ABSTRACT
One need not embrace Arendt's narrative reconstruction of the origin to see the slippage in Agamben regarding Foucault's biopolitical. The biopolitical response to the contagion, a state of exception, is thus a defensive immune reaction, or more precisely, a reaction of auto-immunity that turns against the very body it is designed to defend. By consequence, naked or bare life, the blo e Leben of Benjamin that Agamben often cites, is secondary; it cannot be the original, the first condition. In Foucault's original construction, the biopolitical opens a path in another possible direction, leading away from drawing any direct or indirect line between the agonizing body of the coronavirus patient in the hospital bed and the death camp. It is something the political, biopolitical or not, cannot possibly grasp or touch, even if the medical personages, its agents or actors, respond to it instantaneously, intuitively, without necessarily understanding it.
