications of this new global pandemic, we must get a handle on the basic bio-political premises which have long underwritten all our social, political and moral concepts.

The first is that politics becomes concerned with survival. Viewing political conflict as an existential risk, or, equally, defining threats to survival in political terms, reduces politics to concepts that properly belong to biology (for instance, the competition among organisms for survival). But is it appropriate to the frame political policy, internal or foreign, in terms of biological concepts? After all, organisms compete for sheer existence, whereas political communities compete for a type of existence. Life in the state is qualified by and circumscribed within certain limiting institutional and social norms. Despite what Aristotle says, the human is not a political being by nature.

To the extent that politics is a relative rather than absolute value, political conceptions belong in the domain of what Karl Popper called ‘World 3’; as a product of mind, they include ideas, representations and doctrines. In short, political facts are not part of nature. They are created by human beings. The point is that making politics beholden to naturalistic criteria such as survival shifts the focus of politics away from institutional reform towards defending a social community against what are perceived as external or internal threats to its existence. Then power becomes the prerogative of those who specialize in strategies for survival. The current trends in this respect are rather obvious: for example, the increasing preoccupation of governments with ‘national security’ issues, or the rise of the authoritarian ‘strong-man’ political leader, whose only goal is to retain power (that is, to ‘survive’ politically).

On the other hand, if one considers the kinds of questions of interest to the public lately, from reproductive technologies, the obsession with regimes of self-care, physiological health and personal well-being,[5] to manifold environmental concerns about the future of life on the planet, it’s noticeable that many if not all bear directly on the biological conditions upon which human life depends. Referring to the racial ideology of German National Socialism, Rudolf Hess called Nazi politics “applied biology”. The only difference between today’s situation and Nazism is that rather than a racialized body, now it’s a physiological, and psycho-biological body which forms the sole subject of politics.

At War Against the Virus, but Who is the Enemy?

Quite a few recent news commentators have remarked on the convergence between political, social and economic measures enacted to slow down the spread of COVID-19 virus and the placing of entire nations on what is effectively a ‘war-footing’. With the qualification, however, that the enemy in this case is not so much a hostile nation as an anonymous biological ‘force’. This is important. Identification of the enemy is a precondition of war. In an effort to specify the distinctive feature of a totalitarian political regime, Hannah Arendt distinguished between real and objective enemies. She argues that the latter category is particular to Totalitarian politics. What is the meaning of this differentiation, and why should it be relevant to bio-politics?

The measures taken to combat the real, that is, political enemy, are bound by certain juridico-political constraints. The latter, as a power that “holds back”[6], contains political conflicts and prevent them from becoming untrammelled. Moreover, the fact that the enemy is defined in political terms likewise acts as a constraint on the measures taken to combat them. Whereas in the case of the objective enemy, such constraints are largely absent. A totalitarian political regime does not define its enemies in terms of political or legal concepts; their status as enemy does not depend on intent, behaviour or even political identity. Rather, guilt is thereby attached not to what the objective enemy does, but to the sheer fact that they exist [7] (thus for the Nazi’s, the Jews were guilty of the “sin of being born”).

That the objective enemy is defined in existential rather than political terms has drastic implications. For instance, whilst in conventional war, the enemy combatant has certain legal rights, the objective enemy is beyond the protection of the law. They are a miscreant, a ‘non-person’. In this respect, Arendt rightly identifies the concentration camp as the typical institution of totalitarian politics.[8] In the case of the Nazi regime, the express purpose of the concentration camp system, instituted by Hermann Goering in 1933, was to incarcerate ‘enemies’ of the regime. Apart from functioning as a prison camp, they became a sort of experimental ‘social laboratory’ in which the very notion of an objective enemy was refined. Most importantly, they were places in which the law did not apply. Indeed, what is conspicuous about all the various forms of torture and punishment inflicted on inmates is that by order of the SS, the camp administration were strictly forbidden to correlate these penalties with any specific crime or fault;[9] the inmates must never understand why they were being punished. The point is that the objective enemy is “not really suspected of any hostile action”, and “is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked, or whose past justifies suspicion”. Rather, they are “a carrier of ‘tendencies’, like the carrier of a disease”.[10]

