Confronting Agamben on the Pandemic: Biopolitics,Class Struggle and Surveillance Capitalism

I. Introduction

For many, the lockdown serves as an epiphanic moment through the course of which they become conscious of the fragility of life, rendered apparent under the immediate and imminent threat of death by contagion. With mass unemployment, widespread disenchantment, contractualisation of labour and a generalised hopelessness, the pandemic places the underlying structure of capitalist violence viscerally before us. The most glaring being the disparity in the treatment of working-class lives and those of the affluent classes, the former being abandoned by the system which is fuelled by the life and labour of the very people it has left to be culled. The cumulative effects of a generalised precarity, universal suffering and the particular distress caused to working classes also simultaneously produced super-profits for capitalists and the ruling class. As we are moving towards a more repressive society, the value of capital – which constitutively counterposes survival and struggle, life and livelihood – struggles to overcome its own inherent tendency to self-implode. The future of capitalism rests on its ability to self-engender value to continue to impel its growth through biosecurity and data; therefore, any attempt at understanding security interventions as purely self-maximising acts of sovereign violence would be incomplete observations. The political crisis ensued by the pandemic is internal to capital and therefore produces conditions for capitalism to face revolts of people whom it renders precarious. Given that many countries have resorted to imposing severe lockdowns and have such times, it becomes important for us to re-examine our tendency to collapse systemic violence into a metaphysics of sovereign violence, as has been suggested by Agamben. The necro-economy of mass deaths due to the pandemic as well as the policies that prevented the saving of lives is exceptional but also a culmination of the systemic violence of capitalism.

In ‘normal’ times, the very mobility of people and things is not antithetical to the expansion of capital rather is the force of capitalist expansion so today when immobility and a sense of suspended time animates movement, it becomes necessary for us to revisit the normality that preceded the dreaded ‘new normal’. Today, people are being denied entry and exit across borders, while enveloping the city into compartmentalised virtual public spaces. Even for the State, free movement of people and things is intertwined in the normalised logic of safety and security, which rests on constant appraisal of risk calculation and assessment of needs of capital’s ebbs and flows. Since the security principle of the State’s sovereign power involves the very monopolisation over protected movement of people, it constantly reflexes on legible and legitimate contours of freedoms – for labour that is narrowed or expanded in accordance with the structural requirements of freeing capital. Therefore, insecurity is implicated in the logic of the State’s security solution itself. Against the appearance of absolute immobility and unfreedom that the lockdown foregrounds, the movement of people is internal to networks of production processes and social relations. This much mobility is important even for the modern state to reproduce its own sphere of securitarian discourses.

The contradictions within capital both withhold and free labour, while subjecting and producing the conditions for a life which struggles for survival. The question that seems to haunt us at the onset of the pandemic is, how do we define freedom from hereon? Do we read in our opposition to the regulatory function of the State and its security apparatus? Do we exceptionalise the simultaneous production of decay and decadence under capitalism to invest ourselves in an omnipresent dread of a terminal crisis? Or does freedom always already contain the basis for its own internal negation; precisely through production of a permanent insecurity; inscribed in the value form of capital?

The question that we collectively face is what kind of a social life do we imagine for a post-pandemic, or even, post-apocalyptic world? Through this paper, we will unravel what constitutes ‘elemental’ human freedoms; is it the right over one’s bodily autonomy, mobility, the right to not be forced to wear masks, right to access to food, healthcare and living wage? Or a right to profit by capitalists, right to competition in the free market? The answer to these questions cannot be found out there in the world but needs to be created.

In the ongoing reflections and dialogue initiated by political philosophers and thinkers on the pandemic, Agamben submitted his concerns, ‘What becomes of human relations in a country that grows accustomed to living in this way for who one knows how long? What is a society that cleaves to no value other than that of survival?’ ⁵ The conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated the crisis of capitalism, leading to a reconfiguration of social interactions, meanings of sociality, erosion of friendships. The urban landscape has become a metaphor for ruination, both a representative and a manifestation of a crisis of subjective and social life. My contention with Agamben is not premised on a negation of the fear of a techno-capitalist authoritarianism; rather, I contend that this authoritarianism is a synthesis of capitalism’s internal contradictions. A narrow understanding of a State-capitalist collusion in creating a reign of market fundamentalism and authoritarianism fails to explain the logical unravelling of capitalism in the direction that it has assumed.

