Philosophy Today
DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2020114363
Solidarity, Populism and COVID-19:
Working Notes
ANDREW BENJAMIN
Abstract: The presence of COVID-19 has elicited a range of philosophical responses.
The aim of this paper is to engage with the position advanced by Giorgio Agamben.
Part of the critique of Agamben involves a critique of populism. In response to popu-
lism the paper advances a different philosophical position this time ground in the
concept of solidarity. The work of Hannah Arendt provides the basis for this response.
Key words: populism, solidarity, COVID-19, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben
G
iorgio Agamben argues that the question that should be of concern
at the moment, the question that should orientate as much philo-
sophically as politically the approach to the pandemic and thus the
question that should attend actions now is: a che punto siamo?1 (At what point
are we?) For Agamben the point at which ‘we’ are is explicable in terms of the
actualization of the ‘state of exception.’ He adds further, writing in an Italian
context, that when future historians look back at this ‘moment’ it will appear
as ‘one of the most shameful of Italian history and that those who guided and
governed as irresponsible and without any ethical scruple’ (privi di ogni scruplo
etico).2 Engaging Agamben’s position in these notes will not hinge on the vi-
ability of the invocation of Schmitt, let alone the plausibility of constructing a
Schmittian account of the political in order to describe a setting the departure
from which delimits the ‘politics to come.’ On one level the acuity of Agamben’s
insights should not be doubted—the pandemic is a biopolitical event—nor the
passion evinced in his description of ‘our’ predicament be neglected. Here, re-
sponding to his position will not involve commenting on the contemporaneity
of Schmitt, but rather taking seriously the question—a che punto siamo? (Where
are we?)—and begin with the ‘we’ knowing that it has to be thought in relation
© Philosophy Today, Volume 64, Issue 4 (Fall 2020).
ISSN 0031-8256 833–837
834 Andrew Benjamin
to a specific historical location. ‘We’ are in a moment defined by COVID-19,
understood as a biopolitical event, even if the content, force, and entailments of
that definition are as yet only hastily sketched.
The ‘we’ comes to be what it is in relation to an event to which this ‘we’ is
given. At the same time the event has a constituting effect on that ‘we.’ This is
the ‘point’ (punto) at which this ‘we’ can be located. Two presuppositions have
to obtain. Firstly, there is the presence of the complex relation between having-
been-given—a setting that whilst not the same recalls Heidegger’s conception of
‘thrownness’ in Being and Time—and the constituting effect of that which has a
determining quality at a specific point in time. The ‘we’ is positioned at their nexus,
the second presupposition, thus a further element comprising this nexus, is that
the ‘we’ names a locus of human relationality that is itself determined in advance
by disequilibria of power. Taken together these elements become the ‘point’ at
which the ‘we’ is located; it is where ‘we’ are. Once this claim is made however the
‘we’ as a singularity collapses. At the very least it is divided between two forms of
plurality. The divide is between populism and solidarity. The claim here is that what
COVID-19 has dramatized is this divide. One of the demands that COVID-19
makes on philosophy therefore is to engage the nature of the difference between
these two forms of plurality. There is a sense of urgency here in that both senses
can summon the ‘we’ as that which names it. Currently populism and nationalism
combine while solidarity seems a distant concern.
One of the continuing claims made about COVID 19 is that it ‘does not dis-
criminate.’ Indeed, these words appear in the title of a recent press release from the
Office of the High Commission for Human Rights at the United Nations. While the
claim may be true in that all bodies are essentially vulnerable, it is equally true to
argue that the virus registers in sites that are themselves structured by discrimina-
tion and disequilibria of power. There is an ineliminable reciprocity between these
two levels. The relation between the non-discriminatory nature of the virus and
sites of original discrimination opens up a range of possible responses. All these
responses occur in relation to actions by various levels of government. If the ‘we’ is
taken to name no more than an undifferentiated abstraction, then the ‘we’ moves
between an individuated ‘I’ and its generalization as the ‘we.’ This is the movement
of the structure of law when law is understood as statute. The regulation of the
‘we’ is the regulation of each individuated ‘I.’ The response to this position can
be the refusal of law or statute in the name of the individuated ‘I.’ Such a refusal
becomes the affirmation of a specific conception of freedom. Freedom here has
a restricted definition. It is no more than the affirmation of the sovereign subject
as the locus of freedom. Here the ‘we’ can be denied were it to fail to accord with
the sense of freedom that is maintained by the individuated ‘I.’ This is the setting
within which the politics of populism can prevail. Built into the movement between
Solidarity, Populism and COVID-19: Working Notes 835
the “I’ and ‘we’ is the excision of any possibility that the ‘we’ name anything other
than a projected homogenous site.
Within the structure of populism, the ‘I’ is part of the ‘we’ to the extent that
both are homogenous sites. Built into this structure are however the elements that
unsettle it; for example, the position in which the sovereignty of the state is taken
to deny—in terms of specific acts—individual freedom. And yet, it cannot be
individual freedom that is actually in question. It must be that sense of individual
freedom that can oscillate between the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ to the extent that any vestige
of original forms of disparity and discrimination are excised in the name of the
homogenous ‘we.’ Within this setting state actions—even if conflated with forms
of sovereignty—have had to engage the non-discriminatory nature of the virus
and yet what the non-discriminatory has revealed are settings that are inherently
discriminatory in terms of the availability of health care—including cost—housing
conditions and their relation to both morbidity and death rates. To the extent that
governmental responses either ignore the relation between the non-discriminatory
nature of the virus and the forms of discrimination that are at work within the
already given disequilibria of power that constitutes the given, or seek to undo the
restrictions of social interaction demanded by a non-discriminatory virus, then
such moves are equally populist for the precise reason that they are premised on the
disavowal of COVID-19 as a biopolitical event. In other words, they are premised
on denying a set up involving the relationship between the vulnerability of bodies
and the disequilibria of power. Populism seeks to stem the effect of that denial by
attempting to justify policy decisions by locating them in a setting created by the
continually unstable oscillation between an abstract ‘I’ and an equally abstract
‘we.’ (That oscillation is also the structure of nationalism.)
