Guest Editors: Pilar Martínez Benedí and Chiara Patrizi
In 2020, as many Western governments adopted restrictive measures to contain the Covid-19 pandemic, a number of philosophers, sociologists, political and cultural theorists started thinking about such an unprecedented state of affairs in terms of state of exception and biopolitics. If Giorgio Agamben famously inveighed against “the invention of an epidemic” by state power so as to normalize the state of exception as a legitimate “governing paradigm,” others, like Slavoj Žižek, focused on the “reality of the threat.” “Even if life does eventually return to some semblance of normality, it will not be the same normal as the one we experienced before the outbreak,” Žižek claims, as such, “we will have to learn to live a much more fragile life with constant threats.”