It’s significant that Arendt uses the simile of disease. A recent media news story described how nursing and medical staff were subject to verbal abuse when seen outside hospitals wearing their uniforms. In one reported incident, a driver waiting in a queue at a drive-in coffee outlet scolded a nurse for being out in the public and “potentially spreading the Coronavirus” amongst waiting customers.[11] These nurses are targeted as incipiently ‘dangerous’, but as is the case with the objective enemy, not as a result of identifiable behaviour, action or institutional position. Rather, as suspected ‘virus-carriers’, they represent a threat in the very guise of their living being. Their guilt is ontological, not attached to what they do but to what they are. Simply going about their daily business – shopping, buying food, waiting at a bus stop – is enough to attract enmity.

The category of objective enemy completely transforms how the political adversary is defined. Ordinarily, the latter is someone with whom I may engage in a discourse. Political conflicts can be the subject of negotiation; if such negotiation to resolve differences fails, there may be recourse to war. However, in the traditional politico-legal framework of European public law – the Jus Publicum Europaeum – even in the midst of war, there is always the opportunity to resume a process of negotiation and diplomatic resolution of the conflict. But when the enemy is seen as a non-human force, negotiation and reasoned discussion are clearly ruled out; one cannot reason with a virus.

After likening the Jewish People to a bacterial infection, Julius Langbehn, a right-wing anti-semitic ideologue popular in Wilhelmine Germany, remarked that “[o]ne doesn’t negotiate with trichinae and bacilli, nor are trichinae and bacilli educable; one exterminates them as quickly and completely as possible”.[12] In our context, Langbehn’s choice of words could not be more significant. Negotiation and a spirit of reasonable compromise are precisely the meaning of political rationality. However, when one no longer has anything to say to one’s opponents,[13] politics is surpassed, whilst the concept of war moves beyond any juridical or political framework. In which case, the steps taken to counter the enemy will be less a matter of a battle of wits that engages a worthy opponent and more an efficiently expedited ‘procedure’ (albeit with a certain ideological agenda in mind) such as one might utilize to remove an obstacle blocking one’s path. Rather than an organized fighting force to be reckoned with, the enemy is regarded as a menace – a pest or a dangerous disease which must be eliminated. Now there can be little to prevent the transformation of politics into a “manifestation of absolute violence, a strategy of annihilation taken to the extreme”, as Alain Finkielkraut put it,[14]

Because the objective enemy is defined in expressly non-human terms, bio-politics opens the way for war to become a sort of ‘hygiene operation’.[15] Indeed, the latter was precisely how Adolf Hitler conceived of the extermination of the Jewish People. It’s not without significance that the killing agent used in the gas chambers of Nazi extermination facilities was an industrial pesticide commonly used to eradicate rodents. On these terms, too, Hitler justified the German military thrust deep into Eastern Europe and Russia, which involved the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and other ethnic groups considered to be ‘socially inferior’. It’s important to remember that for Hitler, the operation to ‘clear’ Europe of such peoples served no military-strategic purpose. Rather, it was carried out on the pretext that these peoples represented a threat to the ‘racial health’ of the German nation.

Of course, likening Jews to ‘parasites’ or ‘vermin’ – a plague of insects, locusts or lice, but also to a virus or a disease – has a long history in the language of anti-Semitism. What is decisive, however, with Nazism is that such terminology went well beyond an analogy or a literary figure. The Jews didn’t just resemble parasites or behave as bacteria; rather, for Nazi ideology, they really were bacteria. Therefore they could expect to be treated accordingly. Consequently, the correct term for their massacre is not ‘holocaust’, with its sacred connotations, but ‘extermination’ – exactly the term used for insects, rats, and lice; thus the name for the Final Solution in the Nazi lexicon, Soziale Disinfektion (‘social disinfection’), was by no means a euphemism.

