El autor considera algunas cuestiones planteadas por las principales figuras de la llamada Teoría Italiana, Giorgio Agamben y Roberto Esposito, y por las reflexiones de Di Cesare sobre las inmunodemocracias contemporáneas, centrándose en el papel de los tonos afectivos en la apertura/cierre de nuestra relación con el mundo y en la configuración de nuestra comprensión de la pandemia de Covid-19; así como para teorizar la pérdida de la rebeldía en los regímenes biopolíticos contemporáneos. Desafiando la viabilidad del paradigma inmunitario para pensar la posibilidad de una acción política transformadora y recurriendo a los análisis fenomenológicos de Max Scheler como fuente de algunas claves conceptuales cruciales para explorar la relación entre la capacidad humana de trascender la dimensión biológica de la “vida desnuda” y la posibilidad de resistencia a la lógica autoinmunitaria que actúa en las sociedades modernas tardías, busca probar la existencia de un enfoque teórico alternativo y más radical de la libertad en el racionalismo crítico o “Trascendentalismo de la acción” formulado por los filósofos italianos y los antiguos resistentes Mario Dal Pra y Andrea Vasa.

Abstract

The author takes into account some of the questions raised by leading figures of the so-called Italian Theory, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, and by Di Cesare’s thoughts on contemporary immunodemocracies, focusing on the role of affective tones in opening/closing our relation to the world and in shaping our understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as for theorizing the loss of rebelliousness in contemporary biopolitical regimes. Challenging the viability of the immunitarian paradigm in order to think the possibility of transformative political action; and resorting to Max Scheler’s phenomenological analyses as providing some crucial conceptual keys to explore the relation between the human capacity for transcending the biological dimension of “bare life” and the possibility of resistance to the auto-immunitarian logic at work in late modern societies, she probes the existence of an alternative and more radical theoretical approach to liberty in the critical rationalism or “Trascendentalism of action” formulated by Italian philosophers and former resisters Mario Dal Pra and Andrea Vasa.

Palabras clave

Pandemia, Teoría italiana, Lógica inmunitaria, Rebelión, Resonancia, Trascendentalismo de la acción.

Key words

Pandemic, Italian Theory, Immunitarian logic, Rebellion, Resonance, Transcendentalism of action

In his “reflections on the plague”, which first appeared on his Quodlibet blog¹ during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben invited his readers to ponder not about the epidemic itself, but the people’s reactions to it and, more precisely, about «the ease with which an entire society has acquiesced to feeling itself plague-stricken, to isolating itself at home, and to suspending its normal conditions of life, its relationships of work, friendship, love, and even its religious and political convictions» (Agamben, 2020a). Among the bewildering questions brought forth by his philosophical interrogation concerning the plague, which he identifies with the global condition of modernity, Agamben especially insists on the biopolitical implications of the contemporary loss of any religious as well as political faith. Insofar as «people no longer believe in anything other than a bare biological existence, which must be saved at any cost (Agamben, 2020a), the human condition is reduced to a “bare life” (Agamben, 1998) consumed by fear (of losing one’s life) and incapable of rebellion. Agamben (2020b) detects in fear, since Hobbes the foundation and justification of tyrannical power, the emotional tone at the core of the political paradigm of modernity, which he traces back to the negation of the human capacity for transcending the dimension of thingness and biological life that, echoing Rosa’s 2013 sociological analyses, he conceives to be associated with the typically modern loss of our relationship to the world. From this perspective, theorizing about the Covid-19 pandemic in the midst of its global outbreak testifies to the philosopher’s capacity of retrieving the non-modern or post-modern capacity for transcendence, which consists in taking this unprecedented and disruptive event into account not per se, that is to say, by focusing on its objective dimension, like political theorists or medical scientists do in their global race against time to unravel the mechanisms of this new pathogen, but investigating the attitudes or types of relation to the world which orient our perceptions, understandings and conducts of life faced with the epidemic.

The Italian philosopher draws on Heidegger’s Being and Time the idea that the very openness-to-the-world of a human being’s existential structure is constituted by a specific affective tone that is, therefore, primary in order to grasp our ways of relating to it. Now, the problem with Agamben’s reflections on the pandemic is that, by inverting the heideggerian priority of anguish over fear, and assuming the latter to be the original affective tone that discloses the world in its intramundane and insurmountable thingness, thus, condemning the human being faced with the virus to a will-to-powerlessness (Agamben, 2020), they do not provide an adequate account of the affective openness-to-the-world in which they suggest the possibility of transcending our relation of relationlessness² to the world should be sought for. Hence, one cannot but agree with Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, who traces Agamben’s theory back to what he designates as a “destituting” or de-politicizing approach to politics, which draws precisely on Heidegger’s thought the negation of the human capacity for transcending what is given – in Agamben’s words, the plague understood as an alienated relation to the world – that turns the human openness-to-the world into a potentiality without actuality (impolitical), thus deactivating transformative action (Esposito, 2020, pp. X-XI, 3-70).