If there is a term that can be contrasted with populism—understood as much
as a structure of thought, as forms of activity—then it is solidarity. Solidarity ac-
cepts the possibility of the ‘we’; it accepts it, however, within a setting that assumes
the presence of relations marked by original differentials of power. This is clear
for example from Hannah Arendt’s description of solidarity:
It is through solidarity that people establish deliberately and, as it were, dis-
passionately a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited. The
common interest would then be “the grandeur of man” or “the honour of
the human race” or the dignity of man. For solidarity, because it partakes of
reason, and hence of generality, is able to comprehend a multitude conceptu-
ally, not only the multitude of a class or a nation or a people, but eventually
all mankind. But this solidarity, though it may be aroused by suffering, is
not guided by it, and it comprehends the strong and the rich no less than the
weak and the poor; compared with the sentiment of pity, it may appear cold
and abstract, for it remains committed to “ideas” to greatness, or honour, or
836 Andrew Benjamin
dignity—rather than to any “love” of men. . . . Terminologically speaking,
solidarity is a principle that can inspire and guide action.3
While a passage of this nature necessitates a long and detailed explication in
its own right, it presents solidarity as that which ‘can comprehend a multitude
conceptually’ in ways that do not efface differentials of power. Contrary to the
spirit of populism which operates with the mythic projection of the nation state,
solidarity grounds the possibility of the ‘we’ in what can be described as intrinsic
qualities e.g., ‘honour,’ ‘dignity.’
While Arendt would not have addressed either ‘honour’ or ‘dignity’ in terms
of intrinsic qualities, what solidarity assumes are modes or relationality that have
a radically different structure than those implicated in populism. There are two
defining elements. The first is the assumed necessity of honour and dignity. The
claim is that they are not contingent predicates of human being. They identify
original qualities.4 The second is that despite their necessity their presence is
diminished as a result of the forms of life resulting from differentials of power.
To act in solidarity involves actions that take these two determinations into con-
sideration. What the ‘we’ means in this context has to move between the reality
that the disequilibria of power sustains and the immanent presence of that which
allows that insistent reality to be judged, namely, honour and dignity (understood
as intrinsic qualities). They have to exert unconditional force in the precise sense
that there cannot be a mode of human relationality to which they did not apply.
Were their possible non-application to obtain, it would depend upon set ups that
consisted of pure neutrality. Namely, settings that eschewed both the possibility
and the necessity of solidarity. In such cases all there could be is a shared feeling—
i.e., empathy—which is the affective state concomitant with the homogeneity of
the ‘I’ and the ‘we.’ The significance of solidarity as Arendt makes clear is that
while it assumes a disequilibria of power actions stemming from solidarity are
judgements inextricably bound up with reason; it is not mere feeling. Solidarity
is integral therefore to a politics of judgment.
The affirmation of solidarity undoes what Walter Benjamin identified as ‘em-
pathy with the victor.’5 The naturalization of that feeling which dispels modes of
disparity in the name of the homogeneity of self, community or nation—in sum
populism—is checked by attending to the reality of COVID-19. Understanding
that reality works in two directions. In the first instance it has to begin with the
vulnerability of the body as demanding interventions and seeking care. At moments
of application and treatment economic inequalities are revealed. They are linked
to increasingly precarious employment models created as much by casualization
as they are by the gig economy; to continual housing shortages resulting from
the increasing commodification of housing, i.e., the reconfiguration of dwelling
as real estate, and to the distortion of health care resulting from the separation
of public and private prevision. The other direction is structured by the denial of
Solidarity, Populism and COVID-19: Working Notes 837
this reality resulting from an insistence on the abstract individual as the locus of
rights and the accompanying attempt to efface differentials both economic and
political through an interconnection of the universalizing of the ‘we’ within the
naturalization of the logic of capital.
Pace Agamben COVID-19 is not a biopolitical event because there is the ‘need
to suspend life in order to protect it.’6 It is biopolitical precisely because it exposes
the current state of the political set up to which life now is subjected. At the heart of
which there are, to recall Arendt’s formulation, ‘the oppressed and exploited.’ CO-
VID-19 reveals that a philosophical thinking of life that incorporates COVID-19
as a biopolitical event cannot be separated from forms of solidarity occasioned by
the continual attempt to actualize human dignity. This is where ‘we’ are.7
University of Technology Sydney
Notes
1. Agamben, A che punto siamo?, 31.
2. Ibid., 14.
3. Arendt, On Revolution, 84.
4. I have tried to develop a sustained account of this position in my Virtue in Being
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016).
5. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 406.
6. Agamben, A che punto siamo?, 40.
7. This article forms part of a larger project funded by the Australian Research Council:
ARC DP 200103469—International Law and the Challenge of Populism.
References
Agamben, Giorgio, A che punto siamo? L’epidemia come politica. Quodlibet. 2020.
Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1963.
Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, vol. 4, ed. Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003.
Reproduced with permission of copyright owner.
Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