Behind Hitler’s fixation on a global racial struggle was a bio-political conception of social reality which one recent philosopher has characterized as immunological.[16] It was the likening of the Jewish people to an ‘infectious disease’, quite literally a ‘bacteriological’ danger, that led to measures whose aim was to immunize the German population against a deadly threat. Hence the ruthless genocide enacted against Jewish and East European populations, which was meant to prevent the spread of a ‘racial infection’. Hence, also, Heinrich Himmler’s remarks, in his 1944 speech to SS troops in Kharkov, that “[a]nti semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness”.[17] At the end of the 19th century, Ernest Renan predicted the coming of “zoological wars”, in which whole armies would be exterminated like vermin. Who could have believed that, only forty years later, his vision would become a reality?

All of this, frightening and disturbing as it no doubt must be, does, however, provoke reflection. For instance, what might it mean that a concept like that of the objective enemy can be found lurking in the background of our current global health crisis? Simply that politics in our time has for quite some time been undergoing a radical and comprehensive reorganization. The COVID-19 virus pandemic is, I would suggest, only the symptom of a much more widespread contagion – that of bio-medical politics. Just as in the Nazi concentration and death camps, and as the by-now obligatory ideology of human rights makes clear, the preeminent figure of this new political reality is the notion that the humanity of the individual consists in adherence to its own biological material. The concept of ‘bare life’ is evident in grim forecasts of an explosion in global poverty caused by the pandemic.[18] On the other hand, some commentators have expressed concern about the potential for ‘dehumanization’ when analysis seems exclusively preoccupied with the statistics of mortality and economic effects. Still, what sense could there be in referring to the deprivation of individuals of their humanity when the very determination of life in bio-political terms has always already stripped the person of all personal attributes?

Nietzsche predicted the coming of a “struggle for dominion over the earth”, to be “carried on in the name of fundamental philosophical principles”.[19] We’ve long been familiar with the idea of a struggle for global dominion – that is, geo-politics – but not with the sense that the philosophical principle in this case is the bio-political paradigm of ‘bare life’. With the latter, the human being, denuded of all juridical and ethical determinations, is reduced to a bundle of vital functions that can only be defined biologically and medically.

As with the so-called ‘neo-morts’ – the ‘living dead’ in hospitals and palliative care facilities, whose vital functions are sustained by a complex technological apparatus of life-support systems – it becomes increasingly difficult to define the boundary between life and death. Is the life sustained in this way a form of living being which serves death? Or is it the other way around? (i.e., in the sense that the very machinery which supplies life has become a power of life and death). Where are we to find the ontological postulate to clarify such issues? Even as researchers are unable to reach a consensus on the global tally of fatalities ascribed to COVID-19, because of all sorts of strangely abstract controversies as to how and on what grounds fatalities should be calculated, at least one thing is clear: it’s because power “is situated at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population”[20] that every sort of politics nowadays seems to have turned into a sort of reckoning on death.

The Life of Death

In the previous section, I discussed some ramifications of the analogies, common now, between the COVID-19 pandemic and a state of war. Which of course begs the question: can one go to war against a disease? A political order is a human order to the extent that the enemy confronted on the battlefield is at once a member of a fighting force who can expect to be killed and a person to whom one can speak. And because a spoken word is the opening onto justice,[21] it’s as a speaking being that the enemy has legal rights and thus human dignity. But if the enemy is an anonymous force that can never be personally confronted, what happens to justice? You cannot negotiate with a life-process. In the wake of COVID-19, it may feel like humanity is under siege. But this is not war in any conventional sense of the word. And it certainly doesn’t aid our understanding when, in order to try to address what’s at stake, people reach for conventional theological or humanistic arguments. Let us, rather, attend carefully to the sense of the perplexing difficulty this situation represents. Only then will we be in a position to recognize a beguiling paradox is at work here, a paradox which perhaps defines our bio-political epoch.

To begin with, it’s worth remembering that a virus represents the very potency of life. As a biological process which goes on within and indeed presupposes life, a virus is, in the very same measure, life become a pathological force. In other words, the virus erupts as life and within life, but is already, in this living form, a life-process which negates life. Or, to put it somewhat differently: a virus is that organic development by which life itself becomes the engine of its own destruction, just as an auto-immune disease represents the moment when the life-forces in a living body start to attack its own vital substance. In this respect, death is not something hostile to life, attacking it from without. Rather, it is already present in the form of death-directed life forces which lie ready to ambush the vitality of a living being, destroying it from within.