The aim of this article is to expand on Agamben’s intuition of the primary character of our affective tones in the understanding of the plague, challenging the viability of the so-called “Italian Theory” in theorizing the loss of rebelliousness in contemporary biopolitical regimes. In order to do so, it suggests that we resort not to Heidegger’s but rather to Max Scheler’s phenomenological investigations into the “order of the heart” and his personal formulation of epochè (“phenomenological reduction”) as providing some crucial conceptual keys to explore the relation between the human capacity for transcending the intramundane dimension of actuality (Agamben’s “bare life”) and the political dimension of rebellion or resistance to the plague, probing the existence of an alternative and more radical theoretical approach to political action in the critical rationalism or “trascendentalism of action” formulated by Italian philosophers and former Resistants Mario Dal Pra and Andrea Vasa in the aftermath of World War II.

1. As political thinker Hannah Arendt points out, the term “theory” (gr., thēoria) derives from the Greek word theatai, ‘spectators’: it refers to a peculiar act of understanding an event (“spectacle”), that takes place on the stage of life at a certain historical moment, the meaning (“truth”) of which is attained only from an external position, “implying a view that is hidden from those who take part in the spectacle and actualize it”, thus, entailing the spectators’ withdrawal from the scene, in other words, a “deliberate, active non-participation in life’s daily business” (Arendt, 1971, p. 93). Arendt associates theory with the Aristotelian concept of schōle, which

Now, it may well be argued that when the Covid-19 zoonotic disease first struck the world’s population, most people’s lives bore interesting resemblances to the lives of the all-too-ordinary citizens of Oran, the Algerian city hit by an epidemic of bubonic plague in 194* in Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, The Plague (Camus, 2006, p. 36): devoted to hard working, but solely with the object of making money (Camus, 2006, p. 35), with a penchant for commerce, their lives were chiefly absorbed in doing business (nec-otium). In the French writer’s fiction, the inhabitants of the modern city of Oran were thoughtless and timeless: their absence of reflection was closely related with the “hightening of the pace of life” that sociologists consider a crucial experience of modernity (Rosa, 2013, p. 131)⁵, and political theorist Hannah Arendt interpreted to be the modern reduction of the capacity of thinking to sheer “reckoning with consequences” (Arendt, 1998, p. 322) and the shrinking of the complexity of all human activities, including political action, to laboring.

By abruptly interrupting the hyper-accelerated chain of late modern social relationships and processes of mass production, transportation and communication, the 2019-20 Coronavirus pandemic negated the negation of otium, forcing certain categories of laborers as well as youngsters to withdraw from their extroflected lives punctuated with time-consuming activities and to fold back upon themselves, trapped and lost, just like the inhabitants of Oran in Camus’s novel, in the labyrinth of cement and tar of their houses and districts, doomed to fall prey to the Minotaur of boredom (Camus, 2008a). But this double negation did not entail the affirmation of scholazein as its consequence. And this was even more so for those categories of professionals traditionally committed to theorizing, such as philosophers, intellectuals, teachers and scholars, for whom “spatial distancing” actually meant being locked down in the safe space of their homes, nailed to their computers and tethered to the virtual arena of e-learning and remote working that melted the last remnants of the age-long distinction between the public and the private spheres. Turned into “time-juggling players”, incapable of dwelling in or inhabiting time (Di Cesare, 2020, p. 20), these professionals have been compelled to readjust their conduct of life at a heightening pace in order to handle extraordinary, disruptive events through an effective “event-oriented time praxis” (Rosa, 2013, p. 236), the extremely flexible and dynamic logic of which bares interesting resemblances with the business strategies that pervasively regulate the globalized educational systems. In doing so they were caught to the point of asphyxia (Di Cesare, 2020, pp. 19-20) in a timeless “undifferentiated time” (Rosa, 2013, p. 103) that could not be more different from the ancient Greek disengagement from worldly affairs.

