Biopolitics of Global Health After Covid

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I riti di Covid
Timothy Campbell (De Gruyter, 2023-10-24)
This essay draws on the thought of the Italian philologist Carlo Diano and his notion of “eventic forms”, to theorize a series of responses to Giorgio Agamben’s objections to anti-COVID measures. Challenging Agamben on the nature of event and its forms during the pandemic, it becomes possible to ask what eventic forms beyond bare life can be thought that do not inevitably lead either to myth or sacrifice. The essay does so by employing the thought of both René Girard and Mario Perniola as a way of reading many of the rituals associated with the COVID-19 pandemic not as ones leading to sacrifice but instead as potential examples of what Perniola terms “ritual without myth”. The essay concludes with a reflection on the need to restrain linking gestures to collective or individual belief.