At this point, a parallel arises that is at once striking and uncanny: that between those who spread the contagion and the suicide-bomber. The latter, regardless of their particular theological or ideological motivations, is at base a life resolved to create destruction and endeavouring to take as many other individuals as possible with them on their own death-laden trajectory. The suicide bomber is, in effect, a lethal fragment of living vitality that discharges itself on the life of others with the intention of killing them. As with the person infected by this virus – who has effectively, from the point of view of the disease, become an incubator of death – the suicide bomber is the most intensive activation of life become a veritable force of annihilation.

Nothing demonstrates more clearly the immense conundrum of a politics of living being than this likeness, showing how when life and living being become the highest value, one may expect all kinds of disturbing reversals. For instance, in the cross-fire of political commentary about COVID-19, one often hears talk of a looming conflict between attempts to mitigate against potential economic catastrophe and the intrinsic value of human life. Certain strict economic measures might stop the virus dead in its tracks, but kill the economy, whereas those who baulk at crippling the economic system risk putting many millions of lives at risk.

Steve Hilton takes this dilemma even further:

“You know that famous phrase, ‘The cure is worse than the disease’? That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards. You think it’s just the coronavirus that kills people? This total economic shutdown will kill people. A UK study calculated that 130,000 people died avoidably from austerity there between 2012 and 2017. The years of austerity for America to pay the cost of this shutdown will be worse. Adjusting to the size of our economy, it’s over a million deaths . . . Poverty kills, despair kills. This shutdown is deadly. . . . Don’t turn a public health crisis into America’s worst catastrophe”.[22]

Hilton poses an opposition between, on the one hand, the human cost of economic shutdown, and on the other, the mortality potentially inflicted by the virus. He then suggests that both these scenarios will lead to identical, or near-identical, outcomes – a huge loss of human life. So, his argument goes, why deliberately inflict upon society a total shutdown when, all things considered, the same death toll will result with or without it? Presumably, the virus will do its destructive work and then depart, whereas a deliberately inflicted trauma, such as closing down large sectors of the economy, will leave tragic long-term consequences. The first catastrophe might now be unavoidable; the second, however, can be avoided. Or at least, so this argument goes.

I’m not in a position to verify whether Hilton’s claim about the mortality caused by economic slowdown is factually correct; rather, what interests me is the presupposition of the argument itself. The author sets up his discussion on the basis of an opposition between two scenarios, as an ‘either-or’, but with both leading to virtually the same outcome in terms of loss of life. Hilton obviously sees this argument as a provocation. But what is striking is that he has, quite inadvertently, stumbled on a certain truth: that, in fact, in a bio-political framework, these two terms – economics and human life – are one and the same. Karl Marx understood labour and work as a metabolic exchange with nature that reproduces and preserves the species. In this sense, he anticipated the death of classical political theory, swallowed up in the modern age by the idea of political economy. The latter, arising in the late-18th century and at the dawn of our bio-political era as a sort of hybrid conceptual monster, attests to that coupling of life and power which is at the heart of bio-politics.

The common denominator between the virus and the economy is that both are effectively the life-process writ-large; and with the neutralization of moral, social, and metaphysical standards effected by the paradigms of bio-power, nothing remains to mediate between them but biology. Again, this situation is not limited to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is part of a general trend. For instance, to take just a few examples: the growing prominence of issues of ethnicity and gender, the centrality of public health care as a privileged index of the functioning of economic systems, and the priority which political parties accord to maintaining the homogenous composition of national entities. In all of the above, there is an evident tendency to flatten the political into the biological. Likewise, the fact that international political conflicts seem to be perpetually turning into ‘human rights crises’ is indicative not so much of a proliferation of tyrannical political despots as that people nowadays find it impossible to conceive of a politics that exists outside the framework of ontology (that is, as a politics of living being).

