Metamorphosis, emergency or exception? The governmentality of the pandemic in Italy

The recent Covid-19 pandemic months represent a totalizing social fact which have reconfigured the order of priorities, working as an exogenous shock on global scale. How can we describe this shock and its political consequences? On this behalf, Ulrich Beck (2015) introduced a fundamental distinction between change and metamorphosis. The first case refers to a situation in which something can change in the future while all other aspects remain equal. In the metamorphosis instead, all the certainties of modern society get eradicated. On the other side, Giorgio Agamben (2020) recalled the “state of exception” and described the political measures adopted as the “unmotivated emergency”. Pandemics can be considered as risks generating metamorphosis, an unmotivated emergency or a state of exception? What are the possible reactions to these restrictions? Those reconfigurations took place, in Italy, in a context already characterized by a constant risk exposition (Beck 1986; 2015) and an increasing social control especially towards vulnerable populations (Melossi, 2015). In the attempt to propose answers to these questions, this paper proposes a content analysis of the extraordinary and ordinary legal tools produced for the pandemic governance (DPCM, Regional and municipality orders) since January 2020, and the analysis governmental conflicts between national and regional governments the fight against the pandemic. Italy, indeed, has been the first country in Europe to adopt restrictive measures and to reduce civil liberties. In Italy, in particular, the Constitution does not, fortunately, provide for the state of emergency provided for by the Spanish Constitution (art. 116) or the French Constitution (art. 16). But this has enabled anyway, as proof of the needlessness of this dangerous institution, the limitations of freedom of movement, freedom of assembly and personal freedom, to guarantee the safety and public health, provided for by the constitutional laws that declare these freedoms (Ferrajoli, 2020). To straighten this contrast, the last part of the paper will focus on a specific case study: the reaction to restrictive measures in Italian prisons. In March 2020, 49 prisons (¼ of the National prisons) started massive riots, causing 13 casualties (National NPM, 2020), sixty-nine injured among the convicts, more than a hundred among the prison officers and five medical workers. This case study will therefore offer a specific micro perspective on the transformations of the pandemic that have reinforced and exacerbated the fragilities of the rule of law and civil liberties, the resilient instruments, the resilient tools that can be activated and the forms of conflict that the pandemic has produced.