Saramago, Agamben, and the ‘Invention of an Epidemic'

Saramago and Agamben confronted a pandemic in very different ways: the former as literary fiction, the latter as a real instrument of political oppression. However, both used it to shed light on the critical dilemmas of the sovereign state and its democratic form. Through these events, real or imagined, they reflected on the prospects for political change, which for both remains an open question. With their help, the essay reflects on "what" happened to people during the recent Covid-19 pandemic and "why", in the hope of contributing to avoid the same sudden awakening of Saramago's characters in the novel Blindness, who realize that the epidemic they thought had passed was actually far from over.