Still, there will be those who insist on hammering away at the issues with obsolete concepts. Economics, we are told, represents a relative value, whereas the lives of individuals are an absolute. In which case, how could one even contemplate a trade-off between human survival and ‘mere’ economic considerations? In the meantime, they forget that since at least the start of the 19th century, the concept of value has been understood precisely in economic terms. Carl Schmitt touched on this conundrum in a short pamphlet called ‘The Tyranny of Values’:

“Since 1848, there has been a synchronism as remarkable as it is shocking, a simultaneity, an osmosis and symbiosis between the philosophy of values and the philosophy of life . . . Life is, if not the highest, still one of the higher values of every philosophy of life. For over a hundred years now, the twin pair, life/value and value/life, makes its presence felt in a tightly interwoven contemporaneity . . . In the value system and the vocabulary of racial outlooks, value and life appear intimately bound on a higher plane. Thus, while addressing the Press on the 10th of November, 1938, Hitler spelled out an ‘incomparable value’ for the benefit of everybody, and indeed, of the Germans: the German people was ‘the highest value that there is on this entire earth’”.[23]

Historical content aside, Schmitt’s remarks indicate something crucial. And this is that, henceforth, these two terms – life and value – have become interchangeable. The bio-political paradigm presumes that human life is, in Hitler’s words, “the highest value that there is on this entire earth”. In the meantime, because this paradigm reduces individuals to mere instances of a ‘life-process’, it degrades the actual existence of the human as a personal being, just as it absolutizes the species-being.

We are familiar with this dehumanization in the name of humanity from those “total wars” of modern technological civilization. The political conflicts of the 20th century, which led to mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale, were fought on the basis of value-absolutes; that is, they were wars between ideologies, each of which advanced a total claim on reality. In our bio-political era, the value-absolute is not so much life as the equivalence of life and death (for instance, it’s certainly no accident that the so-called Beveridge Plan, perhaps the largest public health program in human history and the origin of the modern Welfare State, was elaborated in the middle of a war that produced 50 million dead). What’s important, then, is not simply that the COVID-19 pandemic might well kill millions but that it’s a phenomenon which takes place in a period of human history in which this equivalence is unmistakeable.

In this respect, the return to a sort of ontological zero-degree of the human species heralded by bio-politics, far from opening up a new era for the spirit, paves the way for a comprehensive dehumanization, one that will make the horrific events of 20th century political history seem like a kind of pleasant belle epoque.

Conclusion

The Coronavirus has activated the deep principle of bio-politics – the conatus essendi, a concept that Spinoza defined, many centuries before Freud or the birth of modern biology, as the drive by which “each entity strives to persevere in its own being”.[24] We totally misunderstand the connatus by referring to it as selfishness, just as it’s immune to altruism and all traditional notions of virtue. What we’re dealing with here is far more fundamental, the deep ontological ground and power-house of all living being. It will not be countered with the blustering moralizing pronouncements of public intellectuals and government leaders, that in these difficult times ‘we must all pull together’. Those instances mentioned earlier, of nurses being abused for potentially “spreading the virus”, reprehensible as they are, nevertheless do demonstrate a certain unconscious lucidity on the part of the victimizers. Aside from the obvious insensitivity of their behaviour, these people have hit upon a subliminal truth. My point is that, in the imperturbable atavism of the conatus, something totally non-psychological, which defies all conventional religious, moral and socio-political wisdom, has been revealed, once and for all. The conatus is the arcane of bio-politics.

Many cultural critics nowadays bemoan the demise of a notion of the ‘common good’, whether it is defined in terms of virtue or theologically. What the current pandemic strikingly shows is that such a notion does indeed exist, but in our bio-political era, it can only be defined in ontologico-medical terms.[25] This is why the response of governments and political powers all over the world has, with a few exceptions, been so unanimous; it is the implicit confirmation of the doctrine of life as the highest value, the only remaining communal good that exists after the evacuation of all moral, theological and metaphysical categories.