The Covid-19 epidemic seems to have intensified, rather than suspended, the late modern temporalization of time described by sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2013), thus, achieving the erosion of the strategic conduct of life⁶ which was typical of modern the “sovereign”, i.e. stable and monadic self-identities (Rosa, 2013, p. 237), and its replacement with situational, i.e. temporally unstable shape-shifting identities – “if one understands identity as a sense of who one is that provides an ability to orient oneself and to act, then situational identities are quite conceivable as, so to speak, logical vanishing points of heightened individualization and acceleration” (Rosa, 2013, p. 239, my italics). From this perspective, viral metamorphosis seems to mirror the late modern situational logic that dissolves the traditional understanding of the Self as substance and detects in the individuals’ ways of handling the contingencies and vicissitudes of life, i.e. their style (Rosa, 2013, p. 240) and their habitus, the only consistent elements of internal continuity. Resistant to transformative astonishment and thoughtfulness (thaumazein) just like Camus’s “exiled by the plague”, these individuals turned their metropolis into massive barren waiting rooms during “lock-down” (Camus, 2006, p. 183), just to throw themselves with stubborn and almost frantic determination into their habits as soon as they could, invoking their right to disobey the biosecurity measures in order to defend their liberties and vehemently demanding to open up their countries for the sake of business (nec-otium)⁷.

In his seminal work on biopolitics, leading thinker of the so-called “Italian Theory” Roberto Esposito detects in the concept of liberty one of the great political categories of modernity, along with those of sovereignty and property, which he interprets to be artificial, linguistic and institutional constructions developed by human reason, “a sort of natural immunitarian system” that preserves the vital organism against the aggression of external agents (Esposito, 2004, p. 57, my italics) in order to preserve life (conservatio vitae). Resorting to the notion of ‘immunity’ to define the relationship between life and law⁸, the Italian thinker conceives politics to be an artificial procedure for managing life by negatively protecting it against natural hazards (Esposito, 2004, pp. 41, 47). Interrogating the etymon of the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ (gr. eleuthería, lat. libertas), Esposito draws attention to the root of these terms (leuth or leudh and frya) which refer to the acts of growing, opening and blooming⁹. Now, modernity is characterized by a negative conversion or “immunitarian turn” of the term which dissociates liberty from the affermative and connective meaning of its germinal root, replacing it with the modern negative or privative acceptation of freedom from any interference. According to Esposito, the advent of what Isaiah Berlin called the negative concept of liberty marks an “entropic process” that closes the subject back upon herself, turning her into an autonomous unity (individuum), unavailable to the Other and relentlessly trying to gain and keep control over herself and the vicissitudes of life. The Italian philosopher traces this immunitarian logic at the very heart of the modern juridical and political categories, among which the notion of ‘sovereignty’ is recognized to be the most powerful organizational answer to the modern problem of the self-preservation of life (Esposito, 2004, p. 54-55)¹⁰.

In her philosophical considerations on the Covid-19 pandemic, Donatella Di Cesare (2020) draws on Esposito’s thesis of a ‘global autoimmunity crisis’ caused by a paroxysmal activation of these life-preserving mechanisms which is not determined by any real aggression/contagion from an external danger or pathogen. In its increasing demand for preventive immunization measures, the immunitarian logic of late modern societies turns on the same social body negating that very life it was intended to defend. Following philosopher Byung-chul Han (2017), Di Cesare (2020) detects in capitalism one of those immunitarian mechanisms aimed at keeping death in check through limitless accumulation of capital, that have run out of control, turning life against itself for the sake of life’s protection (“capitalist asphyxia”). This aporetic logic is apparent in the contradiction between the constitutional rights to work and to health triggered by public health emergency measures to contain the Coronavirus contagion, which brings the short-circuit of contemporary biopolitics to the fore. The lethal grip in which “immunodemocracies” (Di Cesare, 2020) hold life (bíos), achieving what Esposito (2004) defines as the naturalization or biologization of contemporary politics, was made apparent in the association of the Covid-19 pathogen with industrial, i.e. man-made pollutants as the world’s population experienced those measures of lock-down and confinement that the workers of ex-Ilva’s steel plant in Taranto, their families and the residents in those areas of the Italian city hit by toxic emissions on “wind days”, had started suffering long before the pandemic outbreak. So while Italian political philosophers certified the failure of neo-liberal governance in handling the pandemic and saluted the regained autonomy and primacy of the political over the economic sphere (Portinaro, 2020), in her violent attack against the extension of the state of emergence at the end of July 2020, deputy and leader of the far-right sovereignist party Fratelli d’Italia, Giorgia Meloni, would charge the Italian government, that those bio-political measures had adopted in order to protect the lives of its citizens, with “sentencing to death” thousands of economic activities, symptomatically pleading for sovereignty in order to preserve nec-otium. The (auto)immunitarian turn is apparent in radical right-wing narratives of the Covid-19 pandemic, in which the semantic root of liberty as ‘growth’ shrinks to the economic dimension of profit (Di Cesare, 2020, p. 75)¹¹, while the “meta-immunitarian device”¹² of sovereignty is twisted to denote the self-determining and internally homogenizing process of eradication of potentially lethal conflicts aimed at defending the integrity of the borders of the political body (Nation-State) from the threat of external agents, thus, identifying the virus in/with the stranger, the migrant or the outcast.

Just like the sovereign Self, the sovereign State presents an internal contradiction: walled off, it withdraws and collapses on a monadic singularity incapable of “co-appearance” (comparution)¹³ and con-tact with the other-than-oneself, jealously holding on to a self-referring form of static spatial and cultural identity that the very late modern capitalist acceleration of social processes, from which it draws its vital lymph, dissolves. Confronted with the pandemic, contemporary ‘immunopolitics’ takes the interdiction on contact (noli me tangere) that governs the juridical construction of modern ‘negative liberties’ (Di Cesare, 2020, p. 33) to the extreme point where the life-saving imperative of physical or ‘social distancing’ rules out the relation with another¹⁴ closing the Subject in and on itself. The self-conservative syndrome (Esposito, 2004, p. 109) reaches paroxysmal levels when dealing with the preservation of the educational community in public health emergency. On the one hand, the (auto)immunitarian contradiction between the right to health and the right to work (of students, as well as their parents) reverberates in recent European debates about school reopening with in-person learning. In August 2020, the increase in Covid-19 cases, also among minors, threatened the governments’ attempts at ‘normalizing’ the pandemic with quarantines and further periods of shutdown, the economic costs of which have been the object of anxious assessments¹⁵. On the other hand, during confinement ‘distance education’ or home-schooling intensified the virtualization of the students-teachers relationship, increasing the individuals’ withdrawal from co-appearance and co-construction of knowledge. Providing them with mute, generally anonymous avatars, behind which to retreat from visual contact and communicative interaction, thus eluding what is often perceived to be the devaluing judgment of the others, educators and peers, ‘distance education’ has proved to be functional to the hyper-acceleration of mass production of “situational Selves”, i.e. conformistically situated in their own global environment and frantically urged to absorb, accumulate and replicate pieces of information in order to handle and adapt to their environment’s needs and dynamics.

As Byunh-Chul Han (2017, p. 41 and ff.) pointed out, the digital medium reduces communication to sheer emotional discharge and liquefies the individual’s capacity to metabolize, express and share negative and positive feelings in reflexive narrative forms¹⁶. In the context of neoliberal psycho-politics, which reinforces the identification of liberty with unfettered emotional outbursts for the purpose of controlling and maximizing production and profit, thus, shrinking the time-space for theory (ascholia), the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic dislocates on the web, but does not disrupt the immunitarian logic of late modern biopolitical systems. Though not without some exceptions (Hattie, 2008; Hattie, 2012; cited in Rosa, 2019, p. 246), contemporary learning environments reproduce what sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2019) defines as the “dispositional alienation” that affects late modern societies, that is to say, a negative, repulsive or even hostile, Self-World or Subject-Object mode of relation, which lacks meaningful inner connection (responsitivity).

Echoing Scheler’s phenomenological analyses on resentment and emotional contagion, Rosa (2019) suggests that we understand alienation to be a dis-order of one’s attitude or capacity to relate to the world¹⁷. Identifying resonance with a two-sided bidirectional movement of ‘af-fection’ (being touched by something or someone that ‘speaks’ to us) and ‘e-motion’ (being capable of responding by establishing a connection), he roots alienation in a pathological, socially-induced atrophy of the human disposition to empathy and sympathy, which seals the individual off from living and meaningful contact with others and the world, locking her down in the self-referring and resistant “bubble” of her own Ego¹⁸. This attitude toward the world, brought forth in the devaluation of all good and value which escape the ego's control or possession, is associated with angst-driven self-consuming envy and hate.

In highly competitive individualistic environments, systematic exposure to envy¹⁹, malice and disparagement, when associated with a prolonged and pronounced awareness of impotence, are most liable to develop ressentiment²⁰, which Scheler identified in a more or less permanent state of value delusion (Scheler, 2007, p. 53) or axiological dis-orientation²¹ that precludes the perception of value of what is other-than-oneself (“World-closedness”), as well as the imagination of possibilities that exceed actuality. The jealousy of one’s home or land in radical right-wing sovereignist narratives (Di Cesare, 2020, p. 59), the rise of hate speech and hate crimes during the Coronavirus pandemic and the populist exploitation of mimetic contagion – a crucial affective dimension in current new forms of fascism (Lawtoo, 2019) – eventually associated with denial of the pandemic, concur to expound the (auto)immunitarian logic that regulates the contemporary hyper-consumerist “democracies of ressentiment” (Cusinato, 2013, p. 68). In their peculiar blend of conformist leveling and proliferation of new authoritarian vertical relationships – i.e. between populist leaders and their followers in the physical as well as in the virtual spaces created by the social media – these autopoietic systems (Cusinato, 2013; Cusinato 2017) bring about the withering of consciousness²² and the withdrawal of the egomaniac subject, incapable of transcending the closed horizon of her own natural or social environment and blindly committed to the neo-liberal imperative of enjoyment. What Agamben seems to disregard in his considerations on fear (of losing one’s life) is the fact that, although an elementary form of our relationship to the world (Rosa 2020, p. 110-ff), this emotional tone does not exert the primal function of opening-to-the-world, which in Scheler’s analyses is peculiar to the feeling of love. Instead, fear concurs to delineate the phenomenological profile of the modern man of ressentiment, to which French thinker, journalist and novelist Albert Camus devotes a special attention in his reflections on the plague between 1941 and the publication of his 1951 philosophical essay,L’Homme révolté.

2. Anticipating Agamben’s thesis, according to which the plague had been present in late modern societies long before the Covid-19 pandemic outburst²³, Camus attempts at providing a phenomenological account of rebellion by focusing on the affective tone which is related to what he defines as the “horizontal transcendence” (Camus, 2008b, p. 326n) of revolt vis-à-vis of actuality, thus distinguishing (against Scheler) the figure of the rebel from that of the man of ressentiment. The French author traces the advent of the (auto)immunitarian turn in Epicurus’ and Lucretius’ theories of social atomism²⁴, which reduce life to its biological dimension and consciousness to sheer sensitivity to pain and pleasure, walling up, metaphorically and physically, the human being within the numb construction (“citadel”, “fortress”) of the individual in an extreme attempt of defensive theoretical revolt against suffering and death (Camus, 2008c, p. 85-7). Focusing on the emotional quality of the Athenian plague of the late 5th century BC, the description of the pandemic that closes Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura is likely to have inspired Camus’s disturbing identification of the plague with the Western invention of capital punishment, understood to be an (auto)immunitarian response to the unbearable fact of human death (“metaphysical revolt”) (Camus, 2008c, p. 87). The disease progression, “stiffening” and paralyzing the mental faculties of those who are infected²⁵, emotionally asphyxiating them until they die-to-the-world-and-to-others, turns the plague into the emblem of a dispositional and axiological disorder (“hate”) that, according to Camus, affects modern individuals and societies, and culminates in the Nazi-Fascist mass production of corpses²⁶ for the bio-political sake of securing and breeding life (that is worth living)²⁷. Thus, in the French writer’s homonymous novel, the plague cannot merely be reduced to the infective agent that hits the physical (virus) as well as the social organism (Nazi terror) from the outside: the plague lies in the sovereign power of life and death over citizens; it is the very biopolitical attitude (Esposito, 2004, p. 53) that creates and justifies death penalty on the grounds of the need to preserve life (conservatio vitae)²⁸, which reaches its paroxysmal point in the modern invention of the “state of siege”, which Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben more recently identified with the “state of exception”²⁹.

This thesis should not be confused with more recent identifications of the Coronavirus with the sovereign power: in her thoughts on immunodemocracy in the times of the “plague 2.0”, Donatella Di Cesare (2020) provocatively evokes the power of the “sovereign virus”, which rules over that very political-administrative governance of public health emergency that is supposed to rule the virus out, thus, bringing the internal antinomy and structural vulnerability of the biopolitical order into full light. According to the Italian philosopher, in order to neutralize the auto-immunitarian crisis triggered by the antinomic character of that very logic of immunization which governs the bio-political governance of the Covid-19 pandemic, we need to immunize ourselves against the eidolon of absolute immunization (Di Cesare, 2020, p. 85). In other words, we must carefully dose the contagious poison (Di Cesare, 2020, p. 57). But who decides where the safe measure lies? In late modern societies which, according to Agamben (2020), believe in nothing, namely that are poisoned by nihilism, i.e. axiological blindness, the very preservation of life is subject to economic (d)evaluation. Hate, rather than fear, is the affective tone of that ecstatic, self-dissolving and emotionally contagious communitas (Esposito, 2004, p. 110; Esposito, 2006) searched for in electoral rallies, clubs and on disco dance floors after the lockdown: the acritical leap in the double negation of total de-immunization, flaunted by the ex-pensive lack of fear of the crowds³⁰, is but the other side of the biopolitical coin. Now, according to Di Cesare, the “infectious dose” – of the virus as well as of human paranoia against an external enemy – is indispensable in order to provoke a positive, creative and democratic response of the political body, caught between its (auto)immunitarian construction and its communitarian/totalitarian dissolution (Di Cesare, 2020, p. 88). Resisting the virus marks that political threshold, or in Esposito’s words, the peculiar “projectedness” (sporgenza) (Esposito, 2004, p. 110) of the political “layer” (faglia), that “residue of transcendence that immanence cannot absorb” (Esposito, 2004, p. 61), in which the Italian theorist detects the specific creativeness of the immunitarian logic. This explains why in Di Cesare’s reflections on the “plague 2.0” the immunitarian “bubble” appears to be the insuperable horizon of our time. By resorting to the immunitarian logic in order to think against and beyond immunodemocracy, nonetheless, her argument falls prey to the same antinomy it intended to overcome, thus precluding the possibility to theorize that exceedingness of the political and its irreducibility to the juridical sphere brought forth by the state of exception.