Through this paper, I will demonstrate that Agamben, despite rightly describing the problems that the crisis poses, offers us a myopic account of an alternative politics save for a metaphysical-transcendental notional one of a ‘non-historical’ exit. Agamben’s central abstraction, ‘biological life’ offers a justification for the State’s normalising of measures of exceptionalising human freedom and human existence up to the recent pandemic threshold.

II. Human Life in a Bare State? A Question of Survival and Struggle

Bringing the conceptualisation of ‘human life’ at the very centre of political imagination, the philosopher of ‘bare life’, Agamben’s recent interventions on the pandemic suggest that the coronavirus, which he reckons is not far worse in degree or proportion than the flu is being leveraged by the capitalists and the state which has turned it into a ‘health terror’. ⁶ His critique radically separates the immanence of political life from the transcendental realm of biological unity of human life. He sees this an occasion for the State to deepen policing of people’s mobility and freedoms by inaugurating an unencumbered ‘biosecurity paradigm’. Agamben sees bio-technological surveillance as a further entrenchment of the State within society, which would accelerate the production of bare life; this analysis logically follows from his oeuvre. Agamben’s reading of the human existence as potential implies that history cannot be concluded in a positive realisation of emancipation but can only approximated through an abandonment of history. ⁷ In the light of the COVID-19 crisis, he appeals to people to become conscientious and challenge the ‘sovereign’ State’s project of mass surveillance totalitarianism, without offering a theory or politics of liberation. In fact, his call to action is foundationally passive. He warns people against the comfort of falling for medicalised discourses and biosecurity solutionism offered by the State.

According to Agamben, the homo sacer is the ‘original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension’. ⁸ That is the production of bare life is already inscribed in the very logic of political life and therefore these ‘exceptions’ and ‘anomalies to law are already accounted for as an internal contradiction. If it weren’t for the generalisability of the state of exception, would Agamben be willing to concede the structural reproduction of inequality? Would he view poverty as a ‘natural’ contingency of biopower, in which the suffering of the working class is reconciled as accidental victims from a logical development of biopolitics towards thanatopolitics – that cannot be helped? Agamben’s analysis remains tied to the normalising of the exception rather than studying the roots of the exception itself. Agamben fails to subjectificate the void that haunts and promises to secure post-biopolitical freedom for human life and instead takes the form-of-life where biology is undivided by polity as an ideal. According to Agamben, this impossible ideal which although cannot be realised is nonetheless achieved through inoperativeness. That is, by withdrawing from political life, we disrupt its fulfilment (bios) and come closer to mere life (zoe).

Agamben’s dialectic is a bad infinity stuck between a positive and negative assertion of work at two ends of the spectrum of life. With the pandemic too, Agamben’s first reaction has been to withdraw from the securitarian discourses of the State to directly confront, challenge and oppose it. The very act of refusal to comply with pandemic rules is taken to be as overcoming the predicament that awaits us. To save itself from its own self-devouring path of political life, which colonises all humanity, he offers a radical exit from history based on a prototype of a ‘workless slave’. ⁹ He discounts the formation of subjectivity in and through the sphere of its own social reality, even as Agamben holds that the state of exception does not mark a discontinuity from the normal but is exemplary in the fact of its normality. Therefore, his imagination of a totalitarian State-yet-to-come forecloses the possibility of a negation of its emergence by presuming the political subjects as brainwashed and compliant to State power.

That the very paradigm of biopolitics describes the embeddedness of insecurity in the social field as the ground for securitarian discourses, ‘inseparable from the [liberal] framework of political rationality’, ¹⁰ implies the modern state’s latest device for self-expansion of power and colonisation of life is the biosecurity solution. By this logic, all the various processes of subjectivation and identification, disciplining and regulation, classification and control, internalisation and normalisation of denaturalised life develop as a ceaseless conflict between life and biopower. Agamben does not offer any explanation as to why the colonisation of life is imperative for the system to function, by self-producing itself? It is clear that not all life can be colonised by the State, since life itself contains the labouring capacity, which is essential for the State’s very survival.