At the height of the Nazi Terror, Arendt warned of the dangerous assumption that biological life is “the highest good”.[26] When individuals are preoccupied with asserting their ‘right-to-be’, human existence is in danger of becoming, in the form of the conatus essendi, a modality of that gross life-force which continues on its way, shoving aside everything in its path. In this respect, both nature and history are the medium of a self-sufficient and self-satisfied being, “revelling in its exception, solicitous of its own happiness – or its own health”, a being which, “persisting analytically, or animally, in its being”, in “the ideal vigour”[27] of its identity, always seeks to enhance its own powers, capacity and position in the world. The great problem with bio-politics is that in never questioning this ontological prioritization of the ‘I’, it makes “individual self-preservation the presupposition of all other political categories, from sovereignty to liberty”.[28]

As the opening onto a world which “affirms and firms itself up in the life of human individuals and in their struggle for existence”,[29] bio-politics is an egology, the camouflage for an egoistic striving for personal salvation whose ferocious “concern to be”[30] jeopardizes the ethical, “menacing” the fundamental “generosity” of compassion with the “inhuman necessities of being in man and in economy”.[31] But again, let us be clear that what is at issue with this egoism is not so much an “ugly vice” of the subject as the ontological fixation which sustains the “persistence and insistence of beings in the guise of individuals jealous for their part”.[32]

The ontological postulate of bio-politics makes it impervious to conventional social, moral, political and theological norms. The politics of being is, in fact, the silent revolution which, unbeknown to most, has long been gathering momentum in our midst. And so, the ‘war’ against the COVID-19 is a war that unfolds under the horizon of ontology, in the name of Being, and that means “in the name of fundamental philosophical doctrines” (Nietzsche). Hence a memorable formulation of Emmanuel Levinas, that may well serve as the leitmotif of our bio-political era: “Political totalitarianism rests on an ontological totalitarianism”.[33]

It would be much too easy to think of this pandemic as some freak occurrence of epidemiology, bursting onto the world-stage, to wreak havoc and destruction on all the existing social, economic and political structures of our globalized planetary-system. On the contrary, what is happening today is hardly unprecedented. It focuses and brings together, in a single cataclysmic movement, all the underlying mechanisms of ontological politics characteristic of our bio-political civilization, mechanisms which have long been assembling in the wings, ready and waiting for the opportune moment to be activated.

[1] ‘Not One Kaddish Will Be Said’ (1942), in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 163.

[2] The History of Sexuality, 137. Moreover if, as Foucault suggests, “genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population” (ibid.).

[3] See Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life.

[4] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 137.

[5] Here I’m thinking in particular of the preoccupation nowadays with questions of nutrition, exercise regimes, concerns about health effects of genetically modified foodstuffs, etc..

[6] On the concept of a withholding power, or katechon, see Massimo Cacciari, The Withholding Power. An Essay on political Theology.

[7] On these terms, we might also call the objective enemy the ontological enemy.

[8] See Hannah Arendt, ‘Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps’, in Essays in Understanding. She also points out how the “notion of the objective enemy is much more decisive for the functioning of totalitarian regimes than the ideological definition of the respective categories [i.e. of enemy]” (The Origins of Totalitarianism [Peng. Ed.], 544-5). Hence for Nazism, the Jews represented just one of many categories of objective enemy, categories which were theoretically infinite and whose identification followed upon the strategic needs of the movement. In this respect, “the category of objective enemies outlives the first ideologically determined foes of the movement; new objective enemies are discovered according to the changing circumstances” (ibid.).

[9] The Nazi regime was extremely careful to ensure that “[u]nder no circumstances must the concentration camp become a calculable punishment for definite offences” (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [Peng. Ed.], 587). Cf. also the following remarks of Nazi jurist, Hans Frank: “a complete catalogue of attempts ‘dangerous to the state’, can never be drawn up because it can never be foreseen what may endanger the leadership and the people sometime in the future” (ibid., 559, note 102). One exception were escapes, either attempted or successful, which always received the death penalty.

[10] The Origins of Totalitarianism (Peng. Ed.), 544; Arendt quotes a Nazi legal theorist who suggests that enemies of the regime are counted “not as individuals but as carriers of tendencies endangering the state and therefore beyond the pale of the national community” (ibid., 554, note 96). On this theme see also Roberto Esposito, Bios. Biopolitics and Philosophy, especially Chapter Four, ‘Thanatopolitics (The Cycle of Genos)’.

