Dopo lo stato di eccezione? Temporalità e storicità nell’epoca pandemica

Abstract

What is the time of a state of exception? What is its specific temporality? Is there a temporality of the state of exception with respect to which an "after" can exist? How and with what consequences does the state of exception affect the temporal dimension and in what terms does it enter into a relationship with history and historicity, thus also determining the status and phenomenology of individual and collective memory?

The contribution explores the hypothesis that the pandemic era is characterized by a particular “regime of historicity” and this has found, not from today, but in the Coronavirus crisis with particular evidence and clarity, a generalized clarification on a political-juridical and socio-cultural level in the paradigm of the “state of exception”. 

With particular reference to the Italian case, I intend to reflect, in a philosophical, political-legal and historical-sociological key, on the concept of the state of exception, which emerged in the process of affirmation of Modernity and as theorized by Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, in the perspective of the temporality and historicity involved in it and of which it appears to be symptomatic expression. 

To the extent that the current epoch is understood as distinct and chronologically subsequent to modernity (post-), but in fact still embedded in it in a dynamic of resumption and repetition (-modern), the hypothesis is formulated that the contemporary time can more correctly be defined as trans-contemporaneity. 

In conclusion, there is a homological relationship between the temporality of the state of exception and that of trans-contemporaneity: in both there is a principle of suspension and arrest of the temporal continuum, but with the decision on the state of exception a decisive impulse is given to the movement of the historical continuum. The state of exception is, in this perspective, the device through which it is possible to give motion to a structurally inertial, immobile, frozen situation; but this can only happen in the contradiction of an artificially established – decided – temporality which is itself suspended, indeterminate and indeterminable capable, only apparently, of translating itself into an effective disposition on a historical level.