One has to then ask, whether Agamben’s frame of biopolitics really recognises the challenge of the crisis of capitalism as an internal basis to the ‘totalitarian regression’ of the State-form? Or does the fetish for micro-politics against the ‘sovereign power’ of the State reach a point of shaping resistance into idealist anti-statism and hollow anti-corporatism, at best and a rigid defence of the status quo, at worst? Given the catastrophic nature of the crisis, must we not choose carefully the battle lines and strategize well on how to expend our energies in the fight rather than crying foul about being duped by the excesses of the ‘cronies’ and governments?

In this paper, I argue against an abstract fight against right wing authoritarian control (fuelled by techno-capitalism) by reducing it to an ethical revolt against statist overreach to subdue social life; misses the force of un-freedoms sustained by capitalism’s ethos of persist or perish, which comes at the cost of human life. Thus the only way to seriously contest fascism or totalitarianism is through class struggle such that freedom for all is birthed from the nested conditions of un-freedom that we experience as freedom; as Lenin, argued,

It is only when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters). ¹¹

III. Fighting an ‘Invisible’ Enemy

We see that our philosophers are oscillating between two conceptual landscapes: (1) dealing with immediate questions of security and autonomy, which is largely a function of governance, disciplinarity, legalism and repression, (2) trying to re-imagine the relation between life and freedom going beyond and against the immediate conditions of possibility.

However, the objective crisis is being seen as corresponding to a subjective breakdown of human bonds, freedoms and value systems. The subjective breakdown under the conditions of crisis corresponds to a lack of social security to support subsistence, which negatively determine and produce such disarray. Therefore, to feel a sense of moral repulsion towards the heightening of control, the widening of precarity and deepening of poverty is understandable and necessary but not at the cost of trading an analysis of the crises-ridden nature of capitalist development. Agamben exhibits a tendency to make the intensification of surveillance-security apparatus seem like an aberration, ‘what is in question is the design of a paradigm of government whose effectiveness far exceeds that of all forms of government that the political history of the West has so far known’. ¹² Under these circumstances, a centrality on the State’s response occludes our vision of social totality. The capitalist State form is both mitigating the contradictions of capital from self-imploding while also ensuring labouring potential towards capital with a repressive force (policing, lockdown, surveillance) in order to suppress a real emergency (revolt, uprising or revolution).

Man has been abolished

in the name of life

then life will be abolished.

The truth has been abolished

in the name of information

but information will not be abolished.

The constitution was abolished

in the name of the emergency

but the emergency will not be abolished.

(Giorgio Agamben ¹³ )

I empathise with Agamben’s urgent appeal to address, organise and act against the fast-developing capitalist order, which is even more accelerated in its pursuit of private interests. His position does reflect courage even if based on an abstract universalism or transcendentalism. Agamben wants us to not immediately surrender the tactile treasures and vulnerabilities of human contact to a landscape of viral immunologies nor lose what is ‘quintessentially human’ to the discourses of risk, threat, horror and fear of virus-borne logic of contagion. Here, Agamben echoes Walter Benjamin, who lamented the loss of ‘aura’, as a great tragedy but also a tragic opening for invention of new authority. For Benjamin, aura was regarded as the extraordinary in the work of art and the ‘deauratized’ poet is the one in whom “‘the modern (in)experience of de-contextualization, alienation, and shock, would find its fulfillment, its catastrophe, its (im)possible overcoming,” can be captured’. ¹⁴

We can only perceive the ‘essential’ dimension of something when it is threatened by extinction, assigning it with meaning retroactively. In such a situation, the fear of humans to bend themselves backwards for the system to not collapse is not a completely unimaginable scenario. With more desperation, there is increased pressure to succumb to the bio-digital processes of social subjection. What Agamben does not factor in is that this imperative to bend backwards does not entail a self-conscious surrender of will to the interests of big capital and the State, rather implies that our very sphere of social relations is being enveloped, embedded and engulfed in the networks of such biodigital relations. Thus, internally reconstituting the unconscious of social life and along with it, what it means to be human through the process of reconfiguring labour and value relations. Thus, haunted by the imminence of death that looms in the form of the virus and the repressive policies that seek to fight it; the struggle against surveillance capitalism and authoritarianism exceeds the work of consciousness raising and an abstract will to resist power. Agamben writes, ‘In a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for safety, which has been created by the same governments who now intervene to satisfy it’. ¹⁵

