Antivakseri i ostale stetocine

Sv. Đorđo kolje Levijatana vol. 22 wrote:

Almost twenty years ago, in a book that attempted to provide a theory of the state of exception, I noted that the state of exception was becoming the normal system of government. As you know, the state of exception is a space of suspension of the law, and therefore an anomic space, which, however, claims to be included in the legal system.

But let's take a closer look at what happens in the state of exception. From a technical point of view, there is a separation of the force-of-law from the law in a formal sense. The state of exception defines, that is, a "state of the law" in which on the one hand the law theoretically exists, but has no force, is not applied, is suspended and on the other hand measures and measures that do not have the force of law acquire the force. One could say that, at the limit, what is at stake in the state of exception is a fluctuating force-of-law without the law. However one defines this situation - whether one considers the state of exception as internal or qualifies it instead as external to the legal order - in any case it results in a sort of eclipse of the law, in which, as in an astronomical eclipse, it remains, but no longer emanates its light.

The first consequence is the loss of that fundamental principle of legal certainty. If the State, instead of giving normative discipline to a phenomenon, intervenes thanks to the emergency, on that phenomenon every 15 days or every month, that phenomenon no longer responds to a principle of legality, since the principle of legality consists in the fact that the State gives the law and the citizens trust in that law and its stability.

This cancellation of the certainty of law is the first fact that I would like to bring to your attention, because it implies a radical mutation not only of our relationship with the legal order, but in our very way of living, because we are living in a state of normalized illegality.

The paradigm of the law is replaced by that of vague clauses and formulas, such as "state of necessity", "security", "public order", which, being in themselves indeterminate, need someone to intervene to determine them. We are no longer dealing with a law or a constitution, but with a fluctuating force-of-law that can be assumed, as we see today, by commissions and individuals, doctors or experts who are completely unrelated to the system.

I believe that we are faced with a form of so-called dual state - through which Ernst Fraenkel, in a book of 1941 that should be reread, tried to explain the Nazi state - which is technically a state in which the state of exception has never been revoked. The dual state is a state in which the normative state (Normenstaat) is flanked by a discretionary state (Massnahmestaat, a state of measures) and the government of men and things is the work of their ambiguous collaboration. A phrase by Fraenkel is significant in this perspective: "For its salvation German capitalism needed not a unitary state but a double state, arbitrary in the political dimension and rational in the economic one".

It is in the lineage of this dual state that we must locate a phenomenon whose importance could not be underestimated and which concerns the change in the very figure of the state that is taking place before our eyes. I intend to refer to what American political scientists call The Administrative State, which has found its theorization in the recent book by Sunstein and Vermeule (C. Sunstein and A. Vermeule, Law and Leviathan, Redeeming the Administrative State). This is a model of State in which governance, the exercise of government, exceeds the traditional division of powers (legislative, executive, judicial) and agencies not provided for in the constitution exercise, in the name of administration and in a discretionary manner, functions and powers that belonged to the three constitutionally competent subjects. This is a kind of purely administrative Leviathan, which is supposed to act in the interest of the community, even transgressing the dictates of the law and the constitution, in order to ensure and guide not the free choice of citizens, but what Sunstein calls the navigability - that is, in reality, the governability - of their choices. This is what is happening all too clearly today, when we see decision-making power being exercised by committees and individuals (the doctors, economists, and experts) entirely outside the constitutional powers.

Through these factual procedures the constitution is being altered in a far more substantial way than through the power of revision envisioned by the constituents, until it becomes, as a disciple of Marx used to say, a Papier Stück, just a piece of paper. And it is certainly significant that these transformations are modeled on the dual structure of Nazi governance and that it is perhaps the very concept of "government", of politics as "cybernetics" or the art of government that needs to be questioned.

It has been said that the modern state lives on assumptions that it cannot guarantee. It is possible that the situation I have tried to describe to you is the form in which this absence of guarantees has reached its critical mass and that the modern state, by giving up as is evident today to guarantee its assumptions, has reached the end of its history and it is this end that we are perhaps living through.

I believe that any discussion of what we can or should do today must start from the realization that the civilization in which we live has now collapsed - or, better, given that it is a society based on finance - has gone bankrupt. That our culture was on the threshold of a general bankruptcy had been evident for decades and the most lucid minds of the twentieth century had diagnosed it without reservation. I can't help remembering how strongly and with how much dismay Pasolini and Elsa Morante, in those sixties that now seem so much better than the present, denounced the inhumanity and barbarity that they saw growing around them. Today we have the experience - certainly not pleasant, but perhaps truer than the previous ones - of no longer being on the threshold, but inside this intellectual, ethical, religious, legal, political and economic bankruptcy, in the extreme form it has taken: the state of exception instead of law, information instead of truth, health instead of salvation and medicine instead of religion, technology instead of politics.