Dopo lo stato di eccezione? Temporalità e storicità nell’epoca pandemica [After the state of exception? Temporality and historicity in the pandemic era]

This contribution explores the hypothesis according to which the pandemic era is characterized by a particular “regime of historicity” which, although operating since the end of the eighteenth century, found in the Coronavirus crisis an explication on a political-juridical level in the generalized application of the paradigm of the state of exception. The first part delimits the conceptual and historical sphere of the state of exception, with particular reference to the question of temporality and historicity, in the thought of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, also observing some declinations in the forms of the “state of emergency” and other similar provisions. In the second, the theme of the state of emergency on the Italian case is delimited by considering the foundations of the political-legal architecture on which the socio-health crisis was managed and introducing the theme of changes in the democratic state organization determined, not secondarily, by the role, unprecedented by extension and diffusion, of technoscience. In the third part the reflection, in a political-juridical and macro-sociological perspective, is extended to the global level and the dynamics of the “risk society” are examined in particular. In the last part, after a synthetic resumption of the exposed theses, the problem of the temporality and historicity of the state of exception is discussed, indicating it as a structural and homologous expression of the current “presentist regime” of trans-contemporaneity in which it produces effects of a false movement in the blocked historical continuum. Schemes illustrate the different theories discussed.