Agamben contrasts the sheer abundance of a socially meaningful life – where grieving, solidarity, mourning, support is possible – with the bare quality of mere survival under a normalised post-pandemic, perpetual state of exception. According to him, the securitarian discourses then function towards fostering normalised conditions for carcerality and immunisation by rendering everyone as a potential threat and permanent victims. The bio-security paradigm works through the rhetoric of care and caution and morphs ethics into a personal responsibility towards society, predicated on the idea of averting risk and avoiding greater social damage. The contaminated body is condemnable by the very design of the contagion and its medicalisation self-justifies the need to separate the healthy bodies from the ailing ones – all while rendering all bodies as potentially ill. This internal circularity and self-referentiality corresponds to the very premise of Agamben’s theoretical engagements, a manifestation of what he recognises as an ontological impasse of political life. At many points, Agamben collapses the separation between ontological and ontic/historical notions of time, while paradoxically also trading real abstraction for rapid historicization of immanent violence of sovereignty.

Agamben lays an emphasis on rituals of burial, universal practices of collective mourning, community associations, pluralities of joys and grief being interrupted by the pandemic. He reckons that it is precisely these acts of collectivising, socialisation and identification is what makes us distinctly human. While all of these rituals of collectivising and community building are of much importance, but these have emerged in and through social and political practices. Agamben risks attaching himself to the present coordinates of the social order while lamenting the loss of abstract ‘human bonds’. He says, ‘if we had once again to conceive of the fortunes of humanity in terms of class, then today we would have to say that there are no longer social classes, just a single planetary petty bourgeoisie, in which all the old social classes are dissolved’. ¹⁶ However, such abstract universalism elides into self-sustenance of the dominant mode of capitalist production by by-passing the question of socio-political transformation. Here, Srecko Hovrat’s invocation of the Gunther Anders’ notion of ‘apocalyptic blindness’ (Apokalypse Blindheit) comes to mind, because the crisis and catastrophe that we are inhabiting ‘is simply too big to comprehend, it is not subliminal, but supraliminal, it goes beyond all known limits’. ¹⁷ To some extent, Agamben, like all of us, is struck by the sudden shock of the paralysing force of the pandemic which is what makes him reminisce about a pre-pandemic world.

However, a revolutionary challenge would be to not merely stop the social fabric from withering away but also to reconstitute it in a way to preserve existing freedoms while undoing the conditions of unfreedom. Agamben speaks with a political immediacy and urges us to recognise the violence of the State and pleads, ‘we should refuse the bare life, mute and without a face, and the religion of health that governments are proposing’. ¹⁸ However, the kind of direct challenge to health regulations that he holds as necessary, did come from the counterrevolutionary, right-wing quarters who refused to wear masks, considered the pandemic a hoax and a pretext for state overreach and refused to observe physical distancing, thus undermining the preventive measure of containing the spread of the virus. While the duality and dubiousness of measures such as the lockdown are known to us in its unequal and exploitative content, Agamben’s notion of radical autonomy from the State though does not reflect these social-systemic inequalities. It is principally or ideologically not incompatible with totalitarian regimes. It is strange, given his intent to save democracy from degenerating into fascism and authoritarianism but perfectly logically consistent that Agamben’s position despite his own intentions ends up batting for a reified lifeless form of bourgeois democracy which bemoans the withering of the old rather than raising the need for reconstructing a new people’s democracy from its embers. It is precisely this paradox that I seek to resolve through my insistence on debunking the notion of biopolitics.

IV. Pandemic, as a Launchpad for Surveillance Capitalism?

An entire conception of the destinies of human society is under question, in a perspective that in many respects seems to have taken the apocalyptic idea of an end of the world from waning religions. . . People have habituated themselves to a permanent state of crisis that they no longer seem to realise that their lives have been reduced to a purely biological function, and have not only lost its political dimension, but also any human dimension. ¹⁹

The dual exception of health and digital emergency produces a discourse of crisis – one which solicits, legitimates and produces the necessity for neoliberal management as the only viable and rational form of governance. The restriction on mobility, population control, reconfiguring of spatial logics, the way we navigate and occupy public space, everything is under health emergency’s siege. This, Agamben reckons, is a precursor to the normalised order of things, where political life will further be classified and qualified along the axes of bio-medical and digital analytics. Be that as it may, Agamben’s concerns, nonetheless, seem to be rooted in the fear of losing the unequal tranquillity of the present, and fails to challenge the morphological divide between security and liberty which is built in and through the capitalist system. He doesn’t tell us why the logical development of capitalism has led us thus far; in fact, he does not even study capitalism but refers to neoliberalism as a governing rationale and technique of the modern state which seemingly, only incidentally privileges profit-making interests of capitalists. He does not consider that, from the start, ‘liberty has never been intended as a counter-weight to security. It is always liberty for the sake of security. Liberty has always been security’s lawyer’. ²⁰

Agamben both presumes natural life to be distinct from and irredeemably corrupted by political life. He propounds a pre-ideological abstraction as a ground for shared negativity that conjoins people as a community of human species, a human race. ²¹ During the heightened health emergency under the pandemic, he appeals to people to unite as a human race. To rise in defence of their freedom against political-juridico overreach by the State and biomedical sciences. In fact, no such unity exists for all humans in a class society to coalesce rather solidarity and political unity emerge from and through political struggle and not as a readymade starting point of emancipation. For a unity in consciousness to organically emerge, a new materiality needs to be constituted.

For Marx, ‘there is no social relation, just as there is no market homeostasis, but only an economic instability and perpetual crisis, even when its reality is not experienced directly and overwhelmingly’. ²² That is, for Marx, the species-being is not a precondition for unity but is a socially produced condition, which is internally fettered by exploitative capitalist subjectivity. For Marx, the individual’s life is inscribed in the society and the individual is able to individuate through and in relation to the social, of which it is a part. The political animal (zoon politikon) is irreducible to a sociable person but implies ‘an animal which can individuate itself only in society’ (Nitsch 1992). The mere biological form in which they are born is socially attributed with meaning, symbols and structures retrospectively, through the structuring and mediation function of the force of political economy which permeates the social as an invisible presence. Political life is irreducible to the ‘classic politics’ of humans being a subject of power, administration and governance that corrupts biological life; rather, the social individuates the subject as well as produces its sphere of existence by constructing the relations within which human relations function. The individual’s ‘bare’ form of the body too is irreducible to a predetermined natural, biological organism, stripped of their subjectivity. Opposing such myth of naturalism of the biological body, Lefebvre summarises what Marx says by contrasting Hegelian idealism to Feurbach’s humanism (biological naturalism). Marx saw man as a natural and biological being at heart yet creates ‘his own nature by acting on Nature’, and thus, ‘is not given biologically, but produces himself in history, through life in society, that he creates himself in a process’. ²³

Even our body is materially constituted by signifiers. Social life thus is inscribed by political power which is the driving force that organises – materially and ideologically – the system of both socioeconomic production and subjection. Even though Marx invokes the ‘species being’ in On the Jewish Question (1843), unlike the notion of ‘bare life’ that presumes an ontological immanence of political life virtually being subjected to death or conditions of death, nature is ‘de-naturalised’ to produce the social and subjective universe within which natural life is rendered meaningful and simultaneously deprived of meaning. Marx’s notion is qualitatively different from Agamben’s precisely because the former is a retroactive historical construction of an ontological base of ‘species’ rather than a biological abstraction of ‘bare life’.

The idea of a unity between and among species in Marx is not of a pre-ideological whole to which hopes to return back to. Agamben merely resigns back into presupposing a unity-as-species and argues for a postnational future where the very subjection of people to the State, as citizens – who are also private players with individual rights, individuality and property – ceases to exist. Yet, wasn’t Marx also arguing for the withering of the State as the eventual future to work towards? The difference is that while Marx studies and lays out the historical development of the movement of capitalism and based on that understands the law of value and its self-contradictory nature to frame an opposition, while Agamben appeals for abstract unity against State’s ‘excesses’ by presupposing the ontological pre-eminence of its ‘self-expansionist’ potential. Therefore, Agamben falls short of studying the dialectical advancement of contradictions in a capitalist society and fails to provide us with the tools for dismantling its class basis, which also socially establishes our web of relations within polity.

