Philosopher Giorgio Agamben's COVID-denier turn

Yes, I'm compulsively following the Ukraine story like most other news junkies.

But this article is about a philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, who embraced the antivaxxer agitation over COVID.

Adam Kotsko, tells the story in What Happened to Giorgio Agamben? Slate 02/20/2022. Kotsko is one of Agamben's English translators, and he explains the general idea of Agamben's theory of "bare life." And he comments on Agamben's rightwing turn against public-health measures to combat the pandemic:

When I wrote to ask some of my academic colleagues about Agamben’s most recent writings, all agreed that no one should have expected him to trust the motivations of politicians and public health authorities. Carlo Salzani, a researcher at the University of Vienna who published the first Italian-language study of Agamben (and helped me organize a multi-authored essay collection on his work), told me that Agamben has always been concerned with “the way governments and power more in general weaponize crises in order to tighten their grip on the lives of people.” But he lamented the way Agamben has let his “moral outrage” turn “his politico-philosophical analysis into a crusade.” Asked whether the philosopher’s pandemic writings are a natural outgrowth of Agamben’s previous work, Salzani replied, “Perhaps the way he sees the pandemic is a natural consequence of his previous analyses, but I believe he got stuck in a rigid and limiting pattern from which he’s unable (and unwilling) to escape.” Eric Santner, a professor at the University of Chicago who has drawn repeatedly on Agamben’s concepts in multiple works of literary criticism and political theory, offered a similar lament over this intellectual inflexibility: “I see Agamben’s statements about the pandemic as a transformation of his own work into a kind of ideology, something that makes him a much too easy target for his critics. More than anything else, this saddens me,” he said. [my emphasis]

Kotsko points to what he sees as a theoretical gap in Agambe's understanding of state power and responsibility:

The problem is that Agamben has offered no philosophical tools to formulate any collective answer to the question of what matters most to us. Agamben has always been a man of the left, albeit an idiosyncratic anti-Marxist anarchist, but his apparent overlap with the right wing in his pandemic writings is no accident. If any action by the state, including by state medical authorities, is always intrinsically oppressive, then we have no alternative but to fall back on our own individuality — exactly the libertarian position that the right wing has used for decades to cut off in advance any effort to challenge existing power structures. [my emphasis]