AccScience Publishing / BIJP / Volume 14 / Issue 2 / DOI: 10.29228/beytulhikme.73812
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RESEARCH ARTICLE

From Schmitt to Agamben Exception, Virus, and Normal: A Critical Assessment

Erol Subaşı1
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1 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Siyaset Bilimi ve Kamu Yönetimi Bölümü 53100, Rize, Türkiye
BIJP 2024, 14(2), 485–507; https://doi.org/10.29228/beytulhikme.73812
Received: 22 November 2023 | Published online: 24 June 2024
© 2024 by the Authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
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Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has created a ‘perfect crisis’ that combined health, ecological and economic crises, resulting in the death of millions of people and the unemployment of others. While states took extraordinary measures to manage the crisis, social scientists tried to make sense of this situation. Early in the pandemic, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben controversially claimed that states were instrumentalizing the disease to proclaim, “an authentic state of exception”. This study contributes to the criticisms of Agamben through a critical rereading of German legal theorist, Carl Schmitt. The main argument is that Agamben’s approach to the pandemic is too strongly social constructivist, over-philosophical, over-political and a-historical due to his general philosopho-political project. Agamben’s decisionist and over-political approach is derived from his use of Schmitt’s problematic concept of the “state of exception”. However, Agamben’s use is even more problematic because he uses it to analyze various political developments ahistorically, which obliviates the concept’s analytical consistency.

Keywords
Giorgio Agamben
Carl Schmitt
COVID-19 pandemic
political sociology
political movements and history of political thought.
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Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy, Print ISSN: 1303-8303, Published by AccScience Publishing
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