Agamben bemoans the withering of social intimacy given the regimes of atomisation, insulation and social isolation imposed by the pandemic. However, this loss of intimacy is conjured up in purely abstract terms rather than it being apprehended in concretely abstract relationality with the radical negativity (loss of zoe) in positively antagonistic terms with the State/law/language. In other words, he misapprehends the pandemic as a mere pretext for authoritarian expansion of the State, as a violent assault on humanity rather than a condition of humanity’s own (un)making. Thus, externalising the sovereign logic of the State while rendering political economy as a mere stage upon which the sovereign exercise of power ceaselessly operationalised itself by producing the conditions of death as well subjugating life to death, as necro or bio-economy.

Agamben’s faith in the idea of a reconciliation of all structural antagonisms in a pre-political natural state of life is suspect for it renders an abstract unity between humans sacred but doesn’t probe the conditions of capitalist development through which the subjective and social life of humans is organised and alienated from within society. In fact, his analysis of sovereign state power forsakes a study of the development of contradictions of capitalism. Under capitalist mode of production, everyday life of labour is imminently exposed to and immanently reducible to unremarked death in conditions of their very survival. Each unindexed death is a killing without judgement or consequence, and such killing is necessarily devoid of a notion of sacrifice. No one would imagine the migrant workers who walked miles on foot from the capital of India, Delhi, to their villages, as having ‘sacrificed’ themselves for the country. They merely slid off the frames of patriotic gestures of self-isolation and social distancing. This precisely is because ‘capitalism like all modes of production does not merely exist within history but actually generates its own concept of history, one which functions in tandem with the larger synchronic requirements of the system itself’. ²⁴

By focusing on direct subjection of life to death as his logical and juridical horizon, Agamben overlooks how capitalism revolutionises and operationalises itself towards the permanent exploitation, expropriation and depletion of life. He fails to explain how capitalism succeeds in augmenting a social life, whose condition for participation is predicated on the permanent risk of exposure to death. I argue that political life is not doomed to systemic reversion to biological life qua denunciation of life into its bare, biological. Rather against Agamben’s determinism, which rests on a teleological progression of history, that reaffirms its circuitousness by setting new normalisable thresholds, I argue that it is life which gets politicised through a systematic organisation of social, economic, ecological, environmental and biological conditions that are inflected with capital.

V. Development of Contradictions: Losing Freedom to Remake Freedom

Agamben writes,

Professors who agree — as they are doing en masse — to submit to the new dictatorship of telematics and to hold their courses only online are the perfect equivalent of the university teachers who in 1931 swore allegiance to the Fascist regime.

Following this statement one can infer that when he speaks of resistance, he emphasises a self-conscious, micro-politics of speaking truth to power which refuses instructions by renouncing the terms and conditions for its own survival. In order to understand Agamben’s reflections on the pandemic, it is important that we put in perspective his thoughts on biopolitics as such. Therefore, I will spend some time discussing his oeuvre. Agamben ²⁵ expands by flattening Foucault’s notion of the biopolitical by suggesting that ‘Modern politics is from start to finish a biopolitics, where the ultimate stake is biological life as such’. So how is this moment in history any different or is it different at all? Or is the pandemic the most recent ‘example’ ²⁶ of Agamben’s political framework of the ‘permanent state of exception?’ Contra Foucault, Agamben ends up collapsing different historical junctures into a seamless continuity of gradedness of the same (eternal) sovereign logic (biopolitics of production of bare life), thus circumscribing reality into endless repetition.