3. In his 1962 notebooks, Italian antifascist intellectual Nicola Chiaromonte wrote that “enduring life without knowing what to answer, is the condition for having something to say” (Chiaromonte, 1995, p. 4). What we have suffered from life is what we have to say. “Suffering” should not be understood here in a physical or moral sense, but in the acceptation, which is reminiscent of the tragic Greek pathei mathos, of “having been put to a test”. We suffer from life when we experience the “huge difficulty of recognizing exactly the test that existence submitted us to: what we have seen in enduring it” (Chiaromonte, 1995, p. 110). But, Chiaromonte adds, we rarely accept the test that ourselves, other people or the events we experience confront us with: we prefer to hold on to ready-made ideas, rather than try to find out as much as possible about who we are and who others are.

Developing Agamben’s (2020) provocative interrogation on the lack of rebellion in late modern societies, in which the auto-immunitarian pathological drift of biosecurity dissolves the human capacity for transcendence into a violent and grievous immanence, I propose that we turn to the exceptions, pondering on the affective tone which characterizes the type of relation-to-the-world brought forth in historical examples of rebellion, in order to challenge the possibility of theorizing human resistance to the plague. Anticipating Arendt’s considerations, Chiaromonte identified “theory” (theoria) in a form of withdrawal or “estrangement” from life’s occasions (Chiaromonte, 1995, p. 40) – although not from the world – which consists primarily in the human singularity’s disposition and availability to be touched by others and by the world. In this capacity for con-tact, which is reminiscent of Rosa’s “dispositional resonance”, lies the peculiar ex-centricity of the human being, expressed by the act of seeing (“consciousness” or theoria) alternative possibilities, exceeding sheer factuality as well as the ready-made schemes or opinions of the natural or social environment (Chiaromonte, 1995, p. 41). Theorizing, in this sense, is in itself an act (praxis) of resistance that situates itself outside the (auto-)immunitarian logic opening a time-space for new “constitutions of liberty” (Arendt, 1990).

Insofar as resistance is understood in the defensive, i.e. immunitarian acceptation of ‘withstanding’³¹, it expresses a self-centered attitude of environmental closure and axiological ‘blindness’ to the value of others and of the world (nihilism), which from the justification of moral and physical annihilation of the opponent as ‘enemy’ culminates in the totalitarian extermination camps (Cusinato, 2017, p. 412). This form of resistance³² reinforces rather than disrupts the biopolitical “plague”. Being “put to the test” of the Covid-19 pandemic, instead, and see something about our attitudes, our ways of relating to it, of thinking and acting when confronted with such unsettling event, entails that we dwell on the “expressive exceedingness” of the human being (Cusinato, 2017, p. 25) and work on that “point of transcendence” (Esposito, 2004, p. 56), in which Esposito traces the very beginning of that immunitarian logic that affects/infects the “bubbles” of our existences.

The pandemic reactivates the anguish of death smouldering beneath the feverish ego-centric struggle for social recognition, in which the inhabitants of contemporary immunodemocracies, like the prisoners of the Platonic cave, are totally absorbed, chained to the artificial reproduction of consumerist intemperance, distracted by envy and unconsciously deluded by the defensive eidola of autonomy, self-sufficiency and invulnerability (Cusinato, 2017, p. 410). A modern platonic cave turning in upon itself with its back to the sea, the snail-like town of Oran in Camus’s The Plague is the emblem of the modern (auto-)immunitarian “bubble”. Like our cities during Covid-19 lockdown, the North-African town that, in the French writer’s literary work, is ravaged by the bubonic plague epidemic, is sieged by the beauty of a in-human and human-less blooming measureless nature that presses against its city walls. Way before the plague, the inhabitants of Oran had withdrawn from beauty, defensively immuring themselves in the labyrinth of ennui (Camus, 2008a, p. 582-83):

A careful reader of Nietzsche’s as well as Scheler’s works, Camus indicates the way out of the immunitarian cave in an experience of cathartic denudement of the Ego (Camus, 2008a, p. 584; Novello, 2010) and of the barriers erected by the immunitarian logic of instrumental rationality³³, that is reminiscent of the psycho-technique of “phenomenological reduction”³⁴. Contrary to Husserl, Scheler moulded his understanding of the concept of epochè by pondering on the greek notion of “katharsis”, and considered “phenomenological reduction” to be an act of self-transcendence, the aim of which is not the bracketing of the world, but rather the subject’s ex-position beyond the Ego and common sense in an attitude of love or openness-to-the-world (Weltoffenheit) (Cusinato, 2017, p. 375 and ff).

