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Giorgio Agamben and the coronavirus pandemic: interventions

☛ Una voce di Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet (publisher).

Una voce di Giorgio Agamben is a an online platform where Giorgio Agamben has been publishing short public interventions in Italian since March 2017. It is hosted and maintained by the Italian publisher Quodlibet, where many of Giorgio Agamben’s books have been published.

On February 26, 2020, Giorgio Agamben started to publish short interventions on a regular basis, all focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic. This entry was created as a way to keep track of those interventions and their accompanying translations, including in book form. It is worth noting those interventions spur many reactions online: they are too numerous to be listed here. This entry will be updated with new interventions as they appear. When used, dates are expressed in the YYYY.MM.DD format. When a date is not available, Google is used to estimate the inception date of a given webpage. The entry is divided into four main parts:

Updated: 2021.09.20

• • •

1. The Book: A che punto siamo? L’epidemia come politica

Some of those interventions were gathered in a book titled A che punto siamo? L’epidemia come politica first released by Quodlibet on July 9, 2020. This volume includes modifications to interventions already published on Una voce di Giorgio Agamben, along with a foreword (“Avvertenza”), interviews, and a short essay previously unpublished (“Il diritto e la vita”). One of these new additions is available online (in Italian), while other additions have been made available in translations:

  • [Italian – 2020.07.09] Il diritto e la vita, chapter from the book.
  • [Spanish – 2020.07.10] El derecho y la vida, same chapter from the book, trans. Artillería Inmanente
  • [Spanish – 2020.07.10] La nuda vida, chapter from the book, trans. Artillería Inmanente (interview with Ivar Ekman for the Swedish Public Radio, April 18, 2020)
  • [Spanish – 2020.07.16] Polemos epidemios, chapter from the book, trans. Artillería Inmanente, (interview with Dimitra Pouliopoulou for the Greek journal Babylonia, May 20, 2020; transcript in Greek published on February 10, 2021)

On August 26, 2021, Quodlibet released a “new enlarged edition” (Nuova edizione accresciuta) of the same book A che punto siamo? L’epidemia come politica. To the interventions already collected in the first 2020 edition, this new edition adds most (but not all) of the interventions published between July 10, 2020 (“Due vocaboli infami”) and July 28, 2021 (“Uomini e lemmings”).

• • •

2. Translations collected in book form

Book-lenght collections with translations of Agamben’s interventions on the pandemic:

• • •

3. Interventions on Una voce with translations

Interventions are listed in reverse chronological order of their publication on Quodlibet (most recent on top). For each translation, the language of translation, the date of publication of the translation, the translated title, and the name of the translator are provided (when the translator name is not available, the name of the publication is used instead). This is by no mean a definitive list for two reasons. First, translations are not synchronous with the publication of the original, Italian versions. Second, the search for translations in non-Latin scripts presents difficulties.

  1. September 17, 2021 – Una comunità nella società

  2. August 28, 2021 – Due nomi

  3. July 28, 2021 – Uomini e lemmings

  4. July 19, 2021 – Tessera verde

  5. July 16, 2021 – Cittadini di seconda classe

  6. May 3, 2021 – Il volto e la morte

  7. April 16, 2021 – La nuda vita e il vaccino

  8. March 16, 2021 – Guardati Italia dalla stessa Italia

    • Original: “¡Cuídate, España, de tu propia España!” by César Vallejo, in España, aparta de mí este cáliz, poem XIV, 1939. Reproduced in Obras Poetica Completa with facsimiles of the manuscript, edited by Georgette de Vallejo, Lima: Francisco Moncloa, 1968, pp. 476-477. The edition by Georgette de Vallejo is controversial for a variety of reasons. For a more recent edition, see Vol. III of Cesar Vallejo: poesía completa, 4 volumes, ed. by Ricardo Silva-Santisteban, Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1997, p. 112.
    • [Dutch – 2021.03.22] Pas op Italië voor Italië zelf, trans. Bas Geerts

  9. March 2, 2021 – Un’atmosfera pesante, opaca e soffocante…

    • Quote from 1940: Simone Weil to her brother André (in French), possibly included in Volume VII of Weil’s Œuvres complètes, VII, Correspondance, vol. 1, Correspondance familiale (Paris: Gallimard, 2013).
      • In French: Simone Pétrement, La Vie de Simone Weil, Paris: Fayard, 1973, p. 509.
      • In English: Karen Olsson, The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 92-93
    • Quote from 1939: Simone Weil, Écrits politiques et historiques (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1960; specifically Deuxième partie: Politique, §12 “Désarroi de notre temps”). In this digital edition, the excerpt can be found on page 63.
    • [Dutch – 2021.03.03] Een zware, ondoorzichtige en verstikkende sfeer…, trans. Bas Geerts

  10. February 23, 2021 – La guerra e la pace

  11. February 12, 2021 – L’arbitrio e la necessità

  12. January 25th, 2021 – Di che colore è la notte?

  13. January 20th, 2021 – Una profezia di Lichtenberg

  14. January 5th, 2021 – Filosofia del contatto

  15. December 28, 2020 – Gaia e Ctonia

  16. December 15, 2020 – Capitalismo comunista

  17. November 23, 2020 – Sul tempo che viene

  18. November 6, 2020 – Si è abolito l’amore

  19. October 30, 2020 – Alcuni dati

    • [Spanish – 2020.10.30] Algunos datos, trans. Artillería Inmanente
    • [Dutch – 2020.10.31] Een paar cijfers, trans. Bas Geerts
    • [English – 2020.11.02] Some data, trans. Old News
    • [German – 2021.01.20] Viel Lärm um wenig, trans. Thorsten Schewe and Rubikon
    • [Dutch – 2020.12.02] Gegevens, trans. (title modified) H.J. Prosman

  20. October 8, 2020 – Il volto e la maschera

  21. October 5, 2020 – Quando la casa brucia. Collected in Quando la casa brucia (Macerata: Giometti & Antonello, 2020).

  22. July 30, 2020 – Stato di eccezione e stato di emergenza

  23. July 13, 2020 – Che cos’è la paura?

  24. July 10, 2020 – Due vocaboli infami

  25. May 11, 2020 – Biosicurezza e politica

  26. May 2, 2020 – La medicina come religione

  27. April 28, 2020 – Sul vero e sul falso

  28. April 22, 2020 – Nuove riflessioni, a version of the same interview was published the previous day in La Verità [paywall]

  29. April 20, 2020 – Fase 2

    • [Spanish – 2020.04.20] Fase 2, trans. Artillería Inmanente
    • [Greek – 2020.04.21] Φάση 2, trans. Ελευθεριακης Κουλτουρας
    • [Spanish – 2020.04.20] Fase 2, trans. Federica G. Luna
    • [Dutch – 2020.04.22] Fase 2, trans. Bas Geerts
    • [Greek – 2020.04.22] Φάση 2, trans. Αναστάσιος Θεοφιλογιαννάκος (Anastasios Theophilogiannakos)
    • [Russian – 2020.04.22] Фаза 2, trans. Center for Political Analysis
    • [French – 2020.05.01] Phase 2, trans. Florence Balique (scroll down)
    • [French – 2020.05.10] Phase 2, trans. Annie Gamet
    • [French – 2020.05.10] [Phase 2], trans. (title modified) Annie Gamet
    • [Spanish – 2020.06.10] Fase 2, trans. Patricio Tapia (six interventions are translated: scroll down).

  30. April 14, 2020 – Una domanda

  31. April 8, 2020 – David Cayley: “Questions about the current pandemic from the point of view of Ivan Illich”

  32. April 6, 2020 – Distanziamento sociale

  33. March 27, 2020 – Riflessioni sulla peste

  34. March 17, 2020 – Chiarimenti

  35. March 11, 2020 – Contagio

    • [Spanish – 2020.03.11] Contagio, trans. Artillería Inmanente
    • [Greek – 2020.03.12] Μόλυνση, trans. Ευδοκίας Ελευθερίου (Evdokias Eleftheriou)
    • [Russian – 2020.03.16] Зараза, trans. Center for Political Analysis
    • [Danish – 2020.03.18] Smitte, trans. Monica Mazzoli, Eftertryk
    • [Greek – 2020.03.19] Μολυσματική νόσος, trans. Αναστάσιος Θεοφιλογιαννάκος (Anastasios Theophilogiannakos)
    • [English – c. 2020.03.20] Contagion, trans. write.as (alternative link)
    • [French – 2020.05.01] Contagion, trans. Florence Balique
    • [German – 2020.05.26] Die Volksgefährder, trans. (title modified) Rubikon
    • [Bulgarian – 2020.07.25] Зараза, trans. Нора Голешевска (Nora Goleshevska) (PDF)

  36. February 26, 2020 – L’invenzione di un’epidemia. Reproduced in il manifesto [paywall; archive].

• • •

4. Other interventions on the pandemic by Giorgio Agamben

Missing from the list above are additional interventions in other venues (i.e., not first published on Una voce; most recent at the top):

• • •

1. According to a special report released in August 2020 by the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) the website where this translation is hosted “serves as a platform for Russian ultra-nationalists to spread disinformation and propaganda targeting Western and other audiences”. This entry does not link directly to the website, but uses a cached version instead. ↩︎︎

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