The article addresses Giorgio Agamben’s critical commentary on the global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paradigm of his political thought. While Agamben’s comments have been criticized as exaggerated and conspiratorial, they arise from the conceptual constellation that he has developed starting from the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. At the centre of this constellation is the relation between the concepts of sovereign power and bare life, whose articulation in the figure of homo sacer Agamben traces from the Antiquity to the present. We shall demonstrate that any such articulation is impossible due to the belonging of these concepts to different planes, respectively empirical and transcendental, which Agamben brings together in a problematic fashion. His account of the sovereign state of exception collapses a plurality of empirical states of exception into a zone of indistinction between different exceptional states and the normal state and then elevates this very indistinction to the transcendental condition of intelligibility of politics as such. Conversely, the notion of bare life, originally posited as the transcendental condition of possibility of positive forms of life, is recast as an empirical figure, whose sole form is the absence of form. We conclude that this problematic articulation should be abandoned for a theory that rather highlights the non-relation between sovereign power and bare life, which conditions the possibility of resistance and transformation that remains obscure in Agamben’s thought.

这篇文章将乔治·阿甘本 (Giorgio Agamben) 对 Covid-19 大流行全球治理的批判性评论作为其政治思想的范式。虽然阿甘本的评论被批评为夸大其词和阴谋论，但它们源于他从他的《神圣人》系列的第一卷开始发展起来的概念星座。这个星座的中心是主权权力和赤裸生命的概念之间的关系，它们在圣人的形象中得到了表达阿甘本的足迹从古代到现在。我们将证明，由于这些概念属于不同的层面，分别是经验的和先验的，阿甘本以一种有问题的方式将这些概念结合在一起，因此任何这样的表达都是不可能的。他对例外的主权状态的解释将多个经验的例外状态分解为不同例外状态与正常状态之间的模糊区域，然后将这种模糊提升到政治本身的可理解性的先验条件。相反，最初被假定为积极生命形式可能性的先验条件的赤裸生命的概念被重新塑造为经验数字，其唯一形式是形式的缺席。