In February 2020, Giorgio Agamben's criticisms of the restrictive government measures that were imposed at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe immediately became a cause célèbre. On his once obscure blog, he spoke about “the invention of an epidemic,” taking it as a sign of how institutional powers increasingly normalized a state of exception (Agamben 2020).1 His controversial arguments deployed the analytic framework from his Homo Sacer works, in which he develops his own arcane version of Foucauldian biopolitics with a post-Heideggerian twist. Although he was considered a heroic dissenter by some,2 his downplaying of the severity of the pandemic made him the object of fierce criticism and mockery. One commentator even stated, with a nod to one of Foucault's lecture series at the Collège de France, that “society must be defended against Agamben” (Christaens 2020).
Yet Agamben's take appears innocuous in comparison to...