Agamben finds the historical genesis of political life in the foundationary violence which strips mere life (zoe) to constitute political life (bios), he writes,

The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as a threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoe (as natural life of human, animal) and bios (as qualified life preserve for human). Today it is not the city but rather the [concentration] camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. ²⁷

That is, the form of appearance of sovereign power keeps shape-shifting across temporalities by negotiating the threshold on which it would manifest. The concentration camp, however, is the most extreme manifestation and logical culmination of the sovereign power where life is reduced to its absolute terms; where bare life was fully operative, impassable. ²⁸

In sharp distinction, I argue that it is precisely because capitalist society fetters both subjective and objective conditions that class interests, subjectivities are posited in antagonistic terms between the bourgeois and the proletariat. This political antagonism exceeds one’s consciousness and is rather inscribed in the system which is structurally overdetermined to reproduce itself through our sustained efforts and labour. If abstract labour renders operative socially valuable relations by animating embodied labour towards the production of the capitalist system, then what is made inoperative by the labour theory of value is life-as-non-alienated-labour or alienated subjective force; which under capitalist is cast in the image of value of capital. Following this, one can argue that in the neo-liberal phase of capitalism, the very ontological theory of human potentiality as impotentiality is articulated as capitalist practices of labour as intrinsic value of the human being. In other words, under capitalism, human capacity to produce and capitalist production are conflated to valorise human self-enterprise. However, human potentiality is not only all that a human cannot do because of their alienation in capitalist labour practices, their castration in and through language and law. Rather human potentiality is in the doing of the labour, which is both simultaneously alienated and self-differenting. The primary characteristic of the neo-liberal capitalist state is not its capacity to deploy biopolitical tools of sovereign violence; instead, it lies in the very production of a web of social and economic institutions that sustain exploitation and expropriation of people’s lives along the lines of class and other social inequalities. It is this invisible logic of violence that explains and constitutes the basis for the real and virtual force of sovereign power, which accords the capitalist State-form, the systematic capacity to render vulnerable and strip life to its bare form.

Agamben suggests that life cannot be salvaged through work and nor can we overcome the primordial prejudicial violence that constituted political life. Therefore, according to him, our best bet is to fight the system to ‘depose’ power from the sovereign State to the ‘coming-community-of-people’. I will expand on this in the coming sections. Yet even if we recuse ourselves from the production process or violence of juridical and political life, it still remains operative in society. Therefore, I claim that the affirmation of (in/)escapability from work-as-embodied-labour moves barely in the direction towards realisation or reclamation of the alienated subjective capacity of people. I argue that we cannot redeem labour – or an impossible human potentiality – by deploying ‘destituent power’ that Agamben speaks of.

Conclusion

Today, when the entire litany of hard-won laws of political recognition of rights, safeguards, social protections are being reversed without even proclaiming any emergency provisions, it forces us to reckon with the limit of liberal democracy – liberal dream is the liberal dystopia – which both produces and crumbles under the weight of its own contradictions. Must an attitude of uncritical deference to the sanctimony of liberal democracy then be observed – making the present a moral arch of social life against the sliding into a dystopian absolutist/fascist tomorrow?

The society is under ferment, the approach of the storm is felt everywhere – the fetishistic representation of people as the embodiment of democracy ⁵⁴ stands ruptured from within to forge a unity based in a shared negativity – on a shared threshold of precarity of life – to dismantle freedom which exists as an extension of slavery. Agamben says,

People have habituated themselves to a permanent state of crisis that they no longer seem to realise that their lives have been reduced to a purely biological function, and have not only lost its political dimension, but also any human dimension. (op cit biosecurity, agamben)

Contrary to his contention that people may have facilitated the consolidation of sovereign power by offering themselves to its technology-legal regime of control, we find that the abstract hope for justice attached with law has been diminishing more rapidly in the face of the crisis, confrontation and conflict with the ruling classes. People are fighting the police and State despite the health restrictions, this revolutionary subjectivity is paradoxically produced by the sharpening of contradictions under capitalism.

Under such conditions, freedom is articulating itself as the struggle for emancipation which is not blindsided by the temptations of mere oppositional resistance which cross-breeds and fosters existing inequalities that are guised as liberties. Against perpetual movementalism, we find the possibility for a fight against the capitalist system and not just a direct confrontation with the nation-state’s armoury. Thus, to me, the threat of loss of freedom or human values is neither imminent nor as abstract as Agamben makes it out to be; rather, (un)freedom has always been centrally placed within the social relations from which it has emerged as a historical synthesis of struggles that cut through time.