[11] “Nurses and midwives reported being assaulted on public transport, refused service at grocery stores and spit on by members of the public accusing them of spreading the virus. NMA general secretary Brett Holmes said he received dozens of reports of abuse from nurses and midwives, some from this morning. In Penrith, police were called to a McDonald’s after a pregnant midwife was verbally attacked at the drive-through before her shift. ‘When showing her ID for a free coffee, a driver behind her yelled that she should not be spreading the virus’, the NMA said” (‘NSW nurses told not wear scrubs outside of hospital due to abuse over coronavirus fears’, by Kevin Nguyen, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-05/nsw-nurses-midwives-abused-during-coronavirus-pandemic/12123216).

[12] Quoted in Vidal-Naquet, The Jews, 154. Langbehn’s vitriolic anti‑semitism was a precursor of Nazi Ideology.

[13] As Levinas points out, “Justice is a right to speak” (Totality and Infinity, 298); likewise, as Arendt suggests, “truth can exist only where it is humanized by discourse” (Men in Dark Times, 30).

[14] In the Name of Humanity, 72. The full implications of the redefinition of the relationship between politics and war which occurred on account of modern concepts of total war was first realized by Leninist political praxis. Thus “for Lenin, war free of politics became the essence of politics”; “In another time, the military enemy had a political reality, but Lenin’s political enemy [i.e. the class enemy] was nothing more than the object of a military will for destruction” (ibid.).

[15] This was precisely how Hitler sought to portray the German military deep into Eastern Europe and Russia, which involved the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and other peoples considered to be socially inferior. Europe was to be ‘cleared’ of such peoples, but certainly not because they represented any kind of military threat (even though the ‘partisan menace’ was often cited as a justification for the work of the Nazi Einsatzcommandos, the mobile death squads).

[16] This term was coined by Roberto Esposito.

[17] Quoted in Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Peng. Ed.)., 505, note 112.

[18] For instance: “The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy could see as many as 580 million people – 8 per cent of the world’s population – pushed into poverty, according to researchers” (‘Half a billion people could be pushed into poverty by coronavirus economic fallout, study finds’, by Max Walden,

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-09/coronavirus-poverty-study-research-oxfam-anu/12136222)

[19] Nietzsche, quoted in Martin Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead’, in the Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, s

[20] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 137.

[21] “Justice is the right to speak” (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, 269).

[22] Steve Hilton, Host and Former advisor to David Cameron, from the March 22, 2020, episode of Fox News, The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton (italics in original).

[23] The Tyranny of Values, 6. Originally published in 1959.

[24] Ethics, Proposition 7, Part Three. Spinoza asserts that this striving is “nothing but the actual essence of a thing”.

[25] It might seem counterintuitive to suggest the hegemony of bio-medical politics, given that hospitals and health institutions have been underfunded and mismanaged over the past few decades. Let us remember, however, that biology is the political unconscious of our times. If governments can so grossly underfund public health systems, and then when a global pandemic breaks out, rally extraordinary social and political measures to combat the virus, this only shows that what we’re seeing is truly a form of sublimation, in the strict psychoanalytic sense of the term – that is, the discharge of instinctual energies into the sphere of non-institutional (i.e., political and social) reality.

[26] ‘Not One Kaddish Will Be Said’ (1942), in Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 163.

[27] Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 177.

[28] Robert Esposito, Bios. Biopolitics and Philosophy, 9.

[29] Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 177.

[30] Levinas, Entre Nous, xii.

[31] Emmanuel Levinas, in Robbins [ed.], Is It Righteous to Be?, 120.

[32] Emmanuel Levinas, In the Time of Nations, 110. Italics in original; likewise, Arendt comments that for Heidegger, with the focus of ontology on the fundamental ‘being-there’ (Dasein) of the human, the issue is “not that it simply is, but, rather, that in its being its primary concern is its being itself” (Essays in Understanding, 179).

[33] Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism, 206.