Karl Marx is said to have remarked of a French socialist that if he is a Marxist, then I’m certainly not. In a similar vein, it would appear that Giorgio Agamben is no longer an Agambian—or perhaps he’s been misreading him(self) lately.

The Italian philosopher’s recent article about the coronavirus repeats the absurd, conspiratorial claim that it’s no different from a ‘normal flu’. The seriousness of the pandemic has been, in his telling, exaggerated as a pretext for limiting freedoms and implementing increasingly authoritarian rule: