Jesus, Toilet Paper & Bare Life

Photo by Michael Jasmund on Unsplash

In the last few weeks, we have seen the escalation of measures against COVID-19 by civic authorities around the world. One of the most visible secondary effects of these measures has been a veritable tsunami of people descending upon supermarkets in a series of waves of panic buying, sweeping up into its collective maw a swathe of non-perishables.

At the centre of this frenzy for non-perishables is toilet paper. In supermarkets everywhere, toilet paper aisles and shelves for paper products have been photographed being stricken of their wares.

Even more edifying (or not) are the videos of shoppers resorting to physical violence, or threats of violence, both against other shoppers and staff, in order to secure their stocks of toilet paper or other goods. Such is the situation that, in some parts, armed police officers have been seen at the entrance of supermarkets in an attempt to maintain order.

The situations that I refer to here do not originate from some failing tinpot dictatorship in the margins of the global economy. In fact, the videos depicting violence and cops guarding shelves of paper products originate from countries who form the wealthiest core of the global economy, economies where (sometimes gross) material superabundance is the norm.

There is the question of whether one form of economics or another is more capable of avoiding the scenes of scarcity that we are witnessing now, but that is not the focus of this post. What is the focus of this post is the link between the type of products being so desperately sought after, and the level of aggression expressed so as to secure these products.

My friend Laurel Moffatt has written a piece for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Religion and Ethics site, suggesting that the drive behind the frenzy was the clinging (however desperate) to familiar patterns of life, as well as the desire for some semblance of endurance.

For my part, coming across the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life” has made me think that the link lies in a rather different place. Agamben drew on Aristotle’s distinction between bare or animal life (zoe, the life of eating, sleeping and physical care, including the functions that require toilet paper), which is the domain of the household, and the good life (eudaimonia, the life of flourishing) which is the domain of the political.

In his Homo Sacer, Agamben noted that bare life (sometimes called “natural life”) was not something that was naturally occurring. Rather, designating something as bare life was a political function, a category to which one can be stripped of citizenship and reduced to an object or animal by your fellow citizens and become excluded or persecuted by them. Because you are no longer worthy of the dignified life of a citizen, a person given the status of “bare life” can even be killed by fellow citizens. Bare life, Agemben says, is “life exposed to death”.

Put simply, you did not want to become bare life, lest you become exposed to the death that your fellow citizen’s regime of exclusion would unleash.

For Agamben, modern societies (having replaced common transcendent goods with diverse personal aspirations) subvert the distinction, and end up combining the concept of citizenship with bare life. The good life has became synonymous with maintaining bare life - the eating, sleeping, and the physical care that requires toilet paper - and our cultural horizons became reduced to a combination of “hip pocket issues” and physical safety, a lowest-common-denominator form of unity when there are no common ends left.

The problem however, is that the regimes of exclusion that produced bare life did not disappear with the collapse of the good life with the protection of bare life. Instead, these regimes of exclusion have shifted and are now perpetually directed inward, directed at all fellow citizens.

When the good life in the community collapses into the pursuit of the conditions of bare life - such as the conditions that allow one to eat and handle the after-effects of that eating - my life then becomes exposed to the death that may be brought by other members of community. “My neighbour”, Agamben says, “is cancelled”. Other people then become a threat to my bare life against which I must defend at all costs.

The constant existential threat is what justifies deploying as much force as possible against anyone who might threaten my bare life. This is what leads to aggression over the instruments that sustain bare life (like toilet paper), and this is what justifies the deployment of armed state agents to guard what should be a common disposable at a supermarket.

In Agamben’s words bare life “is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them”.

At the heart of bare life are two things, the lack of common ends and the perception that material things are simply raw materials with no inherent meaning. Moffatt counters both with a sign, the chocolate bunnies that (however remedially) signal to those with the eyes to see the resurrection of Christ. in that resurrection lies a horizon that transcends the material. At the same time, Christ also infuses the material with significance by being resurrected in Body as well as in Spirit, and promising to us in turn the possibility of the resurrection of the dead, which we profess at the end of the Creeds.

As I wrote elsewhere, life is not simply the accumulation of materials. It is what Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes called the stewarding of these materials to “make ready the material of the celestial realm” (GS, 38).

As such, the Christian has a task of being vigilant against calls to reduce all life to bare life, and the potential enslavement that comes with it. Instead, the Christian must recognise both the circumstances of forced limitation that are now before us, but also be mindful of the words of Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori, the Abbot General of the Trappist Order of Monks in his letter to all Trappist communities at the time of pandemic, about the presence of God. The presence of God, Lepori reminds us, is a “supreme freedom” that both immerses itself into these times of forced limitation, yet also creatively breaks through the stark and frightful limits of bare life.

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