Far from expressing an attitude of alienation, or inability of the modern human being to attune with the world³⁵, the dis-quieting and dis-orienting “silence of nature”, that comes in through the windows of the locked-down cities’ stone and concrete walls, calls for the repositioning of human singularity. Beyond the restless chain of desires that divert the consumerist homo ludens, liberty consists in the ex-centric availability to a resonant relationship to the world³⁶, which discloses a different time-space experience. It is not surprising to find evidence of this existential epochè in René Char’s lyrical diaries of the 1943-44 fight against Nazi-Fascism in the Southern France Maquis. The poet qualifies his fellow-resisters as “alchemists” by virtue of their power to strip themselves of their socially constructed Ego, their habits and opinions: when they abandoned their homes and families and chose to enter the Resistance, they relinquished their self-identities. The battle names they took marked the beginning of an ontogenetic process of radical transformation, which brought forth and pinpointed their consciousness (theoria) outside and beyond the individualizing schemes of immunitarian logic, on that “trans-individual threshold”³⁷ of a new collective being-with that is inherently also a being-open-to-the-world³⁸. In the poems of the French poet and resister, this cathartic process of re-birth is expressed in terms of an ex-position and axiological re-positioning of consciousness: “Enfonce-toi dans l’inconnu qui creuse. Oblige-toi à tournoyer. (Thrust into the unknown, which burrows deep. Force yourself to keep turning on yourself)” (Char, 2007, fragment 212, y italics). The image is strikingly evocative of the Greek concept of periagoge, which Plato considered to be the essence of education³⁹ and traced in the capacity of a human being to disentangle from the ready-made ideas or opinions (doxa) of the natural and social environment in which she had been immersed all her life, and change perspective expanding or increasing her view on (the value of) things under the shock of an unexpected event or encounter. Like the liberated prisoner of the Platonic cave, the resisters turn their head around (periagoge), breaking free of the chains of conformist thought and conduct, and experiencing a painful sense of “nudity”, which derives from the reduction (epochè) of the Cartesian self-centered Subject. This act of “turning on oneself” (periagoge) disposes the singularity to a new envy-free⁴⁰ attitude of world-openness and resonant contact with others, allowing for what Scheler defined as an axiological reorientation⁴¹ or excentric re-positioning⁴² beyond the nihilistic devaluation of life brought forth by the autoimmunitarian crisis⁴³. Resonance with nature and with others is precisely what distinguishes the resisters’ attitude toward the world from that of their torturers, who are insensible to the exceptional and blinded by hate to the positive values of their opponents as well as of the civilians who sheltered them⁴⁴.

The dispositional eccentricity of these “outlaws” or “bandits” is manifest in the way that the French and Italian resisters, fighting against the nazi occupants and their fascist allies, experienced love, friendship and happiness in conditions of extreme deprivation, defying the ready-made ideas of what the late modern situational Selves are liable to encounter and label as ‘love’, ‘friendship’ and ‘happiness’ within their immunopolitical comfort structures (Rosa, 2020; Sloterdijk, 2014; Romitelli, 2015). The theoretical import of this form of resistance for challenging the rate of innovation of contemporary biopolitical systems (Esposito, 2004) is brought forth in Italian philosophers and former resisters Mario Dal Pra and Andrea Vasa’s post-war investigations into the “Transcendentalism of action” (Trascendentalismo della prassi), which I propose to interpret as an attempt of philosophical theorization of that “resonant” type of relation to the world expounded by Rosa in his recent sociological work.

Defined as a “practical rebellion” and a “critical resistance” (Dal Pra, 1950, p. 62-3) to all form of “theoricistic” theory, namely, all doctrine that claims to reveal/actualize/realize the actual universality of value or being, which is given to the subject of knowing as her objective (i.e., “real”) term of vision (from gr., theoria), “transcendentalism of action” constitutes a critical rationalist approach, which draws on Kant’s transcendental reflection and on the phenomenological notion of epochè to formulate its resolutely anti-metaphysical affirmation of the meta-actualistic power of human thinking qua action.

Against the “theoricistic” devaluation of human reason, which reduces the philosophical discourse to a mere tautological repetition of and passive adjustment to some principle (Being, Truth, Value) that is already given once and for all, and only accessible through a revelatory vision that justifies human practical interventions in the “cruel garden of the world” (Dal Pra, 1953, p. 279), Vasa and Dal Pra uphold the capacity of human thinking to transcend what is perceived to be a closed, “invincible horizon of facts” and to open it to new possibilities of life, as well as to new forms of theory and action (Minazzi, 2008, p. 83). In their view, far from being aimed at preserving something given, thus, at reproducing (although with variations of dosage) an a priori value structure, human action integrates the rational demand for a possible, i.e., non-actualized meaning or value into the world. Rejecting all immanent and transcendent, idealistic and materialistic “theoreticism”, which neutralizes the human practical intentionality, thus, negating the very possibility of transformation, Vasa and Dal Pra delineate a form of anti-dogmatic “pratical-pure inactualism” (inattualismo pratico-puro) allowing for the maximum openness on being at the historical level of possibility. By affirming the transcendentalism of action, they maintain the responsibility of human intervention into the world by suspending (epochè) the supposedly absolute determination and limitless validity of natural and passive criteria and intuitive schemes (Vasa, 1957, p. 344), i.e., evidence, which they consider to be “the extrema ratio of all metaphysics” (Dal Pra, 1952, p. 238; Dal Pra, 1953, p. 277), and opening new meta-ontological orientations that enhance truth through the practically limitless creation of meanings and values that cannot be given, but can only be enacted (Dal Pra, 1950, p. 64). Thus, the two Italian philosophers translate the “heritage without testament” (Char, 2007, fragment n. 62) of the historical experience of the Resistance into a “logic of praxis [which] is precisely the logic of the possibility of something new” (Dal Pra, 1951, p. 108), that exceeds all situations for the sake of the human liberty of interpretative initiative. From this perspective, no theory or interpretation can be excluded as wrong, the “speculativistic” logic of all forms of “verbal narcissism of experience” (Vasa, 1957, p. 347) representing but one possible choice or way of seeing the world, that is brought forth by an attitude of closure, evocative of what sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes as a relationless relation to the world.

Rooted in the unprecedented forms of democratic life experienced within and among resisters’ groups during the 1943-45 civil war in Italy⁴⁵, “Transcendentalism of action” provides the example of a new type of philosophical theory that renounces the metaphysical claim to rightfulness in order to allow for the maximum possible of practical-critical openness to the world. Conceived to be a “practical-rational challenge to the naturalness of being” (Vasa, 1952, p. 227), it dislocates the alleged forcefulness of the situation, rejecting the contemporary biopolitical reduction of being to its biological dimension (life), as well as all forms of realist or immediatist ideologies that justify power politics and unscrupulous exploitation of organic and inorganic resources on the grounds of a supposed “naturalness” of the economic, social and political orders.

Far from expressing a nostalgic (i.e., “theoreticistic”) celebration of the partisans' political organizations during the Italian and French Resistance, Vasa and Dal Pra’s investigations (2017) contribute to the formulation of a (possible) future-directed theory of rebellion, or resistance to the plague that brings forth a radical notion of liberty. According to these two Italian (non-theoreticistic) theorists, liberty consists in the possibility of human thought to re-orient existence (Vasa, 1952, p. 229) through a positive active mediation of meaning, value and being. The conditions for such mediation or interpretation are not theoreticistically given once and for all to a merely contemplative subject of knowledge, but are constantly enacted anew. This practical engagement, that broadens the horizon of what human beings can love and will (Vasa, 1952, p. 223), integrating their polyphonic being-to-the-world-together, originates from the unsettling experience of not knowing the answers to the test(s) of life. The anti-metaphysical “healthy suspension of the “given”” (Dal Pra, 1950, p. 63), that is to say, of absolute answers (epoché), exposes reason to the mortal risk of its own nothingness (Vasa, 1952, p. 230), eventually opening a time-space for meta-actualistic acts of volition that have no guarantees of success. Insofar as truth is not conceived to be a necessary object of contemplation, but the possibile term of a theorical-practical faculty “committed to the inactual” (Dal Pra, 1953, p. 280) and imbued with hope and a will to transforming the economic, social and political actual modes of existence by transcending the pseudo-naturalistic construct of “bare life” (Vasa, 1952, p. 228), Dal Pra and Vasa’s “Transcendentalism of action” allows for an ex-centric re-positioning of thought beyond the hegemonic immunitarian logic of domination brought forth by the contemporary “theoricistic” attitudes at work in biopolitical systems (and their critiques), thus, maieutically opening alternative possibilities beyond the autocratic closure of contemporary immunopolitics.

Notes

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Fecha de recepción: Agosto 30 de 2020
Fecha de aprobación: Noviembre 23 de 2020

Resisting the Plague: Immunopolitics and Beyond

Resumen

Abstract

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